(Don’t read this. I don’t want to write it anymore. The ending is on the last page, after compression.)
My name is Wen Rujin. I’m the mother in a switched-at-birth case.
I lost my biological daughter for twenty-two years. I didn’t know she existed or what kind of life she was living. I only learned the truth on the day she was found.
But I did nothing.
She was too cold, too hard to approach. Her eyes frightened me. I didn’t know how to be her mother, so I ran back to my adopted daughter, the child I had raised with my own hands, the one who knew to call me “Mom.”
Later, she kidnapped my adopted daughter and planted explosives on the rooftop.
She told me, “If there’s another life, I’d rather be an orphan.”
Then she died. It felt as if I died too.
When I awoke again, I had returned in spirit to the day she was born. I watched the family who hated us carry her away. I watched her being thrown into a dog kennel. I watched her get beaten, sold, and destroyed. I watched her clutch a rag doll in the deepest darkness and say, “My mother must be looking for me.”
But there was nothing I could do.
I could only watch helplessly as the daughter who had once flown off that rooftop was gradually trampled into the mud by this world.
