Where ever you may go, I will follow

Prolouge

"Asana! Did I not raise you with any manners?" Ma looks at me expectedly. "Stop using you're phone at the dining table."

She reaches over to me to take my phone away, but I turn around so that my phone it's just out of her grasp.

"Give me a sec Ma, I'll just text goodbye to my friends." I reply, finnaly looking up to Ma.

I text me friends a quick goodbye, telling them that I have to eat and pass my phone to Ma.

Ma isn't my real mother. No, my real mother died years ago. Ma is my mother's sister. She had taken me in when my mother died.

I look down at the food Ma had made. Chinese. Not the American chinese you can get from Panda Express. Homemade chinese. Despite living in the States for 20 years npw, Ma is still deeply in tune with her Asian roots, whether it was in her music taste, her language, her culture. She was traditional, but not conservative.

"Your mother was the one who got me out of that village in japan." Ma had told me, her voice laced with admiration. "For that, I will always be indebted to her for where I am now."

Ma would tell me stories of how my mother had pulled her and her siblings out of poverty.

"You know when your mother got us out of japan..." These words brought on adventures, filled with wild hand gestures, extreme face contortions and dramatic twists, would start.

"Ma! You said there were four of you when you left Nagano. Why are there only three of you now?" I once asked.

Her face fell, but she replied with a light tone, "My older brother, Hiroshi, fell sick."

"His name was Hero?" I thought aloud

Ma chuckled, "Hiro, not hero." She corrected me. "Although, if he his name was hero, it would be fitting."

She left the room amd came back with a photo album in hand. She flipped though the pages, filled with yellowed, faded photographs, until she found what she had been looking for.

I peered over at the photograph. The photograph consisted of three girls and two boys.

A woman, who looked well in her fourties. She was hunched over and looked ready to collapse from exhaustion any moment. Her face was in a permenent frown which looked a little like Ma's face when I had spilled my orange juice on her cream colored carpet. I assumed that she was the mother of the four other people in the photograph.

The first of the remaining two girls was in her teenage years, although the stress evident on her face had made it hard to tell whether the girl had been seventeen or seventy. This girl was my mother. The one that had brought her younger sibings, one being a young boy and one being barely a toddler. The one Ma could spend hours singing praises about.

The other girl was wrapped in a bundle and was held in the hands of the childrens' mother, the only thing that identified her as a girl being the handmade dress she wore, clearly handed down and well worn with holes in all places. I knew this was Ma, her scrunched up face, looking youthful and hopeful.

There was a boy who looked like he was about nine or ten. He, despite being so young, looked like he had seen the terros of the world and had believed that his fate was sealed, that there was not a single ounce of hope left in the word for him and he was doomed to work as a labourer for the rest of his life. Its hard to imagine a the most optimistic person in my life had once looked like that.

The last child in the photo was the one that stuck out like a sore thumb. His age had been impossible to tell due to the extreme malnourishment, he was even skinnier than his siblings, which were already looked sickly to say the last. He had sicks for arms and legs along with not a single hair on his head. The others had seemed to submit to their sealed fates of dreariness and unhappiness, the boy had hope. Those eyes were captivating, hypnotic, even. He was the only one that had smiled in the photo.

While the sun never seemed to revolve around anyone, this boy seemed to be the sun.

With a smile like honey and eyes filled with hope, even through the faded colors and yellowed edges, all you had to do was give it a thought and the color of the boy would come crashing thought. You would imagine rosy cheeks, if only the boy had been fed enough. You would imagine him running though a woods and all the birls coming out to feed from his hand, if only he had enough energy to run. You would imagine him meeting you and being the kindest boy to you, if only the boy had had enough money to come over and meet you. You would imagine him growing old with his little sister and cheering her up whenever she was down until the end of time, if only the boy had lived.

"That boy right here was Hiro, my brother." Ma pointed to the smiling boy. Quietly, under her breath, she muttered so softly that I almost hadn't caught it," My hero..."

A silence had taken over the room and I has not taken my eyes of the boy in the photograph.

"Let's get you into bed shall we?" Ma said.

Just as she was about to put the covers on me, I jumped off the bed and ran the the medicine drawer. There, I pull out every type of medicine that we had, painkillers, cough syrups, apirin(loads of it[I didn't know what it did at the time, I just thought more was better]).

I ran back into the room, shoving it into Ma's arms.

"Pass this to your brother Next time you see him." I yawned sleepily. "I hope he gets better soon."

I fell asleep then, and as Ma pulled the blanket on me, she chucked and replied with a soft,"I will, when I see him again. Goodnight Asana."