Stories that take flight between reality and fantasy
Not always does the power of letters rest in its exactitude in representing reality. Words and phrases are cherished precisely for their imprecisions so as to conjure up something a step away from reality. It is at the point of this close but removed distance from reality that the imaginations of both writers and readers can spring to life. This journey of imagination contains the very fruit from which our experience of reality can ripen.
With a fiery passion for literature and language, Judy Pang’s stories delve into moments that blur the lines between reality and fantasy.
(Image: Drawing by Judy Pang)
Standing, Donkey stares straight ahead with his big thoughtful eyes. He has maintained this position for months now, ever since the scrupulous carving knife shaped out the finishing curve on his little wooden tail and the paint brush covered him with a greyish color and some hue of blue, both procedures performed by what he intuitively understood as his maker. This powerful being’s sonorous voice and warmth of hands are now what are left ingrained in Donkey’s earliest memories.
Donkey has only a very vague consciousness. It suites him just fine since his wooden frame would not have yielded to his mental command, had his desires developed to be much more demanding than just holding up his current posture. Despite his limitations, of which he is blissfully unaware, Donkey is able to marvel at what he sees in front of him. Inside his range of vision, on the right hand side sits a golden mandarin duck with marvelously delicate patterns painted on her back. She is as still as Donkey, a fact that Donkey appreciated in his even dimmer sub-consciousness. He does not know that she is a mandarin duck, since her silence has kept this a mystery to Donkey, nor does he realize the color gold, is called gold. Yet the sight of her day and night on the right side of his range of vision pleases him. Her patterns of gently intertwining lines and circles seem comforting to him. Her color reminds him of that warmth he felt when he was cradled in his maker’s hands, when he was not nearly half formed. The stillness of her gracious being reflects and affirms his own humble existence and Donkey emits an undetectably tiny hum from the depth of his being in response.
The rest of his vision consists of a corner of a window and inside this, a corner-shaped view of the sky. Donkey faithfully believes that this particular triangle of a sky belongs to him and faithfully watches his sun rise, shine and set, his clouds gather and dissipate, sometimes his rain trickles and sometimes pours, then his sun appears again. Donkey watches these happenings in his little piece of sky with very little understanding but he watches on with an interest intense in its persistency. The unpredictable changes can be somewhat unsettling to Donkey at times because he expects things to stay the way they are made, but he is more often simply at awe. Each time when the sun pours through in its overwhelming splendor, Donkey thinks of his maker and the way he used to say repeatedly “You’ll make a fine little donkey”. The sunrays that reach in to bathe him are for Donkey like a divine metamorphosis of that resonant voice of his maker, bearing down powerfully but kindly onto him while breathing life into him. At other times, when the sun is set or simply obscured, Donkey’s small wooden body would appear a little greyer without him knowing how. But Donkey waits patiently always at the same spot. His sun never disappoints him. That omnipotent, mysterious source of life always finds Donkey again in the end, sometimes only after a very very long interval. But it always finds Donkey. When it does, Donkey would glow ever so dimly.
Donkey continues to gaze at the golden mandarin duck and his small corner of a heaven, the two halves that complete his range of vision. He is at peace. One thing is for certain: nobody understands better than Donkey what home feels like, except Donkey does not know that a home is called a home.