Ch16: Meant to Be

My father has always said that my bond with this family was destined before I was even born.

He has been telling the story for more than twenty years. When I was in elementary school, it was a bedtime tale; after I grew up, it became something he would recount in casual conversation at family dinners. Every time he tells it, his eyes hold an indescribable mixture of tenderness and wonder.

It was the summer thirty years ago. My mother was nine months pregnant with me, her belly as round as though she were carrying a watermelon, and getting around had become increasingly difficult. With only a few days left before her due date, the house was filled with both anticipation and nervousness.

My father was a middle school teacher, and at the time he was busy marking final exams. To avoid disturbing my mother’s rest, he had turned the study into a temporary bedroom. Every night, after finishing his marking at the desk, he would lie down on the folding cot and sleep.

On the night before it happened, the moonlight was especially beautiful. It streamed through the study window, casting mottled patterns of light and shadow across the floor.

My father finished marking the last stack of papers and rubbed his tired, aching eyes. He was about to lie down when he faintly heard a soft song.

The singing was so quiet that it seemed to drift from somewhere far away, yet at the same time it sounded as though it were right beside his ear. It was an unfamiliar nursery rhyme, simple and lovely.

My father assumed that one of the neighbors’ children was still awake in the middle of the night. But when he listened more closely, he realized that the singing was coming from just outside the study door.

He got up and walked to the door, gently easing it open a crack. By the moonlight, he saw a little girl standing in the hallway.

She wore a white dress, and her hair was tied into two small pigtails. Tiny and slight, she stood with her back to him, her face tilted up toward the ceiling as she hummed the gentle nursery rhyme.

“Little one,” my father asked softly, afraid of frightening her, “why aren’t you home asleep at this hour?”

The girl slowly turned around, and the moonlight illuminated her face. Her eyes were large, her skin was fair, and a sweet smile played at the corners of her mouth. She looked about four or five years old.

When she saw my father, she showed not the slightest trace of fear. Instead, she called out to him sweetly.

“Daddy!”

Her voice was clear and soft, sweet as the flesh of a freshly peeled lychee, and it went straight to my father’s heart.

He stood rooted to the spot. Before he could react, the little girl’s figure suddenly turned transparent. Like a wisp of mist, she gradually dissolved at the far end of the hallway, and the song disappeared with her.

My father rubbed his eyes. The hallway was empty, with nothing left but moonlight and silence, as though everything he had just seen had been an illusion.

He decided it must have been a trick of his mind brought on by days of exhaustion. Shaking his head, he returned to the folding cot and lay down. Yet the little girl’s sweet smile and the sound of her calling him “Daddy” refused to leave his mind.

Early the next morning, my mother began having labor pains and was rushed to the hospital.

After a long and exhausting day, I was born safely that evening. When the nurse carried me, swaddled in a blanket, over to my father, he froze.

There I was, with round eyes, fair skin, and the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of my mouth. I looked exactly like the little girl he had seen in the hallway the night before.

My father was too overwhelmed to speak. He reached out and gently touched my cheek, swept by a thousand different emotions.

As I gradually grew older and learned to speak, the first time I called him “Daddy,” his eyes instantly reddened. My clear, soft voice was exactly the same as the little girl’s voice all those years before.

My mother would always laugh at him for being superstitious and say that it was only a coincidence, but my father remained utterly convinced.

He said it had been little me, too impatient to meet him, running out ahead of time to say hello and claim him as my father.

As I grew older, I really did fall in love with singing, especially nursery rhymes.

Whenever I hummed a song at home, my father would put aside whatever he was doing and listen quietly, his eyes brimming with tenderness.

He always said that hearing me sing was like hearing the nursery rhyme from the hallway all over again, as though he could once more see the little girl in the white dress.

Now I have a family of my own.

Whenever I return to my parents’ home, my father still tells the story to my children. Holding my daughter in his arms, he points at me and says, “Your mother came out ahead of time just to call me Daddy!”

I look at the wrinkles at the corners of my father’s eyes and his head of white hair, and suddenly I understand.

That meeting before my birth, outside the study, was more than a wondrous coincidence. It was a bond of family love that transcended time and space.

Like a seed quietly planted on that night thirty years ago, it took root and sprouted, growing into the warmest and most precious bond holding our family together.

Some bonds are destined from the very beginning.