Milk Tea - A story - Prologue

Autumn winds continue to shiver my skin, as if sweeps of chills slowly drench my internal organs into hollowness. Leaves sway their last dances of life, as a deteriorating shade of red slowly takes over the previous vibrant green.

I continue to seep my milk tea, slowly, mesmerizing droplets of reminiscence that I had in the cosmopolitan city of Hong Kong. An image of girl flashed back, I don't think I can forget her.

She was my rhapsody.

I am Pandora Hayashi, chinese-japanese, high school graduate, living in shades of grey in the mixed district of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong. If you form your impression of Causeway* from postcards, I suggest you to completely forget about it.

It is not purely a city of white innocence of shopping paradises, where shopaholics and the rich savour their bags of LV and Gucci; nor is it entirely a city of malicious black - a gangster's playground where prostitution and drugs exist like a duplicate of some parts in Japan's Shinjuku*. It is a patchwork of grey.

My high school received the grant title of 'Gangster Graduation Academy' - the dropout rate is 50%. You may question the quality of teachers or facilities, but the reasons were beyond that. The muscle-toned guys who could beat his opponent into a piece of mutilated flesh were already hired as bodyguards or guaranteed membership to gangs; the PC nerds who usually graduated found their jobs instantly on the IT market; the sexy girls with skirts to their thighs and Barbiesque appearance were lured into prostitution.

And I was just a bold strategist who wandered across the grey world of Causeway. Of course, I was not involved in prostitution, I am living with my aunt, earning part-time money with her dim sum stall. In case you are wondering, my parents died in a car accident ages ago.

The Milk Tea incident was a gateway between the shades of grey in our playground - you guessed it, where caffeine filled drinks, codes and gangs intervened like the shreds of hair in a braid. Although I must warn you, in such complex societies, blood leash may still be the spoken language, and it certainly contains things that an average human being doesn't desire.First crime story, please comment.
Inspired by Ishida Ira's Ikebukuro West Gate Park, Mori Hiroshi's Delta in the Darkness (sorry guys..they are only available in chinese/japanese) and P.D.James/Sidney Sheldon.

Asterisk marks/glossary:
Shinjuku - a county (I think) in Tokyo, Japan which is famous for its shopping malls, as well as prostution and gangs.

Dim sum - traditional chinese cuisine, mostly consists of buns (meat and vegetarian) and dumplings.