The Fine Art of Deception-into the Great
Wall
Sze Chung Lam, Group 3: Fiction, Shatin Tsung Tsin Secondary School
hapter 1
Chicago News Daily 21st July, 2012
The Great Wall of China: the Return Curse?
Horror had once again begun to reveal for the Great Wall of China. It was confirmed that seven
out of eleven Chicago citizens who joined a five-day trip to China went missing on their third day
(20
th July). They were visiting the Great Wall when they appeared to have vanished without a trace.
What made people feel shaken was that this incident bore great resemblance to the one occurred eighteen
years ago. Three adults and a child went missing at that time. Their bodies were never found. Now that history
seemed to be repeating itself, these two cases would be put together in order to find out the secret hidden
beneath them.
In addition, tours to China had been cancelled due to the raising of a black travel alert by Chicago
authorities…
To crack a case, you must first master the mind of a culprit. This was what Morgan had told me ever since
I was a little girl. One time, when I was bouncing on his lap singing merrily, with him trying very hard to
concentrate on the high stack of files scattered across his desk, he suddenly hushed me to keep quiet and asked
me a question. ‘Jolie, what do you think is the most important thing to solve a crime?’ At that time, I was
around seven, so I didn’t really know how to answer him sensibly. Morgan then told me gravely that in order to
become an outstanding policeman, one should put himself into the shoes of the culprit and think like them.
I never forgot his words. When I grew up, I started to find myself following his footsteps. I studied,
worked and trained hard and finally became a FBI agent just like him. We even worked together in the same
station now, with him being my boss.
Morgan was in fact not my biological father. Morgan gently broke this shocking fact to me when I was
thirteen. Although I must have guessed for some time then, I was still a bit troubled by his confession. At times,
when I was small, I would ask Morgan curiously as to why our skin colour was so different, him black and me
white or my hair all blond and wavy while his was black and crop. He would never answer me directly.
Even though I learned that he was not my real father, it didn’t really affect our intimate relationship.
One day I plucked up my courage, went up to Morgan and begged him to tell me something about my
parents. ‘Anything,’ I said. ‘Just give me a photo of them.’ At that instant, Morgan’s expression became full of
sorrow. He stared at the blazing, determined eyes of the thirteen-year-old teenager standing in front of him and
allowed a deep silence to hang in the air. Finally, he told me to wait while he went to find the photograph album.
A minute later, he began to fill me in the story that was kept away from me for a whole eight years.
‘
Jolie,’ he began, ‘your father and I were both FBI agent…We were good friends, and extremely close to
be exact.’ He smiled briefly and continued. ‘As for your mother, she was a housewife and only she could cook
the best meals in the world...’ Morgan’s eyes became dreamy all of a sudden. ‘I could remember tasting her
wonderful meat pie as if it were yesterday. They were the best.’
Then Morgan began telling me that my parents died in a car accident when I was five.
‘
Here.’ He opened the album, took out a photo gingerly and thrust it to me. I took it with shaky hands and
began to look at the faces of my parents.
In my mind, I had always pictured my father as a strongly-built man, with perhaps curly brown hair and a
nice warm smile. On the other hand, my mother would enjoy an elegant slim figure, with long blond hair like
mine. In reality, their real faces were nothing alike to what I’d pictured of. My father was just medium height
and he wore glasses. His crooked teeth showed when he smiled. Nonetheless, it was my mother’s appearance
that made me feel slightly thrown off guard. She was mousy-haired and very small. It was not anything I had
expected.
‘
Jolie, are you alright? You look a bit disappointed.’ Morgan’s voice pulled me back to reality.
‘
Nothing. I’m fine.’ I answered a bit absent-mindedly and asked Morgan whether I could keep the photo.
He agreed and I went back to my room with a heavy heart.
So now back to the China case. It had indeed created a grim mood that gripped the entire Chicago city.
Along four days in a row, this China case had been the newspaper headlines, with updating information every
C