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My partner for this project is Goh Wei Min. He is Malaysian (or part Malaysian and part Chinese) and lives in Hong Kong. Wei Min can speak Chinese, English, Putonghua, and some Malay. Through exchange of e-mail, I learned a lot about Wei Min and his everyday life. However, I did not receive a piece of literature from him. So I decided to do a Chinese folk tale because Wei Min seemed to be more accustomed with Chinese than Malaysian.

This folk tale is called “We are all One” is about a poor, kindhearted old man who saves a rich man from a rare eye disease and gets rewarded in the end. This story is just one of the many stories out in the world that like to put the poor and charitable characters in the spotlight. It is rare to find a story where the rich, greedy man comes out on the top. I think that all of these stories are told to teach people, usually younger children, morals and social behavior.

In the story, an old candy peddler hears about this man with a rare eye disease and decides to go to help him. This peddler and his family were very poor because he was so generous with his candy. So the peddler goes off on a journey to the sick man’s house and saves an ants’ nest from becoming flooded with water from a nearby stream. He tells the ants, “We’re all one.” The ants then vow to help him in any time of need in a dream. The peddler then continues on his journey to run into a bird trying to eat a centipede. He scares the bird away, saying once again to the centipede that “We are one, you and I.” Later on at night, the centipede talks to him and directs him to a cure for the sick man’s eye. The bug tells him to look for a magic bead and then to dissolve that bead into wine for the sick man. The man follows the centipede’s instructions and has a little difficulty finding the bead. The peddler calls to the ants for help and in no time, he had the bead in his hands. He then rushes to the sick man’s house and cures him. The cured man gave him a generous reward and “the kindly old peddler and his family lived comfortably for the rest of their lives.”

The folktale is a little fictional because the man runs into and talks to a nest of ants and a centipede. However, the moral of the story is still important. One moral of “We are all One” is to treat everything with respect. The old peddler could have walked on past the ant’s nest or even stepped on it. However, he stopped in the middle of his journey to save them. Most people would think that ants are insignificant creatures, but the peddler treated them as an equal. Also, he did not have to save the centipede from the bird. Perhaps another man would have carried on with his journey thinking that this scene was just a normal act of nature. Another teaching of the story may be that the “good guy” always wins in the end. This would be a great story for children so that they will too act like the peddler in the sense that they should always make the best out of any situation and be helpful to others. This folktale and similar stories have probably influenced Chinese culture greatly because respect is very important in many Asian cultures.