June 1998, Sydney

I was so young when this happened, wondering why we were ushered to a cramped hotel with many, many relatives. It had the vibe of a CNY gathering for the kids, and the adults let us play all day as long as we promised we wouldn’t go outside. The streets were crowded, and dad didn’t come with us. We couldn’t afford to flee the country, and I never did understand why I should circle “non-pribumi” on school forms. Not until I was much older.

Thank you for writing this.

I'm glad I looked through this ... you've packed a lot of individuality and general thoughts into 500 words! While I don't think I can add enough to usefully review this on IFDB.org, it's entries like this that helped reenforce that, yes, it was worth going through the Neo-Twiny Jam entrants well after it was over.

The fact that you were able to weave so many separate scenes and pieces of information together with such a short wordcount shows such a mastery of writing. Fantastic work 🌸

nice < 500 word gut punch

I think you have a real knack for this kind of minimalism, and at least for me the tones you mentioned in the dev log you were going for came through perfectly

I actually teared up reading this. I'm not Chinese nor did I live through the 1998 incident, but my heart hurts just from imagining what the main character had to go through, and fitting it in less than 500 words requires mad skill. Great work!!