Emily Out of Focus

by Miriam Spitzer Franklin

  “Of course they wouldn’t,” Dad said, taking a big bite to prove it. “Come on, Emily. Give it a try.”

  I stared down at my dinner. “Maybe we should ask a flight attendant.”

  Dad shook his head. “This is Air China and I’m quite sure it didn’t say anything about serving insect delicacies.”

  “Gross,” I said. I stuck my fork in the rice and took a tiny bite. It didn’t seem too different from the Chinese food I’d eaten at Wang Fu’s, but I examined each bite carefully, just to be sure.

  After dinner came an exciting trip to the bathroom (what would happen if someone got stuck in the bathroom for ten hours or more?), and another movie, and about fifty pages into my new fantasy novel, the flight attendant dimmed the lights inside the plane. The sky outside had been dark for a while and I yawned then curled up on the seat with my head in Mom’s lap and fell right asleep. Next thing I knew, someone was shaking me gently.

  “Wake up sleepyhead,” Dad said. “We’re in China.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHINA, DAY 1, 4/3/14

  Dear Diary,

  We made it! After twenty-one hours in the sky, I’ve survived my first plane ride! Now I’m on my way to becoming a seasoned flier just like Nana (instead of an amateur one, like Mom)!

  The worst part was worrying about having to use a puke bag or getting locked in the bathroom while we were thousands of miles up in the sky. Luckily the turbulence stopped before any of us got sick and I solved the bathroom problem by making Mom stand outside the door and keeping it cracked just a bit. Dinner last night on the plane was an adventure because of the mystery food but this trip is all about adventure, right? And I can hardly wait to get started!

  Love, Emily (who has now conquered her fear of flying)

  After I finished my journal entry, I flipped back a few pages and put a check mark next to #1 on My Fears About the China Trip: What if the plane crashes? One fear down, six more to go . . . and we’d only just arrived. I called that progress.

  Dad was beginning to bark commands, so I snapped my journal shut and tossed it back in my bag.

  “All right,” Dad said. “Now everyone stick close together. You don’t want to get lost in a crowded airport in a foreign country. No wandering off—”

  “Dad,” I said. “You’ve already told me a hundred times. No wandering, stick close together, pay attention—”

  “Just checking to make sure.” Dad readjusted a shoulder bag and took a deep breath. “Everyone ready?”

  Mom and I both said, “Ready!” and we stepped out into the aisle, making our way into a crowded airport full of signs I couldn’t read. As I listened to the hum of voices all around me, I realized I couldn’t understand a single word.

  I picked up my pace, making sure not to lose sight of my dad and his red backpack.

  When we finally made it to the baggage area, I spotted our travel group right away. They were the only large group of non-Asian people I’d seen in the whole airport. A Chinese woman with long dark hair, large hoop earrings, and round glasses rushed over to us. She greeted us with a friendly smile. “You must be the Saunders family!” Holding up a clipboard, she pointed to a photo of our family. “I’m Lisa Wu from World Adoptions. The other families are waiting, too.”

  Lisa had a heavy accent, but I hung on every word. After my parents shook hands with the Dopps, Lisbons, and Sullivans, Lisa Wu introduced us to the Bresners.

  A Chinese girl with shiny hair gathered in two French braids stood with her parents, and they all wore matching T-shirts with a photo of a baby on the front.

  “This is Katherine Bresner,” Lisa Wu said to me. I took a closer look. She wore a jean mini-skirt with a pink blouse tied at the bottom over her T-shirt. Polished pink toenails peeked out from white sandals. I glanced down at my rumpled Empire State Building T-shirt, wondering if she’d changed once she got off the plane. That’s when I remembered I hadn’t bothered to comb my hair, and I hadn’t brushed my teeth, either. How had she managed to look so fresh and clean after flying on an airplane all night?

  “Katherine was adopted from China when she was little,” Lisa continued. “Now she’s going to be a big sister, just like you!”

  Giving my jean shorts a tug, I looked up and smiled at Katherine. She didn’t smile back. But she started talking right away. “What’s your sister’s name?” Katherine asked me. For a moment, my mind froze. My sister. The whole reason we were in China, right?

  “Her name?” Katherine repeated.

  “Mei Lin,” I said quickly.

  “Do you know what it means?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, it’s pretty easy to find out.” Katherine pulled a booklet from her bag and flipped through it. “It means Beautiful Lotus Flower.”

  “Oh. Thanks,” I said. “What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Ai Wen. It means Love Beautiful Cloud.”

  “Are you calling her Ai Wen . . . or Cloud?”

  Katherine snorted. “Have you ever heard of anyone named Cloud?”

  I shrugged. I’d only just met Katherine, but something about her made me feel like she was much older than me, even though we were both twelve.

  “We’re calling her neither. My sister’s name is Madison.” Katherine pointed to her T-shirt. In big letters were the words Welcome Home, Ai Wen (Madison).

  “Oh,” I said. “We don’t have any T-shirts of Mei Lin.”

  “My dad owns a screening shop, so he made lots of shirts to give away. We might have an extra, if you want.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. Why would I want a shirt with Katherine’s sister on it? Sheesh. I wouldn’t even wear a T-shirt that had Mei Lin’s photo on it. I’d seen some of those adoption blogs that people posted and was glad my parents had a little sense about the whole thing. Either that, or they were overwhelmed enough with packing lists and just trying to get a room ready for a baby when it had been twelve years since they’d had one.

  “Is your baby a Waiting Child?” Katherine asked me.

  I shook my head. My parents had explained to me that a lot of adoptions these days were babies with special needs, known as Waiting Children. In the past, too many baby girls had ended up in orphanages, but a lot had changed since my parents started the adoption process. Now families in China were adopting a lot of the girls without special needs, which is why we’d waited so long to be matched with Mei Lin.

  “Why not?” Katherine asked me. “We only had to wait a year for Madison. She has a cleft palate. It’s an opening in her lip, see?” She pointed to her T-shirt, but I couldn’t see it very clearly. “She’ll have surgery when we bring her home, and then she’ll be just fine.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t really know my parents’ reasons for not choosing a Waiting Child. They were adult reasons, and they were complicated. Katherine sure was nosy! “So,” I asked, switching the subject, “have you ever been to China before?”

  “Katherine raised one eyebrow at me. I cleared my throat. “I mean, after you were adopted?”

  “This is the second time I’ve been back,” Katherine said as she flipped a braid over her shoulder. I imagined what I looked like, my hair probably sticking out like coiled springs all around my head. Before I fell asleep, I’d taken out the elastic that usually held back my unruly curly hair and hadn’t bothered to put it back in. I had a feeling Katherine noticed.

  I was relieved when an announcement came over the intercom and I didn’t have to keep trying to make conversation. A man spoke in fast Chinese. I was about to ask Lisa Wu what it meant when Katherine said, “The luggage from our flight is ready.”

  I stared at her. “You speak Chinese?”

  “Sure. I go to the Chinese Immersion School in San Francisco. Actually, the official language of China is Mandarin, not Chinese.”

  Mrs. Bresner, who’d been talking to my parents, turned to me. “Katherine’s been fluent in Mandarin since first grade.”

  Mandarin, Chinese, it made no difference to me.
All I knew is people spoke it really fast and I didn’t understand a word. I was impressed that Katherine spoke a language that seemed so different from ours, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  “Now we’ll know who to take with us to the restaurants,” Dad said as we headed to the luggage turnstile, which actually made Katherine smile for the first time.

  This time I was the one who didn’t smile back. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to hang out with Katherine. I’d been hopeful about having another girl my age on the trip, but after knowing her for only a few minutes, it was easy to tell we weren’t about to become great friends. We were too different.

  Once we’d picked up our suitcases, all of us piled into a large blue van. Lisa called it a van, anyway. It looked more like a small bus. Two seats hugged each side of the aisle, so my parents and I headed to the bench across the back. Lisa stood at the front with a microphone so she could speak over the huge fans that rattled as it clunked down the highway.

  “The Dolton Hotel is in the middle of Changsha,” Lisa Wu told us. “We’ll be there in approximately forty-five minutes. You’ll have the afternoon to do whatever you like and get your paperwork in order. If I were you, I’d get some rest. Because tomorrow, you will get your babies!”

  Everyone around me cheered when she said that. The word tomorrow echoed in my ears.

  I looked down at my hands clasped together in my lap. Today I was still an only child. But tomorrow, I’d become a big sister.

  Everything was about to change.

  ’We pulled out of the airport, passing big green fields and swampy rice paddies until we turned onto the interstate. Lisa Wu chattered on and on about the city and its people. I glanced over at Katherine who stared out the window in awe, as if the groups of old brick apartment buildings with green vines growing on the sides were the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen.

  Hopefully when we got to Changsha there would be more to look at because the view from the highway didn’t offer great possibilities for my photo documentary. And my photos had to be amazing if I wanted to win a scholarship to one of the best photojournalism camps in the country.

  Like Nana said, if you really wanted to be good at something, you had to learn your craft. “You must listen to experts in the field,” she’d told me, “and learn to take constructive criticism. You have to stretch your boundaries and do things you never thought you could.”

  By boundaries, she meant that she traveled all over the world. And I was taking the first step now, at age twelve, by traveling to China. This trip was the opportunity I’d been waiting for—the chance to impress those judges and win the contest, and then my parents would let me go to photojournalism camp instead of forcing me to go to those Math and STEM camps like they did last summer.

  Building things in STEM wasn’t so bad, but ever since I took a test in second grade that said I excelled in math, my parents kept talking about how I could become an engineer or doctor someday. If I won the contest, they’d finally take me seriously, instead of thinking photography was just another hobby like collecting trading cards or taking a yoga class or something.

  “Look, Emily, we’re in downtown Changsha!” Dad said. I tuned back in just as we turned onto a busy four-lane road. Tall skyscrapers appeared right in front of me. I stared out at sidewalks crowded with small shops selling their products on the street tucked between tall shiny buildings covered with billboards of beautiful models. I recognized a KFC and McDonalds that looked exactly like the ones we had at home except for the characters on the sign.

  I’m not sure exactly what I had been expecting, but this wasn’t it. Workers with white hats standing in rice paddies as the airplane flew in for a landing—that wasn’t so surprising. All the photos of China I’d seen boasted beautiful mountains and lakes, forests filled with giant panda bears and wild tigers, multi-leveled ancient pagodas. But a city that looked a lot like New York?

  I leaned forward in my seat to get a better look. Cars whizzed by honking their horns. Motorcycles and motor scooters and green taxi cabs weaved in and out, barely missing us as they switched lanes. Then, in the middle of it all, I spotted an old man slowly pedaling a bike, wearing a straw hat, pulling a cart full of vegetables.

  So, maybe it was a little different from New York City after all.

  What was I waiting for? I pulled out my digital and began snapping photos as fast as I could.

  CHAPTER THREE

  This is our home for the next week,” Dad said as we entered the lobby of the grandest hotel I’d ever been to in my entire life. “Can you believe it?”

  Sparkling lights hung like diamonds from high ceilings. Shiny floors surrounded a fountain, the water exploding into bubbles. Off to the side stretched a row of shops like you’d see in a fancy mall.

  “There’s a swimming pool and a bowling alley,” Lisa Wu said. “And don’t forget the baby playrooms on the tenth and eleventh floor.”

  “Baby playroom?” my mom asked, more interested in that than anything else Lisa had mentioned.

  Lisa nodded. “A lot of people stay at the Dolton when they’re adopting, so the hotel has a nice place for everyone to go with their children.”

  “Wow!” I said, taking in the sights.

  “Can we go swimming this afternoon?” Katherine asked her parents.

  “We’re going to The Provincial Museum, remember?” Mrs. Bresner said.

  “Oh. Yeah,” Katherine said. Her voice dropped as if she was disappointed but then she brightened. “It’s going to be really cool, with mummies and everything.”

  I glanced over at my parents. “Can we go, too?”

  Dad shook his head right away. “There’s plenty of time for sightseeing.”

  “Aww, come on,” I begged. “Katherine’s family’s going.”

  Dad lowered his voice. “We’ll discuss it in the room,” he said firmly, and I knew what that meant. I groaned, but I waited until we made it to the seventh floor. As grand as the lobby was, I expected a humongous room. But it was small and plain, with two double beds close to each other and a small TV set.

  “I guess the crib will have to go here,” Mom said, pointing to the bit of open area near the windows.

  I pulled back the curtains and stared at the tall buildings that stood out against a hazy sky. “You heard what Lisa Wu said,” I told my parents. “We’re going to pick up Mei Lin tomorrow. I think we should go sightseeing baby-free like Katherine’s family, while we still have a chance.”

  “I believe Lisa’s advice was to use the time to rest.” Mom yawned. “I, for one, plan to take her up on it. You might have had a good night’s sleep, but I don’t think I slept for all of five minutes.”

  “You mean . . . you’re going to take a nap?” I watched as my mother kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the bed. “When there’s so many exciting things to do?”

  Dad laughed. “We both need a nap, but I’ll take you to the pool in a little while, okay?”

  I sighed in exasperation as Dad collapsed on the bed next to Mom.

  “Katherine’s parents don’t need naps,” I said.

  “Katherine’s parents are not your parents,” Dad said in a tone that told me the conversation was officially over.

  I could not believe we had traveled clear across the world and I was stuck in a hotel room with parents who were going to spend the afternoon sleeping. “Well . . . can I at least explore the hotel?”

  “No,” both of my parents said at the same time.

  “Why not? I can take your cell phone.”

  “Because we’re in a foreign country,” Mom said, as if that were enough of an explanation.

  “But—”

  “No buts about it, Emily,” Dad said. “I’m just going to take a quick nap, and then we’ll go swimming and we’ll explore the hotel. Together, okay?”

  “Whatever,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. Mom rolled over and ignored me, which was weird because she didn’t usually let me get away with a
sassy tone like that.

  “I’m waking you up in thirty minutes.”

  “Forty-five,” Dad said.

  I let out another big sigh and threw in a Hmph! which didn’t even get a reaction from my parents. There was nothing adventurous about this at all! Our one chance to get out and do exciting things without a crying baby, and all Mom and Dad could focus on was catching a few Zzzzs. You’d think a history professor and a middle school social studies teacher would be a little more interested in seeing living, breathing history.

  I’d studied the schedule with my parents before we left, asking if we’d be able to do things outside of the group. “Of course, Emily!” Mom and Dad had said with enthusiasm. “We’ll be in China for two whole weeks. There will be plenty of time to see all the things we want to.”

  Well, it looked like their excited words had been swallowed right up by the Changsha skyline. Mom and Dad seemed exhausted from the plane ride, and maybe it had finally hit them: they were going to be the new parents of a squirmy, crying eighteen-month-old.

  A loud buzzing noise interrupted my thoughts. I turned away from the window and, sure enough, the sounds were coming from my dad, who was already snoring away.

  That’s it! Just because my parents weren’t interested in adventures didn’t mean I had to spend my time listening to them snooze in a hotel room.

  If I stepped outside of the room for a few minutes, how would they ever know? I tore a sheet of paper out of my notebook and wrote a quick note: Went to check out the baby playroom. Took Dad’s cell phone. Be back in five minutes. Emily

  Then I closed the blinds, darkening the room so if my parents did wake up, they might think it was the middle of the night and not even look around for me. But if they did look around for me in the next few minutes, they’d see my note . . . and it would be okay. They couldn’t get angry if I told them I was exploring the baby playroom just down the hall. What could possibly be dangerous about that? Besides, they liked anything that had the word BABY in it.

  I went back and added Love in front of my name and drew a few hearts. Just in case. Then I slipped my dad’s cell phone and the hotel key into my backpack with Nana’s camera safely inside and tiptoed out of the room. The door closed with a click behind me.