Chinatown
Category B: Highly Commended (2024) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Abbey
It’s the same route I take everyday.
Dark-washed skyscrapers that inhibit rows of figures slouching over screens, grey suits slid over heavy boned shoulders. I wince at the clangy metallic screeching of a tram as it comes to a sudden halt, releasing a small crowd of people from its doors. The smell of a burning cigarette from the left. The faint scent of artificial blueberries as a huddle of students pass.
And every day without fail I step into the brown footprints, burgundy brick tiles and black bubblegum. The wind is merciless as it raises an array of goosebumps along my arms and teases the brittle skeletons of bare winter trees.
But today is not the same.
It’s sudden and declaring. The beating of heavy hollow drums that echo and the piercing shaking of bells. The crowd diverges and I’m pushed towards the back, unable to see the spectacle that has latched on to so many curious eyes. I jump up and down, straining to catch a glimpse as the odd music grows nearer, pounding against the cheers and claps. As I leap, I manage to see a strangely shaped red head, big black eyes, swooshing yellow tassels of silk and golden scales that burn an oriental image within my mind. Panicking as the sounds begin to fade, I squeeze through the sweaty bodies and stale air, sighing as my body finally emerges, pale skin tingling at the pinch of a cool breeze.
I look up, seeing archaic boulders on each side, with decorations and characters I don’t understand. And yet it beckons me forward. An outstretched hand, palm up towards the vast, open sky. The music, the cheers, the strange decorations sucking me in, a giddy and sparkling sensation wrapping around my heart, reeling it towards the entrance that stood so foreign yet familiar.
To the left there was a luminous pop-up stall selling painted China dolls, sitting in docile rows. Above hung a line of multiple glowing red lanterns sort of in the shape of a pear, bobbing and floating as the hazy wind swept them into the undercurrent of the heavy drums and sharp bells of a lion’s dance. How I wanted to hop into those swinging red lanterns and jump from one to the other, stealing the warmth and glow that lit them up. Perhaps maybe then I could glow like a lantern.
It was Chinatown.
The place with dark corners, fortune festivals, foods dripping with sauces sweet and sour and sultry and alive. I wanted to consume it all, stuffing all these wonderful pleasures between my sallow lips. Cold fingers reaching out to a nearby stall they enclosed around a little sesame sprinkled ball. I shoved it in, teeth destroying its warm flesh and bisecting it along the horizon of my mouth, the insides spilling out and drowning my tongue in what tasted like red bean. It was the enchanting euphoria of it all that overtook my mind, charming me into submission. These flavours and noises and beautiful glamorous things converged in a single sensation of life for me. It was everything, it was everywhere. At a constant, every turn every glance it overtook me, exploding like a firecracker. Nothing else existed. Nothing but the sugared tang that stained my lips, the blazing trails of red clothes that shaped the one thing that subsisted in my childlike mind and latched onto every corner of my vision.
I’d seen photos of people in these clothes. My mother, a young woman, smiling and wrapped in silk as red as blood. Unrecognisable.
One word that consisted of two, every syllable hitting the palate of my mouth.
Chi-na-town.
It was everything that defined me, my name, my culture, my appearance, the meaning behind who I was. And who I was supposed to be.
With a red painted smile, I skipped along with the lion that danced and leaped its way down the road, scales gleaming. My breath began to waver and chest began to heave, the sticky sweat glueing my stray hairs to the side of my blushing cheeks. And yet the music continued, the lion danced.
It was the muddy tint of the wall and the fading mahogany paint, the tightly packed roads and, now that I really listened, the yelling of unfamiliar words and phrases. Harsh and incomprehensible, like the yelling of a druggy you hear in train stations sometimes. As I feel a crunch beneath my foot, I look down to see the muddy sesame ball I didn’t even realise I was holding, squished flat and bleak along the cement.
“Thief! Over there”.
I turn, watching as a man whose face I don’t recall glares at me with slanted almond eyes and thin furrowed brows that looked like mine. He pointed a calloused finger at my face, mouth moving rapidly – I couldn’t keep up nor understand. And at that moment it suddenly felt as if everyone understood each other in a connection that would never reach me. However even as I stand here, as still as a bare winter tree, he will never reach me. The crowd of anonymous, yet so familiar faces rush in, surrounding me and moving like a blur. A trickle of water runs down my forehead and onto the bridge of my nose, followed by another, cooling the heat of my face. But the sudden rain is far from cooling. It quickens turning from a shower to heavy buckets of thick rain. As my eyes begin blurring, I can no longer tell whether it is the plethora of raindrops or simply my tears. They drip and pour down my throat as the paper-thin lanterns begin breaking, its vibrant glow doused. The rain falls. Suffocating me and drowning me within the crowd of people and dancing lions and heavy drums. They fall like floods, wrinkling my finger pads and leaving my limbs bare and numb.
They fall and fall and fall.
I close my eyes and allow it to wash me away.
Chinatown.