Mom always told me the outside world was fake and dirty, so she did everything to protect me. She never allowed me to have any private space, do what I wanted, or even meet new people. When I was ten, I secretly went to my desk mate’s birthday party. My mom showed up at the party with a knife and dragged me away. When I was fourteen, I borrowed two pens from a classmate and put them in my backpack. When I got home, I was beaten black and blue. When I was sixteen, a boy from the next class wrote me a love letter. My mom slapped me in front of the entire school. My life consisted of nothing but studying. So I never had a single friend. Until I turned seventeen, when I found a little yellow chick downstairs. For the first time, I gathered the courage to secretly keep this small creature. On my eighteenth birthday, Mom mysteriously told me she had a surprise for me. That evening at the dinner table, I saw a pot of stewed chicken, cooked until the meat fell off the bones. “This is the chicken I found in your room and stewed.” She even excitedly posted it on Ins with the caption: “Discovered the chick my daughter’s been secretly raising for a year, so I stewed it and made her eat it herself.” I kept my head down and said nothing. But Mom, that wasn’t just any ordinary chick. That was my only friend. Now that the chick is dead, I can’t go on living either.
“Actually, I knew you were raising a chicken all along. I just wanted to wait until you fattened it up a bit before killing it.” Mom’s eyes crinkled with satisfaction, her face full of pride. “Don’t think I don’t know everything. I have complete control over every aspect of your life.” I stared hard at the chicken in the pot. I couldn’t count how many days and nights it had kept me company. I found it right after Mom had thrown me out of the house for having a marker in my bag that didn’t belong to me. It sat alone in the grass with one lame leg. I quietly brought it home, nursed it carefully, then secretly hid it away. It seemed almost spiritual—it never made a sound, staying obediently in the little box under my bed, neither crying nor fussing. I’d long since come to think of it as my friend, the first and only friend I’d ever had in my life. But Mom stewed it on my eighteenth birthday. Mom picked up a piece of chicken meat with her fork and brought it to my face. “Eat it. Chicken is so nutritious. I stewed it for two hours.” “You raised it yourself, so it must taste especially good.” A violent wave of nausea churned in my stomach. I rushed to the toilet and knelt there, retching violently. I threw up until only bile came out. Just as I was about to stand up, something heavy crashed down on me. A solid wood stool landed squarely on my leg. “Joy, you dare give me attitude? I haven’t even settled the score with you for secretly keeping that beast!” “Mom…” I spoke through the pain, “It’s not a beast, it’s my friend…” “Friend?!” Mom shot to her feet as if I’d shocked her, grabbing the ruler she always kept on the couch. “You have me as your mother—isn’t that enough? What do you need a friend for?” “You want to run off with your friends like your father did and abandon your mother, don’t you? Now you’re hiding things from me. What’s next? Are you going to start hiding people?” I trembled and backed away, raising my hands to shield myself while shaking my head. “Mom, today is my eighteenth birthday…” “So you’re an adult now? You can do whatever you want? You don’t have to listen to me anymore?” “I’m going to teach you a lesson today!” The ruler rose high and fell hard. I covered my head, not daring to cry or scream. This was a rule Mom had established when I was young: for every tear that fell, she’d add ten more strikes. So I bit my lip hard and didn’t shed a single tear. But I hurt so much. The dining table blurred before my eyes, and the living room lights grew dimmer and dimmer. As Mom kept hitting me, she started crying first. “I risked my life in ten months of pregnancy to give birth to you, and this is how you repay me now that you’re eighteen?” She cried with snot and tears running down her face. I stood up to comfort her, but she shoved me away. “Since you’ve grown wings and want to fly away, get out!” The next second, I was pushed stumbling out the front door. It was a bitter December winter, and I wore only a thin shirt. I shivered with cold, huddling in the stairwell. At least they hadn’t confiscated my phone. I picked it up and dialed the number I knew by heart. The call was answered just before it would have disconnected. “Hello… Dad…” “Joy, I’m very busy right now. Whatever it is, we’ll talk later.” Beep beep beep… The call was cut off cleanly. “Dad, today is my birthday. I miss you.” I murmured to myself. Only the howling wind answered me. My heart sank bit by bit. Until this day, my eighteenth birthday. I was finally forced to admit a painful and desperate truth. My father and mother. Neither of them loved me.
Mom didn’t come to find me. I knew this was another punishment. It wasn’t until midnight that the property management lady found me frozen unconscious on the floor and carried me to her duty room. I’d just taken a sip of hot water when the door was pounded loud enough to shake the building. “Joy, you’ve really got guts now! Running away from home!” Mom burst through the door cursing at me. “You ungrateful brat! I worked so hard to make you soup and I did it wrong?” The property manager quickly tried to stop Mom. “The child was frozen unconscious outside. I brought her here on my own initiative. It’s not the child’s fault.” “You don’t need to speak for her. I know exactly what kind of daughter I have.” “She’s so manipulative, pretending to faint to get your attention. Her tricks are pathetically obvious!” I felt ashamed and humiliated, trying to explain. “Mom, I really did faint.” The next second, a slap came whistling down and crashed into my face. My ears rang. “You dare talk back! You didn’t faint earlier, you didn’t faint later, but the moment someone could see you, you fainted?” The property manager looked flustered and tried to intervene, but Mom ruthlessly pushed her aside. Mom’s endless nagging mixed with the ringing in my ears, piercing sharply into my eardrums. “She’s been bad since she was little. When she was young, she’d run away from home and team up with her desk mate’s family to deceive me.” “In middle school she’d steal things—a pen here, an eraser there. When I caught her, she’d refuse to admit it and claim she’d borrowed them.” “At such a young age, she was already flirting with boys, throwing herself at men everywhere. She had no self-respect from the start.” … That’s not true. Mom, I’m not like that. I never did those things. That’s not what really happened. Ever since Dad and Mom got divorced, I’d been careful every day, always obedient to Mom. But why, no matter what I did. Mom always thought I was a thoroughly bad child. In the end, Mom forcibly dragged me out of the duty room. The property manager looked at me with pity in her eyes. That look ruthlessly shattered my self-respect. When we got home, Mom pointed darkly at the floor. Like I had countless times before, I mechanically knelt down. Mom looked at me with disgust. “You like pretending to faint? Then kneel there today until you really do faint.” “Joy, don’t think that just because you’re an adult I can’t control you anymore.” What hurt more than kneeling on the floor was the cold, disgusted tone in Mom’s voice when she said my name. It seemed like ever since Dad had his affair and they divorced, Mom had changed. I raised my head, my eyes brimming with tears. “Mom, don’t you love me?” “Love?” She acted like she’d heard the biggest joke in the world. “Love is the most fake, most disgusting thing in the world.” “You have half your father’s face. Looking at you makes me sick.” “If you weren’t my biological daughter.” “I’d rather you were dead.”
I knelt on the floor for three days and three nights. When I fainted, I immediately forced myself back up. I knelt until my whole body wouldn’t stop shaking, until my knees were covered in red, green, and purple bruises. Mom allowed me to get up because my teacher was coming for a home visit. This was the most important year of my life. The SAT was coming up. Mom took off her designer clothes and put on old ones from years ago. “Ms. Harper, I’ve raised Joy all by myself through blood, sweat, and tears. I’ve given this child all my money and energy.” “But the child doesn’t know gratitude. A few days ago, after I said a few words to her, she threatened to run away from home. I practically got on my knees begging before she’d come back.” I lay on my bedroom bed. I wanted to get up, but the severe pain in my knees forced me to lie back down. I heard the teacher ask about my whereabouts. “This child has everything done for her at home—never lifts a finger. Every day she goes out to mess around with delinquents from society, lazy and never comes home…” I heard the teacher sigh heavily. Because of Mom, I’d long had a terrible reputation at school. Everyone avoided me like the plague, desperate to keep their distance. Only Ms. Harper was willing to accept me, treat me normally, not exclude me. When I was feeling low, she’d patiently comfort me and tell me I was a good kid. Wave after wave of shame and frustration surged up from the bottom of my heart. The teacher didn’t ask about me again and quietly left. I heard the sound of my heart breaking—quietly yet violently. The last person in the world who liked me didn’t like me anymore. “Go wash the dishes.” Mom pushed open the door and gave me a cold command. I endured the severe pain, practically leaning against the wall with half my body just to make it to the kitchen. In the dead of winter, the hot water pipe had long been frozen. Ice-cold water flowed from the tap. A broken shard on the edge of a bowl accidentally cut my hand. Blood flowed everywhere. I planned to find a bandage after finishing the dishes. But when I turned around, I smelled thick smoke. Thinking there was a fire, I ignored the pain, dropped the bowl, and ran to the living room shouting. “Mom! Mo—” The second half of the sentence stuck hard in my throat when I saw the pile of ashes in front of Mom. My diary, my drawings, and my memories with the chick were all in Mom’s hands, gradually burning to ash. “Those are mine!” For the first time, I lost control and shouted at her. I rushed forward trying to put out the flames, trying to snatch back everything that was mine. But it was too late. Burned clean away. “Ms. Harper said your grades have been slipping lately.” “I only came in second place once…” “Isn’t that because your mind isn’t where it should be? Look at what you’ve been writing and drawing. If you hadn’t been secretly keeping that beast and making your room a mess, would you have only placed second!” “It has nothing to do with the chick!” I trembled, tears streaming down my face in strings. I clutched the remnants of the notebook in my hands, which wouldn’t stop shaking. I didn’t understand why Mom had to be so ruthless. I just wanted a friend, someone who could keep me company. Even if it wasn’t human. The chick couldn’t speak, but it had listened to so much of my pain. I told it about when I was little and Mom and Dad were fighting over their divorce, how Dad found a gentle, caring new girlfriend and turned around and abandoned me. I told it how every day at school people whispered behind my back, how everyone knew my shameful stories and thought I was a weirdo who didn’t fit in. I told it about Mom’s extreme, numbing control over me and her endless beatings. No one was willing to listen to these things. Only that fluffy little head would blink its eyes and look at me obediently. I drew many pictures and wrote many diary entries. These were my spiritual pillars for so long. But now, Mom had destroyed everything. She destroyed me too.
“You don’t need to go to school anymore. Since your mind isn’t where it should be, there’s no point wasting money.” “Starting today, you’ll study at home. I’ll personally watch over you.” Mom stood up, looking down at me from above. I didn’t argue back because I knew it was useless. When I was little, Mom wouldn’t let me go to school, but I’d sneak there anyway. When I got home, I was stripped naked and made to kneel in the bathroom while being beaten until I was covered in purple marks. I nodded somewhat numbly and stood up. From then on, I became more obedient and quieter. I never mentioned the chick again, and neither did Mom. But she controlled and managed me even more than before. She called the school and strongly demanded that I return home to study on my own. She said I was mentally unstable and not suitable to study with everyone else. She started monitoring me twenty-four hours a day. “If you can’t get first place, even living is a waste.” “I’m doing this all for your own good. You’re not taking the college entrance exam for me.” So I studied desperately, wanting to get into a good college far, far away. I started having hope again. In the last month before the SAT, I received an early acceptance letter from New York University. I gripped the thin letter tightly, but the next second Mom snatched it away. She tore it to shreds right in front of me. “You want to go to NYU! You want to run far away and escape my grasp! Joy, you’re dreaming!” I watched the pieces of the acceptance letter fall from the air. I silently picked up the scraps of paper, ignoring the woman’s hysteria behind me. One piece, two pieces, three pieces. So it’s true that when pain reaches its extreme, it becomes silent. This time, I couldn’t cry anymore. My heart was completely empty. I turned and went back to my room, opening a practice test. Like I was completing one final task. Take the SAT. Take it one last time. The last time. That’s what I told myself. On SAT day, I set my own alarm, made my own breakfast, and took a taxi to the test center by myself. Just like all those times I’d gone to class alone before. Completely ordinary. When the SAT results came out, I’d scored first place in the entire city. I stood on the rooftop, scrolling through Dad’s social media. Dad’s new daughter had been born. I smiled a little, liked the post, and commented “Congratulations.” Dad’s number appeared on my phone. This was the first call Dad had initiated since the divorce. I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to answer anymore. I’d already blocked Mom’s number. Her messages came flooding in. I threw my phone ten meters away. Inside was my suicide note. “Mom and Dad, I got first place. Will you like me, even just a little bit?” “But even though I got first place, I still have no friends, no home, no self.” “I don’t want to live anymore.” Turns out dying is easier than living. I just had to fall gently downward. And the world went quiet.
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