When my mother got pregnant at forty, Grandma bought dangerous pills to guarantee a grandson, and everyone expected me to help.

When my mother got pregnant at forty, Grandma bought dangerous pills to guarantee a grandson, and everyone expected me to help. In another life, they blamed me when she delivered a daughter, and I died paying for it. This time I moved out, fought for my education, and invited reporters to meet my family. Dad smiled proudly for the cameras, unaware of the other guests I had invited…

In my first life, I said I would welcome a little sister. I died because of what followed.

Now my mother was standing in front of me again, one hand resting on her stomach, asking the same question. “Penny, I’m pregnant. Would you like a little brother or a little sister?” I knew what the wrong answer would cost me. The room looked ordinary, but the future I remembered made every familiar face frightening.

I had already lived through the years that followed. When Mom became pregnant at forty, she grew obsessed with giving my father a son. Grandma shared that obsession. They bought dubious pills, herbal mixtures, and bizarre remedies from sellers guaranteeing a boy.

I was frightened for Mom and the baby. I found medical articles, tried to explain that those products could be harmful, and begged her to stop. Eventually she did. She delivered a healthy daughter, my little sister, and instead of being relieved, my family decided I had ruined their chance at a son.

Mom told them my interference was the reason the baby was a girl. Dad believed her, and Grandma never forgave me. I loved my sister and helped raise her anyway.

My sister grew up hearing the same accusation. She heard that story so often that she repeated it as fact. Nothing I did for her seemed to matter beside the accusation she had learned at home. She believed I had stolen her chance to be male. Eventually she killed me. My friend Sarah contacted the police, but my sister served only three years in juvenile detention.

And then, impossibly, I was back in that room, a high school senior again, hearing Mom ask her question. This time I would not accept blame for their choices.

“Of course I want a brother,” I said, smiling. “Who else will carry on the family name? Dad and Grandma have given you so much, Mom. You can’t let the family line end here.” Dad and Grandma beamed. Mom’s smile wavered. I refused to be her scapegoat again.

In my first life, she had cried when I said I wanted a sister. She accused me of cursing her pregnancy. Now I added, “When I start earning money, shouldn’t I have a brother to support? I wouldn’t want everything going to outsiders.”

“Penny finally understands,” Grandma said, pulling me close. I hugged her back, careful not to let my face betray me. I had protected Mom before; she had never protected me.

A few days later, Grandma presented Mom with a bottle of the same supposed boy-producing pills I remembered. She said the seller had guaranteed a grandson if Mom completed the course. Mom studied the label. Nobody asked a doctor. Grandma repeated the seller’s guarantee as fact.

“Grandma, Mom might forget a dose,” I suggested while cleaning the floor. “Why don’t you keep track? It’s too important to leave to chance.” Grandma praised my thoughtfulness and took charge. I knew the pills were questionable, but stopping them had made me their scapegoat before. My silence was still a choice.

That evening Dad was out working late. Mom pulled me into her bedroom and showed me articles on her phone. “Penny, I don’t want to take these. Look. They could be dangerous.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

She had known the risks all along. Yet in my other life, she had let everyone blame me for stopping the pills and raised my sister on that lie.

Instead of offering myself up again, I raised my voice. “You can’t believe everything you read online.” Then I went into the hallway and called for Grandma. Mom followed, trying to grab my arm, but I had already said that she wanted to stop taking the pills.

Mom immediately pointed at me. “This is Penny’s doing. She’s always scheming.” This time I took out my old phone and played the conversation I had just recorded. Her warning about the pills filled the room, unmistakably in her own voice.

Mom went quiet. She knew Grandma had heard her own words, not another accusation from me. Grandma scolded her carefully, then pulled me aside and told me not to hold a grudge. Her real concern was the grandson she expected.

I had something more important to protect now: my future. In my first life, tending to Mom and then my sister had drained the time I needed for school. I wouldn’t miss that chance again.

“Grandma, I’ll graduate soon,” I said. “Why don’t I move into the school dormitory? You can use my room as the nursery.” Dad agreed, and I moved out while Grandma proudly carried another jar of herbal wine for Mom.

Living at school was not easy. My allowance barely covered meals, and I couldn’t stand the thought of going home on weekends. Often I skipped breakfast to make the money last. Hunger was temporary. My chance at school wasn’t.

My deskmate Sarah noticed. One morning she set two warm meat buns on my desk and told me her family ran a bakery. “Eat,” she said. “You can’t study like this.” She brushed off my promise to repay her.

She was the friend who had called the police after my death. I cried when she handed me breakfast. From then on, her two buns became part of my mornings. Other classmates shared snacks, too, without asking what was wrong at home. That small kindness taught me something I hadn’t understood while living with my parents: care didn’t have to be earned through obedience. Sometimes somebody simply saw that you were hungry.

I studied whenever I could. By the end of the semester I had climbed from fiftieth place in class to the top ten. When winter break came, I returned home. Nothing prepared me for the smell.

The kitchen was crowded with jars of cloudy liquid and animal ingredients. Grandma came in carrying groceries and proudly showed me a jar she called deer blood, another of her remedies for guaranteeing a boy. Mom emerged six months pregnant, swollen, her hair thinning and her skin blotchy.

She stared at me as though I might rescue her. “Have you stayed away because you don’t want your brother?” she asked. “You’re still our daughter, Penny. He won’t replace you.” I said I was pleased about the baby.

I gave Grandma a charm I said a classmate’s mother had worn before having a son. She accepted it eagerly. That evening Mom was served greasy meat, more pills, and bowls of herbal wine. She kept glancing at me. I didn’t intervene.

My old room was already a nursery, so I slept on the living-room sofa. Dad didn’t come home that night. Grandma said he had been staying out often. I remembered his mistress and Mom’s belief that a son would bring Dad back.

At breakfast I made a cruel remark about Mom’s appearance and Dad’s absence. I saw the hurt on her face. I hated how easily my anger made me cruel. Grandma ignored the exchange as long as Dad kept sending money.

I told them I wanted to earn diaper money for my future brother, then went straight to Sarah’s family’s breakfast shop. I helped serve customers and prepare food, and I tutored Sarah when business was quiet. Her mother gave us matching red jackets for New Year. The holiday felt warm. We wore them at the shop while her parents laughed at how alike we looked.

When I returned to school, I found about $800 tucked inside one of my textbooks. Her family never mentioned it. Dad owned a factory, yet it was Sarah’s family who made sure I ate.

I reached the top five in a monthly exam. Then, a month before the gaokao, my homeroom teacher called me out of class. Grandma had phoned. Mom had given birth, and I was expected home to meet my little brother.

The house smelled of dirty diapers. Grandma ordered me to wash one, and I deliberately did a terrible job. When I asked to see the baby, she brightened.

Mom lay exhausted and swollen on the bed. Grandma placed the baby before me, and I saw a cleft lip. My sister hadn’t had one in the other life. I felt pity and dread. This baby hadn’t chosen any of it. I couldn’t know what had caused the difference, whatever the adults had been feeding Mom. But I knew none of their promises of a perfect grandson could protect this child from the cruelty of their expectations.

Grandma was already making plans for me. “College isn’t for you. Quit school and take care of your brother.” I reminded her that admission to Peking University could bring more than 20,000 in awards and scholarships, as well as prestige for Dad’s business. She called him immediately. When she returned, she told me to focus on studying and pressed 200 yuan into my hand.

Mom complained that she would be left to care for the baby herself. I pointedly reminded Grandma how hard she had worked after childbirth, and Grandma snapped that Mom should stop expecting to be served. They were still arguing when I left for school.

Sarah and I took the gaokao at the same exam center. Her parents closed their shop for two days to drive us there. Afterward, I returned to the bakery to await my score.

The results website briefly showed a zero, a display used while high scores were being confirmed. Then Sarah shouted my name. I had placed among the top fifty students in our province. We hugged, crying. Her parents celebrated as though the result belonged to all of us. They had given me the time and steadiness to prepare.

Reporters began calling about my results and the hardships behind them. I agreed to interviews. Dad suddenly wanted to look proud on camera. I told him reporters could visit our house. I remembered how his mistress had been kept separate from the family portrait in my other life, and how Mom believed a son could make him faithful. Before I went, I made another call, to people whose arrival would expose exactly what sort of father he had been.

At home, Dad smoothed his hair and put an arm around my shoulders while explaining his excellent parenting to the reporters. Mom held the baby close, and Grandma stood beside them as though we had always been a loving family. Then angry voices rose at the doorway. An older couple entered with a woman carrying another baby. I recognized Dad’s mistress and her parents.

I had told them when to come. As Mom lunged toward the woman and Grandma rushed to shield Dad, the cameras caught a family portrait nobody had planned. I slipped toward the back of the house, found the household registration booklet I needed for my university paperwork, and walked out while the adults were still shouting.

CHAPTER 2

By the time I submitted my application to Peking University, the story of our home had spread far beyond those reporters. Neighbors described how I had been treated, including the conversion of my bedroom into a nursery. People who had never met me were asking why a father who owned a factory had let his daughter go hungry at school.

The journalists kept digging. They uncovered unpaid wages, safety violations, and other problems at Dad’s factory. It was shut down. They also reported what doctors had discovered about Little Treasure: the baby Grandma had celebrated as her grandson had genital differences, and the doctors said the child was female. The family’s obsession with having a boy had not changed the medical reality.

For my next interview I sat in Sarah’s breakfast shop and thanked my teachers, my classmates, and especially Sarah’s family. I told the reporters about the two meat buns she handed me every morning. Customers began lining up outside the shop, and soon we were kneading dough until our arms ached.

Then Dad, Mom, and Grandma found me. Dad called me an ungrateful daughter and said I should have been drowned at birth. I reminded him that he’d tried once, before Grandpa stopped him. Grandma demanded my scholarship money. I stepped toward the growing crowd outside and asked why people who had refused to support my education now believed they owned its rewards.

Mom knelt in front of me with Little Treasure in her arms. She said the baby needed surgery and begged me to hand over the money. I did not doubt the need for care; I doubted the family that had treated me as a bank account the moment I succeeded. Furious, I shoved the shop’s god of wealth statue toward Mom and grabbed her hair, ordering her to bow and ask it for help instead. It was ugly behavior; I was beyond pretending otherwise.

She tried to shove me away, and I fell back, crying out so the onlookers would intervene. I was putting on a performance, and I knew it. When the crowd recognized my family from the news, they fled. Sarah’s parents checked whether I was hurt. I told them I was all right and tried not to let them see my hands shaking.

Dad called not long afterward, speaking more gently than he ever had. He said families shouldn’t hold grudges and invited me home for a meal to celebrate my success. I remembered what he was capable of, but I went, determined to stay alert. At the table sat Wong Xiang, the brother of Dad’s mistress, a man I recognized from my first life.

Grandma insisted I sit beside him. Dad introduced him as a friend and poured liquor into a glass for me. I refused. Wong Xiang nudged the glass back toward my hand, and Dad slammed his palm on the table. “Drink when I tell you,” he said.

When he forced the glass toward my mouth, I secretly connected a call to Sarah. I let them think I was complying. As I grew unsteady, Dad signaled Wong Xiang to take me toward a bedroom. Then police voices sounded outside. Sarah had heard enough to summon help, and the call had preserved what they said.

I woke in a hospital with Sarah beside me. An officer later explained the plan: Dad owed support money to his mistress’s family, and he meant to marry me off to Wong Xiang while taking my scholarship money. Dad and Wong Xiang were jailed. Mom and Grandma asked me to write a forgiveness letter. I refused, and their pleading turned to curses. I left for Beijing with Sarah, carrying the first future that truly belonged to me.

CHAPTER 3

College felt strange at first. I could go to class without wondering whether I would be ordered home to wash diapers, or whether Dad’s mood would decide if I got to eat that day. I had friends who cared if I ate and professors who wanted to know what I thought. Sarah and I studied hard, laughed often, and kept her parents’ kindness close to our hearts. I remembered her warm buns.

I saved what I could from my scholarships and made investments, helped by what I remembered of the years ahead. Over time I built a comfortable financial foundation. After graduation, Sarah and I started a business using an improved version of her family’s bun recipe. Eventually our products reached customers nationwide. We worked for it, made decisions together, and kept our lives private when the business succeeded. I never forgot who had fed me when I couldn’t afford breakfast.

Sixteen years passed before my family found me again. By then I was married, had a child, and lived in a home of my own. Dad arrived gray and hunched, with Mom beside him and Grandma, improbably, still alive. He rubbed his hands together as he looked around and suggested we could all live together as one family.

“What I have has nothing to do with you,” I told him. The affection vanished from his face. He lunged toward me, Grandma began shouting, and Mom cried as though my refusal were another injury I had inflicted on her. I called security, but I noticed Little Treasure standing a little apart from them, silent and watching.

The cleft lip had been repaired, leaving a scar. Doctors had described Little Treasure as female, but the family had raised the child as a boy, and Little Treasure continued to insist on being male. I recognized something else in his expression: the accusation that had followed me throughout my first life.

I asked the guards to leave him for a moment. “Why didn’t you stop them?” he asked. I told him I remembered the other life, the one in which I had begged Mom to stop taking those remedies and was blamed for the outcome. “This time I didn’t stop her,” I said. He angrily accused me of causing his cleft lip. I could not tell him what had caused it. I could only see that whatever choice I made, he still wanted to make me responsible for his life. When he started shouting, security escorted him out too.

Later I learned what had happened to the family. Their home had been auctioned to cover debts, including wages and support payments. Dad struggled to hold jobs and spent much of his time drinking and gambling. Mom washed dishes; Grandma scavenged for money. Charitable help had paid for Little Treasure’s lip repair, but the family continued to fight doctors over his sex development, and he had endured bullying at school.

I could feel sorrow for that upbringing without inviting them into my home. No child deserved Little Treasure’s upbringing. Then they appeared on a television reunion program, saying they had raised me lovingly and paid for my education. Sarah phoned in outrage. My husband and child sat with me while I watched, reminding me how different my home had become.

I posted the old reporting and the public records of Dad’s sentence on our company website. Viewers found the truth, and my family became recognizable for reasons they had never intended. I thought that exposure might finally end their attempts to rewrite our history. For years I had let them speak for me; now the record spoke for itself. Instead, I found myself wondering whether Mom, at least, wanted a way out.

CHAPTER 4

I went to see Mom and Little Treasure once more. Dad had built much of our misery, but Mom had spent years defending him. I wondered if she wished for a different life.

“If you want a divorce,” I told her, “I can help you with a monthly allowance. You could live quietly instead of struggling for the rest of your life.” She burst into tears, but not with relief. She said I had ruined my father’s life and demanded to know how I could suggest abandoning him. Even after so much hardship, loyalty still meant defending Dad while he blamed everybody else. Even my offer became an accusation.

I turned to Little Treasure. I said I could provide some financial help so he could make his own decisions about his future. He looked interested. Outside, Mom hurried to Dad and announced that I had tried to make her leave him. Dad cursed me while she held on to his arm. I walked away. I had offered a door, but I couldn’t make her walk through it. Once again, I had tried to rescue someone determined to accuse me.

Time passed without contact. Eventually, someone investigating the family’s circumstances told me that Mom and Dad had taken Little Treasure abroad for gender-affirming surgery. After recovering, he resumed a relationship with a man he had known in our previous life. I hoped he could finally live without Grandma’s expectations.

That hope ended with a devastating report. Little Treasure had killed his boyfriend, then killed Dad and Grandma. Mom had been badly injured and later died in the hospital. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. I was stunned despite my memories of his earlier violence.

I visited him in prison. I wanted to understand why he had killed them. There was no answer that could restore those lives, and I knew it before I entered. Through the glass, he told me his boyfriend had said he was not a real man and wanted to marry a woman and have children. He spoke of that rejection as though it justified a murder. It did not.

Then he blamed our family for pressing him to believe that becoming a man would make life easier. He complained that after the surgery he still had no house, no money, and none of the security he had imagined. Now he insisted that being a woman might have been easier instead. The bitterness sounded terribly familiar: whenever life failed to give him what he wanted, he searched for someone else to punish.

I asked him whether any of those people had deserved to die. He leaned toward the glass and turned his anger on me. “You knew. Why didn’t you stop me?” he demanded, as though I could have chosen his life for him and guaranteed he would never hurt.

Guards took him away when he lunged toward the partition. Outside, Sarah was waiting. I told her I had spent two lifetimes hearing that every decision about that child was somehow mine to answer for. The truth was that Mom had made her choices, Dad and Grandma had made theirs, and Little Treasure had made his. None of them had given me the right to control another person’s body or the duty to accept blame for murder.

Sarah made a small joke about getting another chance at life as a creature that changes sex, and despite everything I laughed. We went home to the people who loved us without conditions. I could not undo either lifetime, and I would always mourn what that family had become. But the years ahead were mine to live, not theirs to take.

THE END.

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