From The Wall’s Perspective
Kevin Ye
’
m a wall. Technically, I’m a heap of stones, bricks, wood and human heads piled here since the dawn of
mankind. But nevertheless, people like to proclaim me as a wall. So, the humble narrator here is just an
average wall in an average city with average rocks in a below-average planet.
ung, Group 4: Fiction, St. Mark's School (Secondary)
People have flocked from all over the world to get a glimpse of my decaying body and to step on me, in the
last three thousand years. I can proudly tell you all that Genghis Khan has stepped on me. For now, quite a lot
say they want to visit the place where Meng Jiang Nu died, to learn about the bloody and gory decapitation of
heads, and maybe to get a model of me made from plastic. But what do those people know? Let’s look into the
story from the wall’s perspective – my perspective.
I
Back in the Qin dynasty, I was a little pebble lying around in peace, playing with Little Miss River,
occasionally with Mr. Weed too. All of a sudden, Little Miss River was forced to gulp down innocent blood
spilled by the Qin army and enemy skulls started to flush along her. Some days later, the Qin Emperor went for
a walk and stepped on me. ‘Hey, we can use these pebbles to build a huge wall to protect our kingdom!’ That’s
when life became a living hell for me.
The Qin army dug, scavenged, manipulated, plowed all my fellow pebble brothers and stacked us up trying to
build a foundation for the Wall. We tried to be very non-cooperative and moved around a lot, so the soldiers
never managed to get us stacked well. The Emperor thought it was the incompetence of the soldiers. Solution?
‘
Off with their heads!’ So skulls became the filling material of our foundation, and all of my brothers were
scared to death. In our world, superstitions says staring directly into a hollow skulls eyes will cause instant death.
Yet, only I was brave enough to directly look into the skulls, and here I am alive to tell the tale.
Soldiers gone. What next? Here comes our great man Fan Qi Liang, a poor peasant who can’t afford the taxes
so he is forced to build me, along with thousands of other peasants. He started out as a good chap, but was never
able to stand the hostile conditions of the Emperor. So, his work quality decreased every minute and his attitude
started to get even worse. Fan can’t even hold a chisel properly! See that bump over there? And that another
bump a few kilometers away? They aren’t my bulging biceps. It’s all caused by his terrible workmanship. You
won’t believe how he swore at the other workers, stole their meals, and used his tools to play mischief on them!
As payback, I decided to let one of my bricks ‘accidently’ slip when he walked over it, and he went to the
ground with a spectacular fall. Got a nice big bump on his head too, just like the numerous ones he made on me
with his carelessness. This is when our heroine Meng enters.
Meng was a poor family girl married to Fan just moments before Fan was dragged away to build me. She
wanted to bring some clothes to Fan to keep him warm from the blistery weather here. So when she came here,
she kept screaming for Fan to find him. When she finally knew Fan was not going to receive the clothes, she
collapsed – literally. She wailed night and day, crying for her dead husband whom she thinks is really