“The loudest voice in the room is rarely the wisest.”
– Confucius (551-479 BC), one of the most influential philosophers in human history.
IN a community of about 2,000 people, a man who never stops boasting is just an occasional pain in the neck. You hear him once a month, roll your eyes, and carry on living.
Drop that to 1,000, and he becomes a steady, dull headache. At 500, he’s a full-blown migraine – the sort that makes you consider shouting at the sky, but you don’t, because you’re not an idiot and the sky has never once apologised to anyone.
Yes, yes, the maths sounds dodgy. “How can one man become more annoying just because there are fewer people?” you ask, as if human misery must follow neat equations. But the idea is simple: in a smaller crowd, the chances of bumping into him go up.
That was village life for us in the 1950s and 1960s when I was little, and then the 1970s when I was a teenager. A remote place where everyone knew everyone.
Usually, we didn’t get 2,000 people gathering in one place. We barely got 500 unless something serious was happening – like a football carnival the week before Gawai Dayak, our annual harvest festival.
But here’s what I learnt around the age of nine – maybe ten – sometime in 1962 or 1963: a boastful man doesn’t need a big crowd. All he needs is an unfortunate listener. Preferably one trapped by politeness, geography, or a bench that’s too low to escape quickly.
I saw this demonstrated every other day, especially on weekends, at a provision shop near our house. The same show ran at two other shops at the north and south ends of the village, where old men leaned on posts, sipped drinks, swapped news, and pretended they were discussing serious matters.
I learnt early that if you want to “join” gatherings where adults deal with “grown-up topics”, you don’t announce yourself. You sit quietly. You don’t fidget. You don’t cough. You become as silent as the posts they lean on; as unnoticed as the benches they occupy.
It’s amazing what adults will say when they forget you’re there. They’ll reveal secrets, grudges, petty triumphs, and the occasional philosophy. They’ll also lie with great confidence, a skill I later found was very useful in politics, business, and certain family reunions.
Anyway, among the regulars was one man in particular.
We called him Muji.
Not to his face, of course. We weren’t stupid or suicidal.
“Muji” in the Bukar-Sadung sub-dialect of the Bidayuh language means “to praise”. So, because this man praised himself excessively, we nicknamed him Muji – even though his real name was Buji.
By “we”, I mean me, my younger brother Little B, and our cousin Ratum. Ratum was reluctant. He didn’t care for adult talk.
He didn’t care for boasting. He didn’t even care for most things, except food and not being bored. He tagged along because he wanted to be with us.
Now, I disliked Muji’s self-promotion the way you dislike a mosquito – small, persistent, and annoying. But I was also fascinated. Not because his stories were good – they were often ridiculous – but because he told them with such calm certainty. No shame. No hesitation. No awareness that everyone around him could see the stitching.
Even a snot-nosed kid with an unfinished primary education could tell what was happening. You could watch the transformation, step by step, like a slow, tragic parade: confidence turning into pride, pride swelling into boastfulness, boastfulness hardening into arrogance. And then arrogance dressing itself up as “truth”.
Muji didn’t just talk; he performed. He would arrive at the shop like he owned the air around it, greet people loudly, and then begin.
If the conversation was about hunting, he had once hunted an animal so fierce that the forest became quiet out of respect. If the topic was farming, his crops grew so well they made the neighbours jealous. If someone mentioned a football match, Muji had once played so brilliantly that the other side “forgot” the rules out of sheer awe.
None of it was delivered as a joke. That would have been charming. No, Muji told his stories the way a priest delivers a sermon – with conviction, with authority, and with a gentle assumption that if you doubt him, you are a simpleton, uneducated.
The adults played their part too. They didn’t challenge him directly. Not because they believed him, but because village life runs on harmony, and harmony is often just conflict postponed until a more convenient time. They’d respond with little noises: “Ah.” “Oh.” “Is that so?” The sounds you make when you’re letting someone else talk themselves tired.
But Muji never got tired. That was his gift.
Sometimes he’d use a listener like a prop. “You remember, don’t you?” he would say, pointing at someone. The poor fellow would freeze, mind racing: Do I remember? Was I even there? And because saying “No” would make things awkward, he would nod slowly, as if remembering a sacred event. And Muji would beam.
For us kids, the best part wasn’t the boasting itself. It was the way Muji’s stories grew, like a slowly inflated balloon.
One day, he would say he carried a sack of rice from the river to the village. The next week, the sack got bigger. A month later, it became two sacks. Eventually, it became a heroic rescue mission in which he carried rice, a crying baby, and a stubborn goat while also advising the village headman.
Little B would grip my arm to stop himself laughing. Ratum would stare at the ground, bored out of his mind, and occasionally whisper, “Can we go now?” as if he were trapped in a long prayer.
But I stayed. I watched. I studied Muji the way you study a strange insect you don’t want to touch, but can’t stop looking at.
What baffled me was not that he lied. People lie all the time. They lie to look good. They lie to avoid trouble. They lie because the truth is plain, and plain things don’t get attention.
No, what baffled me was his total lack of self-awareness. Muji didn’t seem to notice that the world did not react to him the way he imagined. He didn’t seem to notice the polite smiles, the exchanged looks, the small coughs people used to cover a snort.
Or maybe he noticed and didn’t care. Maybe he thought any reaction was proof of importance. If people laughed, they were impressed. If they frowned, they were jealous. If they walked away, they were intimidated.
It was a very convenient system. Whatever happened, Muji won.
Of course, in a village, nobody truly gets away with anything. Not forever. A boaster’s stories might float around for a while, but reality has a way of showing up like an uninvited guest.
When someone else actually did something brave or skilled, Muji would attach himself to it like a vine. “I taught him,” he’d say. “I advised him.” “He did it because I told him to”. If a man fixed an engine, Muji had “explained the principles” years ago. If a woman ran an excellent feast, Muji had “suggested” the timing.
We, children, noticed this. We also noticed something else: Muji was lonely.
Not in the dramatic, tragic way people talk about in sad books. More like the everyday loneliness of a man who can’t relax in his own skin. The kind that makes someone fill every silence with noise, because silence might force them to sit with themselves.
Once, I saw him sitting alone outside the shop, before anyone else arrived. He looked smaller, somehow. Not defeated – Muji would never allow that – just quiet, like an actor backstage without an audience.
Then someone came. Muji straightened. The performance started again.
That moment stayed with me, even as I grew older and thought I’d forgotten him.
Because here’s the thing we don’t like admitting: Muji wasn’t unique. Every place has one. Sometimes it’s a man in a shop. Sometimes it’s an uncle at a wedding. Sometimes it’s a colleague who tells you, unprompted, how their boss “relies” on them for everything. Sometimes – if life is feeling especially cruel – it’s you, on a bad day, talking too loudly about your own struggles because you want someone to notice you exist.
In our village, Muji was just easier to spot because there were fewer people and fewer distractions. In a big city, a boaster can blend into the background noise. In a village, he’s a proud rooster that never learns the sun will rise without him.
So yes, in a population of 500, one boaster can feel like a migraine. But with time – and this is the irritatingly hopeful part – you realise something else.
The boastful man is not the whole village. He’s just one thread in it, loud and tangled. And villages, like lives, are made of many threads: the patient ones, the generous ones, the quiet ones who do the work and don’t announce it, the ones who listen, the ones who laugh, and even the ones who lie a bit because they’re scared of being ordinary.
Muji, for all his nonsense, taught me something I didn’t ask to learn: people perform because they want to be seen. Some do it with kindness. Some do it with skill. Some do it by making themselves ten times larger than life, because they don’t know any other way to feel real.
And maybe that’s the most philosophical truth you can squeeze out of a provision shop in a remote village: everyone is trying, in their own clumsy way, to matter.
Even Muji.
Especially Muji.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at www.hayhenlin@gmail.com
