Photographic memory: 3 (UK)

I was touring the Isle of Man with some English friends on Easter Sunday in March 1978 when we drove past a shop that sold something I’d been looking for.  It was shut and we were returning to Liverpool the next day, when it’d still be shut (those were the days when everything shut at 4pm on Saturday and all day Sunday — public holidays are treated as Sunday).  The shopfront had its telephone number displayed, but we didn’t have any pen and paper to write it down.  I gazed at the number, imprinted it onto my brain screen, then when we got back to the house and could get hold of pen and paper, closed my eyes to call up the number on my brain screen and wrote it down. 

(UK, 1978)

Photographic memory: 2 (Singapore)

I’d always had a photographic memory.  

As a child, I’d go with my mother on her post-natal visits as a private midwife, just for the car ride.  

One day, a man whose wife was going into labour turned up while my mother was out on her rounds and I happened to have opted out.  My mother’s cousin had dropped by, so we jumped into his car and I directed him along the route my mother would’ve taken.  We found her at the second place, so she was able to dash off to deliver the baby before resuming her visits. 

My nephew Kaikai shares the same ability.  My brother and his wife would drop him off (aged two or three) at his maternal grandma’s place before going to work.  He used to hate this and would cry as soon as they approached the grandma’s block of flats, so one day they decided to try a different approach to the block.  

Now, Singapore’s high rise blocks, especially those within the same estate, all pretty much look alike, yet Kaikai knew they were driving him to his grandma’s and started crying, even though it was from a different direction this time.

(Singapore, 1960s / 1980s)

Students' versions are much more fun: 1 (London)

My style of teaching is to challenge the student as much as possible, e.g., make them work out the meaning of a compound or phrase by breaking it down to the individual components and arriving at the final meaning that way.

One of those phrases is 可有可无 kě yǒu kě wú / “can have can not-have”, which the Mac dictionary gives as “be as well without it as with it” and another, online dictionary gives as “it doesn’t matter whether one has it or not”, i.e., one can take it or leave it, it’s dispensable.  An example would be: "Some people cannot do without coffee.  For me, it's 可有可无."

When I asked David M what he thought it meant and when it might be used, he said, “Perhaps, say, used by a greengrocer, replying to your asking if they have any apples: ‘可有可无。Maybe we have, maybe we don’t.’”  

I collapsed in fits of laughter.  What a perverse greengrocer, being so cagey about whether they might have apples or not!  

(David is a mature student, not a teenager whose general knowledge of life might be a bit more limited and whose imagination might run a bit wilder than adults’.)

(London, 2017)