My Mom Is a Transmigrator

In the summer of 2008, high school senior Lin Xiao found a blue-covered diary in her mother’s drawer.

The first page read: September 12, 1978. I’m not crazy. I’m forty-four years old this year. This body is eighteen.

The last page read: My name is Su Min. I remember everything.

Her mother had come from the year 2024.

Each time she used “precognition,” she had to trade away one person. Not forget an event, but forget a person. Their name, their face, then “what this person means to me,” until they were gone completely and irreversibly.

Over thirty years, she took on seven identities, started a factory, and paid off 107 debts.

There was a small red plastic-covered ledger in the drawer. Write down a name, then draw a line through it.

Crossed out meant forgotten.

And now it was Lin Xiao’s turn.

She wanted to know who her mother was, who the 107 people were, and why her mother couldn’t remember what she had said three minutes ago, yet still remembered how, when Lin Xiao was six and feverish, she had clung to her back and said, “Mom, the moon is following us.”

She also wanted to know why her own name was on the list in the diary, with a line started after it but never drawn all the way through.

The doctor said her mother had two years left.

Lin Xiao began keeping records: what her mother forgot, what she said, and the names that were crossed out and later written back in.

Then she discovered that she could only say one sentence a day.

Say any more, and her mother would collapse.

Theme: Remembering someone is harder than loving them.