We would run up the wooden staircase to the upper floor which had a wide space for rice storage. There were 4 rooms too for Grandma and her visitors. Actually this double storeyed big house was made up of 5 units of double storeyed terrace house, in modern day terms. Furthermore the wooden house was stilted. In other words, it was actually a three storeyed house.
And in the evenings we would share stories with each other, or just listen to stories from Grandma and Third Uncle. We would all be sitting at the Lang Doh or connecting balcony, enjoying the river breeze, under the large kerosene pressure lamp. Sometimes we would enjoy aroma from the steaming of huge baos which by 9 p.m. would be ready for supper. Third Uncle would always make enough for supper and breakfast the next day.
Somehow we could never get the same tasty baos anywhere in the world. Only in Ah Nang Chong. A well known baker in Miri told me that today, flour is different from the flour of yesteryears and he could understand what I was talking about.
The huge baos were as big as heaven and earth together!! They were as big as the huge Chinese kuali. Uncle was generous. He would make two or three of those baos, which he would slice for all of us. And a whole bag of flour would last probably just one or two weeks. We were such voracious eaters!!
Here's another exaggeration. One of the stories we heard was about how big the land of a landlord in Minqing. Grandma said he was so rich that his land was as big as Heaven and Earth together - Tien Ah Bang Bang Duai. Well all our eyes grew big and we had to imagine how big that piece of land could be...She would say, "When he looked out from his main door, he could not see the other end of his land. So that was as big as heaven and earth."
Later we also used to phrase to describe anything that was big...Foochows can exaggerate sometimes.
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