| The Big family lived on the second storey. Old Papa and Old Mama used to heat up a large wok of cooking oil and fry chicken wings, fishcakes, hot dogs. They would cook large baskets of bee hoon and char kway teow. Then they would pack everything in a squarish white or red basket, that is used to carry vegetables in wholsale markets, and brought them downstairs and sell to the neighborhood. The little girl loved eating all the fried food, and grew up eating them. However, they are still times when she felt nausea from eating chicken wings everyday. it was like a luxury which she got tired from eating, as one well-off person would get tired from eating birds' nest everyday. Nevertheless, fried chicken wings remained as her favourite food till today. Then one evening, when business was growing well, they had neighbours coming to buy food from them almost every night. Then a medium white van drove up the road. The little girl had the least idea of what had happened. By the time she came out of the house, the white baskets of fried food was gone, and so was the white van. Everyone was crwoding around, talking and whispering to each other "they must have thought the food was not hygenice enough! "somebody in this neighbourhood must have leak off the secrets to the te gu!"" The little girl had never seen such commotions happend to her before. She went up to the Big Brother and asked "What had happened? Why is everyone so unhappy?" He replied "The government people had took away our food, we can't sell them now, we cannot earn oney anymore. We had no more money left." The little girls was shocked to hear all this, she did not know that money could upset people so easily, she stood there like a big dumb doll for a few moments, loking at the crowd. Then she went up to her room, where she had shared with Old Papa and Mama. She found her piggy bank. It was a long cylinderical container made of cardboard, with a slit at the top of the container for inserion of coins and notes. The little girl had previosly pasted strips of colours around the containder, in sequence of the colours of the rainbows, purple, blue, lime, green, yellow.... She poured out all the notes from the container, but she had no idea which note had the greatest value, she think for quite a while, and rested her eyes upon the old singapore twenty dollars currency, that had a imprint of a bird on it. "This note is special, it has a bird on it, unlike any other notes, this should be the biggest note" she thought to herself. So with that note, she went down to find Big Mama, and stuffed the notes secretly into her hand, Big Mama saw what she was doing and laughed at her, telling her to keep her notes. The peoply around her had started to saw what she was doing and laughed at her innocence too. "why are they laughing at me? " she thought in embarassment and annoyance "i will do it even more quietly in future." |