Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 2020complete | Page 455

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?”
“Maybe next week,” one of the workers replied. “We’re still working on getting it out.”
I nodded, biting my lip. The fountain never gets clogged. Something’s fishy about this. Makonga had a
lot of advanced technology, including anti-clog systems. They sounded weird, but they were useful. There were
also leak detectors and solar towers, wind turbines and committee machines. There were a lot of things.
Complicated things, but also simple things. And one of those things was a foolproof anti-clog system for the
fountains.
I kept walking. Away from the dysfunctional fountain. Away from my fibs. Away from my mother’s
need to cling to her motorcycle, to cling to the past, which I had already abandoned but couldn’t quite shake.
The thing was, I also tended to cling to the past. And I’d never liked it. I’d tried to move past it
multiple times, but to no avail. It was like a boomerang. You threw it and it always returned. I kept feeling
nostalgic of the few days I remembered from before Makonga, before all of this.
Of course, that was not to say that they were great days. All I remembered was struggling. It was the
only thing I was old enough to remember. But there were joys to be found in pain. All the factories would
suspend work and we’d be released from school whenever the chairman visited. On those days, I could enjoy
seeing clear blue skies and empty roads. In Makonga, the chairman never visited. Instead, there were drones that