Before she passed away, my mother told me I had three older brothers.
So I slung my snakeskin sack over my shoulder and went to the city to find them.
But when I got there, I discovered…
My eldest brother was a financial genius.
My second brother was a top celebrity.
My third brother was an eSports prodigy.
I had spent my whole life thinking I was an only child.
Not a lonely only child, exactly, because Mum had filled every corner of our small life with chores, rules, warmth, scolding, and the quiet kind of love that never needed announcing.
But still, when other children talked about brothers and sisters, I had always felt a little space open inside me.
I used to imagine having an older brother who would walk home with me when the mountain path grew dark.
One who would carry the heavy basket without being asked.
One who would say, very casually, that no one was allowed to bully me.
Mum never laughed at those childish wishes.
She only looked away and put the kettle on, even if there was already tea in the pot.
I thought that was grief over my father.
I did not know it was guilt.
The truth came on a grey afternoon when the rain had softened the whole world outside our window.
The room smelled of medicine, clean sheets, and the old tea towel Mum kept folded on the chair beside her bed.
She had become so light by then that helping her sit up felt like lifting a bundle of dry washing.
Her voice was not really a voice any more.
It was air moving around words.
“Yun Yun,” she said.
I leaned closer.
She had not called me that in front of anyone since I was small.
“Your father was having an affair while I was pregnant with you.”
For a moment I thought I had misheard.
The rain tapped the glass.
The kettle clicked off in the next room, though neither of us moved.
Mum’s eyes were open, but they were not quite focused on me.
They were fixed on some old room, some old argument, some old doorway she had never truly left.
“I intended to take all four of you with me,” she whispered.
“All four?”
My own voice sounded rude in the stillness, too loud and too alive.
She nodded once, and the effort seemed to cost her.
“Your three brothers. And you.”
I stared at her hand under mine.
It was smaller than I remembered.
“I had no job then,” she said. “No money. I could not win custody from them.”
I wanted to ask who them meant.
I wanted to ask why she had never told me before.
I wanted to ask whether my brothers had known about me, whether they had looked for me, whether they had ever wondered why the baby sister disappeared before she was old enough to remember their faces.
But Mum had already used up most of her strength.
Her thumb moved once against my palm.
“Luckily,” she said, with a bitter little breath, “they valued sons over daughters. So I was able to take you away.”
That sentence sat between us like a locked box.
A whole life had been built inside it.
Mum had carried me away because no one else thought I was worth fighting for.
She had raised me with rough hands and soft eyes because the world had made a calculation, and I had been the remainder.
“Yun Yun,” she said again.
I bent so close that my hair touched the blanket.
“I’m almost gone now. Go find your brothers.”
I shook my head before I could stop myself.
“No. Don’t say that.”
She did not argue.
Mum had never wasted breath arguing with things she could not change.
She only looked at me with those tired eyes and tried to smile.
After the funeral, the house felt wrong.
Not empty, exactly.
Worse than empty.
It felt as if Mum had only stepped out and would be cross with me for letting the ashes go cold in the stove, for leaving a mug unwashed, for standing in the doorway with nothing useful in my hands.
I packed slowly.
There was not much to take.
Two changes of clothes.
The little amount of money left after paying for the funeral.
My household registration book.
The piece of paper where Mum had written three names, each one pressed so firmly into the page that I could feel the marks from the other side.
And the snakeskin sack.
It was ugly, strong, and familiar.
Mum had used it for years, carrying vegetables, blankets, cheap rice, and once a pair of muddy wellies someone had given us because they were too small for their son.
The sack had split at one corner and been mended with blue thread.
I slung it over my shoulder because I had no proper suitcase.
At the bus station, people looked at it.
Then they looked away because looking too long would have been impolite.
That was almost worse.
The journey to the city felt longer than the map said it should.
The mountains fell behind us.
The roads grew wider.
The traffic thickened.
By the time I arrived, the city was already moving faster than I knew how to think.
Cars slid past with rain shining on their roofs.
People crossed roads without hesitation.
A queue formed and dissolved outside a small shop in the time it took me to read half the sign.
Everyone seemed to belong to the place.
I did not.
I stood on the pavement with my sack against my hip and the note with the three names folded in my pocket.
I had imagined that finding my brothers would be difficult.
I had not realised I would not even know where to start looking.
In our mountains, people knew whose child you were before you opened your mouth.
In the city, no one knew anything about anyone, and that seemed to be the point.
I walked until my feet hurt.
I looked at office buildings, apartment blocks, shopfronts, hotel lobbies, and car parks.
Any of them could have held one of my brothers.
None of them offered me a clue.
At last, tired and damp and beginning to feel foolish, I remembered something every teacher had said to us since childhood.
If there is a problem, find a police officer.
So I found a police station.
The entrance doors opened with a soft mechanical sigh.
Inside, the light was practical and plain.
There were plastic chairs, a noticeboard, a counter, a pen chained to a form stand, and a faint smell of wet coats.
Someone had left a paper cup beside the waiting seats.
A tea mug sat behind the counter, untouched and going cold.
I approached slowly.
The officer at the desk looked up.
“Can I help you?”
His voice was calm.
That almost made me cry.
I placed my household registration book on the counter with both hands.
“I’m looking for my brothers,” I said.
The officer blinked once.
Then, to his credit, he did not laugh.
He asked me for their names.
I took out Mum’s note.
The paper had softened from being folded and unfolded too many times.
I read the first name.
Then the second.
Then the third.
The officer’s face changed before I had finished.
It was not suspicion.
It was not pity either.
It was recognition mixed with disbelief, the expression of a person who has opened a cupboard for a broom and found a sleeping tiger.
“Could you repeat your name?” he asked.
“Song Yunyun.”
He looked at the book again.
Then at the note.
Then at me.
“Please take a seat for a moment.”
A second officer came over.
Then a third.
They spoke quietly to one another, too low for me to catch more than pieces.
Name.
Record.
Contact.
Family.
I sat on the edge of a plastic chair with my sack upright between my feet.
The sack looked absurdly out of place in that bright, official room.
I suddenly hated it.
Then I hated myself for hating it, because it had been Mum’s.
I watched the officers make calls.
One of them asked a question, listened, straightened slightly, and looked over at me again.
My hands went cold.
Had I done something wrong?
Had Mum’s note been mistaken?
Had those names belonged to people too important for someone like me to claim?
After what felt like hours, the first officer returned.
His tone had changed.
It was gentler now, almost careful.
“We’ve contacted your eldest brother,” he said.
My breath caught.
“He’ll be here to collect you shortly.”
The words should have comforted me.
Instead, they made the whole world tilt.
I had an eldest brother.
Not an imaginary one from childhood.
Not a figure from one of Mum’s half-finished silences.
A real person, close enough for a police officer to call, close enough to come and collect me.
I thanked them because that was what Mum would have expected.
Then I went outside to wait.
The rain had eased into a thin drizzle.
The pavement shone grey beneath the afternoon light.
Cars hissed along the road.
A red post box stood across the street, bright against the wet stone like something from a picture I had never lived inside.
I set my snakeskin sack beside my shoes and tried to wipe the damp from my palms.
Another boy was waiting near the entrance.
He looked about my age, perhaps a little older.
His hair was buzzed close to his head, and tattoos ran over both arms even though the air was cold enough for sleeves.
He kept shifting his weight, restless and pleased with himself.
I looked away.
He did not.
“Hey,” he said. “You waiting for your family too?”
I glanced at him, then nodded.
“What a coincidence,” he said. “Me too.”
His grin widened.
“I got into a bit of trouble.”
I did not ask what kind.
He told me anyway.
“Beat someone up. Sent him to hospital. Now they want compensation.”
He said it as though he were discussing a parking ticket.
My stomach tightened.
“But it’s fine,” he added, lifting his chin. “My family’s got money. We can settle it in minutes.”
I had no idea why he wanted me to know that.
Perhaps he thought money was like a medal, and every stranger had to be shown it.
I smiled politely because politeness is sometimes the cheapest shield a person owns.
He took my smile as encouragement.
“You from around here?”
“No.”
“Thought not.”
His eyes dropped to my sack again.
I felt the look more sharply than if he had touched me.
There are people who can glance at your clothes, your shoes, your luggage, and decide your whole life before you have spoken ten words.
He was one of them.
A black car pulled up.
The boy straightened immediately.
His swagger became brighter, louder.
He whistled under his breath.
“There we go.”
The car stopped near the kerb.
A Range Rover.
I knew the name only because I had seen it in films and on shiny city roads.
The boy turned to me with triumph written all over him.
“See that? My family’s car.”
I nodded because he clearly wanted me to.
“Range Rover,” he said. “Costs over a million pounds.”
The number meant almost nothing to me.
It was too large to hold in my head.
It sounded less like money and more like a weather system.
He leaned closer.
“What about your family? What do they drive?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He laughed.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
It was the truth.
I did not know my eldest brother’s face.
I did not know his voice.
I did not know whether he would be glad to see me, ashamed of me, angry at Mum, or embarrassed that a sister with a snakeskin sack had appeared at a police station asking for him.
How could I know what kind of car he drove?
The tattooed boy looked at my sack once more.
This time he did not bother hiding his conclusion.
His smile became lazy.
Pleased.
A little cruel.
“No car, then?”
I did not answer.
“That’s all right,” he said, as if granting me mercy. “When your family gets here, I’ll give you both a lift.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
“Don’t be like that.”
He pulled out his phone.
“I’m not a bad person. I just want to get to know you.”
The rain caught on the black screen as he held it up.
“Scan my contact?”
For a second I simply stared.
Then I understood.
He thought I was someone he could impress with a car that was not even his.
He thought my sack meant I would be grateful.
He thought poverty, or the appearance of it, was an invitation.
Mum had always told me not to look down on anyone because of what they carried.
She had never warned me how often others would do it first.
I was about to refuse when the road noise changed.
It was a small thing.
A hush in the rhythm of traffic.
The kind that happens when a beautiful or expensive object enters a space and everyone notices before admitting they have noticed.
The tattooed boy turned first.
His mouth opened slightly.
A car was approaching the kerb.
Long, dark, polished, silent in a way that made the Range Rover beside it suddenly seem noisy.
The boy’s voice dropped.
“Damn.”
I followed his gaze.
“A Rolls-Royce.”
The name meant more to him than to me.
His eyes were bright now, stripped of all the smugness he had aimed at me.
“And it’s a limited edition,” he said.
The car rolled closer.
I asked the only question I could think of.
“Is this one more expensive?”
He stared at me as if I had asked whether rain was wet.
“Of course it is.”
“How much?”
“Over ten million pounds.”
Again, the number was too large to feel real.
Ten million pounds sounded like something printed in newspapers, not something that stopped beside a wet pavement while I stood there with a mended sack.
The boy was still staring at the car.
“I wonder who’s rich enough to—”
He never finished the sentence.
The Rolls-Royce slowed.
Then it stopped directly in front of me.
Not near the Range Rover.
Not near the tattooed boy.
In front of me.
For one strange second, I thought it must be a mistake caused by the narrow kerb.
Then the passenger door opened.
A young man stepped out.
He was handsome in a neat, composed way, wearing a dark suit and a coat with rain shining along the collar.
He did not look at the tattooed boy.
He did not look at the Range Rover.
He looked at me.
His gaze flicked once to the snakeskin sack at my feet.
Then to the household registration book clutched against my chest.
Instead of disdain, something like concern crossed his face.
That frightened me more than mockery would have.
He came towards me, stopping at a polite distance.
Even his hesitation seemed practised.
As though he had been told to be careful with me.
The tattooed boy beside me had gone perfectly still.
His phone was still in his hand, but the screen had tilted down.
Two people passing the station slowed without meaning to.
Behind the glass doors, I saw the officer at the desk look up.
The young man in the suit lowered his voice.
“Excuse me…”
My grip tightened around the book.
The rain touched my eyelashes.
The city, which had been too loud since the moment I arrived, suddenly seemed to hold its breath.
“Are you Song Yunyun?”
I had imagined finding my brothers in many ways.
At a door where no one wanted to open.
Across a desk where someone would ask for proof.
In a room where I would have to explain Mum’s choices to men who had grown up without me.
I had not imagined this.
A Rolls-Royce at the kerb.
A stranger saying my name like it mattered.
A boy who had mocked my sack standing beside me with his pride collapsing in silence.
I swallowed.
“My name is Song Yunyun,” I said.
The young man’s face shifted almost imperceptibly.
Not relief.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
He glanced back towards the car.
The rear window was dark.
I could not see who was inside.
But I felt, with a certainty that made my knees weak, that someone inside could see me.
The young man opened his mouth again.
Then paused, choosing each word with care.
“I was asked to bring you to your eldest brother.”
The tattooed boy made a small sound beside me.
It might have been disbelief.
It might have been fear.
I barely heard it.
My whole body had gone alert around one phrase.
My eldest brother.
After all the years of not knowing, after Mum’s silence, after the funeral, after the note folded in my pocket until the paper softened, the first thread had finally tightened.
I wanted to ask where he was.
I wanted to ask why he had not come himself.
I wanted to ask whether he had known my name before today.
But before I could speak, the rear door of the Rolls-Royce moved.
Only slightly.
A pale hand appeared against the edge of the door from inside.
There was a document folder resting near it, dark leather, with the corner of a photograph visible beneath the clasp.
My breath caught.
The young man in the suit turned his head, as if waiting for permission from whoever sat in the back.
The police station doors opened behind us.
Footsteps hurried onto the wet pavement.
The officer who had helped me earlier came out holding another sheet of paper.
His expression had changed completely.
The calm had gone.
He looked pale.
He looked at the car.
Then at me.
Then at the paper in his hand.
The tattooed boy stepped back, his heel knocking against the kerb.
The Range Rover’s driver had lowered the window now.
Everyone was watching.
I stood there with my snakeskin sack, my mother’s last secret, and three brothers whose names had just begun to open the world beneath my feet.
Then a voice came from inside the Rolls-Royce.
Low.
Controlled.
Not the suited young man’s voice.
Not the officer’s.
The voice did not say Song Yunyun.
It said the name only Mum had used when she was tired, frightened, or full of love.
“Yun Yun.”
The sack slipped from my shoulder and landed on the wet pavement with a dull sound.
The officer stopped beside me, breathing hard, the paper trembling in his hand.
“There’s something else you need to know,” he said.
I turned to him, but my eyes would not leave the half-open rear door.
Because inside that car, behind the dark glass and the careful silence, someone who knew my childhood name was waiting.
And the photograph in the folder looked, from where I stood, as if it had my mother’s face on it.