Can you interpret the poem "Festival" by Kenneth Wee?

"Festival" addresses the age-old
difficulty of
generational gaps, in the setting of a traditional Chinese-style New Year's

celebration.

It's written in first person, using the royal "we"
to
symbolize the author's generation, which is two generations removed from
the "old
men," their relatives who are talking nearby in groups while the
youngsters watch
television.

The author establishes that
though young and old people are
gathered in physical proximity, they are
experiencing the festival in vastly different ways. The
younger generation
feels like outsiders, separated by language, food, and tradition. "We
know
them not," Wee writes of the elders. The rituals that the older generation

relishesgossiping, eating special foods, dancing to traditional music, and hanging
decorative
couplets mean little or nothing to the author and his peers. They
prefer watching screens to
talking, cheesy pizza to "tasteless" food, rock
and roll to Chinese classics, movie
posters to decorative Mandarin
characters.

Yet, despite the wide cultural
gap, there is
something deep inside that still touches the author. In the final stanza, as
he
watches his old relatives, he is reminded of his heritage and confesses,
"I'm proud to be
Chinese." This is followed by the powerful final line of the
poem"In
English"which succinctly summarizes the contradictions between his
old culture and his new
one. That "we" think and speak in English symbolizes
the younger generation's
distancing itself from ancestors' heritage. And that
"we" are proud to be Chinese
symbolizes the dilemma of young people caught in
transition, who are not immune to change, yet
also yearn for the cultural
traditions of their childhood.