Fiction: Group 4
New Tales of the Pearl River Delta
Island School, Vishweshwar, Vedika - 14, Fiction: Group 4
y name is Meimei Chan. I am an eighteen-year-old training to become an Olympic swimmer.
This is my story.
I grew up in a small village called Tin Ha, around two hundred miles away from the epicentre of the Pearl
River Delta. My background was modest; my father worked in a toothbrush factory in Zhuhai, and he
managed to scrape enough money every week to send my sister and I to school. My mother passed away
giving birth to my sister, so I took over the maternal duties in our house when I was ten. Every morning, I
woke up at dawn to make a meagre breakfast for my family, rice mixed with scanty portions of milk, sugar if
we were lucky. Then I cleaned the house with our single riddled cloth, washed our shrunken, begrimed
clothes and prayed to our ancestors for good fortune to come our way. But I encountered the most difficult
part of my day once I came back from school; fetching the water. The water in the river was contaminated
by industrial waste and people alike; drinking it would only cause your faeces to become runny like paint.
So I had no choice but to make a perilous journey across the Xi Jiang River to fetch government water
from a nearby town. I hated the boat rides. On good days, I would be able to taste bile at every rock of the
boat and prayed that it wouldn’t slip out of my mouth. On bad days, torrents of rain would pour down from
the skies and I would feel like I was drowning, even though I wasn’t in the water.
But on one such day, I was in the water, and I was drowning. Hurricane Vamei lashed out at the Pearl
River Delta, trampling our village like an elephant standing on a mouse. Violent streaks of lightning
illuminated the skies, accompanied by the delayed, deafening claps of thunder. I was on the boat, returning
to the village with my water when the hurricane caught me off guard. It began with a dainty drizzle,
intensified into a steady downpour and finally into cascades of rain that fell like spears, all in a matter of
minutes. The boat quaked feverishly from side to side, the enraged river threatening to sink us at any
moment. I had an iron-like grip on the boatman’s wrist and hung on for dear life, desperately hoping that
my ancestors would choose to be merciful that day.
Lightning struck our boat. The impact rocketed me out of the boat into the plundering waters, electrocuting
every cell in my body. Spluttering and choking, I desperately tried to keep myself afloat, but despite living
an hour from the river, I had never learned to swim. I felt myself swallowing mouthfuls of water, my lungs
bursting for air that never came. My arms and legs thrashed wildly in the futile hope that they would find
something to grab, but they only found incessant waters that slipped through my fingers. The last thing I
remembered was my body failing me - energy spent, muscles unresponsive and all attempts to breathe
aborted. So I closed my eyes and let the water lure me to its depths.
My eyes snapped open. A familiar face leaned over me. The boatman. I lurched over to one side to release
the water from my ears but the bile from my stomach was released instead. Now I could finally breathe.
Ignoring the stench, I took deep, heavy breaths, cherishing every second of every inhalation. In, out, in out.
Air had never felt this good. But as I lay in my pool of vomit, I had forgotten about the boatman. I glanced
at him and he gratefully took the opportunity to the launch into the speech that he had obviously prepared.
“You nearly died.” He exclaimed
“Uhhh” I croaked. I couldn’t manage speaking yet.
“But don’t worry. I save you. You sink very very deep in water but I swim very fast and pull you out. You
should say thank you. I save your life. I nearly died myself but you are young girl, just like my daughter, so I
save you.”
“Oh.”
Only then did I realise the magnitude of what had just happened. I could have died. My sister would be all
alone. She would have to fetch the water by herself. She is too young to even tell their left from right. How
can she be tasked with not only her survival, but my father’s as well? No, I cannot leave them. They are my
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