Breakthrough

I walked into my boss office this morning certainly believe that she was going to fire me. It isn’t really

her job to fire me.

It’s should be Human Resources jobs. But that’s department has been cut.

Cloud Media was the media company that I have written for and loved since I graduated from college,

but now was hanging by a thread.

Three steps inside the cluttered room stacked with old magazines, ours and our competitors’, and my

breakfast Americano, and chicken bao turns into a stone inside my stomach.

Without even looking up from the folder in her hand, my boss Lin Xi signals to the chair across hers.

“Li Shu, sit down.”

I sit silently, a thousand things leaping to my tongue. Though can do better, I can do more but just let

me do more, two articles a week rather than one.

No matter how hard it is, just let me work for free until we can find our feet.

Though I can’t afford to work for free because I have rent, I’m still paying off my college loan, and I have

a mother I love with a health problem bill. But I still love my job.

Yes. I don’t want to be fire. Because I have never wanted to be anything else other than what I am now,

at this moment, as my fate is in her palm.

So it’s with dread and an impending sense of loss that I sit here and waiting anxiously before Miss Xia

Rong finally lower that folder and look at me.

I wonder, as our eyes meet, if the next story I have to tell in my life is the one of her firing me. Because I

am in love with stories.

For me it’s precious, how they’ve shape our lives. How they open the people who don’t even know us

lifestyle. How they can impact us even when an event didn’t exactly occur in our own lives.

The first things I ever fell in love with were the words my mother told me about my dad. In those words I

got what I didn’t have in real life was my late father. I would collect them into groups, memorize the

stories of my parents formed.

Mother told me that father taken my mother on their first date thai cuisine restaurant and his laugh was

funny. Then mother told me that his favourite was Tom Yum Goong cuisine. He like how much the hot

chilli spice in his throat jumped and the sweet and sour from the soup.

I was growing up up in love with my parents love stories so that why with all the facts and details it’s

enabled me to imagine it in my mind that left memories of my father that have been with me for life.

My aunts said I was dreaming when I said I wanted to a writer for the entertainment but my mother

kept quoting to my aunt that.

“If you got into kitchen, he’d be a chef. If you got into entertainment, you will be the actress darling.

That’s exactly how I feel about you. So do, what you love Ah Shu.”

“I would do it more happily if you were doing what you love too, mother,” I always replied, miserable for

her.

“What I love is taking care of you,” she always came back with.

She’s a lovely chef nobody else thinks so but me and her one restaurant went close months after its

inception.

So my mother has a normal job now and the chef hand still in her though because I love eating her

cooking when I got home.

But she’s sacrificed so much to give me an education and more. Since I’m actually a little shy with

strangers, I didn’t have encouragement from a lot of my teachers. None of them believed I had the

stomach for hard-core reporting, so I ran with the only thing I could in the sole motivation from my

mother and her belief in me.