She wasn’t brought up on picture books the way her own children were. Even though illustrated storybooks existed back in the early 1970s – for example The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats had already been out for about a decade by then – these reading materials for infants and toddlers never reached the shores of the woman’s former hometown of Ipoh when she was the right age for them. Besides, her Malaysian Chinese parents raised her by instinct, not by the book, and certainly not any book written by Westerners, be they writers or illustrators, psychologists or doctors. As a result, the woman was never read to as a child, or if she was, she has no memory of it.
What the woman remembers clearly from her childhood is a slim book kept in the top right hand drawer of the wooden display cabinet in the living room. Her parents, who consulted this book fairly regularly, called it the Numbers Book. An accurate title, as its pages were printed with row upon row of three-digit numbers, each combination accompanied by printed words in Malaysia’s three major languages – Malay, English and Chinese. Each number was paired with explanatory line drawings, rudimentary and unimpressive in style, yet oddly alluring. The woman – a child of four at the time – called it the Pink Book, for the light pink paper that it was made of, held together by two staples. You could argue that it was the woman’s first picture book. In reality, the pictures were secondary. It was the numbers you turned the pages for.
You see, not long after the woman was born, her parents realised that to give their child a future, a brighter, better future, in a place where she would be afforded equal opportunities regardless of race or religion – not just to excel, but to work, to love, to pray, to simply live and to become the person she was meant to be – they would have to build a boat for her to get into, a boat with its prow pointing outwards, bound for foreign lands such as England, Canada, Australia, countries seen as being more egalitarian, more hospitable, more promising. The woman’s parents decided they would keep this daring escape plan to themselves – how could they burden their offspring with knowledge of such a weight that they themselves could barely shoulder? – and they would pour their life’s energies into building that boat, making it seaworthy, nail by nail, plank by plank, timber by timber.
Because chance is the courting cousin of uncertainty, the woman’s parents would sometimes take a gamble with their hard-earned money in the hopes of hitting the jackpot. Betting on numbers – Toto, 4D, Magnum – the equivalent of landing on a square with a ladder or passing GO and collecting $200. After an odd dream, or sighting the license plate of a car, wrecked after a road accident, or spotting an unusual bird in a tree, her parents would rush to the top drawer, pull out the Numbers Book, and look up the set of digits corresponding to that particular event in the hope that it might end up in next week’s list of winning lottery numbers. The Numbers Book was hope. It offered sweet salvation.
For the woman, a curious child at the time, the Pink Book was an object of wonder. Reading it was not verboten, yet, the child would wait until the mid-afternoon when everyone at home, including her grandparents, was napping. When all she could hear was the muted ticking of the wall clock, the child would steal into the living room and stealthily withdraw the book from its drawer. She’d crawl into the darkened space under the dining table, the book in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and pore through its pages, stopping at illustrations that held her attention because they were salacious, at least to a four-year-old’s eyes: 186 (berkaseh di padang, or lovers in a field), 277 (minom susu, or breastfeeding), 789 (berchium, or kissing), 720 (berkaseh, or making love). Or because they were rude: 473 (berak, or pooing), 809 (seluar dalam, or underwear), 837 (baju dalam, or brassiere). Some pictures were fascinatingly morbid: 349 (mati lemas, or death by drowning), 351 (gantong diri, or death by hanging), 407 (mayat, or corpse). Others were quaint: 505 (ayam berlaga, or cock fighting), 539 (tangkap babi, or catching pigs), 723 (melawat penjarah, or visiting someone in prison), 848 (itek berkahwin, or ducks getting married). And many others were simply inexplicable: 441 (sputum mug), 565 (hisap chandu, or smoking opium), 614 (ear wax digger). There was no explanation for how the numbers came to carry the meanings that they did, no pattern the child could discern, and this both frustrated and captivated her. On many a day, she spent what felt like hours (but was probably no more than fifteen minutes), mouthing the words like mantras and tracing the lines of the pictures with her eyes before surreptitiously returning the Pink Book to its drawer before anyone in her household stirred. The Pink Book was a puzzle. It offered secret pleasures.
Many years later, back in her childhood home once more, the woman discovers the Pink Book tucked away in a stack of old books and magazines. Surprised by the unexpected find, she sits down heavily in her father’s fraying rattan chair and hugs her mother’s lumpy cushion to her stomach. She starts to thumb through the familiar pages, sepia-speckled with time. The staples, now rusted, still hold the numbers and their pictures together, steadfast and true. The woman flips to the page, searching for number 592, to double check that her memory still holds. Sure enough, there is it, the picture of a coiled cobra, ready to strike. Ular, or snake. That lump on the road was definitely a snake, her father had insisted as the family drove to dinner somewhere, back when it wasn’t illegal to sit on your mother’s lap in the passenger seat with the seatbelt slack across your belly. From the Numbers Book, One + Snake = 1592. Her father had been right. Jackpot. The winning lottery number allowed her parents to build a boat big enough for the three of them, strong enough to bear them all to a new horizon, into a brighter, better future.
The woman smiles. She will show the Pink Book to her children. She will let them read the Numbers with their Pictures. She will tell them how it all began.
Maureen Tai is an award-winning Malaysian writer living in Hong Kong with creative works in Cha, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kyoto Journal, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Does It Have Pockets, Porch Lit Magazine and the Hooghly Review, among others. Primarily writing for children and teens, she has published short stories for children with Oxford University Press and Marshall Cavendish (Asia). Maureen’s work and book reviews can be found at www.maureentai.com. Her time as the Program Director of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in 2023 is the highlight of her literary career to date.