I was just being polite to the neighbor: "Your grandson is so cute, I want one too." When I came home for summer break, my parents had miraculously produced a baby brother for me. "Your wish came true, so he was born. You have to take responsibility for him!" My parents immediately washed their hands of everything, and my brother's entire life became my burden. From potty training to homework, from his first car to the down payment on his house. Later, because I couldn't afford to buy him a house, my brother brutally murdered me. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day I complimented the neighbor's grandson. "Wow, your grandson is so cute, I want..." My parents exchanged a look, their eyes gleaming with calculation. I paused for a second: "I want a luxury mansion!" "I want a sports car and a yacht!" "I want to study abroad!" "I want a billion dollars in cash!" 1 Our neighbor, Mrs. Davis, brought her little grandson over to play. My mom observed my expression while dropping hints: "Maya, look how cute this little guy is! If you had a cute little brother like this, I'd wake up laughing from my dreams!" I scoffed inwardly. Having lived through this once, I knew perfectly well that this had nothing to do with what I wanted. The "little brother" in my mom's belly was already well on his way. This "old and young" tag team acting out this little play right in front of me was just a setup. They wanted to trick me into saying, "I want a little brother too," so they could dump the massive responsibility of raising him squarely onto my shoulders. In my past life, I fell for it completely. Just because I politely said, "Your grandson is so cute, I want a little brother too," my parents happily abdicated all their responsibilities the moment he was born. They dumped my brother on me, forcing me to handle every aspect of his daily life. As he grew up, I was the one paying for his school, his job hunting, his car, his house. I carried it all alone. If I dared to show even a hint of reluctance, they would immediately start laying on the guilt trips. "Your wish came true, so your brother was born. You must take responsibility for his life!" My wish caused a pregnancy? Their excuses for wanting a son were more creative than my college thesis. But the tragedy was, through their daily brainwashing, my brother actually believed them. When he failed a test, he blamed me for not finding him a good tutor; When he couldn't find a job, he blamed me for not using my connections; When he couldn't afford a house, he blamed me for not working hard enough. Even at the very end, as he lunged at me with a knife, he roared: "If you don't have money, why did you have me born?! It's all your fault! If it wasn't for your stupid wish, I wouldn't have been brought into this hellhole world to suffer! Go to hell!" The brother I raised from childhood raised a knife and brutally murdered me. And my parents? They actually signed a legal waiver pledging not to hold him accountable. I was the only one who suffered in that timeline. In this life, I will absolutely not repeat the same mistakes. Seeing my silence, Mrs. Davis pushed her grandson forward a bit: "Timmy. Quick, call her big sister! Let your big sister hold you." The kid looked at me blankly. Mrs. Davis struck while the iron was hot: "Maya, look how lovable this little guy is. You should tell your mom to give you a little brother too." My mom held her breath, staring intently at my mouth. She practically had "Say you want a little brother" written across her forehead. I smiled: "Wow, he's so cute, I want..." A massive surge of joy erupted in my parents' eyes; they both instinctively leaned forward. "I want a luxury mansion!" "I want a sports car and a yacht!" "I want to study abroad!" "I want a billion dollars in cash!" The living room fell dead silent. The smile froze on Mrs. Davis's face. My mom's jaw dropped in shock. My dad's hand trembled so much while pouring tea that the hot water splashed all over the coffee table. "You kid, what kind of nonsense are you talking about!" My mom recovered first, her face burning, embarrassed and angry. My dad's face was dark. He put down the teapot, his voice harsh: "Maya, stop joking around. We're talking about serious matters." I blinked innocently: "What serious matters?" "Mrs. Davis asked if you wanted a little brother, what do you think?" I played dumb: "If I want something, I can just have it?" My parents: "Yes, whatever you want, we'll do everything in our power to give it to you." Me: "That's amazing! Like I said, I want a luxury mansion, a sports car, a yacht, to study abroad, and a billion dollars in cash. Which one are you going to give me first?" My parents remained silent. I raised my voice: "I said! I want a luxury mansion! I want a sports car and a yacht..." "Enough!" my mom interrupted shrilly. The fake smiles on their faces completely vanished. 2 Mrs. Davis awkwardly made an excuse and hurried out with her grandson. As soon as the door closed, my mom rushed up to me, pretending to be concerned: "Maya, tell me the truth, do you want a biological little brother?" "No." I said firmly. "Mom is thinking of your future! With another sibling, you'll have someone to look out for you later in life." She tried to paint a beautiful picture of familial bonds. "I have friends, I have a boyfriend. I don't need a little brother causing trouble." I kept my face expressionless, casually picking up an apple from the table and taking a bite. My dad chimed in, using his parental authority: "What do you know! When you get married, if you don't have a brother to back you up, your in-laws will take advantage of you!" "Oh, then I just won't get married." I chewed the apple, my voice slightly muffled but perfectly clear. "I'll just date and never marry. Total freedom." My mom blurted out: "Even better! Then your brother can take care of you when you're old!" Heh, there it is. The truth comes out. They didn't care at all if I had a good life; they just desperately wanted a son. I gave a fake smile: "If I have to rely on a brother to take care of me, I might as well just go die right now." My parents: "Even if you don't think about yourself, you have to think about us. A son is like a nuclear weapon; without a son, we'll get bullied. Your dad and I have been looked down on our whole lives, it's time we finally held our heads high." I dismantled their arguments one by one: "Don't worry, by the time your 'nuclear weapon' grows up, you'll both be in your seventies or eighties. Forget about people bullying you, even if you fell on the street, no one would dare help you up for fear of getting sued!" My dad's face turned the color of a bruised plum. He slammed his hand on the table: "Insolent! Is this how you speak to your parents? We want a son to carry on the family name, and it's perfectly natural! As the older sister, helping out your brother is your duty! It's expected of you!" I threw my hands up: "I can help him, but on one condition: you stop him from being born." "Our family is dead broke, and you two don't even have a retirement fund. Bringing a kid into the world now is just setting him up for misery." Seeing that playing hardball wasn't working, my mom instantly switched tactics. She cradled her barely showing belly and looked like she was about to cry: "Look, Mom is getting older. The baby in my belly is already four months along. I can feel him kicking. Besides, an abortion is terrible for a woman's body. Don't you care about your mom's health?" "Care?" I sneered, my tone sharp as a knife. "When you were doing the deed, did you think about your health? You didn't use protection, and now that the fun is over, you suddenly want me to feel bad for your body? You couldn't keep your pants zipped and created this mess yourself, now figure out how to deal with it. Don't try to guilt-trip me!" My parents never expected me to be so blunt. Their faces went through a spectacular cycle of colors—green, red, purple. My dad was furious: "We're keeping this child!" Finally showing their true colors! 3 Looking at their infuriated but helpless faces, I knew the moment had arrived. I whipped out my phone like lightning, switched to video mode, and pointed the camera straight at my stunned parents. "You should have just said you wanted to have a baby in the first place. Why go through all the trouble of trying to blame it on me?" "Future little brother, are you watching? I adamantly opposed Mom and Dad bringing you into this world; they are the ones insisting on it. If your life sucks in the future, take it up with Mom and Dad. It has absolutely nothing to do with your sister." "Our family doesn't have an empire for you to inherit, only pots and pans in the kitchen. Once you're born, you're just fresh meat for the corporate grinder, a wage slave for the factories, the bottom rung of society, a speck of dust in the universe." "Mom and Dad are bringing you into this miserable world, but they don't have the means to lift you up. You'll only have yourself to rely on in the future." "Good luck! We're all just struggling to survive~" I ended the recording, my finger firmly pressing 'Save'. On the screen, my parents' faces went from red to green, green to white, and finally settled into a deathly, ashen pallor. "You... you ungrateful, heartless monster!" My dad finally found his voice, screaming in a fit of absolute rage. "If you won't let us have this baby, we're having it anyway!" I raised an eyebrow, mocking: "Go ahead, do whatever you want. Just remember what was said today." I had my video evidence. In my past life, whenever my brother faced the slightest setback, he would take his anger out on me, physically assaulting me. My parents would either pretend not to see it or actively egg him on from the sidelines. "You're the older sister. You should act like a mother to him and be more forgiving." "If you hadn't insisted on a little brother in the first place, he wouldn't even be here." "He's emotional; you should bear the brunt of it." In this life, when they become the targets of his resentment and his emotional punching bags, I wonder if they'll be as "forgiving" as they preached. Winter break ended, and the very first thing I did when I got back to college was log my daily steps on Instagram. I finished my final lap with a sprint, checking the stopwatch. My sweat-soaked sports bra clung tightly to my stomach. It was flat and toned, without a single trace of pregnancy. I pointed the camera at my midriff and hit record: "Three miles done for today! Keeping it up tomorrow!" I had to make sure I posted plenty of updates about my body during my mom's pregnancy. In my past life, because I didn't know my mom was pregnant, I went home for summer break and was immediately handed a baby brother. When I took the newborn down to the apartment courtyard for some fresh air, a high school classmate happened to walk by. She stared at my puffy dark circles and the crying infant in my arms, and blurted out: "You had a baby in your junior year of college?!" My mom not only didn't clarify the situation but gave a cryptic, knowing smile: "Oh, well, when we're out and about, we just tell people he's her little brother." She intentionally misled people into thinking the baby was mine. She just wanted everyone to believe my brother was my child. No matter how much I explained, no one believed me. In this life, not only am I posting daily updates on Instagram, but I'm checking in on every single social media platform. I run three miles every day, hike on the weekends, and do crazy amounts of sit-ups in my dorm room at night. My roommates thought I had lost my mind. "Maya, you're already so skinny and you're still working out? How are the rest of us supposed to live?" They didn't know that I was doing all this just to survive. A whole semester flew by. I successfully got abs. Just after I posted a picture showing off my new abs, my dad called. "Summer break started two days ago, why aren't you home yet?" "I transferred you two hundred bucks. Buy a train ticket and get home tomorrow. It's mandatory!" Oh, right. They're in a rush for me to come back and be their unpaid nanny. I accepted his two hundred dollars, then immediately booked a bus ticket heading south. [Dad, I agreed to work at an electronics factory with my classmate for the summer, so I won't be coming home.] My parents are incredibly cheap. Even if I don't go home, there is no way they'll be willing to pay for a postpartum nurse. My dad is the type who refuses to lift a finger around the house. Having him take care of my mom during her postpartum recovery? That house is going to be a warzone. 4 The first few days after my brother was born, my mom's Facebook feed was like a live broadcast of a perfect life. Close-ups of her son's tiny pink hands, photos of the happy family of three hugging deeply. She practically posted eight times a day, and her captions were full of arrogant pride. [It really has to be a son! Now that I have a son, even the air smells sweet!] [I've finally done right by our ancestors. The Smith family line won't end with me.] [The happiest family of three!] Unfortunately, their "happy days" didn't even last a week before descending into total chaos. In the middle of the night, my dad called me, his resentment practically shooting through the phone line. "Your mother is impossible!" "I barely close my eyes for two minutes, and she's yelling about a headache, a backache, or her bones hurting, demanding I massage her. Who hasn't had a baby? Back in our day, didn't every wife get back to work the day after giving birth? "I make her oatmeal, dragging myself out of bed before dawn, and she complains it has no flavor! I buy premium pork trotters to make soup, bring it right to her, and she says it's too greasy! She's recovering from childbirth, does she really think she's a princess?" "She's constantly whining. I'm done serving her!" My mom sent me voice memos crying hysterically, one after another, accompanied by the sound of a baby wailing in the background. "Your dad is completely useless! Relying on him will literally kill me!" "Your brother cries from hunger, and I tell him to make formula. He uses boiling water, and the powder immediately clumps up! Things even a pig could learn, I tell him a hundred times and he still can't remember!" "He sleeps like the dead at night. I can't even shove him awake. When I finally manage to wake him up to change a diaper, he just wipes haphazardly with a wet wipe and shoves the baby into a new diaper while he's still soaking wet! It's only been five days! Five days! And the baby has severe diaper rash!" As if they had coordinated it, they both issued the same royal decree to me, one after the other. "Hurry up and come home! We can't handle it here anymore!" In my past life, I was the one taking care of my mom at home. If I did something slightly not to her liking, she would call me an ungrateful monster. If the water temperature was off by one degree, she called me useless. If the chicken soup was a little cold, she said I was intentionally trying to harm her. When my dad came home, she would add fuel to the fire and complain about me to him. Then, the two of them would tag-team me, yelling and screaming. Now that it was just the two of them, dealing with each other's "loving care," they couldn't even stand each other for a week. I'd rather be a wage slave at the factory than go home and face those three. Go back? Unless I've lost my mind. [I'm not going back to add to the chaos! You three living a happy life together is better than anything else!] I really hope they can just forget about me. Stop trying to drag me down. 5 After working at the electronics factory for a day, my phone blew up with messages when I got off my shift. In the extended family group chat, my parents and all my aunts and uncles were putting on a grand show for me. It started with my dad posting a video in the group. In the video, my mom looked pale, curled up on the bed, the mattress beneath her stained with dried blood. Her groans of pain could be heard intermittently. He added a caption full of accusations: [The mother of my child had a C-section, the wound is infected, and she has a 102-degree fever. And her daughter is out there living it up, ignoring us! What a disgrace to the family!] The other relatives immediately piled on, condemning me. Aunt Carol: [Your mother risked her life to give you a sibling, you heartless monster! Hurry up and get your ass back here to take care of her postpartum!] Aunt Susan: [How did you raise such a daughter? You shouldn't have let her go to college! Women get too wild when they read too many books!] Uncle John: [Hurry back and take care of her! A girl needs to learn how to manage a household and take care of kids. Otherwise, what man will ever want to marry you?] ... They're all so good at moral kidnapping. Well, don't blame me for airing their dirty laundry in public. [@Aunt Carol, you put Grandma in a nursing home after she was paralyzed and haven't visited her in three years. Now you're pretending to be a dutiful daughter?] [@Aunt Susan, your son-in-law is cheating and physically abusive. Do you really have the free time to worry about other people's families?] [@Uncle John, has your son paid off that $30,000 loan yet? Next time his creditors show up at my door, do you want me to tell them where you're hiding?] The group chat exploded again. When they couldn't win the argument, they tried to pull rank. [We are your elders! How dare you speak to your elders like that!] I ignored their moral grandstanding and replied: [Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone here is a living saint, and I'm the only ungrateful monster.] [Since you all care so much about my mom, why don't you take shifts taking care of her during her recovery?] [Whoever wants to sign up, I'll pay for your Uber.] The group chat went dead silent. The avatars that were so self-righteous a second ago were suddenly mute. I see these relatives maybe once a year. I wasn't afraid of offending them. Trying to guilt-trip me? Not a chance! My mom finally popped up, playing the victim: [Mom is begging you. Your brother cries all night, your dad doesn't even know how to make formula, the family needs you. Please have pity on Mom, my incision hurts so much I want to jump out a window!] Now you know what pain feels like? This is nothing. During the summer break of my past life, I went home and worked like a slave. At 3 AM, I would pace the balcony holding a crying infant, only to be met with my mom's energetic scolding: "Hold him steady! If you drop your brother, I'll skin you alive!" I washed my brother's cloth diapers until my hands were stiff and waterlogged. Every day, I helped my mom out of bed to exercise, exhausted to the bone, my back aching. After a month of non-stop work. My mom emerged from her postpartum recovery looking beautiful, strong, and healthy. I looked haggard, like I had just given birth to octuplets, and developed a chronic joint problem. And all I got in return was: "The pain you're feeling is just the sweet pain of sacrifice. Your brother will repay you when he grows up!" In this life, she will bear all the pain and suffering of having a child herself. So, I threw her own words right back at her: [It's supposed to hurt! This is called 'the sweet pain of sacrifice'! You gave the family a male heir, you've brought honor to our ancestors! It's all worth it! When your son grows up, he'll definitely repay you!] As for how he'll repay her? That would be with constant physical and verbal abuse, and eventually, raising a knife against her. Now that's what I call a heart-piercing pain. 6 Time flew by, and a month later, it was time for my brother's one-month milestone celebration. In the family group chat, Aunt Carol posted a video. The camera panned across my parents at the dining table. My mom looked like a water balloon ready to burst, swollen and puffy, her face a sallow, exhausted yellow that couldn't be hidden. My dad, on the other hand, hadn't changed at all. He still looked greasy-faced and full of energy. In just one month, she had been worn down to this state. My dad definitely deserved all the credit. He's the kind of guy who wouldn't lift a finger to pick up a fallen bottle of oil in the house. A total slacker. If you asked him to help with chores, he would bombard you with an endless stream of idiotic questions. In my past life, when my mom was recovering, I was overwhelmed and asked him to help me make formula. He hovered around me holding a baby bottle: "Sweetie, does the bottle need to be washed?" "The water should be 110 degrees, right?" "Do I add the formula first or the water first?" "Does the bottle need to be shaken?" "How do I shake it?" ... Just answering his stupid questions was more exhausting than doing the work myself. Eventually, I stopped asking for his help, preferring to just spend more time doing it myself. In my past life, because I shouldered the entire burden, my mom looked absolutely radiant at her one-month celebration. Everyone who saw her praised her, asking how she looked even better after having a baby! Little did they know, behind the scenes, I was carrying the weight for her. I remember clearly, she had even maliciously mocked a coworker who had also recently given birth. "Oh my god, how did you let yourself turn into a haggard housewife during your recovery?" "Look at me, I look even fresher after my recovery!" "You must just have bad genes. With my constitution, if I have another one, I might just revert back to an eighteen-year-old!" Well, look at her now. The way she looked in the video, she couldn't even hold a candle to that haggard coworker. At the end of the video, I distinctly heard Aunt Susan whispering a complaint: "Oh my, look at her after her recovery... her face looks completely ruined..." My mom is a very vain person. She would absolutely never allow herself to stay ugly. Sure enough, it wasn't long before she reached out to me. "You're probably not eating well at school, right? How about this: next semester, Mom will rent an apartment near your campus and cook for you every day so you can nourish your body." Hilarious. I'm starting my junior year. Only now does she realize I might not be eating well at school? I saw right through her little scheme. She just wanted to use the excuse of "taking care of me" to force me to help her take care of the baby, giving her time to recover her health and looks. "No need, Mom. I'm starting an internship soon. I won't have time to go back to campus, and if you come, you won't even see me." "Where are you interning? Mom will go rent an apartment near your company. That'll be even more convenient for you." "It's not finalized yet. Wait until I get the official offer, it won't be too late for you to come then." "Okay, it's a deal then." Actually, I wasn't doing an internship at all. I only said that to stall them temporarily. The only way to truly escape this bizarre, bloodsucking family was to study abroad. And I had just secured an exchange student spot from my university. In my past life, I naively shared this good news with my family, expecting them to be proud of me. Instead, they immediately filed for a leave of absence on my behalf, locked me in the house, and destroyed my passport and ID, all just to keep me as their free nanny. In this life, I didn't tell a soul about the exchange program. Outside of my college classes, I worked like a maniac—tutoring, working as a promoter, taking shifts at the factory—and saved every single penny. I knew they would never give up on the idea of making me help raise the baby. However. By the time they couldn't wait any longer and came to my campus to find me, they would discover that I had already left the university and was in a foreign country. I was really looking forward to seeing their ridiculous expressions when their scheme fell apart.
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