Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 12 | Page 429

I land in a tiny apartment hardly the size of a box, with food rations that wouldn’t survive an hour. I can get
more every day, but this is not what I expected from a refugee home.
I expected much worse.
I bite the food, thankful that I pulled through on the perilous journey. The biscuit tastes like sawdust,
crumbling as soon as I touch it, but I manage to get the most part in my mouth. It simply refuses to get down my
throat, so I struggle a bit of water into my mouth. It tastes even worse than the biscuit, the sawdust immediately
dissolving into the liquid, but I swallow down the vile mixture. It satisfies the hunger gnawing at my gut, but I don’t
look forward to a life like this. Perhaps a concentration camp would have been better.
Don’t, I silently scold myself. Forget it.
A quick stroll down the river, however, shocks me to my senses. Homeless beggars owning nothing more
than the clothes on their backs, rich men and women who kindle money for warmth, refugees who weren’t as lucky
as me. At least I have a place to live, with food to eat.
I stare at the rich for a while longer, watching their buttons pop off when they bend their backs and their
rhinestone belts getting duller with the lack of sparkle. Those little trinkets are always caught by some poor maggot,
thrown by the rich, like an owner telling a dog to fetch. I shuffle away, hoping they don’t mistake me for a beggar.
Pride does mean something to me.
There is a park in the distance. The sign shows me that it is in the Old City, where the Chinese live,
apparently. I make my way towards the gleaming houses and gardens bursting with fruit. People don’t mind the
random Jew in their midst, so I don’t bother them.
Once again I compare the life of a Jew in Nazi Germany to the life of a refugee in Shanghai. Maybe this life
isn’t perfect, but it’s a start. I’m an outlaw in Germany, and treated as an actual human being here.. “Beauty is in the
eye of the beholder”, isn’t it?
I suppose that this life is beautiful enough for me.