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Candidate name: Alyson Lang

Candidate number: 0883484

My earliest memory is of an arm wrapped in a blanket. Three fingers exposed to the sun were burned dark and flaky. At five or six years old, my first instinct was to see if those fingers led to a wrist and a watch or bracelet. I was disappointed. Just a grubby knot of string, which had maybe once held a key, encircled the wrist. I pulled on the hand until the arm emerged from the blanket, severed above the elbow, a blade of shattered white bone jutting from a jagged stump. I don’t remember the smell, but I recall my fascination with those two joints: wrist and elbow. The construction of this forelimb, which could twist round independently of the main joint, was mesmerising. I flipped the hand over and back, over and back. Compared it to my own arm, which was exactly the same and a similar size. I must have shown it to my sister, but she was too young to appreciate the weirdness.

At some point an adult picked their way past us. ‘Give it!’ The arm was snatched away and that was that. Strange how in my memory they said the words in English. Is that because I’ve forgotten Mandarin? The arm was whisked off into the distance, and my sister and I carried on looking for scraps of metal and food in the rubbish that regular people threw away.