The World of Tai Tai

  "Mr. Lo, how's your analysis report coming along?" she asked. I stopped short in my tracks and looked at her helplessly. "Come on, Mr. Lo," she berated. "Don't be always blur!" "I really don't know how to do it," I said in my defence. "Can you give me the format?" She rolled her eyes and with a wave of her hand, said, "Okay, I will give you the format." "Thank you," I said. She took out a piece of paper from her file and gave it to me. On my way back to my desk, I heard her speak to a teacher in Hokkien, "Zi Le Ta Po Jing Bing Tua, hami du ai meng. Bei Pak Kua ani ca hei sinsei'(That man is very lazy. He always asks. I've never seen any teacher as incompetent as he is."

My train ride from Kuala Lumpur to Penang was a drama full of human oddities. I was in a crowded economy compartment. It was my first train ride, and its novelty excited me. However, the thrill wore off as morning dwindled into afternoon. The hot sun burnt away the balmy morning temperature, making the economy compartment unbearably hot like a kiln. We kept complaining to the train conductor about the heat. Taking pity on us, he transferred us to the air-conditioned second-class compartment behind ours; it had become quite vacant after some of the passengers had got off at the previous stop. Two passengers in the compartment were behaving unusually. One was a transvestite, and the other was a large tomboy. The former, standing outside the toilet, kept puffing away on a cigarette and talking to a lewd middle-aged man. The push door that divided the toilet from our compartment could not close well, and the irritating cigarette fumes kept coming in. The latter—t...

Every Friday or Saturday, I will make a requisite stop at a stall in the open air market.  Run by a group of elderly, it is popular for its Hainanese curry rice.  Patrons will wait 20 to 30 minutes for their order and no one dares to remind the stall operator and his helpers lest they incur their wrath.      The dish has a generous topping of steamed chicken, Char Siew and braised pork.  The rice, drenched in thin but savoury curry gravy, is addictive.  There are other stalls that sell the same rice but they don't come close to this one. At RM4.50, it can satisfy a big sized man like me.  At one time I took a young Kuching boy to this stall and he had two helpings of the rice!

Bought two Chinese rice dumplings from my favourite stall. As can be seen in the picture, the unwrapped one was full of crushed peanuts. Every bite warranted great satisfaction.

                                            I first flew a kite at the age of 14, pretty late, right? I remember racing down a slope to give my kite a start. It flopped several times on the ground before taking the air. Papa helped me to unravel the string as the kite rose. Feeling the thug of the kite's string on my hand, my heart was swelling with pride. It gave me a sense of power watching the kite soaring towards the clouds. Through my maneuver, I seemed to be able to bend the winds of heaven to my will.

Twenty years ago I told myself if I could not pan out as a teacher I would work as an enumerator in the statistic department. Twenty years later I really do not do a good job as a teacher but I am determined to suck it up and stay on. It's not because I have no other job to fall back on but I've realized that it is truly my dream, a job in which I can find my solace.

                                                   " Teacher, add more marks to my composition," he said pleadingly. I decided to be firm and refused to change his score. "Teacher...." he continued, tapping the desk earnestly. "No,I won't," I said with finality. His face darkened and he looke d vengefully at me. "Teacher, if you don't improve my score," he said threateningly. "I will cause a bump on your nipple!" He removed the lead rod ejector of his mechanical pencil and balanced a little pencil stub on top of it. He launched the pencil through the air by pressing the push button but the 'missile' fell onto the desk before it was able to strike its aim

Question: Write a recount of a hit-and-run accident and suggest what the hit-and-run driver should do. One night, I was walking home from my tuition class. The usual route I took was lined with serried ranks of shops.  The halos of street lights brightened the darkness around me. There were not many pedestrians along the road. While turning a bend, the frail figure of an old woman caught my eye. She was bending over a rubbish cart by the roadside, rummaging through its contents.  A feeling of pity welled up within me. I wondered why her family let her scavenge at this hour.  She should have rested at home and enjoyed the warmth of her family.  Did poverty compel her to do such a thing? My thoughts were interrupted by the roar of an engine that came from behind me.  I turned round and to my shock and horror, saw a car zooming towards the old woman. What made it stray to the roadside?  Judging from the erratic pattern of the driving, the dri...

As usual, I struggled to get up at five this morning.  My eyes heavy with sleepiness, I pecked at my breakfast. I set off for work at 6.00a.m and got caught in a bumper to bumper traffic crawl for thirty minutes. Upon arrival at school, I thought I could heave a sigh of relief but another annoying thing was lying in wait for me. As soon as I entered the staffroom, I asked Kim Foong, a young temporary teacher if she had finished printing the certificates of the writing competition winners. She smacked her forehead and told me in an apologetic voice that she had forgotten about it.  Seeing how sorry she was, I did not have the heart to admonish her.  Instead I gave her more time to complete the job. When I was about to remove my laptop from my bag and do some typing, Kim Foong came up to me and asked me to check if a student's answer to an examination question was correct. This is how the sentence goes, 'The Ponggol Festival is an awesome festival." Unsure of its v...

Question: Write how you celebrated Mother's Day with your family and emphasize its importance. The moment we saw mother pulling her Myvi into the garage, we turned off the lights and scurried into the kitchen. John struck a match and lighted all the candle sticks on Mother's cake and I thrust the roses I had bought into Juliet's little hands.  Father put his finger to his lips and motioned for us not to make any noise. The door knob clicked and mother entered the house.  "Why is the house dark?" Mother said to herself. "Where is everybody?" The bewilderment in mother's voice made us have a hard time stifling our giggle.  Poor mother, due to her tight work schedule, she had been unaware that it was Mother's Day today. "Okay, everyone," father said in an undertone. "Let's go out now and give your mum a surprise." Excitedly, we came out from our hiding and in one voice, shouted 'Happy Mother's Day'....

The bumpy, tedious, six-hour bus ride from Miri to Sibu would only bring my Scrabble team to a humiliating defeat. In the preliminary round, my partner and I looked poised to win the first match, but nerves got the better of us. We took the first game easily, and many people believed that we could defeat our opponents in straight sets. With a decent individual scoring range from 15 to 50, I was the top scorer at 183 points. Disaster struck when my friend accidentally formed a non-existent word. Capitalizing on the careless move, our opponents rebounded by successively scoring a 24 and a 36. They took the second game with a 22-point margin. The loss pulled the match to a rubber game. Despite the loss, I garnered the highest individual total of 196 points. In the deciding game, I was unlucky to have drawn more consonant tiles than vowel tiles. I could arrange just one to two tiles at a time, swallowing low one-digit scores. In comparison, my par...