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Liang Wern Fook (author), Christina Ng (translator), The Joy of a Left Hand, Balestier Press, 2023. 144 pgs.
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When my youngest child was about two years old, I noticed he was using both hands to eat and to pick up toys. I wondered if he would show a preference for one hand or the other as the months went by. And sure enough, he soon started eating and drawing and picking up toys, all with his left hand. He was the only left-handed member of our family and naturally conversations came up around it. A significant percentage of lawyers are left-handed, as have been a number of US presidents.
It was fun to talk about these trivial matters, and there was never any talk at preschool, or the paediatrician’s office, or even at home about trying to get my younger son to use his right hand. But that wasn’t always the case and if he’d been born decades earlier, he’d probably be writing with his right hand in high school now and brushing his teeth with his right hand and tying his shoes with his right hand. In many places around the world, being left-handed has been seen as a sign of weakness and even outlawed. Left-handed people have been forced to use their right hand, usually when they were just starting school and learning to write. Thankfully we have evolved.
Liang Wern Fook takes this idea of being forced to operate—in all senses of the word—as a right-hander when some people are naturally left-handed. What would happen if everyone were allowed to write freely without the need to stifle any part of oneself? His book The Joy of a Left Hand is a compilation of 52 very short stories—many just a page or two long—about people, mainly in Singapore, who do not censor their thoughts. He wrote this book in 2006 and Christina Ng’s flawless English translation came out in 2023.
“A Taste of Niangao” is an endearing story of a young man who returns to Singapore at Lunar New Year from his new home in Guangzhou. His uncle in Singapore had told him some years back that his first wife in Guangzhou made the best niangao, or New Year cakes, and implored him to bring back her niangao on his annual Chinese New Year visits. When the story takes place, the uncle is getting up years and his health is deteriorating.
On this particular New Year, several years after the narrator moved to Singapore, the first thing the uncle asks about is if he’s brought the famous niangao from Guangzhou. He can still remember the distinct flavours of his first wife’s New Year cake after many years. But when the narrator speaks to a cousin, they each learn news from one another. The first wife passed away half a year earlier and is no longer around to make niangao. And the niangao the narrator brought, not knowing the aunt had passed away, was store-bought in Singapore. Since the narrator didn’t know of the aunt’s passing and had purchased niangao at a store, one has to wonder how many times, if any, did he take her niangao back to Singapore and if he had been buying it from a store all along.
A humorous story, “Cultural Exchange”, is just a page and a half and is told from the viewpoint of a Chinese teacher in Singapore. In preparation for a visit of American high school students, the teacher asks students to write down distinctly Singaporean places they might take the Americans to. They disappoint the teacher when they write: Takashimaya, MacDonald’s, and Boat Quay. The last might be a Singapore attraction, but the first two are Japanese and American, respectively. When he asks them to think about places that represent their culture—and to please use Chinese since it is Chinese class, after all—the students come back with “GaoDaoWu, MaiDangLao, BoChuanMaTou”.
The teacher is furious and gives them one more chance. Maybe the students can’t find other places that represent their culture, but can they at least write these places in Chinese characters? The students find the characters and when the teacher asks just what they’ll do at Boat Quay, they answer that they’ll take the Americans there for Mexican food. The story ends there and there is no reaction from the teacher, but it’s not difficult to imagine the teacher coming to a eureka moment where he (or she) realises the students’ culture really is multinational and that one can be in Singapore, New York, or Paris and these shops and fast food places are all the same.
Another story that stood out is “Teeth”. The narrator is an older man who is repulsed by his wife’s teeth. He thinks back to their younger years when her teeth were pearly white. As they both reached middle age, he only saw her teeth when she barked out orders to him when he forgot to turn off the lights or didn’t squeeze the toothpaste tube to her liking. The thing that drove him crazy the most was the way she would grind her teeth at night, keeping him awake.
When his wife passes away, he notices for the first time the jaw structure and teeth of other people and realises his wife’s teeth weren’t that bad. And then he notices that he has started grinding his own teeth. One night he opens the drawer in the nightstand next to his bed and finds her dentures. This was a secret they kept from their friends and family. She had wanted to age gracefully and had used dentures towards the end of her life to keep that sparkle in her mouth. But the husband didn’t have her buried with dentures because he wanted her to leave the world a dignified woman. He also made sure she would be unable to “bare her teeth” again. It’s with irony that he falls asleep one night holding her dentures, falling into a deep sleep as he recalls the sound of her teeth grinding.
The stories are quirky and often bring about frustration, anger, and annoyance in the characters, but these are the emotions that people often suppress because they feel it’s not socially acceptable to express them freely. The Joy of a Left Hand shows humans in all states of emotion, and the short story format works well. While most of the stories are set in Singapore, they are all universal and will resonate with readers everywhere.
How to cite: Blumberg-Kason, Susan. “Humans in All States of Emotion: Liang Wern Fook’s The Joy of a Left Hand.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 27 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/27/left-hand.
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Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair With China Gone Wrong. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books‘ China Blog, Asian Jewish Life, and several Hong Kong anthologies. She received an MPhil in Government and Public Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Blumberg-Kason now lives in Chicago and spends her free time volunteering with senior citizens in Chinatown. (Photo credit: Annette Patko) [Susan Blumberg-Kason and ChaJournal.]