Chapter 1

Chapter 1

My mother was a shrew.

Those weren’t my words. They were what the classmates who never wanted to play with me said.

When I was in elementary school, my dad was out driving his cab when someone slit his throat.

It happened very close to my school. That day, he was supposed to pick me up after class, but instead he died in a corner with no surveillance cameras.

His buddies from the taxi fleet took my mother and me to collect the funeral compensation. That was when I saw the driver’s seat of his red taxi, the spot where my dad used to sit, and on the little pink-and-green crocheted cushion, there was a huge puddle of dark brown liquid.

I was still too young to understand. I didn’t know what it meant for someone to die, and I didn’t know what having your throat slit meant.

All I knew was that my mother’s hand was very cold.

She loved money more than anything. Every day when my dad came home from driving, she would even find the coins he had hidden in his underwear.

My dad was always grinning, too, never learning his lesson. After my mother kicked and slapped him and searched him for all his money, he would turn around and dig one yuan out from under his stinky shoe insole, then show off in front of me. “Look, your old man’s still got money!”

And in the very next second, my mother would double back and snatch it away.

But that day, when the old leader from my dad’s fleet handed over a palm-thick stack of money,

my mother just stood there in a daze, as if she had forgotten how to take it.

After that, my mother changed.

She became what people called a “shrew.”

Back then, our homeroom teacher asked us to take a parent information form home for our parents to fill out and bring back the next day.

When the teacher collected all the forms the next day, she rearranged the seats that afternoon.

After the seats were changed, a few girls from the front row stopped playing Chinese jump rope with me.

I didn’t understand, so I asked Zhao Lingling bluntly, “Why?”

Our homes were close together, and we usually went to school and came home together.

Sometimes, when my dad finished his shift early, she would hitch a ride home with me in his taxi.

When my dad’s red taxi came from far down the road, Zhao Lingling would giggle and tickle me, saying that in the foreign movie she had watched the day before, women hailing a taxi had to roll up their pant legs, show some leg, stick one leg out, and shout taxi.

The two of us were like two silly frogs, rolling up both pant legs and shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!”

Until my dad rolled down the window and laughed along with us. “What are you two doing, going down to the river to catch fish?”

Zhao Lingling laughed too. “Uncle Chen, you’re so nice!”

Zhao Lingling was my best friend. For a time, I truly thought so.

But that day, she tugged at the new T-shirt she was wearing. It was pink, with a little check mark drawn on the chest, a brand I had never seen before.

For some reason, she didn’t quite dare look at me. Then she said softly,

“My mom won’t let me play with you.”

“Why?”

“She said your family showed off too much, that you had so much money you just had to flaunt it, and that’s why your dad got stabbed to death.”

Then she and the other girls from the front row started playing Chinese jump rope. I stood beside them and waited for ten minutes, until the class bell rang, but Zhao Lingling still never called me over.

When I got home, my mother asked why I had come back alone today. I repeated Zhao Lingling’s words exactly.

Even now, I still remember that afternoon.

The last of the sunset faded away little by little, but no lights were turned on at home. It was a sweltering evening, so stuffy it was almost suffocating, yet even the creaky electric fan had not been switched on.

A pile of needlework was spread across the table. It was the new work my mother had taken on recently. She earned thirty cents for each piece she crocheted. Working from morning to night, she could make four yuan and fifty cents in a day.

“Mom, can you crochet a check mark on my school uniform too?”

“If I have a check mark on me too, will Zhao Lingling be willing to play with me again?”

I stared at the yarn flower on the table. My mother clenched her jaw tight, her face completely expressionless.

But the next second, she wiped her face hard with her sleeve.

“Let’s go!”

That day, she dragged me with one hand and grabbed a kitchen knife from the kitchen with the other, then stormed over to Zhao Lingling’s house and hacked a gap right into their security door.

“If you dare spout nonsense in front of my daughter again, I’ll send every last one of you down there to find my Dapeng!”

After that, the story that my mother was a shrew spread completely through the school.

My name also changed from Chen Miao to “that shrew’s daughter.”

Zhao Lingling stopped playing with me.

So did the other classmates.

Even though my mother had embroidered a check mark on the chest of my school uniform too.