Once, at a writers’ festival, I was asked by an eager-looking young person busily taking notes, ‘What can I do to become a writer?’ I replied facetiously, ‘Choose your grandparents.’

I must have inherited my love of, and talent for story-telling from Ah Kong, my grandfather on my mother’s side. The scientists who daily announce that they have discovered a gene for this or that disposition, such as alcoholism or depression or risk-taking, will one of these days discover a story-telling gene, and I will know that I have two copies of it in my chromosomes!

Ah Kong who was an opium addict looked appropriately like the Ancient Mariner, the compulsive storyteller in Coleridge’s famous ballad. He had the mariner’s ’skinny hand’ that drew the listener to his side and the ‘glittering eyes’ that hypnotized him throughout the story-telling. And what stories Ah Kong told! Chinese legends, dazzling romances, stories with moral lessons, bawdy tales that outdid the bawdiest in Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ and that made Grandmother cluck her tongue in disapproval and say, ‘Children, run off. Your grandfather is mad, I tell you!’

Ah Kong’s urge to tell stories was exactly that—an urge that had to be instantly satisfied, like his craving for opium. One day, according to an aunt with whom he lived for many years, he woke up raring to tell a tale that must have been a-churning in his fervid imagination through the night. Whenever Aunt and the other members in the household sensed the imminence of this narrative onslaught, they would hide in various parts of the house, and wait for its retreat. Ah Kong looked around, saw nobody, but knew that his story, fully formed in his head and now racing along his tongue, had to find an audience.

Suddenly Ah Kong saw a beggar, an old man, at the doorstep. He dragged him in and made him sit down and listen to the tale which lasted a full ten minutes, during which time the beggar sat very still, clasping his begging bowl with his hands and nodding with deferential attentiveness at various points in the story-telling. When Ah Kong was done at last, he dropped a coin in the bowl and promptly dismissed his captive audience of one.

I am glad that my story-telling propensity does not quite approach Ah Kong’s. But it is enough, each time I am invited to speak at conferences, to make the strict time-keeper remind me, very politely, about the allotted time for my speech, and hint, very tactfully, that it would simply not allow for the telling of stories, particularly that lubricious one about how Ah Kong’s opium addiction boosted his prowess both in story-telling and the secret arts of pleasing his concubines.

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...