Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction Group 3 - 2017 | Page 517

She would not play with them in the city courtyards. When they passed the ball to her, she let it roll by. When they called her name, she only stared at them. She remained still and silent no matter how much the others laughed. And, of course, her biggest crime was that she had not grown up in Shanghai. She had only moved here ten years ago, and she remembered the waves and the mountains of the world away from the walls. Whereas they had been in Shanghai all their lives, even before the wall had blocked off the outside world, hence they had long since forgotten the way the world truly was. And so, the children despised her for all these reasons, both important and trivial. They hated her stillness, her silence, her past and her passion for the sea. "What're you looking at?" Li asked again. "What are you waiting for?" "The sea," she murmured. Li laughed contemptuously. "Please. You've never seen the sea and you never will." "But... I..." "Never!" Li cried savagely, turning around to his classmates. "She'll never see the sea. She'll not see it today either. Will she?" The other children blinked then laughed, catching on, and shook their heads. "No, no, she won't see it!" They giggled, and their words pierced her like a sharp knife. "The wall will never open!" "You'll never see the outside world." They cheered and jeered as she looked at them in despair. "But..." she murmured. "Let's put her into the back room!" The cry arose from somewhere in the jostling crowd of schoolchildren, and it grew louder and louder until it drowned out all her desperate pleas. Xu fell back, shaking her head, but the children surged forwards like a tsunami, both inescapable and inevitable. "No, no," she whispered, helpless. But they dragged her down the hallway, into the cramped, dusty back room, where they threw her in and locked the door. They smiled as they heard her muffled cries. They laughed as they saw the wooden door tremble under the blows of her beating fists. Then the children, with the faces of angels but the hearts of devils, laughed and headed back to their seats, just as the teacher arrived. "Are we ready, class?" He asked, and the children nodded their heads eagerly. "Are we all here?" They nodded again, beaming. The bells tolled and the gates swung open. All at once, the children spilt out of the classroom, running across the courtyard to join the sea of people at the gateway. They cheered as they saw the open iron gates, pushing and weaving their way through the crowd, jostling each other in excitement, and surged through the stone archway. And it was then that they saw the sea at last. The cerulean blue waves swelled upwards, gurgling and gushing upon the shore, before ebbing and retreating back into itself. Silver clouds threaded across the indigo sky, reflected in the vast expanse of blue stretching towards the horizon. The cries of seagulls swooping through the sky echoed and resonated from the cliffs, and the sound of the sea crashing against the shore muffled the ecstatic cries of the children that rushed out to greet the water. "Don't go too far," the teacher called out after them. "Listen out for the bells. You only have three hours before the gates shut!" But they ignored him and ran into the sea instead, splashing their faces with crystalline water and relishing the gentle waves that lapped at their feet. They waded into the bay and smelt the salty ocean breeze. They looked at the walls and marvelled at how small Shanghai was, compared to the vastness of the world around them. And the children, who had been trapped behind walls all their life, felt freedom for the first time. But then, the bells came tolling from the watchtowers once more, and even the thunderous crash of the waves on the beach could not mute the brass ringing.