Starting-starting I better tell the readers that this won’t be their typical primary school karangan, isn’t it? I know one, just because they see the title, sure they thinking they so clever, already know the whole story from Paragraph…
This story began as a narrative poem, which became a monologue, which then turned into a short story.
A poem may sometimes have an epigraph in the format of “after so-and-so”: a way to acknowledge the person or work that has preceded it, and this precedence inspires the poem’s coming into being. This story likewise has its own predecessors. So here are a series of epigraphs:
After Lee Beng Chuan, who passed in 2020 and was often called the last traditional joss stick maker of George Town, Penang—the state I come from. There have been efforts to preserve and carry on Lee’s legacy, particularly in the framework of George Town being a UNESCO World Heritage Site (since traditional crafts like his are part of the city’s cultural heritage). But this is not an easy designation to bear: how do you preserve a practice in the context of shifting economic, cultural, and technological realities? This question forms the story’s spine and is informed by the various videos and articles documenting Lee, his successors, and the art of joss stick making.
After Preeta Samarasan, whose fiction has expanded for me the possibilities of Manglish (Malaysian colloquial English) in literary writing. The poem version of this story was entirely in standard English; the monologue, meant for performance in Malaysia, was in full-throated Manglish, drawing from the grammar, vocabulary, metaphors, and even thought patterns of various Malaysian languages. The short story form, however, tries to balance the colloquial and the codified. It addresses the Malaysian listener but also leaves room for the foreign reader. (For instance, I largely retained the syntax of Manglish, but reined in the codeswitching.) Samarasan pulls off this kind of stylisation to such intoxicating effect that it no longer seems an act of compromise, but transforms into a mode of creation in its own right. I hoped to do the same.
After the primary school essays I used to write. Back then, for language classes, we were assigned essays in which we took on the persona of a pencil, a bicycle, a television, a pair of football shoes. The story invariably begins with the “I” being produced in one factory or another, who ends up in happy servitude to a caring owner—or meeting the occasional tragic fate: stolen, forgotten, or unceremoniously discarded. Though we mostly wrote to a template, I like how, as kids, we were already encouraged to engage with the idea of birth and death, through an effort of imaginative empathy, no less. The choice to use this conceit as a metafictional structure was further inspired by Julie Bouchard’s “What Burns” (translated by Arielle Aaronson). Bouchard’s use of direct address in her story helped me realise the triangulation of perspectives that this story requires: the joss stick, its maker, and, of course, the reader.
YEE HENG YEH is a Malaysian writer and translator. His poetry has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, while his short fiction has appeared in Reader’s Digest Asia and Guernica. “I Am a Dragon Joss Stick: An Essay” won the Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers in 2025. He was also a Writing Fellow at A Public Space in 2023. You can find him on Twitter and Bluesky @HengYeh42.
