The Night Tiger

by Yangsze Choo

We were a chocolate-box family, I thought. Brightly wrapped on the outside and oozing sticky darkness within.

When I was a child, once in a while when guests came to visit, we got a box of assorted chocolates. I remember how absolutely thrilling this was, especially those boxes with pictures of the different types and fancy descriptions, such as “a soft whisper of nougat wrapped in the finest Belgian chocolate”. Often, the descriptions were almost better than eating them. I also spent a lot of time when I was a kid eavesdropping on older people. Part of it was because I’ve always been interested in history and stories, and partly because my parents came from a small town in the Kinta Valley, close to Ipoh, and whenever we went to visit, there were lots of neighbors and my grandparents’ friends who had stories to share, or were just very chatty. All one had to do was sit around, eating quietly, and listening to stories about so-and-so’s nephew. Some of those stories were really surprising. Perfectly ordinary people turned out to have second wives, hidden hobbies, and secret children. Which goes to say that you never can tell from the outside whether you’re really going to get a chocolate cherry, or just a sticky mess.