Family

"God knows how much I regret giving birth to you! God knows!"

A hoarse woman's tirade, delivered with a natural RAP cadence, shattered Song Ya's sweet dream. He sighed, sat up helplessly, and slowly grabbed a sweater from beside the bed to pull over his head.

He'd been transported here more than ten days ago. Whether he liked it or not, he could only put up with it for now.

Of course, his name wasn't Song Ya anymore, and he wasn't Chinese anymore, either. His full name was Alexander Song, a fifteen-year-old boy whose biological parents had died in a car crash and who was living with his aunt in Chicago.

The house had practically no soundproofing, and the rapid-fire stream of vulgar insults downstairs came straight through. Aunt Susie was "educating" her seventeen-year-old daughter, Connie—Alexander Song's cousin.

Her own flesh and blood, Song Ya thought with a sigh.

"Yeah, yeah! Speaking of bitches, I wonder who had two kids by the time she was seventeen!"

Connie was clearly used to being berated after all these years. She immediately fired back, showing no sign of backing down. Aunt Susie had given birth to her eldest son, Tony, at sixteen, then had Connie the following year. After that, the man responsible had vanished without a trace...

Hey, hey, wasn't the main issue that she stayed out all night? Song Ya complained inwardly.

If this were China, parents would never lose sight of the main issue. But Aunt Susie kept arguing until she'd completely forgotten that Connie had been gone all night...

After getting dressed, Song Ya went out and turned into the nearby bathroom. He turned on the tap and began to wash up.

The rush of running water temporarily drowned out the argument downstairs. Facing the mirror, he took another look at who he was in this life.

By Chinese standards of beauty for Black people, he had a handsome, slightly boyish face. With half Chinese ancestry, his skin was a little lighter, too. He was already over 170 centimeters tall at fifteen, with a fairly well-proportioned build... Of course, as a transmigrator, his success in the future was a given, so it didn't really matter what this body looked like. This was the USA, after all. In a capitalist society, what couldn't money buy?

"But here's the problem: it's bad enough that I got transmigrated without any special abilities, but not even bringing my memories from my past life is just too much!"

No matter how hard Song Ya tried over the past ten days, his memories of his previous life remained a complete muddle. Apart from his math grades improving by leaps and bounds, he couldn't remember any major events from history, or any of the books he'd read or games he'd played in his previous life. And his improved math grades didn't prove much, either. The South Side of Chicago was mostly a poor neighborhood where Black people lived, and the local middle school's teaching standards were poor. The tests were easy to begin with. If he couldn't even bring over that bit of Chinese talent, Song Ya would have no chance at all.

"Hey, what about the other lazybones? Get down here and eat breakfast!"

There were too many kids and not enough energy to treat them differently, so Aunt Susie treated everyone the same. She'd never abused or favored Song Ya, and of course, her words were no different.

"Coming!"

Song Ya hurriedly finished getting ready and went downstairs.

The creaking of the stairs showed that the house had seen better days. It was a typical little house in a poor neighborhood: detached, but with little space between it and the houses on either side, and built almost entirely of wood. Upstairs, there had originally been two bedrooms, one large and one small, as well as a bathroom. The larger bedroom had been divided in two. Song Ya shared one half with his cousin Tony, while Connie shared the other with her ten-year-old sister Emily. Aunt Susie and her baby son Freddy, who wasn't even a year old, occupied the original small bedroom.

Downstairs was an open-plan living room, kitchen, and dining area. The only other bathroom was beneath the stairs, and it had no shower.

Everyone carried on with their usual business despite the loud arguing. Aunt Susie held a spatula in one hand as she watched the golden scrambled eggs in the pan, while cradling Little Freddy in her other arm and soothing him as he stared at everyone with his big blue eyes. Aunt Susie's latest boyfriend was white, so Little Freddy was biracial.

At the table, Connie and Emily took turns pouring milk and Cheerios from their family-size boxes into their bowls.

Tony, meanwhile, tilted his head back and sprayed whipped cream straight from the can into his mouth.

"Open up."

He swallowed a huge mouthful of cream, then flipped the can around and pointed it at Song Ya.

"No thanks."

Song Ya shook his head. The soul in this body had been replaced, and with Aunt Susie and Tony's barrel-shaped builds—and Connie's increasingly obvious tendency to put on weight—as warnings, obesity was definitely an enemy he'd need to stay alert to in this life.

"You've changed a lot lately, Ya Li," Tony said.

"Have I?" Song Ya's heart tightened. "In what way?"

"Uh..."

Tony started polishing off his cereal and milk. "It's just... I don't know, it's a feeling... You know?"

"Obviously! It's for a woman!"

Connie teased Song Ya. "Who've you hooked up with?" She'd successfully derailed the conversation again.

"I..."

Song Ya hadn't caught up with her train of thought when Aunt Susie divided the soft, fluffy scrambled eggs evenly among the plates in front of the four siblings. "Shut your damn mouth and hurry up. You don't want to miss the school bus!" She was thoroughly fed up with Connie at the moment.

"Give me a minute to change! I'll be right down!" Connie didn't talk back this time. She sprang to her feet and raced upstairs.

For American girls, wearing yesterday's clothes usually meant they hadn't come home overnight. So Connie's main reason for coming home that morning was to change.

"Who drove her home this morning?" Aunt Susie took the opportunity to ask quietly. It turned out she hadn't forgotten about it after all.

"How would I know? I only heard an engine," Tony replied, then secretly stepped on Song Ya's foot.

Song Ya shook his head. He really didn't know. Little Emily shook her head, too.

Aunt Susie didn't press the matter any further. She went back to washing the dishes. "Oh, Black women..." she lamented under her breath.

Song Ya finished off the milk, Cheerios, and scrambled eggs in just three minutes. It was 1990. The USA's welfare system probably wasn't as good as it had been in the time he'd come from, but for a single-parent family with five children, it seemed to cover their basic needs—food, clothing, housing, and education—without much trouble. If anything, the food had too many calories.

Once Connie had changed, the four siblings said goodbye to Aunt Susie and left the house together.

Unlike Song Ya's impression of the USA before he'd transmigrated, the houses in this neighborhood had no lush lawns in front or behind them. There was only gray, withered grass, piles of clutter, neglected wooden fences, and old cars of every make and model. Several households nearby, including Aunt Susie's, had small Cameroon flags hanging outside their doors, showing they still remembered their roots far away on the African continent.

"It's so cold!"

Chicago in February was not only freezing, but windy, too. Emily shivered and quickly hid behind Tony.

Tony turned and lifted Emily into his arms, then shielded her face with his hand. Hunched against the cold, they hurried toward the school bus stop a few hundred meters away.