"Don't forget to come back and cook lunch. Your brother loves your braised pork, and Val's been asking about it for days."
I walked down the cracked cement road, the surface warped and split from years of heavy trucks.
I thought about the year I turned sixteen, when Dad died in an accident.
At the funeral, Mom grabbed my hand and wept like her soul was being torn from her body.
"You're the oldest. From now on, you're the backbone of this family."
"My health is failing, and your brother and sisters are still young. You have to help me hold this family together. I'm counting on you."
That day, I stood in front of Dad's headstone in mourning clothes that didn't fit. I clenched my teeth and nodded.
From that day forward, my youth, my dreams, everything had to make way for this family.
I could have gone to college.
I could have had my own life, my own future.
But I gave it all up.
After the funeral, I held my baby brother on one hip while I knelt and bowed to every uncle and elder, thanking them for helping arrange Dad's burial.
Mom had four children and nearly bled out during one of the deliveries. Her health never recovered. She could only manage light housework after that.
The first year after I dropped out, I learned to plant rice at Uncle Hector's farm. I learned to raise seedlings, learned to transplant them into the paddies.
The sun blistered my skin until it peeled. Thick calluses formed across my palms. Even holding chopsticks hurt.
When the planting season ended, I picked fruit alongside the other women for the orchard farmers. Bent over all day, back screaming, spine feeling like it might snap in two.
Fifty dollars a day.
When there was no fruit to pick, I hiked into the hills to dig up herbs and sold them for pocket change to keep the household running.
At harvest time, I begged neighbors to help bring in our crops, fumbling through the work like a child pretending to be an adult.
The second year, I planted every inch of our fields with fruit trees. Saplings took three years to bear fruit. Three years. The family couldn't survive three years without income.
So I started bouncing between odd jobs at the small factories in town.
March meant making plastic crates. The workshop was sweltering, the fumes from melting plastic so thick I could barely keep my eyes open. Blisters bubbled up on my fingers, but I didn't dare stop.
May and June, back to the orchards picking fruit.