Ma tells me we’re river folk, always have been. She raised me and my sister in a two-bedroom apartment just a few hundred meters away from a small creek. When we were willing to push our way through several yards of bushes and brambles, we sat on sandstone rocks weathered flat by time and dipped our toes in its cool, gentle trickle. But Grandma is the one who lives in the house on the bank of the river that I know Ma means when she says this.

Ma was raised in that house, whose interior walls are covered in light green wallpaper that has faded to swampy yellow with stiff vines stretching from floor to ceiling like cell bars. Every Sunday afternoon that we visited, Ma would tell us in the car how she’s glad she got out of that goddamn house, but every visit, she would close her eyes and breathe in deep, holding the air in her lungs an extra few seconds to savor it. Grandma always says she’ll die in that house like her ma before her. And like her ma before her, she walks to the river every morning as the sun rises and washes her face with the water. She says it keeps her young. Ever since the coal processing plant was built upriver, Ma says she’ll die in that house sooner rather than later.

But even when Ma moved away, Grandma gloated that Ma couldn’t resist living near water. My older sister once traced the creek behind our apartment to its source and found that it’s a tributary of the river that flows by Grandma’s house. Once, my sister and I tried walking to Grandma’s along the creek, but we turned back when the sun threatened to sink below the horizon. My sister keeps a river map hanging above her bed, the meandering line between us and Grandma drawn in thick red Sharpie. Ma would deny it if you asked, but I saw her eyes linger on the map when she used to tuck us in at night.

My sister tells me that when Ma submitted my adoption paperwork, she went to the bank of the river near Grandma’s house and whispered her wish that her second daughter would come from river folk too. Perhaps the river heard her, because when she flew across the ocean to meet me, her hotel was on the bank of the longest river in China. It was meant to be, Ma tells me now that I’m old enough to feel the distance between the two rivers stretch farther than any tributary can connect. The water brings you to where you belong.

When my sister moved out for college, Grandma insisted on coming with her on the tour to see whether there was a river, creek, or stream near enough. Ma rolled her eyes at this, but she seemed pleased that my sister chose a school at the confluence of three rivers and that, three years later, I followed.

In my first semester of college, when newness stagnated into homesickness, I borrowed my roommate’s bike and helmet, rode to the southern river, and sat on the edge of the concrete walkway. After heavy rains, the river would overflow and leave the walkway brown with silt and broken branches until city workers came and cleaned them. I took to calling Grandma afterwards, to ask if there had been flooding along her river too. Often, the storm didn’t have enough power to affect both. But every now and again, she’d tell me, A little, but my mamaw knew how the riverbank breathes when she built this house.

When my sister and I came home after my first semester, Ma gave me a chest of items she’d kept from her visit to the river village where I was born. I was old enough for them to be mine, she had decided. A glass jar whose interior was painted with a crane standing on the riverbank. A scroll painted with my Chinese name that Ma bought from a vendor in the village market. She couldn’t read it, but she had shown the calligrapher my name on my passport, and he promised to write it truthfully. How do you say it, I asked, and Ma paused as something nearing an apology formed on her lips. Instead, she smiled wistfully. They told me at the welfare center, but I was never able to get it right. After a moment, I realized I was supposed to smile back.

I took the chest with me back to school. Now, when my roommate is away for the night, I open it and pull out an item or two, letting their weight sink into me until they feel like the only solid things in the world, until they feel solid enough to build a home upon. When it rains and the rivers rise, I wonder what floods are like on the river along which I was born, if my Chinese Ma sits with her toes dangling inches above the water and feels at peace, if the riverbanks are breathing deeper there too, ready to inhale the houses that had been built so many years ago. When I sit on the edge of the walkway and the water meanders towards my feet, I wonder how long a red Sharpie line it would take to connect Grandma’s river to my Chinese Ma’s. I wonder, sitting on the bank of this home away from home away from home, if I let the rain wash me into the river, where the water will deliver me.

Kimberly Rooney 高小荣 is a Chinese-American adoptee from Jiangsu Province. They work as a copy editor, and their writing has appeared in The Offing, Longleaf Review, Chestnut Review, and Waxwing Magazine, among others. They now live in Pittsburgh, PA with their cat Toaster. You can find them at kimrooneywrites.com or on Twitter or Instagram as @kimlypso.