Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 2020 | Page 47

Hong Kong Young Writers Awards 2020
Anywhere Else
Shanghai American School (Pudong), Cheng, Jai–an Zoe – 11
“Nova! I need the… the… the thing with the sharp point and strange screwdriver thing.”
My mother’s call bounced along the walls and traveled to my room. I sighed as I rose to
my feet and grabbed the tool. “It’s called a twodriver. They were designed to help work with
small objects.”
“I know that,” my mother grumbled as I approached. She took the tool and kept trying to
fix her old motorcycle. It was barely functional, an old set of pipes on wheels from sometime
in the 1980s. It was easy to see that she wasn’t going to get it fixed.
I looked up at the clock hanging high on the wall. It read 2:12. “I’m going to go outside.
I’m supposed to meet Jeremy in 3 minutes.”
My mother nodded absentmindedly. I grabbed my coat and headed out the door.
I hadn’t really arranged to meet with my best friend, Jeremy Wang, that day. I’d just
needed an excuse to go outside. As soon as I was on the sidewalk, I closed my eyes and took
a deep breath, letting the sunshine envelop me. It was a perfect day — just enough light to
brighten your feelings, the temperature right in between too hot and too cold. The Greater
Bay Area was like that in the spring, more often than not.
The Greater Bay Area wasn’t a very good name for our region. It was nothing like
the actual Bay Area in America. When the government was naming it, there were a lot
of disputes. Most people liked the name Cantonesia since a lot of the people there spoke
Cantonese. But, somehow, we ended up using the name Makonga. I used the name often.
Nobody else really called it that, though, even if it made much more sense than the Greater
Bay Area.
As much as I loathed the name, I had to admit that it was amazing there. Before we had
Makonga, it had felt like the country was broken. It wasn’t unified. After we really started
working on making it a reality, it was like everyone was just connecting over the region.
Everyone was saying, “If we could accomplish this, then we must be able to come to other
agreements.”
But even though Makonga was great, the people were no different from people in any
other place. Some people were arrogant and selfish; this was unavoidable. Some people were
modest and selfless; this too was unavoidable. Some people outside of Makonga would assume
that it was a perfect paradise or financial center, thereby unintentionally expecting the kids
to be either perfectly mature or all business. Makonga was not like that at all. The kids were
just like any other kids. We jumped rope and skipped stones, did anything that any other kids
would do. We didn’t leave our little bubbles of comfort.
As I walked past the main fountain in the Moonstone Park, I noticed that there were
construction workers standing around it. They seemed to be discussing something. I was
an ambivert, sometimes having trouble talking to strangers, but my curiosity won over. I
approached them tentatively and gathered my words in my throat. Then I asked in my best
Cantonese, “What’s going on here?”
One of the workers winced, and it was clear that I’d minced a word. Another worker
answered. “There’s something clogging the filter, and we really have no idea what it is.”
I quickly translated it to English in my head. “So when should we expect this be fixed?”
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