I have a great story to tell. Once upon a time, when there was no human being, there was a monkey village. This village was always filled with peace and love. It was just like a heaven with no forest fire, flood, drought, thunder, or lightning, which we can only imagine.  However, change came to this village. This ever-peaceful and quiet place turned into somewhere dull place. So, the monkeys started to beg God for something new. After a month of protesting, God began to ask.

“Alright, what do you want me to do?”
“We are the only creatures in Monkey land. Please make some new creatures for us.”
“Okay, then what kind of creature do you want me to make? Do you want dolphins playing in the water?”
“No, we can’t even swim.”
“I see, then what do you want? Pigeons flying in the sky?”
“No, we can’t even fly.”
“Okay, then just tell me what you want.”

With excitement, the monkeys began to explain to God. “I’d like the one with long hair.” “Please, the one with long legs. Because running on four feet doesn’t look cool. I hope they can run on two feet.” “I wish they didn’t have body hair. My body is hairy, so the hairs stick to my foods whenever I eat them. “They kept on talking about the creature they wanted to God. After God is tired of the monkeys’ protesting, God started to make a man.

“Alright, is this what you want?” Then, the monkeys got noisy in excitement. “What I want is the one with long hair.” “I prefer a woman than a man.” “I wish the waistline was slimmer.”

They, again, began to talk about the creature they wanted. Fed up with the monkeys’ demands, God started to make a woman this time.

After human beings appeared in the world of the monkeys, many things changed. The monkey started to be jealous of human beings because human beings had something that they didn’t have. The human beings knew that the monkeys were envious of them. So, they started to differentiate themselves from the monkeys. People made clothes with leaves and then pointed the finger at the naked monkeys saying that they were dead to shame. Also, they started to make a fire to avoid the cold since they had short hair, unlike the monkeys. That fire became the one that made people warm, but it caught other places in an instant and then resulted in a forest fire. They just felt bored and then wanted something unusual, but the situation flows differently than the monkeys thought. So they desperately called upon God for help.

“You win.” The group of monkeys said. For the first time, they felt an emotion ‘fear’ and then wailed. “This is not what we wanted. Take it back now. Take it back. “

But, of course, it was too late. Once the evil begins, there is no turning back to peace.

Reflection:

I went through many trials and errors because it is the first time for me to write a story like this and tell it in front of other people. Telling a story, I either fleshed it out or simplified it, or I even had to restart talking about it from the very beginning because I was confused with what I wanted to say. Besides, having no idea what message I was going to convey in the middle, I had to rewrite it. Every time I told my story to the listeners, it changed little by little, so none of my stories were utterly the same.

What I felt after telling my story to the listeners was that there was a vast difference between listening to stories and watching them. Even if I said the same story, it subtly changed depending on my voice tone, so the listeners either easily understood what I meant to say or got it slightly wrong accordingly. Some asked a question after entirely realizing the message that I’d intended to convey, while others said that my story seemed to be sarcastic about the creation by God. Some found it fun, saying that it was like a children’s story, while others found it somewhat scary. It was such a scary but surprising experience. Though I told the same story every time, it turned into a different one depending on who listened to it.

When I read King’s book and then heard it in narration, I felt different though it was the same story, and just like me, I think that my listeners may have felt the same way. When I heard the narration of what I had read with a blank look, I could feel the urgency in his voice and then became urgent like him, too. When I heard the laughter of the audience behind his voice, I laughed, too. I think this is the pleasure that the language gives us.

Reference

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. House of Anansi, 2003.