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P5 The Mudskipper LS 6.2

Author: Ovidia Yu

Yu, Ovidia (2012) "The Mudskipper" pp.61-62, Scholastic, Singapore

LS 6.2

Learning Sheet 6.2: Extract from pp. 61‐62

Extract from pp. 61‐62

[…] suddenly he froze and very softly said, 'Look. Over at the base of that tree. There, you see? That's a mudskipper.'

Lizhi saw something move. It was small and brown and not shiny at all. She was not very impressed.

'Is that all? Why isn't it bigger?'

'How much bigger do you want it to be?' the man asked.

Lizhi thought. She held her hands out as wide as she could. 'This big,' she said, 'Then I could ride on it. And I could go into the water on its back.'

Ah Guan laughed, ' it wouldn't be a mudskipper. It would be a freak. People at the Resorts World would put it in a tank and charge us money to look at it and the traditional Chinese medicine people would cut it up and sell it to make cancer cures and love potions.'

'That's horrible,' Lizhi said. 'To be a freak like that and not belong to one place or another.'

Ah Guan seemed surprised to hear her say this. 'Why? It could mean you are at home in both the places.'

'But it doesn't happen like that in real life,' Lizhi said.

Ah Guan seemed to want to know more, and Lizhi was always happy to talk.

'It's like me,' she said. Papa used to call me his little mudskipper and he and Mama like me as I am. But everyone here thinks I'm weird. Like Aunt Mona and her friends.'

The old man looked surprised. 'Why did your father call you a mudskipper?' Anyone else would probably have been too embarrassed to say, but Lizhi liked answering questions almost as much as she liked asking them.

'Because I get muddy no matter where I go,' she said honestly. Looking down at her hands and feet and her little undershirt and shorts they both could see how true this was. 'But also because of me being half and half, you see. Like a mudskipper. I don't belong in the water and I don't belong on the land.'

© 2020 Gifted Education Branch, Ministry of Education

DMU Timestamp: February 27, 2021 01:26





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