A lonely George sipping morsels of cheap, steaming noodle, his glasses fogged up in a hurry. A
humming fan hanging precariously from the tattered ceiling, spinning a room with a steadily rising rent. The
only company the waxen-like woman in the television set, her dull voice droning on and on and on about the
drab weather Hong Kong had in store.
Regret tore at his soul like time tore at his walls. Silently wiping the smears on his spectacles, George
took a hefty glance towards the door. To him, it was almost sobering to see the lone suitcase waiting for a
journey he had never wanted to take. There was only one person in the world who would have wanted such an
adventure, one other person whose suitcase could have accompanied his... but alas, she was gone, and as George
had learnt over his many years of contemplation it was no use dwelling on such trivial matters.
“
The best feature to have ever been written about the Great Wall,” George muttered. His voice dripped
with a cold-hearted harshness he had never uttered before - but there was no use in being bitter, not now.
And so it was with a melancholy he left the house and made his way to his very next piece of
mechanized, unoriginal, manufactured piece of what George used to love as ‘writing’.
* * *
“
长城欢迎你！
”
By the entrance of the Great Wall a flamboyant voice called out above the noisy hubbub of tourists. In
the crisp winter air the voice rang like a bell, mingling with the sights and smells surrounding what George
dreaded as the beginning of an arduous day. “Welcome to the Great Wall of China!”
George sighed. He wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing. Nor was he in the mood to meander across what
seemed to him an endless construction.
But however much he protested inside, his grumbles inaudible yet profoundly tangible in his burdened
soul, a force within him inspired his limbs to move forward. Whether it was the bustling of the thickly-clad
tourist swarm, George could not tell. He knew, however, that deep within the depths of his heart, his conscience
-
much like the bitter Chinese wind clawing at his face - whispered to him: the best feature to have ever been
written. Let it be, thought George, how hard could it be to write such a feature? How hard was it to write about
the tangy smell of people from all walks of life? The frailness of winter branches, the worn surface of the
thousand year old concoction of tamped earth, wood, brick, stone, its dragon-like, explosive, expansive
largeness, history, meaning, sentiment, popularity, usage, profundity, nature, people-
“
Jia Li?”
In front of George - three meters or so away - stood a red-capped female guide who had simultaneously
stopped to stare back. Her slick black hair rustled in the winter wind as she stood, palm to mouth, staring at
George with a kaleidoscopic look in her eyes: confusion, shock, pain, doubt, all kinds of feverish, intense yet
somewhat exciting sensations all whistling through hazy eyes as she stood, staring.
“
G-George!”
It was overwhelming. In that one moment when she all too hurriedly and awkwardly broke the
interminable silence, something within George seemed to throb in a painful longing for the days when such an
utterance wouldn’t have sounded so strange on her tongue.
“
Jia Li,” George replied. It was all he could say.
Three years was a long time. Her face - what had been so bright and jovial no matter the time of day or
climate of season - now settled in a somewhat sallow manner, her skin tightening at the cheekbones in a way
that disturbed George. Her frame, a frame well-rounded and voluptuous in the distant past, had now shriveled
into a skeleton of a woman, hunched up and stooped under bundles of dismal attire. But what most perturbed
George were her eyes: after a frantic search he realized with a pang the wanderlust was gone.
“
It has been a while,” she started. The corners of her thin lips turned up in a futile attempt to induce an
illusion of happiness. “What brings you here?”
“
A feature,” George replied.
“
Due?”
“
Six days.”
“
Typical.”
For a moment Jia Li broke away from the mono-syllabled conversation to shuffle her feet. Clouds of
ancient dust - or dust from tourist feet - billowed into the air.
“
Broken dreams,” she finally muttered. George could see her eyes were filled with a palpable sadness.
“
Dreams that lure, then allow you to fall. Dreams pursued, then achieved, then poof,” - she waved a
single, bony hand in the air - “all gone. It’s like an endless abyss masked with a charm - once you’re in, you’re
never out. A punch in the face, you might say.”
George, looking out across the vast expanse of the wall, nodded.
“
Yes,” he finally said. “I think I understand.”