Fiction: Group 3
New Tales of the Pearl River Delta
International College Hong Kong (ICHK), Ho, Clarissa - 11, Fiction: Group 3
here was a 10-year-old girl called Camilla who lived in Hong Kong. Camilla had dark brown
eyes and short black hair.
Her dad was a construction worker, and her mum worked as a waitress. They couldn’t afford to buy or rent
a flat in the city, because it
was expensive
in Hong Kong. So the family lived in a shabby little hut near the
Hong Kong-Shenzhen border in the Pearl River Delta.
Their hut had a
few
holes on the rooftop. When it rained Camilla had to put a bucket next to her bed and
hear the drops of rain: dip dop, dip dop.
Though her family lacked material things, Camilla was a playful person and enjoyed playing spies. She liked
how they tracked down criminals with cool gadgets. Sometimes she thought of being a spy one day.
One morning after finishing her homework, Camilla was bored. She knocked on her friends’ doors to ask
them to play spies, but they weren’t there. So she wandered around. While she was walking on a path, she
felt something under her shoe. It felt hard and small. She lifted up her shoe, and picked up the object. She
could hardly believe her eyes. “It’s a gold coin!”
While she examined it, she took another step and felt another piece of hard thing. It was the same exact
coin! She realized that there was a whole TRAIL of them!
She followed the trail and picked up the coins as she went along. Suddenly a sound alerted her to hide in a
bush.
Down the slope, she saw a man wearing a surgical mask. He looked suspicious.
He was dragging a few brown sacks. One of them had a hole in it. Gold coins were falling out!
“Maybe he is a burglar,” Camilla thought. “I must find out what he is doing.” With that thought, Camilla
reached for her old Nokia phone and set it on video record.
She followed the man to places in the village she had never been to before. She climbed on rocks and
walked on slopes while trailing after him.
He stopped by a river, with a sign that read
Sham Chun River.
On the other side of the river was China.
Camilla’s parents said crossing the border was dangerous because people would kidnap children and sell
them. However, she was filled with excitement and fear did not enter her mind.
The man dragged his sacks of gold into a boat, and rowed it across the river. “Mum and Dad would get so
mad if I crossed the border,” Camilla thought. At the same time she felt excited that she could have a
chance to explore and spy on somebody. But there was no time for her to think because the boat was
leaving.
“I must go,” Camilla said to herself.
Camilla stopped the video and waded into the murky water. The water went up to her waist. Her trousers
were soaking wet. There were mud and leaves in her shoes. But the boat was moving away, and Camilla
couldn’t catch up. She yelled, “Who are you? What are you doing?”
The man looked back. He ran up to her and clamped a cloth over her mouth. Before Camilla knew what
was happening, she fainted.
T
