Rebirth15 min read
Back to 1990: I Get One Chance
ButterPicks9 views
I woke before dawn, because habit from a life I remembered like a map—old, worn, and deadly clear—pulled me out of bed. The small house smelled of night sweat and straw. I padded across the floor, careful not to wake Maxwell, and washed my face in the cold water we kept for mornings.
"My jacket," he mumbled from the bed without opening his eyes.
I hung it over my arm and went out the door with a shovel. The earth was the same, the sky thin and hard as a coin. At the irrigation entrance the water had been pinched off—half my plot was dry, half already stolen by the greedy current that always found a new owner by dawn.
"This one was blocked," I said to nobody and to the dark in the order the world had given me.
I dug at the mouth of the channel and worked upstream to free the line. Vicente Brandt was already at his field, smiling like a man who kept small mercies. When I opened his intake he patted my sleeve.
"Francesca, you're early," he said. "Looks like you saved me a day."
"It was either that or watch it vanish," I answered.
When I returned home I found Wilma asleep on Josephine's stomach. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched their faces: one child lean and clever, the other small and warm against my ribs. I knew both their lives already in a way that felt like a curse and a key. I remembered the terrible last years—the fevers, the hospital trips, the empty bed in the cold—but here, now, my body felt young again. I touched the mirror. A woman's face looked back at me that time had stolen once: twenty-something, hard, settled.
"Mom?" Josephine's voice came like a feather. "Is it true? Are we really going?"
"Today we'll cook," I said, though my mind could only think of a steel city called Pengcheng and the soft ache of leaving. "Today we keep things alive. Later we make choices."
We ate quick. Maxwell came in dusty from the field and sat down with smiling, half-awake gratitude. He was the sort of man who gave everything he had to his family and asked for nothing. I loved him for that and wanted him to stand up for himself.
"Did he say anything?" I asked him, meaning the old rumor about bricks and rent money, meaning the talk of mountain land being worth coin.
"Nothing yet," Maxwell said. "The old men are slow to tell bad news."
Vicente and I met neighbors and the ditches were full of gossip as thick as the water. The man who warned me about fake bills at market—the one we call the "big sister" of the traders—was right: false currency circled like a rat until someone put their hand down.
At the market, when the man called "Monkey Zhang" came to our stand, Maxwell tested the hundred yuan note with the diligence of someone who could not afford to be cheated. I called for an old friend from the town police, Pavel Coleman, and the muscle of the neighborhood showed up when counterfeit money was suspected. The charade ended with the fake bill exposed and a real hundred handed back. People around us breathed relief like cold air.
"It pays to watch each other's backs," Vicente said with a grin.
"It pays to be awake," I replied.
When Josephine fell into the river later—my throat still tight at the memory of the last life—I felt the floor drop out. The return of memory was a blade shaped into warning. The river was cruel. She sank before my mind could decide which failure haunted me most. Then Vicente jumped without hesitation and carried her out. The hospital smelled of disinfectant and worry and once again I held my daughter's white, trembling face and understood how fragile fortune was.
"You were there," I said to Vicente, clutching at a man whose face belonged to the neighborhood. "You are an answer we can't repay."
He shrugged.
"It was the right thing," he said. "Nonsense to make heroes of us."
But we spoke later with calm. The river had witnesses. A small girl who had been staring at Josephine—Hermione Morales—had shoved and been pushed in a moment of childish meanness that had blood and guilt thicker than the creekwater. I pressed the truth out of Josephine quietly later; the girl had lied at first but then the truth came in pieces.
"Shall we make them admit?" I asked Vicente when we took the path back.
"Let's wait," he said. "Public truths need a place; if you catch me in the right moment I'll stand by you."
That night, when the village crowd assembled because my mother-in-law, a woman with a loud mouth and a hunger for more, declared it time to split the family property, the whole valley gathered like a storm. Bernabe Kobayashi, the elder, sat with his pipe and watched the drama unroll.
"Today's the day to decide," Maxwell's mother, a hard woman who had never given him a softness, declared. "We will divide and my oldest will be favored. It's the right custom."
"I don't agree," I said, because 1990 had given me proof: those mountains would be rented to brick makers soon, and if we lost our share we would lose a future.
"Don't you speak to your elders with that tone!" she scolded.
"Mom," Maxwell said quietly. "We are asking only for fairness."
"Fairness?" she sneered. "What does fairness mean when some sons already have three children and one decent job in the county?"
It hurt to hear him belittled; still I kept my voice steady.
"I remember a deal," I told the small crowd, my pulse loud in my throat. "My husband has his name on the mountain allotment. If those mountains bring rental incomes for the future, he shall get his share. That's the law of our time. We won't sign a paper that gives our land to those who already have more."
The elder thought for a while, puffing his pipe, and then he spoke up.
"The allotments are written according to each headcount, but if a man refuses to be fair and tries to use noise to take what is not his, a village cannot honor him. Show us the registration," Bernabe said.
We all wanted it small, private, solved with nods and whispers, but when greed smells something it grows teeth. Magnus Hill—my husband's eldest brother—stepped forward on the side of his mother and tried to bluster.
"What's the point of troubling the family?" he said. "My father and mother deserve more care. Our family will manage."
"Your portion is already accounted for," Maxwell said. "If you want more, show how you earned it."
"You're a simple man, not city smart," Magnus said. "You can't keep up with the market."
"Maybe not," I said, "but I can keep up with the truth."
There was a hum of approval from people who had watched Maxwell work his fields and feed his family; they knew his steadiness. Under pressure the elders scratched out a second distribution. When Magnus's face turned red with equal parts anger and calculation, I held my ground and Maxwell signed only after the mountain stayed on his ledger.
We left that day with a thin happiness. They had not taken everything. But the old voices still murmured.
"You are stubborn," Maxwell told me on the walk home. "Did you have to use that word—'market'?"
"It was the only way," I said. "You hold on to claim something for your children."
At home that afternoon, we packed vegetables, wrapped rice, and prepared to leave for a market trip. We were busy people. Life was small and steady and the edge of it was the rumor that the bricks men were circling our mountains with eyes full of coins.
"Take care," I told my husband when he left early for the market.
"Always," he said, and in his voice lived the steady man he was.
I had begun to make lists: papers, small savings hidden in red paper, the routes to Pengcheng, the woman who could say "speak for me" in the city if needed—Alfredo Vasseur, my distant cousin and a man who moved between the town and the factory lines. I kept things to the bone, because everything we owned would have to stretch.
Then Josephine fell into the water and the old story of my life clawed back. The boy at the river—Hermione's brother had not been a boy yet—Hermione denied it at first. She only caved when the older neighbors pressed her and when her father Alfredo Lopes faced them and looked small.
"What did you see?" I asked Hermione, sitting in the kitchen that evening. The oil in the pan hissed with the evening. "Tell me the truth."
She shook. "She pushed first."
"Who pushed who?" I asked calmly.
"My friend shoved her," Hermione said. "But she—"
"Stop lying," I said simply, because the heart of a mother is not only tenderness; sometimes it is a hand that will not release.
In the end Hermione wrote a brief note and placed the ink-stain thumb on it—the "guarantee" that her father had been forced to make her sign. It was done in front of neighbors. The moment was small and savage and public. People watched. Her face went from defiant to scared. For a child that visible transformation was as complete as a weather change.
Still, that was only a first humiliation.
Weeks later there was worse. The brick buyers came to the elders with coin and plans and a paper smell. The village meeting grew hot and people debated as if the future had a price. I sat on the edge, holding Wilma who had cut the page of a comic with a small, careful hand. I had the knowledge of a previous life: the rents would be paid, coin would spread among hands that did not seed our future, and the men who gathered coin now would gather breathless sons and call them lucky.
One afternoon Bernabe stood up and called the village together. The little square in front of the hall filled: neighbors in patched shirts, children with tied sleeves, and men washing the sweat from their brows. I went early because when the crowd gathers, smart tricks often show themselves in daylight.
Magnus and his mother, who had been loud before, walked into the circle like two condemned people who had walked into a trap of their own making. On the table in front of the elder three rows of paper lay: contract offers, signatures from a small factory, and an envelope of the first down-payment.
"Friends," Bernabe said, and he didn't puff his pipe this time. "This meeting is to discuss the mountain lease. But we must speak plainly first. There have been attempts to change the allotments by deceiving the assembly. Those who seek to take more must stand and explain."
Magnus stepped forward, the same arrogance on his face as when we first argued. He had thought to bully his way into the richer portion, assuming the herd would follow.
"This is how it goes," he began with a smile that wanted to be casual. "My family needs more, and the factory offers coin. A man does what he must."
"Do you deny the rumor," Bernabe asked, "that you moved to secure signatures with the bait of this factory and with promises to your own mother, telling her to force the division?"
"Promises are easy," Magnus said. "Markets are fair."
The crowd hissed. Someone in the back—Pavel, who had a policeman's eye for detail—walked to the table and produced the ledger page I had seen earlier: a ledger Maxwell had carried in his hand that proved his share. It bore his thumbprint. I had not recognized the paper then; now everyone saw it.
"These are signatures forged," Pavel said. "I examined the marks. They are not matched to actual headmen. Some were obtained late, some not at all. We have no right to change people’s allotments on the sly."
"Who says you can question our names?" Magnus responded, then, noticing the hard faces of the villagers, tried to play humility. "Look at me. I am your son. I only want what is fair."
"It is not fair to gather in secret and then smile publicly," Bernabe said. "To take land because you have three sons who will tend may seem reasonable to you, but you cannot sell your brother's name."
The crowd shifted. People began to talk: "Did Magnus offer them a cut?" "Who got the envelope?" "Who signed without witness?"
At that moment Alfredo Lopes, father of the village family who had been noisy in the house and had been the instigator behind his own child's bullying, stood up to add fuel. "It's all common sense," he bellowed. "We did what's best. Those without sons will plant less."
"Stop," Bernabe said. "We will not be searched by greed today."
The turning came when Bernabe produced a deed and read aloud the proper register, lines and stamps and the names. He then moved to a surprising step: he asked the bank clerk who had accompanied the brick company to step forward. The man arrived sweating and awkward, a middleman between villages and business. He had been ready to pay out the envelope in private.
"You asked these men to sign?" Bernabe demanded.
"Yes," the man said, "but the payment was to be distributed according to the allotment. We thought—"
"You thought you could bribe and persuade?" someone shouted. A string of mutters ran through the crowd.
Magnus's face, which had been red before, blanched as the net tightened. He went through a sequence of emotions in public—smugness, then a forced smile, then a flash of anger, then denial, then cracking. He tried to regain grip.
"It was an arrangement," he spat. "I did no crime."
"An arrangement in secret is a theft," Bernabe said.
Then the elder did something heavy: he asked everyone to speak. One by one older neighbors stepped up to say they had seen Magnus's men whispering in corners, that they had been asked to sign under pressure, that promises had been made to them individually—with coin, with favors. People—simple farmers who could not afford shame—began to tell their short stories of how a handshake and a smile had been used to cut pieces of their summers to themselves.
The tide turned.
I watched as those who had feasted on the rumor found themselves in the light. Alfredo Lopes tried to laugh it off, then cried out, then shook with anger. Magnus's posture shriveled. He had been sure his family would back him; instead they flinched under the weight of public exposure.
"You wanted the mountain for your sons," Bernabe said slowly. "You wanted to make sure your three boys had an advantage. But do you think bribes and trickery are right while you scold our daughters for playing at the well? Do you think that is honor?"
There was a long silence. Then someone laughed cruelly, and that laughter became the sound of the village closing in. Neighbors who had once kept quiet began to name the favors and call them out. Some women spat in the dust. Two men, who had brought the envelope, were made to stand and return what they had. The envelope was opened and the down-payment notes set on a cloth for all to see. People leaned forward as though tasting a secret.
Maxwell stepped forward then, the steadiness in him like a plow in winter.
"I will not take revenge," he said. "But I will not be bullied. My daughters will eat the fruit of what their father earns, not gifts to those who fear less hard work."
The crowd's sympathy fell like a hand on our shoulder. It felt like warmth.
"What did you expect," Alfredo Lopes asked, his mouth twitching, the denial falling.
"For mercy from those who traded in lies?" someone answered. "No."
At last Magnus's face collapsed. He went from smirk to rage to pleading. He knelt in front of his mother and then stood and turned to Bernabe with desperation.
"What do you expect? We are family!" he cried.
"We expect no theft," Bernabe said. "We expect people to be counted fairly. You will return any paper you made them sign. You will not lease what is not rightfully yours. You will apologize publicly and make reparation if you can."
The humiliation at that market circle was full. There were no phones to broadcast, but some men carried small film cameras; an old woman took out a simple camera and clicked pictures of the documents being opened. Others told the story that walked the village faster than wind: "They were greedy and tried to buy their way, but the village saw them."
Magnus's progression was visible to all: confident smugness, then anger, then frantic denial, then slope of collapse. His mother at last sat silent, face reddened and small. The crowd's reaction was a mixture of scorn, relief, and a fierce sense of justice. Men spat on the ground near him; a woman shouted, "You thought you could buy our fate?" Another laughed; one man quietly packed up his bundle and walked away with head held higher than before.
By dusk the documents had been returned or torn. Bernabe, large and patient, pronounced simple terms: no unlawful lease; any factory contract presented to the village must be read aloud in full, with witnesses, of which I—and others—would be counted. There was no trial; there was exposure and shame and the cold hand of community.
We had forced them to kneel in the dry light of our square. That moment would follow Magnus and Alfredo Lopes for years. People would shake their heads when their names came up. They had traded their quiet dignity for a public fall—an old-fashioned punishment that is small, stinging and, in rural currency, lasting.
After that, when the brick company came with its polite papers and its middle-man smiles, the village read everything in open day. No longer could any one person pick up a pen behind curtains. The mountain stayed in family names where it belonged.
"That's the way," Vicente told me when we walked home. "When a thing is stolen in the dark we must bring it to the light."
"I remember we had to be louder," I said, thinking of the previous life and what had been stolen then. "We must keep our girls safe from both hands—they can be pushed into a river or pushed out of a future."
At home that night Maxwell and I agreed on a plan. We would take our children to Pengcheng to work, to keep them away from the petty greed that ate at our valley. The brick money might come; it might not. But our daughters' schooling and a chance at a different life had to be tried.
The train ride to Pengcheng was long and dizzy. Alarms of old stories and strangers sat like a stone in my chest. Alfredo Vasseur, a cousin with pull in the city, had arranged a small cluster of lodging and job leads. He had been practical, blunt and oddly kind in the way of men who cross from town to factories.
"Take the single room with the toilet," he advised. "You will be safer for the children."
We listened.
At the city we found a patchwork of high walls and smaller houses standing under cranes. The work started first for Maxwell and for Vicente on a construction site overseen by Mateo Henry, a foreman with a quick temper and a fair system. Max and Vicente learned heavy lifting in a week and were asked to stay. For the women, a factory lined with benches and bright lights hired our hands. I signed a small contract, then wrote the name of the factory and the hours in a small book I kept in the night stand.
Our daughters slept in the daytime and learned quickly how to navigate a new room, a new town. Josephine began to bloom in the way clever children do when their world widens by one small degree.
Then came a harder moment. We had thought we could afford childcare. The costs in city orphanages and nursery places were high—almost as much as I could make if I worked overtime. I spoke bluntly to our landlady and to a woman in the street named Eileen Stein, who quickly became a friend, and we devised a plan: Josephine would start at a school a long walk away—if we made a plan for travel—and Wilma would stay with Eileen a few days in rotation. We would earn and we would not break.
But life in the city stretches money like taffy. One night Wilma turned hot again, and the old fight with worry came back like a rotten tide. We had to choose: stay and steady the work, or come home if the city proved too sharp for our children.
I remembered my previous life: every time I had chosen comfort we had paid in loss. So I kept going. The work was a grind. I rose before the sun even in the city and returned when it had set. Josephine learned to make noodles in the small kitchen, and Wilma learned to sleep to the rhythm of machines.
Months passed with the pulse of factory belts and the echoing hammer of Maxwell's labor, but never did the city make greedy men go away. It merely showed me that some fights are fought on many fronts: at river, at market, in the square, and in a small room where two daughters sleep.
And yet things shifted. Josephine's school accepted her papers. We paid fees and bought a small bag and a pencil box. People who had once whispered about us now nodded. I kept my lists tight—papers, savings, cousins who would help. I learned to barter at the market, to make a pot of something small and warm that could feed a family of strangers and settle them into trust.
One evening, a week before the festival, Lorenzo—no, Matteo Archer, the foreman—came to the small yard. He had heard of a house where a woman cooked like a mother, and he wanted to speak about a new batch of workers.
"You feed people like my own mother used to," he said. "Keep this place and you will always have hands to help."
The men at work weren't only laborers; they were companions in grit. They could be cruel and funny and sometimes loving in the spare hours. I crouched near the edge and watched Maxwell laugh with men who had once been strangers. He drank from a chipped mug and came home with a battered grin. In this life I had time to see the small good things; it didn't make the nights less sharp, but it softened them.
When news came of the village back home—of more people trying to cheat and take by promise and coin—the old wound flared. But this time the village knew how to look.
We had returned the favor of the market with courage and exposure. The people who tried to use the village as commodity had been burned by public truth. They had been humiliated there in the square where the film camera snapped the documents. That public punishment had been the only cure our valley had for theft. People would tell that story for years: the time the greedy were made small in the sunlight and the community did not forgive them.
In Pengcheng we lived in a thin room that smelled of stew, sweat, and the dust of bricks. We earned, saved, and stuck to a life like glue. Josephine, clever, learned to read a little faster; Wilma's cough receded from the hard days and turned into a child's mischievous cough.
I learned to sleep with one ear open. I learned to speak to people in short sentences and longer kindness. I learned the small power of being seen by others who owe nothing to you. We survived because a village once stood up and because the city taught me to be watchful. Both lessons were necessary.
One evening when the bells in the factory were silent and the men had come home, I sat on the bunks and read out loud to Josephine the stories I had kept in my head: the world, reborn, the small horizons I wanted to buy with coins. She listened like a map, marking where she wanted to go.
"Mom," she said softly, "do you think we'll be safe?"
I put my hand on her head and felt the small weight. "We have already been brave," I said. "We will be brave again."
Outside, in the city, a night vendor rolled his cart. Inside our small room, two daughters slept like seeds. I had been given a second chance—an astonishing, terrifying rerun—and I had used it to teach stubbornness and kindness in equal measure.
If the mountain back home ever becomes a coin again, I knew the village would be ready. If greedy men came, they would be tall and clever, but every time people gather and speak truth they pull a light into the dark.
And for that I would spend my life: to illuminate the dark for my girls and to keep them from falling into deep waters without hands to haul them out.
The End
— Thank you for reading —