As a child I was not too happy staying in a wooden house while many of my friends lived in concrete houses until my ngie mah taught me a lesson or two. She reminded me that "refugees" had no pillow to rest on until they found a Godly place to sleep and then she started telling me stories from the Bible. She was illiterate but she remembered so many stories "by heart". After her stories, I felt better and appreciated the peeling white washed walls of our wooden houses.
Whitewash - Tom Sawyer
Reading Tom Sawyer gave me an uplifted sense of wonder. Fences in the US were white washed. There was this big house called White House. After that, I thought that all houses painted in white, or white washed were just lovely. One night as I cycled home from MYF I saw my wooden house gleaming pale white in the dark. I was glad I 'was coming HOME". I had a home in which lived my parents, my siblings and my grandma.
White Wash - today many people have forgotten about white washing as a metaphor. May be it has gone out of use. Obsolescence? Never mind. writers, politicians, tycoons. do a lot of white washing.
White wash in Fujian...for the first time I realised that white wash could be just made in a backyard. In Minqin I saw this..and men came to collect their white wash in their pails, ride off in their tricycle for their day's earning.
Whitewash cannot be erased from my memory.
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