A woman purposefully and continuously overfed her young stepson with unhealthy but delicious foods and sugary beverages every day to make him sick and die.
What the …! Damn! The storyteller had me hooked.
Incredulous, I asked, “Why?”
“She did not want the boy, who was an only child, to inherit his father’s riches,” he said in a whispery, conspiratorial tone.
“Did he die?”
“No, he was extremely obese but he did not die. One of his teachers caught on to the diabolical plan.”
“That’s a relief. Was it something the boy said?”
“No. The boy was not aware of what the stepmother was doing to him. He was just a child, remember?”
“Oh! So?”
“The teacher noticed some unusual things. After several conversations with the boy, he decided that something was not quite right.”
“Did he tell the boy that he was in danger?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“The boy would not understand or believe him.”
“Why?”
“He thought that his stepmother was kind and loving.”
“I see. So, what did the teacher do?”
“He undermined what the woman did. I don’t remember every detail but his counter plan had a happy result. The boy survived and grew up. Although he was still big, he was not obese.”
“Did he ever know?”
“No.”
“Oh! Why?”
“The story did not go in that direction. Anyway, it was not really about the boy.”
“Of course, it is!”
“No. The teacher was the central figure.”
“No! I want the boy to be the hero.”
“Only if you change the story.”
“How?”
“Create your own story. What I just told you was someone else’s creation.”
Oh, by the way, the storyteller was one of my uncles-in-law, a second-generation Chinese whose parents migrated to Sarawak from China towards the end of the reign of the Third Rajah Vyner Brooke.
As soon as World War II broke out the young couple asked a Malay boatman to take them upriver where they hid from the Japanese. I heard the same boatman later built them a boat.
Eventually, they set up a trading shop overlooking a location where the river tide reaches its farthest point a few miles from our village, Kampung Ta-ee, in Serian District. They quickly realised that the best way to get in and out of the place when transporting goods to restock their shop was by taking advantage of the ebbs and floods of the same river that enabled them to escape the war.
The natives living in several villages farther upriver were glad to have them as their neighbours as they did not have to walk for hours through the jungle to reach the other shops along the Kuching-Serian Road whenever they wanted to sell their goods or buy necessities such as salt, sugar, kerosine, and cooking oil.
When he was of age, Uncle Teo was sent to a school in Kuching but dropped out before he could read and write well because he did not like being cooped up in class. He also disliked town life and being far away from his parents.
Without the basics of writing, reading, and arithmetic in Mandarin, he was incapable of taking over the family shop, which was unfortunate because he was an only child. After his parents passed away, he closed it and moved with his wife (my mother’s younger sister) and children to Serian town where he did various odd jobs and even tapped rubber trees.
What I found most fascinating about him was his ability to disassemble and re-assemble radio receivers. Now, looking back at my childhood years, I realise that people with such skills were rare in the 1950s and 1960s.
While attending the Serian Government Secondary School (SGSS) as a boarding student from 1966 to 1970 I spent many a weekend with the family and often found him soldering a bewildering array of wires onto the motherboard of a radio.
People were always giving him radios to repair, which was a good thing because he was often out of a job and money.
Though it was not much he was grateful that he got paid for providing a service which to him was a hobby. That explained why he was reluctant to charge higher fees for his service.
He was also fond of building loudspeakers and their housing using parts cannibalized from various electronic equipment. I was tickled pink one day when he modified a large ceramic jar to house a loudspeaker.
Yet, despite my admiration and respect for his unusual technical skills, I remember him more for the many stories that he loved to share than for anything else.
The first time I heard him narrate a story I assumed that his children were fortunate for having a father who was a good storyteller. I was wrong. After a few more storytelling sessions my aunt let on that he did not talk to their kids the same way he talked with me. No wonder my cousins were always all ears whenever their father told me a story.
I guess Uncle Teo liked me because I was a good active listener. My cousins, on the other hand, were glad to enjoy a side of their father that came alive only when I was around. According to my aunt, he often looked forward to my weekend visits when he could interact with me. I found this rather interesting because I was of the same age as his eldest son.
Notwithstanding our age difference, I looked upon him as a kindred spirit in that we shared common interests, values and worldviews. We were like-minded individuals who felt as if we were on the same frequencies. I also felt as if we had similar souls. Maybe we knew each other in a past life.
By and by, I noticed that my listening to his tales made him cheerful, even happy. He liked it when I interrupted him to ask questions or to argue certain points.
After dinner one Saturday, while he was enjoying a peg of alcohol and homemade cigarettes, I asked him where he got his stories from. Without hesitation, he pointed to his radio.
“Chinese radio stations … I listen to them a lot,” he said.
“I thought you can’t understand Mandarin,” I said.
“I can’t read and write Mandarin, but I can understand it quite well. Also, the stories are not all in Mandarin.”
Before he retired for the night, he told me his personal story — the struggles he had teaching himself how to repair radios.
As he could not read the labels and symbols on the electronic parts, his learning process was slow. It was so difficult that giving up was often on his mind.
The only thing that kept him going was an enduring desire to maintain his radio in working condition so that he could continue to listen to stories, news, and music.
Up until the 1960s, radios were rather primitive by today’s standards. They were not very reliable.
When Uncle Teo was young and still living with his parents, their old shop was far away from the nearest town, so it was hard to get the radio to a repair shop. Hence, the desire and decision to be his own radio repairman.
As a beneficiary of his efforts, I was (and still am) glad that his Singer radio (later, a Toshiba) was always in good condition.
While I benefited a lot from reading storybooks in our school library, I also enjoyed listening to him.
The weekend storytelling sessions were among my most cherished memories. I still remember his children and me sitting cross-legged and leaning against a post or a wall, or lying down on the floor, listening intently as he spun his stories using not only colourful language but also physical gesticulation, tone, and volume.
In the absence of any visual illustrations, such as those we had in school, I visualized in my head the characters that he described in his stories. Later on in life, I found that this skill was essential in reading novels that do not have images or drawings. Uncle Teo did not know it, but engaging me in oral storytelling at a young age helped me build this skill early.
It is a consensus among experts in early childhood education that in terms of language development, a child who listens to stories aloud, without visual stimuli, is activating the auditory system and language processing systems.
In my case, I often found myself processing the stories through verbal prompts, or I interpreted the gesticulations to understand them more.
During my secondary school years, in my struggles to improve my English, I often practised speaking the language by re-running Uncle Teo’s stories in my head.
In this way, I learned gradually how to combine or linked words that I already knew or new words that I found in books to create meaningful and creative narratives. In the process, I also made sense of grammar and syntax.
That was how I developed some of the skills needed to write or tell stories such as the one you are reading now. I hope you enjoy it.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the New Sarawak Tribune.
