Fiction: Group 4
“Hilarious, Peng,” I punched him on the back. “As always.”
After the goodbyes had been done and dusted, my parents and I stood at the entrance of the village, looking
back at those with whom we had spent many years of joy. It was time to walk away, starry-eyed... yet I saw
no stars that day. The figure of expression only alluded to the mosaics that dotted my vision, enlarging and
blurring the contours of the world in a wet, kaleidoscopic dance of light.
“I’ll miss you!”
I never saw Peng again.
***
Dear Jia Li - I’m sorry for not having written to you for so long. Things have been messy at home. My
dad’s sick and my mom might as well be - she’s so worried all the time. Don’t fret about us, though, and
tell me-
It has been twenty years since I walked away from a place I had always called home.
In fact, even now as I hold the third and last episode of Peng’s handwritten cards, I cannot help but smell
the waft of pungent fish we used to smell as we played our games. I cannot help but see Peng and his cheeky
grin, the bob of his hair as we ran down street after street with ridiculous appendages stuck on our heads.
I just heard from my father that he, too, is sick. Something is growing inside him - which means that he
might have to go back to China sometime soon. But me? Now I am old enough to do whatever I want, yet
I don’t know what I want to do. Hong Kong is home, yet by the same logic there are millions of other
homes just waiting to be found.
Hong Kong is a city of wonders, yet it will never be what Shantou was to me. Here, life never seems to
stop. Towering vehicles bustle through crowded roads, filled with faces not one of which I recognize. The
buildings are chromatic, tall and unforgiving, and each Chinese medicine practitioner I see is not the one I
used to know but a foreign man, whose deer antlers never exude the aura of mysticism and magic I used to
feel at home.
I am a foreigner with wings made of card. In my dreams I see myself with wings - constructed out of a
hundred paper cards - flapping as it brings me to places I’ve never been. In each place I shed a card, leaving
my memory, and I know one day all my cards will have been shed and I will have to stay where I eventually
land.
And home? I don’t know what Shantou is anymore. I resigned myself to an Internet search and I didn’t
recognize a thing - cold-faced buildings dotted the streets I used to know.
I do not know where Peng is, nor do I know whether or not I’ll hear from him again. I do not know
whether or not he is still in Shantou, living in the same villages we’ve always been in, or whether he too has
traversed different seas into foreign lands we’ve never seen together.
Three million and five hundred thousand cards.
Dear Peng - the world is smaller than it seems.
