In 1987, my parents bought a one bedroom apartment in Shekou. It was Chinese for snake tongue because
there was a fork in the road that divided the village from the city. This was the same path my father took
to work every day with his loafers that he wore all year round. While he was away, my mother made the
house. She sewed buttons and chose curtains with lace on the bottom, which my father saw and later beat
her for because the fabric cost extra. I was born sixteen months after they moved in. My mother bathed
me in jasmine and rubbed lotion into my skin while my father played with me: catching me in the air and
telling stories with a dimmed candle. The first few years were the happiest before the apartment started
shifting. The stovetops started to heat with something other than fire, while white noise whispered
underneath the floorboards. My father started getting angry, too. Angry over too much salt in the dinner,
angry that he had been asked to take out the trash after a long day, angry at the stock market, angry for
picking the wrong stock, angry we had walked too fast and left him several paces behind. A clenched fist
eventually replaced my mother’s soft hips at his side. But my mother told me times were stressful for him
because the country was undergoing an era of change so it was our job to be kind. The candle burned
itself dead a few years later. I watched the tendrils of smoke leave out the window, carried by the wind,
billowing along the very path that led to the city.
Jia Yi lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and studies political science and writing. In her free time, she enjoys photography and working on her prose poems.