the moral of the story

my most vivid memories of my dad revolve around the stories he used to tell when i was growing up. most notable was the months-long period during which he read me the epic, 1000+ page romance of the three kingdoms cover to cover, spread out over many bedtimes. i am not sure if an english translation already existed then, but we had a chinese copy of the book which he had brought back to the U.S. after a trip to taiwan. he would read each sentence out loud in mandarin, translating them one at a time into english, and mimic each of the main characters in cartoony voices, making grotesque faces at times and waving his arms during critical battle scenes.

besides the three kingdoms, my dad liked to share many jokes and stories orally, especially while i helped him with his yard work outside. most of the stories had a confucian underpinning, with morals around respect and appreciation for one’s parents layered in thickly. there was one particularly morbid one about an ungrateful son who lashed out angrily at his mother whenever she brought him his dinner tray; somedays because she brought it too late, other times because she brought it too early, and yet other times because the food wasn’t seasoned to his liking. then, one day, he woke up from a sudden reverie, reevaluated his priorities and rushed towards his mother as soon as he heard her ring the dinner bell. he wanted to apologize for his ingratitude and thank her for everything she had done for him over the years. but alas, when the old woman saw her son charging at her like a bull she turned and ran out of fear that he would beat her; stumbling, she tripped over a tree stump due to her poor eyesight and fell to her immediate death. moral of the story according to my dad: not only should one love and appreciate ones parents, but also not too late in life, lest you accidentally kill them.

out of the blue i recently remembered another story my father once told, about an aspiring buddhist monk who climbed to the top of a very steep mountain in order to join an acclaimed monastery. on the first day, he asked to see the teacher, but there was only a lone cook present who gave him a huge bowl heaped to the brim with plain, unseasoned rice. puzzled, the monk could not imagine fitting all those flavorless carbs into his belly, but after a struggle he eventually did. the next day, the cook brought another bowl of unadorned rice, and the day after that, and the one after that, too. it wasn’t until two or three weeks into his stay at the monastery that the monk realized that the amount of rice in the bowls was gradually shrinking, one grain of rice at a time. Eventually, years after he’d first arrived at the monastery, the monk received his final bowl, empty except for a meager grain of rice. He had wasted down to a fraction of his size; where his once-rotund belly once drooped, he was now as thin as a bamboo rod. “Ah,” the feeble monk muttered as the cook handed him the bowl. “I’m finally down to the last grain of rice. May I see the teacher now?”

the cook laughed and said, “Idiot! I’ve been here with you all along.”

when my dad finished telling me this story, i scratched my head and asked him what the moral of it was. he laughed gleefully, showing all of his teeth. “no idea. you might have to become a monk to find out!” he said, patting me enthusiastically on the back.