My mother has never been much of a storyteller. She was more of a buyer of Chinese storybooks, when we were kids. Before my brother and I went to school and on the stock school kids’ diet of Tintin, Enid Blyton and Asterix, she fed us stories about the foolish monkeys who believed four acorns in the morning and three at night was better than three in the morning and four at night; the fool who got his feet measured to go shopping for shoes but forgot the measurement and had to go home empty-handed; and so on and so forth. Never mind that we were too young for some of the stories, which were simplified but not dumbed down from Zhuangzi, Hanfeizi and other old philosophy texts.
My mother has never been much of a storyteller. She married one, isn’t it enough? She would be the one who bought us a kids’ edition of Journey To The West and my father would be the one who brought it to life for us, with exciting exaggerations, in weekly instalments. His hero in storytelling was Lei Dai Soh, Rediffusion’s Cantonese charmer in the 1950s (Dai Soh, Big Fool, what a name). Week after week, as he ad-libbed his way through Journey To The West, my father became our Lei Dai Soh.
My mother has never been much of a storyteller. But as kids, we came to expect a good story from her every time she had a fight with my father. Fight. Story. Fight. Story. Fight. Story. Telling us stories, it was her therapy. These were all true stories of my father’s Dickensian days as a child coolie. He hardly told us these stories, so we had to hear them from my mother, who told them so well, she must have told them, line for line, as they were told to her by her Lei Dai Soh. She must have loved these stories. She did only one thing differently: Her stories always ended with, “Your father is a good man.”
I am my mother’s daughter. Oscar was a man with many tales. Of central Asia, of central Europe, of Effendi.
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