Picked up Nicholas Yong's 'Seven Sacks of Rice and Other Baggage' (2023). It's all about Singapore stories. These 10 short stories are rather familiar, and could be easily heard from neighbors, from grandparents, and friends. But it's also the author's own creation.
It's like... kampung tales organized into a book. Is it satire? Probably. We read stories when we don't get to hear it from people we know. Are they urban legends or have they firmly become folk tales? Apparently these stories are also based on the author's family history.
These stories span decades, or are from a bygone era or they could be inserted into any year we know. The context is oddly familiar. There are stories about seeing ghosts in a flat in Jurong, a Chicken Task Force, a coffin floating down Singapore River, some weird woodcutter and the Korean-Japanese War in 1931, a young boy being a runner for a loan shark, and a Mr Kim at a tattoo parlor,
The book opened with the eponymous story 'Seven Sacks of Rice'. It's pretty much a tragedy of ancient societal and family customs and trying to meet expectations. A woman birthed girls and hence adopted a son. She pretty much BOUGHT a son in China from her next village for seven sacks of rice. Then the family came to Singapore. Of course it's replete with a useless husband. This boy never came to understand or love his family. The boy grew up in hate and fear and carried that with him all his life. He never embraced his adoptive mother, sisters or family. He also probably died alone.
He ran away from home time and again. On occasion, he would be found sleeping by roadside stalls. It got to the point where Lee Eng asked her mother to send hum back to China, but Kim Choo merely repeated her stock line, “I paid seven sacks of rice for him.” She was always the first one to look for him whenevr he went missing. Eventually, the day came when Ming Ching did not come home, and his adoptive family stopped searching for him. He was 12 years old.
There was also a story ‘Ming Chao’ about a reporter being asked to kill a story, by the Prime Minister of a country, no less. The title is a reference to the Chinese hell notes ‘冥鈔’. She smartly asked for something in return — an interview with the Prime Minister, face to face and rather long. Nobody was harmed, and it didn't flout any laws. It's not even morally questionable. And she got things done, and it leaves you wondering how much wheeling and dealing we all have to do throughout our lives in order to 'get things done'.
I laughed so hard at the coffin floating down Singapore River along Boat Quay. ‘Water Body’. That ended with a corpse reanimating as a vampire. The story used the Chinese term spelt in pinyin ‘jiangshi’ (殭屍). HAHAHAHHAHA. Then it got worse. The language is perfectly fine. Kinda funny really. But the stories themselves left me in stitches.
We have a divinity-ghost story of a Ming dynasty ghost and a scholar in a Taiwanese Mazu temple in ‘The Queen of Heaven’, zombies in an apocalypse in Singapore on its 28th day in ‘Heightened Alert’. And then the book ended with a final odd little story ‘Mr Kim’, about a Mr Henry Kim who was a customer at a Singapore tattoo parlor before he was assassinated in Kuala Lumpur. He was the half brother of the infamous North Korean dictator-leader.
I can't miss the literal point of 'baggage'. Be it as sacks of rice, anything physical, including a human, or emotional. How much baggage do we want to carry and how much do we want to let go?
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