Week 6 Reading Diary: Filipino Stories

Below I have presented my favorite stories from Filipino Popular Tales.

In the story The Clever Husband and Wife it seems that the story is being told from an outsiders perspective. It is about how a husband and wife get married and they have nothing at all so the husband keeps asking his employer for money. He approaches the employer several times making up excuse after excuse in order to gain more money. Then finally he ran out of excuses so he pretended that his wife had passed so he could gain money to give her a proper burial, then the wife did the same thing to her employer. Then the two employers got suspicious so they went to the house only to find that both husband were alive and well, they found it to be a funny joke so they let them live with them.

In the story Chonguita the story also seems to be being told by an outsiders point of view. This story is about a king that has three sons, he sends them all out to find their wives. Two of the sons found “normal” wives but one ended up marrying a monkey. The wives went through several trials and tasks assigned by the king but the money wife succeeded in every challenge and so the king crowned her husband the new heir to the thrown. The monkey wife ended up turning in to a beautiful woman at the end of story.

The story The Enchanted Prince is about a prince who falls in love with a witch but his father forces him to marry another girl. The witch gets angry so she places several spells on the city and the prince and makes him a monkey for five centuries. Only can the spell be broken when the time has passed and he has a girl fall in love with him.

In the story The Monkey and the Crocodile there is a monkey that is needed to cross a large river but he cannot do it by himself so he seeks out a large crocodile that can help him. He convinces the crocodile to let him ride on his back across the river and then the monkey will lead him to all the monkeys in he could dream of eating. The crocodile agrees and swims him across, then the monkey jumps off his back and climbs to a tree and laughs at the crocodile. Later on the monkey thinks the crocodile is dead so approaches him but then the crocodile attacks, later on they learn not to take the advice of others but to rather learn to trust yourself.

In the story The Ant there is a snake that goes up to God and asks him for power of poison in order to keep order in the village. God grants him the privilege of poison and so he goes back and brags to all, then the ant asks for the same power from God. He initially grants the ant the power and then the ant doesn’t listen to God so he lessens his power.

The Lost Necklace was a story about a crow that bought a very nice and fancy necklace. He then went to show it off to a hen, the hen asked to borrow the necklace. The crow allowed, then the next day the crow returned to get it back, but the hen had lost it. So the crow said he would eat one of her hens each day until he was repaid.