I could no longer remember how the two of us stepped into the room.
Nor could I say how long we held each other, weeping in silence.
It was only looking at my mother up close that I realized with a shock how horribly she had aged.
“The steamed bun shop owner went back to his hometown,” she sobbed, her voice trembling. “He left without telling me a single word. He didn’t leave a single penny behind.”
Left with nowhere to turn, she had sold off every last item in her home.
She gave up her old room and moved into a cheap, chaotic tenement compound just to keep a roof over her head.
For the past two weeks, she had been wandering everywhere trying to track me down.
In the end, relying strictly on her vague memories, she came here just to check.
She hadn’t held out much hope, simply taking a desperate gamble.
She never expected she would actually find me.
“I didn’t dare recognize you through that glass,” she whispered, tears streaming down her hollow cheeks.
If I hadn’t called out to her first, she likely would have turned around and walked away in silence.
Once the sobbing subsided, a bout of wild, bitter laughter suddenly burst from my throat.
She had suffered so much to find her daughter.
Yet she had no idea that I was already living in the shadows, trapped in the same trade.
Back then, she had scraped by to raise me, forced down a desperate path just to stay alive.
Now it was my turn to support her, and I was walking down the exact same road.
It turned out that a poor woman’s struggle was an inherited fate, passed down from mother to daughter.
It was like a birthmark—a destiny written in the blood, impossible to escape.