Henry Wang Hengle, Grade 8, BASIS International School Shenzhen

Chapter 1 — The old man by the street

My name is Jack, and I’m a poor servant boy in the isolated U.S. town of Monroe, Nebraska.

Here, life is never enjoyable, but is simply about wasting away your time with the heartbeats and breathes of your body. Life is never anything special, as we perceive. It instead resembles a constantly rotating wheel, no matter how hard you try to alter it, it always comes to the same result — misery — a misery that I have experienced for 12 long years.

Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve been parentless. The only thing I know about my parents is that my mother was frail and kind and my father was a drunkard. My only companion in my entire childhood, my grandmother, died last week from tuberculosis. That’s a lot of misery to endure, especially for a poor little boy like me.

As a servant boy, I’m always wondering about life, my life: Will my life be what it has always been, enshrouded in misery, or will it come to an entirely new phase never hitherto imaginable?

Until the morning of November 12, 1930, I never knew the answers. But in that morning, everything changed.

I was walking across the dusty main road of my town, heading towards the restaurant where I worked, when I suddenly noticed an old man sitting by the curb.

Like everything in my world, he was covered with a thick coat of dust. He wore a gray shirt, a gray jacket, and a pair of gray trousers, all battered and shabby and full of holes not yet sewn together for the sake of comfortable living. All this reminded me of the picture of my grandmother, in which she sat on a dusty bench polishing some dusty silverware. It was the only picture that I’d ever had of any of my family members, and I prized it beyond anything. I held back the tears lingering under my eyelids.

The old man didn’t seem to notice my presence at all, as he just sat by the curb serenely, smoking a battered ancient pipe. He kept staring at the vast gray sky, as if a new and shiny world would fall before him. But I noticed something particular about this man that I had never seen on the visages of others, though it seemed that I couldn’t find a word to describe it.

I ventured forward and, having addressed him, awoke the old man from his daydreams.

He was silent but looked at me, while I observed the gray old eyes on his kind and wrinkled countenance. We stared at each other for a considerable amount of time, until I finally plucked up the courage to ask, “What is your name, sir?”