Tales from the mother-in-law

Sitting in a hawker centre at Ghim Moh, surrounded by a sea of brown faces, including my partner and her mother, eating fish porridge and a raw fish plate - mixed with sliced red pepper, generous slices of fresh ginger and a sprinkling of freshly squeezed lime juice and black pepper powder, the conversation turned to the shrine off to my right and some 20 feet behind us, upon which reposed a bearded, heavily costumed Shinto God surrounded by food offerings and burning joss sticks offered each day by the various vendors.

The smell of incense mixed with the the sundry smells wafting from the rows of narrow and cramped food stalls added to the immediacy.

' Mother say, ' interrupted my partner who had noticed that I was scanning the shrine and its assets, 'that a long time ago the Cantonese and the Hokkien ( Hokkien being a mix of ethnic Chinese from mainland China) met each other for the first time. The Cantonese asked the Hokkien what they were? The Hokien responded in dialect: 'Lang,' meaning person in Hokkien, but 'wolf'' in the Cantonese dialect.

Hearing this, the Cantonese fell upon the Hokkien and began to kill them. The Hokkien tribe fled to a forest of bamboo to try and save themselves. In this forest they invoked the help of their Diety.

A Diety arrived and stood before the Cantonese, saying nothing. The Cantonese scoffed and laughed and cut off his head. To their surprise, green fluid spouted from his headless shoulders and they ran off in fear.... that's what mother say,' concluded my storyteller.

I looked over my shoulder at the shrine and said: 'That diety has a head.'

'Yes,' she replied, 'But mother say it was the Diety you see at the shrine who sent his son and that is why to this day the Hokkien here and everwhere worship this diety. '

I smiled and my attention wandered back to the sea of faces , their thousand stories and gods and beliefs. Truly Asia...