Fifty Square Feet Within

Excerpt

Mama is a fabric that has been worn and torn and stretched into near nothingness. She works two jobs—a waitress at Yiu Wah Café by day, and a cleaning lady at the Hong Kong Museum of History by night—and we never have time to spend together. To the rest of my Sheung Wan world, we are mother and daughter, bound so tightly by our surroundings that our relationship has become somewhat of a sacred vigil to our caged home community. Ma is always busy. When I return from school, she is at work; when she is home from work, I am at school. There is no magic. There is rarely conversation. There is simply silence and providing. Providing and silence.

Dinner is the only meal Mama and I share. Every evening, we crouch into the public hallway and walk into the shared kitchen where dinner will be served. This is the mixture I have grown used to: the revolting combination of kitchen and bathroom, toilet and uncooked meat, toothbrushes and noodles. A ring of dirty towels hangs on the ceiling, a chandelier above our heads. I look at Mama and smile, thanking her for preparing dinner. I feel sympathy for my single Ma but I am afraid of the words that might come from my mouth. We each sit on fold-up chairs bought from the Japanese dollar store down the road and clasp onto our plastic chopsticks. We pick up each bite with caution, silently consuming each and every grain of rice.

Erika Yip

I am a senior at Milton Academy, a boarding school in Boston, Massachusetts. I live far away from my home in Hong Kong. I first fell in love with writing in a creative writing class I took sophomore year. Since then, I have produced works that revolve around cultural assimilation and childhood nostalgia. I write to feel calm, and to show myself that vulnerability is not always negative. On campus, I am the editor-in-chief of Magus Mabus, a student art and literary magazine. I hope to use writing as a way to build unexpected bridges between people with different experiences.

Patrick Ryan on “Fifty Square Feet Within”

Erika Yip’s “Fifty Square Feet Within” is a story that gripped me from the beginning with its quiet, claustrophobic atmosphere and then held me at the edge of my seat right up till the end. Tian is a teen girl living with her mom in the Sheung Wan area of Hong Kong. They share extremely cramped quarters in a subdivided apartment, and her mother works long hours at two different jobs to pay for their food and lodging.

Because of her mother’s work hours and her own school schedule, Tian usually only sees her mother for the duration of a single meal a day: dinner. But one evening her mom doesn’t come home. And Tian has to figure out what to do next.

“Fifty Square Feet Within” reads like a mystery. It builds suspense as Tian takes matters into her own hands, and it conjures a feeling of claustrophobia that it maintains even when she steps out of her confined living space and ventures out into the larger world. Erika Yip’s story is one of the winners of our Teen Writing Contest, and we’re excited to be putting it into your hands. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.