A Mountain of cakes
by Hang Liu
My older sister has been married for several years. Today is the first time I’ve come to see her new home.
The neighborhood is quiet, shaded by trees. Pale pink magnolias bloom along the paths. When the door opens, I see her again after a long time. Her sharply arched eyebrows and firm features are still there, though her expression has softened.
A cartoon plays in the living room. A little girl with twin ponytails runs toward me.
“Hi, Auntie!”
She is my sister’s daughter, Xiaoyin. Her eyes sparkle with a hint of mischief.
“You’ve grown so much,” I say, smiling.
I look around the apartment and can’t help exclaiming, “Your home is beautiful.”
The living room is spacious, washed in soft shades of beige. On a nearby shelf stand clusters of crystals—pink, purple, and orange—catching the light. On the walls hang framed pieces made from leaves, feathers, and stones arranged into delicate patterns. A cactus stands in the corner.
The room feels almost like a small gallery, except for the toys and everyday clutter scattered across the table.
My sister laughs.
“Mom made all of these,” Xiaoyin says proudly.
We sit on the sofa and talk for a long time—about the apartment, work, life choices, marriage. After a while my sister goes to the kitchen to prepare dinner.
Xiaoyin stays on the balcony, feeding her gray rabbit fresh greens.
“Xiaoyin, come here,” I call.
She runs over in a flash.
“This is tasty. Want to try some?” I take a snack from my bag and hand it to her.
“What is it?” she asks.
“A corn sausage. Your mom loved these when she was little. Have you ever had one?”
“No.” She turns it over in her hands, then looks up at me and asks, “Can I eat it now?”
“Of course. I’ll open it for you.”
I’m a little surprised she’s never had one before. Then I remember how careful my sister is about what Xiaoyin eats.
Xiaoyin takes a bite. Her eyes widen.
“It’s kind of sweet,” she says. “It’s really good.”
I laugh.
“When your mom was a child, she would roast these corn sausages for me. She’d skewer them on chopsticks and cook them over charcoal until lightly charred. They were delicious.”
“Your mom once had a wish,” I continue. “Actually, it was my wish too. We wanted a whole mountain of corn sausages.”
“Hmm?” Xiaoyin looks stunned for a moment, then bursts into laughter.
I pinch her soft, round cheek.
Xiaoyin and I share a special closeness.
Looking at her, I think about the years when my sister and I were children together.
In my memory, my sister was always remarkable.
When she was in elementary school, she often went out with a group of classmates. She once told me she was second-in-command in her class, and many people listened to her. The “number one” was her close friend, a pretty girl I remember meeting once.
My sister was also an excellent student. She studied in a village school and rarely attended tutoring classes, yet she still managed to enter a top university. My parents were proud of her. So was I.
Yet deep down, sometimes, I also felt a twinge of jealousy.
After university, however, things did not go smoothly for her. She worked in a large company in an administrative role, but soon said, “It’s too boring.” She switched jobs, then said, “It’s too tiring.” And again, “There’s no future here.”
Eventually, she settled into a smaller, more relaxed company, and stayed there.
After that, no one said to me anymore, “Why can’t you do better? Look at your sister.”
I never really knew how she felt during those years.
Sometimes she would call me and say, “Little sister, work is very different from school. You’re good at expressing yourself and communicating with people. That’s something society needs. School is about absorbing knowledge, but most jobs don’t require that kind of deep study. Don’t doubt yourself just because your grades aren’t great. Be confident. Find something you like and you can devote yourself to.”
When I ran into unpleasant classmates at school, or when a supervisor treated me unfairly during an internship, I wanted to cry. I would call her, full of grievance. She would first roar with me in anger, then calmly guide me forward, encouraging me to grow.
Later my sister got married. She did not marry someone with an especially impressive career. At the time, I felt a faint sense of disappointment.
Yet she seemed content, and their relationship was strong. She poured her energy into her home, decorating the house.
Looking at the things she collected—feathers, stones, the small crafts she made herself—my own heart softened.
“Auntie, is there any more corn sausage?” Xiaoyin asked, chewing slowly.
The pale green package is already empty.
“No, that was the only one. I brought it to eat on the way.”
She nodded, still chewing.
“You’re still eating it?” I ask. “Why don’t you swallow?”
She shakes her head lightly. “I can’t bear to.”
“Hahaha!” I burst out laughing.
“It’s okay. Eat it. I’ll take you out to buy more later.”
She was very much like her mother.
In fact, my sister and I did not grow up together very much.
Most of my childhood was spent with my parents in a small but busy town where they worked. There were many factories there, and many migrant workers, including my parents.
My sister, who is several years older, stayed in our hometown with our grandma, more than a thousand kilometers away.
I lived with them for only a little over a year. The rest of the time, we only met during winter and summer holidays.
In my memory, my sister was very frugal.
Back then both my grandma and my sister often reminded me:
“Turn off the lights when you leave the room. Don’t waste electricity.”
“Switch off the TV when you’re not watching it.”
Snacks were rare in the countryside. Most were local pastries, simple and not particularly tasty. Occasionally, Grandma would return from the town supermarket with groceries. Among them would be a kind of small cake we loved. They were soft, delicate, fragrant.
To keep things fair, she divided the cakes into two portions—one for my sister and one for me.
When I had almost finished mine, I would notice that my sister still had plenty left.
She would slowly unwrap one and eat it in front of me.
After finishing it, she would scrape the crumbs from the paper liner and eat those too. Then she would put the paper in her mouth and chew it like gum before spitting it out.
“Don’t waste food,” she would say.
Then she would add, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a whole mountain of these cakes?”
I mimicked her, savoring even the paper’s flavor.
When I later returned to live with my parents, my mother scolded me: “Don’t chew cake paper!” It took some time before I stopped.
“Auntie, let’s play!” Xiaoyin suddenly says. “I have lots of toys—blocks, trains, dolls.”
“What do you want to play?”
She thinks for a moment.
I glance at the cushions on the sofa and suddenly have an idea. “How about we build a house with pillows?”
When we were little, my sister and I gathered pillows from every room. We stacked them upright to make walls and draped quilts over the top as roofs. That was our house, our secret nest.
Sometimes she would tell me to stay quiet inside. Then she would shout, “Grandma! Little sister is missing!” so that our grandmother would come looking for me. We would hold our breath, tense and expectant, until we were found—and then burst into laughter.
“Great!” Xiaoyin says happily.
“We have lots of pillows for building houses! Let’s go get them.”
She leads me to a storage room filled with large boxes. One container is packed with pillows of all shapes and sizes.
“These are pillars, this is the door, that’s the lion sculpture in front of the door, this is the round roof…” Xiaoyin picks them up one by one, explaining.
For a moment, I stand there, startled, and then I find myself smiling.
I reach for a soft, fuzzy brown pillow—the “roof”—and turn it in my hands.
Such a simple game—and somehow it goes on.
Time passes. We grow up. New lives quietly take our place in those bright hours of childhood.
The evening sun spills through the window, turning the walls a warm golden orange.
“Let’s carry them over,” she says, excited.
“Okay,” I say. “What kind of house do you want to build?”
<Hang Liu biography>