I have been, for many years now, a regular lecturer on luxurious cruise ships such as the Queen Elizabeth 2, the Queen Mary and the Crystal Symphony. The passengers are mainly very wealthy American and British couples celebrating their silver or golden wedding anniversary, but there is always a small number of single men, lonely widowers and divorcees, presumed to have come on board for the sole purpose of finding a companion.

Because of my position as a guest lecturer, I have a more noticeable presence than the other single women on the ship. There is another factor in my favour, which I explain to friends back home, as ‘The Einstein Effect’. As the average age in the ship is 75 or thereabouts, a woman in her sixties like myself is relatively young, hence showing the beneficial operation of Einstein’s Law of Relativity.

Maybe there’s a third factor—the infamous, high-slit, tight-fitting silky cheongsam which I wear for each of my four lectures during a cruise. Many Western men somehow associate it with oriental exotica, and stare unabashedly at it. I can count on these dedicated starers filling at least one row in the lecture theatre—usually, the front row, directly facing the stage.

One of these admirers—we’ll call him Stan, for the simple purpose of an alliterative title for this piece—generously bought me drinks in the ship’s bar. He was a tall, good-looking gentleman with distinguished grey hair, Clark Gable sideburns and a warm smile, and was always dressed impeccably. He told me his wife died just a year ago.

On my last evening in the ship, as I was having dinner with a group of women in the dining room, the young waiter attending to us suddenly whispered, ‘Ladies, look at that gentleman in the light blue coat at the table near the window. He’s told us the most amazing story about himself.’ I looked and said, ‘Why, that’s Stan! What’s his story?’

It was amazing alright. Stan had recently won 8 million dollars in some lottery, back home in San Francisco. Suddenly we were all agog with excitement, and teased each other about snaring the biggest fish in the ship. We were all single women except for one, somebody called Bunny who said she was going to get her divorce soon and join us in that happy league. Bunny turned to me and said with a wink, ‘Get to work. You have exactly 13 hours to test the sensational seductive power of your Chinese ginseng, in addition to your Chinese ‘cheongsam‘, before you disembark tomorrow. Don’t let the Big One get away!’

Somehow I thought Stan, from the small hints he had dropped during our drinks at the bar, had a more intriguing story to tell than the winning of that jackpot. And I was right. A week after I returned to Singapore, I had a call from him. By the second call, he had told me his stunning story.

He had been working for years as an elevator repairer, struggling to support himself and his wheelchair-bound wife. It was a hard life, made harder when her illness made her bad-tempered and even violent; she once threw a glass at his head which required several stitches.

And then, he won the jackpot (It was eighteen million, not the eight reported by the waiter in the ship) His wife immediately demanded to be taken to the best boutiques, the finest jewellery shops. She went on the wildest shopping spree. ‘I wheeled her around in the neighbourhood at her insistence,’ said Stan. ‘She never wore the same designer dress twice, and she wore rings on all ten fingers. She had chosen the most expensive emeralds, diamonds and rubies.’ She died six months later.

That wasn’t the end of Stan’s amazing story. He told me that he had joined a charitable organization, to ‘do some useful thing with all that money’. Part of the work of the organization was to provide prosthetic limbs for young people born deformed or who had been injured in accidents. The happiest day in his life, said Stan, was when a young boy he had helped, who had been lame from birth, insisted on walking to him on the new limbs, to thank him.

I have lost touch with Stan, but have never forgotten his very unusual, very heart-warming story.

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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...