“
Stay away from my father! Leave him alone, you hear?”
As the kids scattered, Mei rushed to his side.
“
Dad? Are you alright?” she asked, shaken.
He merely shook his head, sighing, “Let them be, they’re just having a bit of fun.”
“
But dad-“
“
I’m really fine. Now you run along and tell your mother that I’ll be back once I’m done here, okay?”
With that, he turned back to his pitchfork.
Why didn’t he ever fight back? How could children be so cruel? Going back home was the last thing
on Mei’s mind then, as she ran in the opposite direction. What she wanted most now was to escape from the
hunger, the shame, the worries that she faced daily. And, instinctively, her feet were bringing her towards what
she saw as a barrier to freedom- the Great Wall.
At last it loomed in front of her, yards of unyielding brick that barred her exodus. And so she did what
she hadn’t for years; she climbed.
Now, what fueled her climb was no longer curiosity, but desperation. She longed to break out from her
oppressive village, to see the world, to start life anew. She climbed for what felt like forever, even as her hands
bled and her muscles screamed.
She was close. One more metre or so, and then…
She nearly wept in relief. There was a world out there, after all, seas of green unmarred by any scar that
lay across the earth’s crust. Sitting on the edge, she prepared to leap-
“
Dear God! Girl, what are you doing? Are you trying to kill yourself?”
She was so surprised that she would have toppled right off then and there, wasting all the time she’d
spent on scaling the Wall, were it not for the steady hand that had grasped her elbow.
She looked up and met the eyes of the strangest boy she had ever seen. He couldn’t have been much
older than her, maybe just barely 17, but his clothes were bizarre. He was dressed in a loose tunic and trousers,
along with armour that seemed to be made of stone, a brown cloth around his neck that looked like a cross
between a handkerchief and a scarf, and weirdly shaped, pointed leather shoes. What astonished her most was
his hair; it was even longer than hers, and drew back into a bun that almost looked comical.
She blurted out in a rush, “Who… who are you? How did you come up here? I didn’t even see you
when I climbed. And I’ve never seen you in our village. Are you even from around here?”
The boy laughed, and said, “I’ll answer your questions when you answer mine. What are you doing
here, and how come you’re not back at home?”
“
I could ask the same of you, but sometimes I just want to run away and never turn back. It gets so hard
to go on from time to time.”
Frowning, he said, “Well, my life has never been exactly easy, either. The emperor-”
She scoffed. “What emperor? It’s not as if we’ve had one of those for at least a hundred years.”
He shook his head and insisted, “Believe me or not, we do have an emperor. I work for him in fact, as a
soldier. I’ve been here, patrolling the Wall, for as long as I can remember.”
“
If there is an emperor, then how could I have never heard about him? My teachers told me that China
is a country ruled by the people, and have always been that way.”
He laughed again, incredulously, “That’s impossible, because from what I know, China has been ruled
by emperors for thousands of years.”
She decided that he just might be delusional, but, unwilling to argue, she gave a noncommittal shrug.
“
Anyway, you must have heard of my emperor, as the people are always going on about him behind his
back. He burned books, you know, and –not that we can ever mention it- he even buried a handful of scholars
alive,” he continued.
“
If he was that bad, then why on earth would you still work for him?”
He gave a bitter laugh. “That’s a really good question. I even ask myself that sometimes. It’s just that
my father, my grandfather, and even his grandfather before that had been in the army, generation after
generation. Our neighbors hated us, said we were traitors to work for tyranny, but we somehow came to see it as
our duty, doing what we can to protect our country.”
“
But how can you manage not to hate the Wall? We might as well be in jail, with that forever keeping
us from the world outside.”
“
Hm,” he mused. “It’s true that it can feel like a cage, living in here, but the Wall has always protected
us from the Mongols and all sorts of other tribes. We might not even exist as a country if we don’t have it here.
And I know the world outside seems all pretty and inviting but…”