The Walled City

by Ryan Graudin

  The counselors Mrs. Sun hired to talk with us, they tell me these things are normal. Symptoms of something called PTSD. And most of the time I believe them. But sometimes, sometimes, I hear Mama-san whispering: It’s not our world. People like us belong in the shadows.

  And sometimes, sometimes, I wonder if maybe she’s right. If I do not deserve the wide of the sea or the electric hum in Dai’s eyes, which crackle and spark in my heart, or everything Mrs. Sun is giving me.

  The other girls feel this, too—this war of choices. Yin Yu was the first to slip away. Our fourth morning at the Suns’ house, we woke up and her mat was empty. All the clothes Mrs. Sun had given her were left in neat folds. More empty mats followed, and—later—a few dormitory beds: girls from the other halls. Always, always they end up back in Hak Nam, surfacing in scarlet-lamped doorways, back to the old ways. Back to the shadows.

  The counselors tell us this is normal, too. Every two weeks they go with Mrs. Sun back into the Walled City—issue their invitation with cups of icy, sweet yuen yeung and smiles. They have not come back with any of the missing girls, but they do come back with news: more Security Branch raids, a wave of evictions. Slowly, steadily, the government is draining the city, preparing its body for dissection. I haven’t been back to Hak Nam, but every once in a while, its picture will appear on the folds of Mr. Sun’s newspaper. It looks the same as ever: bricks on bricks and bars on bars. Openings gaping like sockets in a skull.

  It’s hard to imagine how a place like that could ever be a park—all green and sunshine and growth. Where things like bright red hibiscus and magenta bougainvillea bloom.

  But it will be. One day.

  And Dai. He’s stayed in his father’s house, studying with tutors to make up for those lost years. There’s an entire unknown world at his fingertips—universities and traveling. He likes to talk about it a lot. He also likes to use the word us.

  Our world changed, but one thing stays the same. As constant as the tide.

  Every Sunday at noon we take a car to the south of Seng Ngoi—away from the city’s smokestacks and crowded shoreline—where the beaches are hidden things, with rocks and unbroken shells. Jin Ling curls up on a blanket with her ever-present pile of books, flipping through pages and sounding the characters aloud—transforming the slashes of ink into words. It makes me jealous how quickly she’s learning. We’re in the same classes—along with Nuo and Wen Kei and a lot of the vagrant boys. But it won’t be that way for long. Jin Ling’s already finished the first three books our teacher gave her, and she’s always hungry for more. I think it’s because she’s at the top of our class that our instructors let her keep Chma at school. The cat is almost a part of her wardrobe. She even brings him here, to the beach, where he sits patiently on the edge of the blanket, stalking the tiny crabs that sometimes inch out of their holes.

  He’s watching one now, the ends of his fur all bristled and gray. If he still had his tail, it would be twitching.

  “Hey, Mei Yee!” Jin Ling’s face is wide as she looks up from her book. It’s one from the stacks in Hiro’s old room. The pile Dai gave her. “Did you know that there are whole mountains under the ocean?”

  I shield my face and look back out at the water. Try to imagine the tower of mountains beneath it. I remember how we all laughed when Sing told us the very same thing. How it seemed so impossible that such a height could be swallowed by such a depth.

  I look back at my sister and am struck by how much she looks like my old friend—crouched on this blanket with a book, the light of words in her eyes. She even tries to wear her hair in Sing’s old braid. She asks me to braid it for her every morning, so I do. It’s still far too short, and the end result is nothing more than a stub. But I take the three strands of Jin Ling’s hair anyway and twine them into something whole. Something as strong as she is.

  Some scars stay with you. Like the medallion of shiny skin that punctuates Dai’s shoulder. Or the furious violet welt curled into my little sister’s side. If you looked at me now, you’d see nothing—no bruises or cuts or lumps made by old hurts. All the blisters and bloody toes I got running from Longwai’s guard are long gone. You can’t see my scars, but they’re there all the same. Sing—her death—is just the tip of it. The more I talk with the counselors, the more I find. Wounds that float up faster than they seem to heal.

  But they are healing. Step by step. Day by day. Choice by choice. I’m tearing down the bars and bricks.

  I’m becoming new.

  “It says so right here!” Jin Ling jabs a finger at the shiny page. At the exact same moment, Chma jumps, plows nose-first into the sand. From the looks of it, he didn’t catch anything. He’s only grown fat and lazy now that he doesn’t have to hunt rats the size of himself. “See?”

  “Maybe instead of reading about the ocean, you should go experience it.” I’m only teasing her, but my little sister leaps up anyway, starts sprinting across the sand all the way down to the waterline.

  “Where’s Jin going?”

  I look back over my shoulder to see Dai walking up, barefoot in the sand. His jeans are rolled up to his knees, and his white V-neck glares against the afternoon sun. So bright I have to shield my eyes.

  “Off.”

  “I got us some lunch.” He kicks the sand off his toes, settles onto the blanket beside me. The brown bag crinkles against his lap, and I catch the familiar, delicious smell of stuffed buns.

  Chma isn’t the only one who’s been getting plump.

  “Should I call her back?” I glance back in the direction my sister ran. The tide is low today, shirking back to show an entire carpet of seashells. Jin Ling tiptoes through them like a ballerina, bending down and picking some up. When she finally reaches the water, she starts tossing them back, watching them land like gulls in the rough blue. I’ve never seen my sister act so much like a kid. Even when she was one.

  “No. Let her be. She’s having fun.” Dai shakes his head and grins at me. “I’m not hungry yet, anyway.”

  That smile is just like the sea. I’m not sure if I’ll ever grow tired of it. I shut my eyes and feel the warmth of the summer sun on my skin, my face. The rawness of remembering Sing starts to fade, along with all the other things. Mountains covered by the depths of something greater, more vast than I could ever begin to fully know.

  Dai’s arm slides around my shoulder and I lean into him. Open my eyes and stare ahead. Where my sister stands in that carpet of shells, chucking them one by one into the sea.

  “That’s funny,” Dai murmurs next to me.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.… It’s just that I’ve seen this before.” A not-quite frown appears on the edge of his lips, stays there. “Déjà vu.”

  The word sounds foreign, but not like the English I’m studying. “Is that bad?”

  “No,” he says, and looks over at me. “Not bad. Perfect. It’s absolutely perfect.”

  Our lips are so close, just a breath or sigh away.

  My window-boy—he’s always so careful, so gentle. He always waits for me to choose, to reach out, to let him in. I lean closer, and the softness of his lips grazes mine. Fire-flare bursts in my chest, full of life, life, life. Dai pulls in. His fingers are feather-light on my cheeks, brushing and swirling and teasing like a phoenix in flight. We linger together—in this space without grating or glass. In this place I want to be.

  And even when it ends, it doesn’t. I see so much reflected in the brown of his eyes: my sister and the sea. Heights and depths. Horizons and possibilities. Flights on fire. I see these things and I feel the vastness calling, deep inside my chest.

  It’s times like these I know—in my deepest core, in the marrow of all that is me—that Mama-san is wrong.

  This is my world. Wide and open and waiting.

  JIN LING

  I am running. This time there are no boots. No sliming puddles or cigarette butts. Just sand like velvet between my toes. Spray and salt and sea.

  It feels so differ
ent—running without a reason. Without knifepoints or purple-veined shopkeepers at my back. I turn around and all I see are Dai and my sister on the blanket. So close to each other they look like a single person under the sun. Chma is still rooting through the crab burrows, his tailless rump raised high. Hunting for the fun of it.

  There are no shards of broken glass under my feet. Just things the sea washed up: kelp, crab claws, and shells. A lot of them I recognize from Hiro’s book. Mussels, sea snails, Arabian cowrie. I bend down. Pick them up. Check to see if there’s still life inside. Hiro’s book said that sometimes the shells wash up and dry out. Before the next tide can save them. Every time I see a snail’s sealed up yellow end, I throw it back. Plop! White foam and sink.

  Plop! Plop! Plop!

  It’s a small thing. A toss for a life.

  My life has been full of these small things. Clothes without holes. Boots that fit. My first real mattress. Chma lounging in sun slants and dust motes. New, not-molding books. Bowls of rice porridge every morning. Classes with chalkboards. Dai rumpling my hair every time he sees me and talking about how long it’s getting. My sister smiling again.

  The small things add up.

  One day I’ll find a way to pay it all back. I’m learning all I can—books and books of words. Mrs. Sun says I’m “exceptionally gifted.” I can be whatever I want. A doctor or a diplomat or a lawyer. I don’t know for sure what I want to be yet, but I know I want to help. I want to find a way to go back for my mother. To face my father without a gun in my hand or a bruise on my face. To show her she doesn’t need him.

  For now, I’ll keep throwing.

  “Jin!” I look back over my shoulder. See Dai waving a brown paper bag over his head. Like I’m a taxi he’s trying to flag down. Chma is on his lap, begging. “I got stuffed buns!”

  My stomach squeals the way Chma used to whenever I accidentally stepped on his tail. It’s never hungry the way it was before—all gnaw and teeth. But the stuffed buns always taste just as good as they did that morning on the roof.

  “Coming!” My voice gusts back over the sand.

  There’s one last shell by my toes. All curled and coiled the way Nuo wears her hair. So big my palm almost can’t hold it. I pick it up anyway. Toss it far, far, far into the sea.

  For more great reads and free samplers, visit

  LBYRDigitalDeals.com

  and join our communities at:

  Facebook.com/LittleBrownBooks

  Twitter.com/lbkids

  theNOVL.com

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Walled City was real.

  A very real, unreal city.

  I first learned about its existence when I went to hear a woman named Jackie Pullinger speak. She spent nearly twenty years living and working in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City. The place she described—a sunless, lawless shanty-town overrun by gangs—sounded like a setting straight out of a dystopian fantasy. My imagination began racing (as it tends to do). I started thinking about all the different types of people who lived in the Kowloon Walled City: the street kids, the prostitutes, the fugitives, the ruthless gangsters. Storylines rose out of nowhere. Wove together into a story I couldn’t put down.

  This book does not fit into the category of historical fiction, and was never intended to. While I did extensive research on the actual Kowloon Walled City, and tried to portray it as closely as possible, I also employed artistic license to convey the story I wanted to tell. This can be seen in the name changes (Hong Kong became Seng Ngoi, for example), the timeline of the Walled City’s eviction and demolition, Seng Ngoi’s judicial system, and the specific operations of the Brotherhood of the Red Dragon.

  Another thing savvy readers might notice is how I handled characters’ names. Names in the Kowloon Walled City were generally in Cantonese, with a single-syllable surname (such as Sun) and a double-syllable given name (such as Jin Ling or Mei Yee). In Hong Kong today, it’s not unheard of to shorten the given name to a single-syllable nickname (as Jin does, to maintain her disguise), though back when the Kowloon Walled City existed, this practice was not common. But for the purposes of the story I wanted to tell, I chose to shorten some names throughout. Some of the names also had Japanese or Mandarin origins, depending on where the characters are from. I also feel it’s worth mentioning that although the term Mama-san has negative connotations in the US today, it was the traditional title used for women who managed brothels in the Kowloon Walled City, where there was some Japanese influence because of Japan’s occupation of Hong Kong during World War II.

  Apart from the things mentioned above, I do believe the reality and the fiction are not all that different. Both Hak Nam and Kowloon started their lives as military forts. Both grew so thick and fast that the sunlight could no longer reach the streets. Both housed powerful gangs and over 33,000 people in their cramped borders (it was 6.5 acres, only 0.0102 square miles). Both were eventually torn down by the government and turned into a park. In fact, the decision to demolish the real Kowloon Walled City was announced on January 14, 1987. The exact day and year I was born.

  Although I was never able to see the real Walled City, I was fortunate enough to visit the park built in its place. The space is small and manicured, filled with remnants of the neighborhood: cannons, the crumbling ruins of the South Gate, a metal replica of the old city, a bonsai tree garden, and even (on my visit) a tailless cat. Should you ever find yourself in Hong Kong, it’s well worth taking the time to visit this site.

  The Walled City might be gone, but human trafficking is not. According to a 2006 UNICEF report, nearly two million children have been trafficked into the sex trade. Some, like Mei Yee, are even sold by members of their own family. To learn more about this issue and how you might be able to help, I suggest visiting the website of the International Justice Mission, a human rights agency dedicated to rescuing victims of trafficking and providing them with legal protection. You can find it at ijm.org.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing this book was a raw, intricate process. I felt as if I were plucking out pieces of my soul, spinning them into delicate strings, knotting them into a tapestry of words. But writing this book was not a lonely process. So many people supported this project and ultimately became a part of it. Strands of their own.

  There are those who knew it as Cutthroat Novel—Lydia Kang, Amanda Sun, Kate Armstrong, and Emma Maree Urquhart. Those who read it as WALLS—Kelsey Sutton, Justina Ireland, Christina Farley, and Caroline Carlson. Those who encouraged me to keep working even when it seemed foolish—The Lucky 13s and Aimee Kaufman.

  There is my brilliant agent, Tracey Adams, who loved the strength of sisters and mountains beneath the sea. There is my phenomenal editorial team—Alvina Ling, Amber Caravéo, Bethany Strout, Nikki Garcia—and all the publishing teams, who worked tirelessly to bring this book to the world. There are the readers—Mio Debman and Amy Chaw. Mio especially provided invaluable cultural insight and helped me paint a more vivid picture of Hak Nam.

  There are my friends and family, whose love and encouragement constantly remind me that the braid is always stronger than the strand. There is David, who sits on rooftops and seashores with me. Who talks about stars and home, and stretches my heart full.

  And through it all there is God, who weaves all things together: my stories and my life. Soli Deo Gloria.

  David Strauss

  The author posing with a model of the Kowloon Walled City.

  Greg Girard

  The Kowloon Walled City in the early evening, glowing from the illuminated homes and shops of some of its 33,000-plus residents.

  Ian Lambot

  An aerial view revealing the unmistakable density and shape of the Kowloon Walled City.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  18 Days Jin Ling

  Dai

  Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  Me
i Yee

  16 Days Dai

  Jin Ling

  Dai

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  15 Days Dai

  Jin Ling

  Dai

  14 Days Mei Yee

  Dai

  13 Days Jin Ling

  Dai

  Jin Ling

  12 Days Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  11 Days Dai

  Mei Yee

  10 Days Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  Dai

  9 Days Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  8 Days Mei Yee

  6 Days Dai

  Jin Ling

  Dai

  Mei Yee

  Dai

  2 Days Jin Ling

  Dai

  Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Dai

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Dai

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  1 Day Dai

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Dai

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Dai

  The New Year Dai

  Mei Yee

  Dai

  Jin Ling

  Mei Yee

  Dai

  Epilogue: 180 Days Later Mei Yee

  Jin Ling

  Author’s Note