Free The Rice Paper Diaries by Francesca Rhydderch

write mine.’
    The stool screeched against the pavement as I got to my feet. I walked quickly the way I had come, back to the kongsi fong . I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to see his puzzled face.
    The streets were quieter than I had ever seen them; shops were closed and doors to buildings usually kept open were securely barred. Washing, hung to dry on ropes that ran above the street from one building to the block opposite, flapped in the breeze like paper birds. In the kongsi fong my feet made an empty sound against the wooden stairs, as if there was no one else in the building, and when I got to our room I saw that some of the other girls had cleared out their belongings and gone. I sat in my cubicle and surveyed the contents of my life: three bags of clothes and a bottle of lavender water that Mrs Elsa had given me. I thought to myself, even if I wanted to go home now, where would that be – the Pearl River Delta, Sheung Wan, the Peak? There’s a little of me that has been scattered through them all and taken root there, and to try to cut the shoots that have pushed their way out like sweet potato leaves and bring them together in one harvest would make me someone else entirely. Whoever that person would be, she wouldn’t be me.

4
    I was up on the roof terrace hanging out the washing when the bombing started. Although I had wrung the sheets out by winding them tight, they were still heavy with water and awkward to pull up onto the line without letting the other end drag on the dusty tiles underfoot. The early morning sky was misty above Victoria, and over in Kowloon the rows of windows along the wharf glinted in the sun. At the bottom of the hill was the race course, the grass cut so short it looked like a green lake. I was happy, although it was cool and I had come up without a coat, and hanging wet sheets was always hard work. I enjoyed the peace of these few moments on the terrace alone, when I could think about the rest of the day, about what Mari was going to wear, when we would go to the park, and the noodles and fresh fruit Lam and I had bought for our supper.
    The first thing I heard was the drone of aeroplanes from the other side of the hill. I turned round to look, but my hands were full of damp linen so I couldn’t shade my eyes and had to scrunch them up against the sun. Flying in over the Peak like squat, gorged mosquitoes were six planes, so low I could see the burning red circles painted on their sides. As they flew over the apartment their undercarriages started to open. They must have been about halfway down the hill when they released their load. The first bomb fell on the cemetery on Ko Chiu Road, and the earth opened up like a flower, sending out a shower - burst of chipped slabs, metal vases, bits of wood and incense sticks.
    After that there was another boom, and another, more smoke and debris floating up through the wooded hill that separated us from the rest of the city. I ran down the steps from the roof, through the apartment to the living room, pegs snapping against the linoleum as they scattered all around me, a bundle of washing still in my arms.
    There was no one there. The captain had gone to the customs office early. It was Christmas morning, and he needed to deal with some urgent business before the festivities began, he’d said.
    There were more hammering bangs – not from outside this time, but from inside, then the wrenching, splintering noise of doors being broken in. Down on the ground floor, then the second floor, then the apartment next door.
    I ran to Mrs Elsa’s dressing room, where she was sitting at her mirror doing her hair. She was still in her negligee, covered up by a house coat wrapped around her middle with one of her elegant sashes. She hadn’t done her make - up and her face looked young.
    ‘Hide!’ she said straightaway. ‘Hide Mari.’ There was fear in her voice but no hesitation.
    I went to the nursery and lifted Mari from her cot without my usual