One day as they were begging along the sreet, they stooped at the home of the exfishman and his wife the wife recognized her former husband who was now dressed in rage. why are you so poor?
she asked my second wife was no help to me he replied ashamed and so i lost my business the woman could not neglect the man who used to be her husband and gave him a good sum of money before sending him and his family
on their way then the careful clever wife and her hard-working husband lived happily ever affter.
this story was first told to me by my grandmother when i was six or severn years old Afterward i heard it many time from my mother and I in turn told it to my younger sister. i never go tired of hearind it or telling
it although it was never told just for amusement. it was meant to each girl how to behave, to show them what their reponsibilities in life would be and how they hould carry them out.
The moral of the story is very clear- woman must be thrifthty and tidy and know how to look after what thier husband earn. the story tells us that women are impotant for no matter how hard husband work if their wives don't know how to help
them they will never succeed Husband earn the money but wives must manage it.
IN the own family these values where put into practice over two generation. My grandmother was a goldsmith for the royal palace. He died very young, when my father was just ten. My grandmother kept his businnes going and even managed to send my father to a French schlool. That was a great achievement for such an education was expensive. Grandfather worked right up to the time her sons could earn their own livings. She built the house we lived in, in a business district a mile from the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. It was a wooden house on stilts with the living quarters upstairs and a little shop underneath. She used to carry on a goldsmith's business from there during her working years but when I was ca child it was a pawnshop run by my father's older sister, another enterprising woman.
