Fiction: Group 4
us laughing at how ridiculous we looked, and then the chase would commence.
Whilst Peng and I played our game on one particular day in the summer of 1979, we noticed that
something about our little village seemed different. Although it was only noon, the Chinese medicine
practitioner had already cleared away his collection of deer antlers and was closing his shop for the day.
Other businesses followed suit; soon, Peng and I found ourselves running through quiet streets dotted with
aging footsteps with no one in sight. Once we saw the greengrocer tucking away the greens he had yet to
sell - which, we realized with dismay, would discolor and wither throughout the empty afternoon - we
decided to call a truce. There was no dried fish that day; the market had closed as well.
Back then, we never fully realized what was happening in our little village. We walked home to find our
parents flanked with all the other village adults. When they saw us approach, they hushed their frantic
whispers and looked at us two children, their lopsided smiles plastered half-heartedly beneath harrowed
eyes.
“
Ma ma,
why is everyone here?”
“There’s no reason, Jia Li. We’re just talking about village affairs.”
A wrinkled man - perhaps the man who lived two blocks away from our hut - shuffled to my mother’s
side and whispered something in her ear. Her lips quivered. She nodded her head.
“Now hurry off you two, and don’t worry about us. Leave the adults to meet in peace.”
But before we were out of earshot, I heard the old man say:
“This is how it ends.”
***
Dear Jia Li - Hong Kong - wow! You’ve gone a long way, haven’t you? I hear there are some things in
Hong Kong you can’t find anywhere else. Like the tram. Have you taken the tram before? Why is it called a
ding-ding?
Have you-
In 1985, our family said goodbye to Shantou forever.
After the government had declared the official opening of the Pearl River Delta region, no two things had
ever been the same. The neighbours we used to see meandering about town, lazing in the warm sun, now
preoccupied every waking hour fantasizing about business enterprises they
claimed
to have always wished to
open but never did. They blamed it on the village: how small it was, how slow it was, how separate it was
from the rest of the world. The Chinese medicine practitioner closed the blinds of his shop for two whole
weeks. When somebody suggested he could process his ingredients faster in a factory, his stony eyes simply
clouded over as he replied: “I am an artisan, not a fool.”
In his view, everybody in our village had become a fool overnight. Within two or three years, hordes of
people had left our village in search of prosperity. They murmured about
factories
and
economic prospects
and
business models.
These people, who had never taken a business class in all their lives. Starry-eyed, they
walked away without a second glance back at what remained. What remained was our village, fractured,
quiet and never again the haven it used to be.
