The notification arrived every Friday morning at nine o’clock, as reliable and unforgiving as a bill collector. Transfer complete: $550.00 to Margaret and Robert Chen. For three years I watched that money leave our account with a feeling I could never quite name accurately, something between obligation and dread, layered over with enough guilt that I never let myself examine it too closely. Examining it would have meant asking questions I was not yet ready to answer.
My name is Sarah Chen-Thompson. I am twenty-seven years old, and for most of my adult life I operated under the belief that being a good daughter meant being an inexhaustible one. Not the heroic, self-sacrificing kind that gets written about in certain kinds of stories. The grinding, invisible kind. The kind measured out in five hundred and fifty dollar increments while buying store-brand cereal and secondhand shoes for my daughter and telling myself it was temporary, that things would get better, that I just had to hold on a little longer.
