Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 3 2018 | Page 33

That day, somewhat miraculously, they were able to cross through train tracks in the dark. Ahed sleepy,
dropped her little comic book once, near the train track. She immediately cried out and started looking for
it. They could hear the faint whistling of a train approaching from afar, but Ahed was so frantic that nothing
reached her ears. Fares suddenly stumbled upon it while trying to drag her away. He shouted, “I found it! I
found it. Let’s go, we have to hurry up!” The train was approaching and it was just a hair’s breath away
when her mother pulled her from danger.
Years later, after she graduated from high school, she would wonder why she had been so attached to
folktales which were not even her own, so much that she had risked her life just for a simple comic book on
it.
Xu Hui had been a person very dear to her- but it was something about the symbolism in the stories, the
way the characters faced many difficulties on their journey but still pulled through and succeeded in the end,
that made her try to relate it so much in her own life. The book was a physical copy of those dreams, she
supposed, and her source of comfort during those years.