Fiction: Group 4
pain is so visible internally and externally. One look at my mother and you can see the pain she has been
through. In her eyes, you can see a ghost of a smile, wrinkles have formed making her face look like a
crinkled piece of paper, and her skin and flesh draped over her bony frame. Her actions are without
emotions or feelings; she does things because she has to. Her mind is just a mechanism just giving orders to
an unconscious body. My father seems much stronger, but I know he does it just for us. My father is much
like a tree standing tall, secure and healthy, but the storms that have hit him have hollowed him inside with
heartache, any minute you fear he will snap and fall when the winds come. My parents would spend days
not eating, though we never had much to eat anyways.
It has been a year and it has only brought a flow of cutbacks for our lives, which is part of the reason why
we are here now… at the train station. With our suitcases packed with whatever we could fit from our lives,
we stand in the line waiting to buy a set of three train tickets. Now for the government we are the perfect
sized family.
Every corner, every bend of the river, memories are wind back. The pain is like adding salt to an open
wound. These are our tickets to a new life, some place where we have no past, somewhere in which
memories don’t haunt us at every corner. To those visiting, they see our village and its inhabitants as many
others, but for those living here they don’t just see an abandoned house, they see themselves and their
friends peeking through the door trying to see what is inside, they see themselves playing in front of the
door, they see their family dressed in their nicest gowns walking past to go to a their grandparents house for
Chinese New Year, they see their loved ones and love fills their heart-warming them inside. Every building
reminds me of Tin Wa
riding his new bike through the alleys, when we would walk through the alleys and
giggle at the sight of someone’s underwear hanging from the clothing lines above, or when he would save
his pocket money to buy an egg waffle from the old man’s shop next to the factory.
As the train departs, I can see the streetlights reflecting in the river creating a glistening image and the
raindrops creating millions of tiny ripples on the surface of the water, I can see a middle aged man with a
woven basket on his back riding his bicycle home, I can see our little village, the silence of the streets is so
visible, I see our house with my brother’s bedroom light still on. I leave with these sights to another part of
the Pearl River Delta, somewhere this river is all too familiar with, the city side.
