I was eight when I broke my mother’s emerald heirloom.

My mother was sitting on a King sized bed in the middle of a bedroom facing west, with the broken necklace in her palm, and cried the hardest I had ever seen her cry. The door entry was in front of her, the bathroom at her left, and a window was facing the busy street outside. It was already early afternoon, but the lunch was still left untouched on the dining table. I could smell the sweet and sour spareribs turning cold. Sunlight shined through the decentralized phoenix tree leaves outside the window, lighting up the room.

I never saw the broken beads of that necklace again after grabbing it off my mother’s neck and killing it—I never asked my mother if she threw it out or not, and she never bothered to tell. The necklace was made out of a handful of small emerald beads the size of a pinkie nail and every single one of them was in the same, exact same, almost to an unnatural degree, rich opaque green. It was an heirloom from my mother’s grandmother, a woman I had never seen, not even in a picture.

My aunt had once told me a story about how an ancient Chinese woman’s soul was trapped in her favorite hairpin after her death. The entire story was about how she waited and waited, meters down in the icy mud, for another woman to touch and wear her jewelry again. I didn’t like that story at all. It creeped me out. But every time I looked at that emerald necklace, something inside the stones triggered my memory of that story.

I hated that necklace, to be honest—which is probably why I didn’t hesitate when I tore it apart—but I only hated it because my mother had treasured it. Looking back, I feel like those stupid children I had always looked down on, fighting for mommy’s love with siblings, only that my opponent was unbeatable—no matter how many As I got.

However, I was too young to realize my foolishness. During one afternoon, months before I destroyed the heirloom, my mother had left the necklace on top of the cabinet before going to the supermarket. I went to the bedroom to get clean laundries for changing. The ray of the sunset were burning through the window glass and hitting the beads. For one second, I realized where this purity of color came from. It was a century condensing inside the stones. Just as it had for that woman underground; time stopped like a freezing lake in the winter. It was a different realm, a place where nobody move, a place where the raindrops stopped before falling down, a place where dusts hung in the air, a place where no one died, a place where suicidal floats in the mid air before kissing the ground. A place where no one lived, a place where all one do and could is to stare at the sun, which never rose or set or even moved, but just waited, for eternity. But it was just one second, and the sunset went down fast; the rays soon moved down to the handle of the drawer, and the time went on again as I walked away to get my socks for shower.

When I fought with my mother over some stupid thing I can’t even recall now, I got so angry that I tore the necklace from her neck—in just one mere second, the beads were flying. I heard the woman inside screaming in pain or desperation as I pulled her body apart; I saw the realm distorting and twisting; I saw the heirloom losing its color and fading back into a plain necklace. I saw the sun setting and the dark night approaching.

I cried in the bathroom while my mom sat on the edge of the King sized bed and wept into her palms. My dad was busy looking under the bed for the beads that had run off as soon as I pulled them lose. I didn’t even cry for what I had just killed. My tears flew like an incessant stream because that was what you were supposed to do after a big fight with your mother when you were eight because you somehow felt misunderstood and grieved for no reason at all.
I sat on the cold bathroom tiles while watching my mother through the ajar door. I didn't even realize the crime I had committed.