Sam tilts his head to the sky as the punishing midday sun scorches his skin unmercifully. Guangdong sun is never this hot, he recalls. Only six weeks prior, he was happily pushing rice seedlings in the paddies barefoot at the back of the Fok ancestral house tucked in a cul-de-sac at the edge of Makao Village. He’s now standing on foreign soil, an island with an alien name that barely registers in the carefree but jaded mind of a nineteen year old Shunde boy.
As he cast his eyes across a barren field of makeshift graves, he shudders at the thought of what he has been summoned to do by his mother and her two sisters–an all-powerful, all-female politburo helmed by her exalted majesty Ama the matriach, no less. His mission–no matter if he chose to accept it–is to find the dirthole where his father was buried, to dig up the cadaver, put it in a box and haul it home. And home is but three thousand and two hundred miles away, or some fearsome thirty three days on choppy, nauseating waters of the South China Sea.
I didn’t sign up for this.
Uncle Seven frowns as he gestures at Sam. “Get to work, kid,” he rasps in his trademark gravelly voice as he slings a rusty shovel to the back of his broad, tired shoulders. “Being the only man in the family has its privileges,” he gruffs. “I hope you’re having a blast.”
Whoosh! A gush of icy wind washes over Sam’s sweat-drenched face, interrupting him from replying to Uncle Seven’s remark. The evening begins to darken, with gray clouds swarming over its skies. Uncle Seven glances up and lets out a scowl. “We’d better go find it before it gets pitch black.”
He leaves no room for comments and darts in the direction where he staked a stick, the stick that marks the grave where the body–Sam’s dad’s–was buried. Sam wipes his sweat with the back of his hand and flicks off the dust on his rusty shirt as he trails over Uncle Seven’s outsized footprints.
He couldn’t recall how long he paddled behind until his uncle abruptly stills in front of him. The expression on the old man’s face isn’t of surprise nor exhilaration; instead, it’s one of pure horror. Sam peers over Uncle Seven’s broad shoulders across the barren land that seem to stretch out for eternity.
“No, no, no. NO!” Uncle Seven repeats for what seems like a million times. His usually fierce eyes turn cloudy with desperate exasperation. “It should be here. Sam! The darn stick. It must here… somewhere!” Just as Sam’s breathing halts to a stop, ka-boom! The darkened sky cracks with a thunderous bolt of lightning. The world disappears around them, slowly swallowed by an endless, pitch-black void. The harsh wind plummets Sam’s face mercilessly; the tempest growls, seemingly trying to tell them something. And at this moment, the same thought hit both of them. The stick has been blown away for who knows how long, which made one point clear…
…they are never going to find the grave.