Backwards

I've posted some stories before from Tai Dong Huai (see here and here), adopted from China as a child, now an adult. She writes short fiction, and frequently touches on adoption issues. I've just run across another one, in the Apple Valley Review, a meditation backwards to her birth mother's childhood full of possibilities:

Every April 1st, my middle school has “Backwards Day. . . .” Needless to say, the next day everything is back to normal.

But what if it wasn’t. What if the clocks continued to tick off the future. . . . I’d return to the womb of a Chinese mother who would first abandon me, then ponder her situation, then agree to lie down with the man who is my father. And before that, perhaps, she would be working in a factory making American sneakers. Then in school, studying mathematics and living with her family. She would be young and beautiful and see her life stretched out in front of her like a lake on which possibilities float like lit paper lanterns on a warm summer night.