Mom had four children and nearly bled out during one of the deliveries. Her health never recovered. She could only manage light housework after that.
The first year after I dropped out, I learned to plant rice at Uncle Hector's farm. I learned to raise seedlings, learned to transplant them into the paddies.
The sun blistered my skin until it peeled. Thick calluses formed across my palms. Even holding chopsticks hurt.
When the planting season ended, I picked fruit alongside the other women for the orchard farmers. Bent over all day, back screaming, spine feeling like it might snap in two.
Fifty dollars a day.
When there was no fruit to pick, I hiked into the hills to dig up herbs and sold them for pocket change to keep the household running.
At harvest time, I begged neighbors to help bring in our crops, fumbling through the work like a child pretending to be an adult.
The second year, I planted every inch of our fields with fruit trees. Saplings took three years to bear fruit. Three years. The family couldn't survive three years without income.
So I started bouncing between odd jobs at the small factories in town.