Like Spilled Water
Page 1
Advance praise for
Like Spilled Water
“Family obligations, personal desires, and secret lives collide in this tense yet graceful novel about a girl seeking the truth behind her brother’s unexpected death.”
—Amelia Brunskill, author of The Window
“Like Spilled Water is an immersive, riveting book. Amid secrets surrounding her brother’s death and parents mired in despair, Na finds the inner strength to forge her own path as a teen girl in modern-day China. Liu weaves an inspiring story through compelling characters who must defy societal expectations to lead authentic lives.”
—Jennifer Moffett, author of Those Who Prey
“Full of suspense and honesty, Like Spilled Water is an illuminating and heartrending examination of cultural norms, gender roles, and the complexity of family relationships in China today. Jennie Liu has crafted an unforgettable story of about the transformative power of forging one’s own path in the face of so many barriers—I promise you’ll be thinking about this book long after you’ve finished.”
—Amber Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Way I Used to Be and The Last to Let Go
Text copyright © 2020 by Jennie Liu
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.
Carolrhoda Lab®
An imprint of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.
241 First Avenue North
Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA
For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.
Image credits: Visualspace/Getty Images (main); -Slav-/Getty Images (texture); Cartone Animato/Shutterstock.com (line pattern).
Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std.
Typeface provided by Linotype AG.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Liu, Jennie, 1971– author.
Title: Like spilled water / Jennie Liu.
Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Lab, [2020] | Audience: Ages 13–18. | Audience: Grades 10–12. | Summary: “Na has always been in the shadow of her younger brother, Bao-bao, her parents’ cherished son. But when Bao-bao dies suddenly, Na realizes how little she knew him. And he wasn’t the only one with secrets”— Provided by publisher. Includes facts about education in China.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019034451 (print) | LCCN 2019034452 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541572904 | ISBN 9781541599321 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Death—Fiction. | Secrets—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Family life—China—Fiction. | China—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.L5846 Lik 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.L5846 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034451
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034452
Manufactured in the United States of America
1-46578-47594-4/23/2020
To my family.
1
Having just finished final exams, my seven roommates and I are crowded in the narrow space between the bunks of our dorm room, singing to the blare of K-pop and dancing around the mess of clothes, bags, and books strewn all over the place. We’re supposed to be packing up, getting ready to head back to our homes for the summer break, but the glee of being done for the year is bubbling over us, and we can’t stop laughing and tossing the hairbrush-microphone back and forth. I almost don’t hear my phone ring over the noise. I bark out to Xiaowen to turn down the music as I ransack my bunk, searching for my phone under the pile of clothes.
I answer the call. It’s Nainai, my grandma, but I can hardly hear her. I press my free hand over my other ear and move out into the hall, but the connection is bad. The reception can be spotty in the countryside at home, and I can just see her yelling into her old flip phone as if shouting will smooth out the choppy breaks and static.
I think I hear her say, “Your brother died!”
And now it’s me who’s shouting, “What?! What did you say?”
But the connection is already broken.
***
I can’t believe I heard right. Bao-bao dead? How can that be? I punch in Nainai’s number three more times, but I can’t get her back.
I dial up Mama, but the call goes to her voicemail. Same with Baba. I try texting them. I wait and wait, sitting against the wall in the corridor with my knees drawn up, restlessly unbraiding and rebraiding my hair.
My roommates and the girls all up and down the hall laugh and shriek and sing as they stuff their bags and fill the trash cans. There’s no response and I’m left frantically wondering, Why don’t they answer? Why don’t they call me? What could have possibly happened? Bao-bao can’t be dead.
Finally, a couple hours later, my phone dings. It’s a text from Mama telling me to get on a bus and come to Taiyuan. That’s all she says. Nothing else. I consider messaging back, hammering her with questions, but I know she won’t answer them, because she’s paid no attention to me so far.
My roommates help me cram the rest of my clothes and books into my bags, and I drag them to the Linfen bus station in a foggy state of mind. I text Gilbert, my childhood friend, to tell him I won’t be traveling home with him to our village, that I have to go to my parents in the city instead. He messages back to ask what’s going on. I only say something’s happened to Bao-bao, the same vague information I gave the girls. I can’t say he died.
I can’t, because I wished for it so many times.
***
My bus leaves in the late afternoon, and an hour later, it’s still crawling in a procession of coal trucks that clog the roads. The smell of exhaust and burning coal seeps into the bus. The air is thick, and the spewing smokestacks of the refineries near the highways are barely visible in the yellowy-gray smog. With the traffic around the cities, the stops, and the transfers, it will be at least a six-hour trip to Taiyuan where Mama, Baba and Bao-bao live. Where Bao-bao lived.
Because of the fug of pollution, I can’t tell when the sun goes down or when the day turns to dusk, but by the time night falls we’ve gained speed. We pass several massive, well-lit Sinopec gas stations with their rusty exercise equipment and billboards with gory images of what could happen in a car accident if you don’t take care while driving.
People crowd onto the bus at the stations of towns and small cities. At one stop, a pregnant woman waddles down the aisle. I automatically stand to give her my seat. She smiles gratefully, but moves one step past the seat I just vacated and ushers a little girl in pigtails, who was hidden behind her, to sit down. Immediately, I regret giving up my seat to this little emperor. But then I see the mother’s protruding abdomen bump against the girl’s head when the bus lurches on, and I remember that I was once like that little girl—a first child showered with attention, indulged, until I was pushed aside by a second child. My brother. Who is dead.
What could have happened? I wonder and wonder, questions stopping up my muddled feelings of bewilderment, old jealousies, guilt that I’m not sadder. Was he hit by a car in traffic? Has he been sick? What sort of terrible disease could strike so fast?
The last time I spoke with Mama, Bao-bao was due to take the gaokao, the two-day, nine-hour entrance exam for college, which he’d been preparing for since middle school when my parents whisked him away from Willow Tree Village. That was when he went to live with them in Taiyuan, where they paid to send him to a much better middle school than the one in the village, and then to a high school, which always co
sts, but even more so for someone without a city resident ID. He’d just finished his final year, and when I talked to Mama, she was taking off three days of work from the scrap metal plant to get him ready for the test. She had been stocking him with test pencils and fresh erasers, buying him lucky red clothes, brewing brain-rejuvenating tea, and cooking all kinds of nourishing foods to take to the hotel where they would stay to be closer to the testing site.
When Mama told me all that, I felt a hardening in my chest and an urge to push the end-call button on the phone, though I could never actually hang up on her. That bitterness is still with me when I reflect on how much they’ve always favored him, how much they gave him, but now I’m hit by the suffering that Mama and Baba must be experiencing.
They spent all those years preparing Bao-bao for the exam, hoping that he would test into a good university, the only way to get past a future of farming or factory work. They made so many sacrifices—the years separated from us, the mind-numbing toil in the bad city air, all the money spent on his school tuition, books, and tutoring. Even though I am oddly lacking in my own sorrow for Bao-bao, I know Mama and Baba must be submerged in grief, and I resist the urge to keep ringing and texting them to pry out what happened.
***
The bus pulls into Taiyuan around eleven at night, but the city still seems awake. Taiyuan is only a third-tier city, but the avenues within the metropolitan area are as wide as highways and lined with businesses and industrial parks, dizzyingly bright with lighted signs of every color. I texted my parents the time of my arrival, but they didn’t respond. Now, I get off the bus and enter the vast, dimly lit station, unsure if anyone will be here to meet me. As I aimlessly follow the other passengers into the echoing building, I start to worry about how I’ll find Mama and Baba’s apartment, since I’ve only been to Taiyuan once before.
“Na! Na!” Mama’s throaty voice chokes out my name before I see her. There she is, rushing toward me across the lobby, through the straggly crowd of weary passengers who glance at her as she flies by them. Her smallness surprises me, as it always does. The last time I saw her was five months ago in our village during the Spring Festival. She was lively and full of plans then, helping Nainai scrub the house and make noodles and dumplings for the New Year feast.
Now, she looks thin as a child, her face painfully pinched. Her hair is a black, unruly frizz in the heat. She reaches out to me and clasps my arms, squeezing them, before one hand slides up to stroke my cheek. She smiles at first, painfully, but after a moment her face cracks, and tears are streaming.
“Mama!” My voice breaks. I’ve never seen her cry, and my stomach flips with anxiety. She stands sobbing, her head bent in her hands. People stare openly at her as they pass by. They know these are not tears of a happy reunion. My ears turn hot at her public display. I am completely helpless.
“Mama, let’s go,” I say timidly. I hook my arm through hers and pull her along while my heavy bags bump against my back and hip. I don’t know which way to go, but I have to do something to get her to stop crying.
Slowly, it works. She sniffs fiercely, as if determined to inhale her misery, and swipes her face. We cross the bus station, our shoes clicking on the tile floor. As soon as we’re outside in the shadows and spills of city lights at night, Mama is recovered enough to lead me toward the metro station. Her tears have stopped and she seems intent on hurrying us there.
We have good timing; the train arrives just as we’re descending the steps. Once we sink into our seats, Mama looks at me. Fatigue is still written all over her face, as if she hasn’t slept in days. “I should have brought you something to eat,” she says with an apologetic grimace.
I shake my head. “I ate.” The last meal I had was in the midafternoon, fried bread I grabbed on the way to the bus station. My stomach is an empty pit, but I don’t want her to worry about me now.
She sighs, and her shoulders slump like wet concrete has been poured over her. Her round pale face, usually so luminous, is pasty gray in the fluorescent light of the subway car. She looks so old, though I know she is only forty-five. I want to ask her about Bao-bao. I want to know, and my tongue itches to ask, but it’s not the right time. I’m too afraid she’ll start crying again.
“You’re here,” she says absently, her eyes vacant. She pats my arm with her hand. I can tell she’s still struggling to hold herself together.
I nod, and we fall into silence as the train speeds underground. The silence is like an insurmountable space between us, a void. I fret over it, but Mama is lost in her own thoughts. We get off at the next stop and Mama carries one of my bags as we walk to the bus stop. There’s more silence between us as we wait for the bus. I try to come up with things to talk about, but everything that pops into my head seems trivial or might upset her.
I’m glad when the bus arrives. As it grinds through the streets, I see that we’re heading toward the outer ring of the city. Finally I think to ask, “Where’s Baba?”
“At the apartment,” Mama answers. “He just couldn’t make it to the station. Oh, he’s been so . . .” She blinks furiously.
I squeeze her hand as she clamps her lips together and brings her fist up to her mouth, collecting herself again.
“You’re a good girl for coming,” she says hoarsely. “We need you.”
My heart jumps. They need me. She’s glad I’m here. I know it is small of me to think this now, and I immediately suppress the feeling.
“I’m just tired to death.” She flaps her hand close to her chest as if asking me to excuse her. “I worked until nine, then ran home to check on your ba. He’s . . . not doing well. Not been able to work. I’ve been doing extra shifts to try to make up for him.” She leans toward me, nudging my shoulder with hers. “It’s good you’re here. You have to help take care of your baba.”
The words are like a warning signal. The Baba I saw at the Spring Festival was loud and boisterous, goading Bao-bao and me to set off fireworks, tossing back shots of liquor with the friends we visited, eagerly exchanging information about study schedules and rankings with the other parents whose kids were able to go to high school. What does she mean take care of him?
Despite my growing unease, I try to keep my voice steady and calm. “Of course. Now that I’m finished for the summer, it’s no problem.” I’ve just finished my first year at vocational college in Linfen. It doesn’t offer the traditional academic course of study, but I’m lucky to have found it—and lucky that Mama and Baba agreed to let me go and help me with the tuition, which is far cheaper than a regular college or university. Before I had heard about the school, they had wanted me to go straight to work.
Mama’s face clouds briefly, but she says, “Yes. You’re done for the summer. Did you do well on your exams?” The lights from the streets flash in her eyes and the distracted look creeps back in before she turns away to the window. I imagine Bao-bao and the gaokao have just shot back into her mind, so I just give a noncommittal murmur instead of a real answer.
The bus mounts an overpass in a tangle of interchanges and now we’re on the outskirts of the city, where it’s not so bright. Blocks of dingy white high-rises loom in rows and rows along both sides of the highway, clearly visible in the darkness. We lurch and stop several times before Mama gestures for us to get off at a massive complex called Glorious Towers.
Lugging my bags, we file past several identical buildings before we enter one through a dirty glass door. I remember the spartan, grubby lobby from when I came last summer to help them move from the small third-floor apartment of another building to the basement floor of this building—one of the sublevel units that were framed in as an afterthought as a way to squeeze more rents from the property. We pass the grid of mailboxes, the elevators, and flyers covering the walls offering services for remodeling, drivers, “massage.”
I follow Mama down the stairs. The air changes. It’s cooler, but the subterranean atmosphere is stifling. The wan light has a sickly cast in the long, narrow pas
sageway where I see only a single short fluorescent tube tacked to the low ceiling. I remember being taken aback when I first saw the place last year. Mama said they had to economize and move to an even smaller apartment—so they could afford more tutoring and extra English classes on Sunday for Bao-bao. She worried about how the underground conditions might affect him, but she told herself that he would be at school from seven in the morning to nearly eleven each night, so he wouldn’t suffer too much from the dank air and cramped space.
The sublevel is damp and smells of cooking odors and stale cigarettes. Through the unfinished drywall and hollow-core doors, I can hear people snoring, music and videos playing as we weave our way through the warren of apartments. The doors are mostly unmarked, and I can’t remember which one is theirs, but Mama locates it and lets us in.
She snaps on a lamp clamped to a cart just inside the door. The apartment is as tight as I remember. There is only one bedroom, and the bed in the main room is in disarray and takes up nearly a third of the space. The cart next to the door holds a hot plate, an electric rice pot, and a small fan that whirs quietly and stirs the air in the room. There are plastic baskets of clothes, books, and other miscellaneous items in another corner, a couple of plastic stools. I look for a spot to put my bags.
Mama reaches for them and piles them on top of the other things in the corner.
“Tired to death!” she heaves again. “I should make you something to eat.” She points at some packages of instant noodles stacked on the lower shelf of the cart among some kitchenware and other foodstuffs.
My stomach grumbles, but I say, “Don’t bother, Mama, just go to sleep.”
Her head dips in agreement, or from exhaustion. “You remember where the toilets are?” she mutters.
“Yes. Don’t worry about me. You’re so tired, you have to sleep.”