“The Water Bottle” by Huina Zheng

Photo Credit: Nancy Hughes

I slide into the back seat of the taxi and the first thing out of my mouth is, “How could you even forget the water bottle? I reminded you twice to check before we left. Did you ever listen to your mother?” Before the sentence is finished, I realize my voice has already risen.

My mother shoots me a sideways look and says, “It’s just a water bottle.” Her arm slips around my eight-year-old daughter Lan’s shoulder as if I were the one who needed discipline. She then tells Lan that once we arrive in Hanoi she will buy her a new one, the newest and prettiest and most expensive, using that pinched, syrupy tone she has never once used on me. After that, she turns to me with that other voice, the one soaked in accusation, “There’s no need to lose your temper over a cheap bottle. You’ve always been stingy, obsessed with money, even as a child.”

“Fine,” I tell her. “Fine. Remember to buy Lan a new one.” I swallow the words boiling up my throat because I don’t want to remind her, not in front of the taxi driver, even though he can’t understand Chinese but can certainly read the tension in our voices and faces, and swallow the memory of how she once scolded me for half an hour for buying a notebook one yuan over her budget, calling me wasteful and brainless and useless with money, even forcing me to return it though she knew perfectly well the shopkeeper would never refund me. She just wanted to humiliate me, to let me “learn a lesson.”

I clench my fist so hard my nails dig into my palm, my hand sweating, the car stifling, and I roll down the window but the wind does nothing, absolutely nothing, to cool the old anger heating under my skin.

My mother says, “You need to be patient or Lan will inherit your bad temper.”

I want to tell her that from the first day of this Chinese New Year trip to Vietnam I already regretted everything, that I never should have believed my husband when he said this vacation might help her and Lan build some magical grandmother-granddaughter bond, that gentleness in her now comes only from age not transformation, and I remember all the years she scolded and criticized and dismissed me, all the headaches she blamed on my lack of care, and how I foolishly thought three generations of women walking a forging city together could stitch back forty years of tear. But the way she picked up a chicken leg and placed it in Lan’s bowl with that exaggerated, performative gentleness dragged me straight back to childhood when every drumstick was always for my younger brother. And I remember the rainy day I biked him home from school, both of us soaked through, my knee scraped and bleeding, and she rushed to dry his hair, urging him to shower before he caught a cold, never once looking at me shivering beside them as if I were made of air, as if my blood and pain and presence were invisible. Because in her eyes my brother is the treasure and I am only the daughter destined, eventually, to marry out and be poured away like water.

Artist Statement

This piece grew out of a family trip during the Spring Festival, when my daughter forgot her water bottle and a much older tension between my mother and me surfaced. What struck me was not the argument itself, but the shift in my mother: the same woman who had once been strict, even harsh, with me now spoke to my daughter with a gentleness I had never known.

I found myself caught between two versions of her. The story became a way to explore that dissonance, the unevenness of care in a family shaped by son preference, and the realization that change does not always mean repair.

Huina Zheng works as an admissions coach and writes creatively in her spare time. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.