It can be daunting to deal with all the excuses two little kids can come up with to avoid bedtime. When I was young, my father used to tell my brother and me bedtime stories featuring a turtle named Frank who came to the rescue during all sorts of emergencies. So to get my kids to fall into line, late this spring I started to tell them my own bedtime stories.
Hong Kong stories.
Taken mostly from my experiences in Hong Kong, each night I relay a short snippet of something out of the ordinary. Their favorite hands down is called The Night of the Flying Red Ants. At the conclusion of each new story, they usually ask for a repeat of the red ants one.
It goes something like this: After a heavy rainfall one spring night, a swarm of flying red ants seeped through the cracks in my dorm room screens. Ants were everywhere–in my hair, on my desk, on my bed, in my shoes. They covered all ground. I quickly ran out of the room, slamming the door behind me, and raced down eight flights of stairs to borrow bug spray from the front desk guard. After fumigating the room, I returned the spray. A two-hour hall phone call to a friend kept me away from the poison in my room. And when I returned, I simply swept up the dead ants and threw them in the communal rubbish bin down the corridor.
That happened once a year.
Other stories they enjoy include:
Night of the Walla Walla (taken from my uncle’s experience in Hong Kong many decades ago)
Face to Face with a Pack of Wild Dogs (that’d be me again)
Attack in the Monkey Forrest (the main story takes place in Bali, but with a prelude in Hong Kong’s New Territories)
The Dirty Apple (my lesson in eating unwashed fruit)
The Many Flavors of Chungking Mansions (taking unsuspecting guests out for a night of Indian food), and
No Taking Chicken Pictures (when Tom was chased out of a Mongkok chicken stall for trying to photograph the place).
The kids are excited each night for a new Hong Kong story. They calm down, I calm down, and in the process we all enjoy a special moment together at the end of the day.
Do you have a Hong Kong story that is age-appropriate for kids 3 and 5 years old?
Shannon Young says
Wow, I don’t think I’d be able to sleep after hearing the flying red ants story! I was visiting a friend’s village house in Sai Kung during flying ant season this year. The most nature I usually experience is a gecko that comes into my apartment when it rains.
I have a contribution for your HK story collection. This Sunday I was swimming off a junk boat in Turtle Cove (South Lamma Island). It was a beautiful sunny day and the water was just right. When about ten of us had been in the water for nearly half an hour, a boat nearby started speeding towards us and shouting, “Get out of the water! There’s a shark!” We thought they were joking, but got back on the boat just in case. About ten seconds after I had climbed out of the water, I saw a fin the size of my arm break the water close to the beach. Of course we all grabbed our cameras and watched a beautiful 12-foot shark swim back and forth not far from our boat. We learned later that it was a whale shark, which only eats plankton and is completely harmless, but we figured it was better to be safe than sorry. We also realized that it probably had to swim directly underneath our group to get so close to the beach and we didn’t see it.
Susan Blumberg-Kason says
Yikes. That’s too bad you saw the flying ants in Sai Kung. I never minded geckos (that’s another Hong Kong story I tell the kids).
Thanks so much for the shark story! I relayed it to the kids last night and they loved it, especially when they learned it was pretty harmless, unless you’re plankton. Still, it must have been scary at the time. Twelve feet is quite large!
Anju Gattani says
Hi Susan,
Lovely post and such a treasure you’re handing down to your kids. They may not realize the depth of your bedtime stories now… but will surely do so when they’re older and take another trip to HK with you!
Enjoy the memories… I still do. 🙂
Susan Blumberg-Kason says
Thank you so much! I can only imagine the stories you have from Hong Kong!! I’d love to hear them sometime!!