by Samuel Shem
Mr. Ma asks for her full name, and then sends an assistant out to find them.
Clio takes out the little album that Katie and she have prepared, to show to the orphanage workers, and hands Mr. Ma a photo of Katie in the arms of her caretaker, a rail-thin woman with a squirrelly face and a prominent gold front tooth.
Mr. Ma sends another assistant out with the photo.
Maybe money will talk. Pep tells Mr. Ma that they have brought a donation to the orphanage on behalf of their group of eight families. Mr. Ma nods. Pep zips open his fanny pack and finds the envelope containing the thousand-dollar check. As Pep opens the envelope there is a ripping sound. Two weeks of humidity have sealed the flap onto the check. A piece of the flap sticks to the check, obscuring his name and address. Mr. Ma inspects the check meticulously and shakes his head no. No bank will cash a damaged check. Katie slumps into a high-backed chair and twirls around in it.
“This is not going well,” Clio says softly to Pep.
“It’s a disaster. I can’t believe he didn’t blink at the thousand bucks.”
An assistant comes back with the documents for “Chun” and sets the folder down.
“These are your records from the orphanage, dear,” Clio says.
“Can I see?” Katie asks. Clio looks to Pep and, getting his okay, nods.
A tense moment. They bend over the documents. But they are merely copies of the official adoption documents they already have: Chun was brought to the Nan Da Lu police station at one month of age and, later that same day, brought to the orphanage.
Clio goes on to ask Mr. Ma about Katie—whether there are any other records, any notes found in her swaddling clothes, any anything? Mr. Ma says no.
“Chwin? Chwin-Chwin!” Someone is calling to them from a group of women standing in the doorway.
Pep and Clio turn. It is the woman with the wizened face and the gold front tooth—the woman in the photo who was Katie’s nursemaid from one to four months old. Ten years ago she carried Katie out of the little redbrick building, called out her name—Chwin!—and handed their baby to them.
“Oh my, she remembers her!” Clio cries and, taking Katie’s hand, goes to her.
Clio greets her excitedly. Katie holds back. The woman kneels to her level and looks her in the eye, and hugs her.
The woman points to herself and says, “Name, Hongyen.” Smiling, she goes on, “Hongyen Ayi. Ayi mean ‘Auntie.’ Chwin Auntie.”
“Kate-zer, this is the woman who took care of you when you were a tiny baby!”
Katie, still being hugged, feels strange. Released, she finds herself looking up into the woman’s eyes, sticking out her hand and saying, “Nee how, nee how, Ayi.”
Hongyen bursts into tears and puts her hand over her face. Pep and Clio are tearful as well, amazed that Katie has spoken Chinese.
Mr. Ma has called in another man, who is examining the check. They may be able to steam off the piece of gummed envelope flap. Mr. Ma presents a gift to Katie, a china plate with a fish on it. Katie thanks him and, looking into his eyes, shakes his hand. She sits down with Hongyen Ayi at the end of the table and begins demonstrating her red Squeeze Breeze. It’s a plastic water bottle with a small rubber fan on top, battery operated. At the push of the button the fan sprays a fine cooling mist in your face. Katie has Squeeze-Breezed her way through the searing heat of south China. Hongyen feels the mist on her face and laughs hard.
Mr. Ma indicates to the Macys that the meeting is over and they can now tour the orphanage with the caretakers. They leave his office and walk to the nine-story building and wait at the elevator. The walls are rough concrete. As they wait, the elevator empties out several old people in wheelchairs—it is an old age home as well.
Suddenly they are in a room filled with infants, ages about one to three, most of them in motion, tooling around in those cruiser seats on wheels that years ago were banned in America as unsafe. Some children are sitting in chairs—not the handcrafted bamboo ones Pep and Clio recall from the old courtyard, but plastic. An abundance of caretakers follows them around, the tails of their long white coats making them seem like mother geese tending their goslings. Crude, colorful murals grace the wall. The activity is lively and noisy. Fluttery, Clio thinks, bright-fangled birds on a lost Caribbean island.
They know that there are only girls here.
Clio is moving toward the babies. A little girl, one eye clouded over completely, toddles up to Katie, silent but curious about Katie’s red Squeeze Breeze. Katie looks embarrassed, but the toddler persists, following her as she retreats behind Pep’s legs. She is dressed in lime green and carries a small purple plastic rake. Pep takes Katie into another room, where younger children lie, one to a crib. One child has an IV tube taped to her scalp. Katie, curious, asks what it is, and Pep tells her that the girl must be sick and is getting special medicine. Katie stares down at her. The one-eyed girl comes close again, and they move on.
Meanwhile Clio has been handed a baby, and is cooing to her delightedly, walking around absently among the kids and caretakers.
“Dad,” Katie says, “that little girl with the one eye is bothering me.”
“Okay. Let’s try to get away from her.”
“Mom said maybe I should give her my Squeeze Breeze?”
“Nice idea.”
“Come with me, Dad.”
Katie leads Pep to the girl and gives her the Squeeze Breeze, showing her how to use it. Suddenly Pep flips into his risk-assessment mode, personal injury division, and wonders about giving a toy with a motorized fan to a child with only one eye. Lawsuit, trial, headline in International Herald Trib—“Insurance Agent Should’ve Known Better, Ten Million for Lost Last Eye.” He thinks to take the Squeeze Breeze back, but the girl is gone. Wait. The thing is American-made, to code; a soft rubber fan. Safe. Katie and Pep rejoin Clio in the large room reserved for the newborn babies.
There is good light and warmth and a flock of white-coated nurses. The cribs are the same old ones Pep and Clio recall, the dark-green-painted wood, handmade, that Katie and the others lay in on their backs in the cute little brick house, Katie Chun sharing a crib with Faith Ying. Seeing these old green slats and the same red quilts with the white impatiens, Clio senses, finally, the red thread of meaning unspool back ten years and catch—pulling tight against the past. There are, as before, two newborns to a crib. One is only ten days old, lying asleep on a bamboo mat, in a Western-style onesie that keeps her warm. Clio stares at her, and at Katie, wondering what she is making of it all. Does she see herself in this tiny baby?
“Look, hon,” Clio says, “the quilts are the same colors as your dress. And they’re the same quilts you had on you when you were that old.”
“I remember, from the pictures you took.” She contemplates them quietly. “Can I look at the other babies?”
“Sure, sweetie. But don’t go far.” Katie walks off to another crib, and stands there once again, staring down intently.
“She’s taking it all in,” Clio says. “She’s got that look. Everything.”
“Yeah. It’s big.” Pep sighs. “The conditions are so much better now.”
“Yes. They’re not swaddled up and tied up with twine—their fingers can touch. But I don’t much like this high-rise building. I doubt they get outside much. I liked the other better. Our little brick house and playground?”
“Yeah. It was special.”
“Remember the newborns?” He nods.
Back then, she and Pep had wandered away from the group at the redbrick ward and had come upon a dimly lit room. There, in two long rows of cribs in a narrow high-ceilinged space filled with a gritty, sooty attempt at warmth from a coal stove at one end, were newborn baby girls, maybe twenty of them, covered up by the red quilts with the white impatiens, a continuous long line of quilts, door to far wall. Some were completely bu
ried under the quilts; some had faces showing. Above each baby, tacked to the plaster wall, was a plastic pouch in which was placed—in which, she realized, could be placed and then replaced—a piece of paper and a few Chinese characters: name and date of birth. The oldest was barely two months. Despite the stove, it was chill, and deathly still, the silence punctuated only by a cough or a sneeze from one of the covered-up bodies, up or down the line. Occasionally there was a whimper. One baby, and only one, was crying weakly. Clio uncovered the tiny face, flushed and frail. She put her finger on the forehead, across a blue thread of vein. The skin felt hot. There was no attendant in sight. She looked at Pep, and saw such a sense of desolation in his face that tears came to her eyes. They left, and went out again into the autumn light.
“Incredibly sad!” Clio said.
“Yeah. I guess only the healthiest make it out of here to the brick building.” His voice was hoarse. “The survivors. The ones that survive the first month.”
“Selected for special care, to be adopted.”
“The odds against them—it breaks your heart, Clee, doesn’t it?”
“Into little pieces.”
Now Pep is following Katie into a sunroom. He worries that she is getting overwhelmed, and he wants to get her out of there as soon as possible, but Clio isn’t ready to leave—he watches her walking around with a baby in her arms and a big smile on her face. She wants another. Me too. I’d love to go back to life with a baby. But we’re way too old. But if it were easy, if we could just walk out with one now? Sure.
The sunroom is empty but for a single girl of about three with a bandage on her head that makes her look like a Maoist urban guerrilla. She stands quietly, unmoving, hands stiffly at her sides, her big dark eyes staring at them.
“Dad, I want to talk to you?”
“Yeah? Come sit, and tell me.” Pep is glad to be the one she wants to talk to now—he feels valued. He offers her his lap, and she curls up into it, playing with the hem of her dress. He readies himself for a heart-to-heart, happy to listen. “Okay, hon, what’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking... when I grow up, I think I want to adopt a Chinese baby, because I know how to do it. Anybody can have a bio, but not everybody knows how to be a parent to an adopted baby, especially if she’s Chinese. What do you think?”
Pep hides a smile, amused at how she’s picked up their lingo. “You certainly do know all about it. But why wouldn’t you want your own bio?”
“Because anybody can have a bio. It’s easy, I mean, except for you and Mom.”
“That’s right. We tried hard, but it didn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“We never found out. The doctors never found a reason.”
“Well I’m glad, ’cause that’s the only way you could get me.”
“Me too, honey.” He hugs her. “Me too.”
Finally Clio appears, ready to leave. They try to find Hongyen Ayi to say goodbye, but she is gone.
9
It is still raining hard. As they wait for the guard to open the gate, they see Hongyen Ayi rushing toward them, shielding her head with a pink plastic coat. Pep raises his umbrella and urges her in.
The four of them huddle under the Grand Sun umbrella. In a frank language of her eyes and face and hands, Hongyen conveys that she is touched by them coming back, and that she has something for them. She looks around to make sure no one can see her. Quickly, as if scratching her neck, she reaches into her bra and brings out a small envelope and slips it into Clio’s hand. She smiles, bows to each of them, hugs Katie, and splashes through the muddy puddles back to the orphanage.
The forbidding gate opens, and closes hard behind them. Under the umbrella they walk through the mud alongside the ditch to the hotel. Pep stops, and pops some shots of the bare-chested workmen in the ditch and the striped plastic sheets that serve as the walls of their makeshift huts, floating out in the rainy wind like spinnakers.
Clio waits, her arm around her daughter, trying not to agonize about what could be in the envelope. She finds herself staring up at the sleek hotel. What irony! These dirt-poor orphans, given up for nothing, wind up at the most expensive houses and schools in the richest country in the world, studying the Greek gods and goddesses in fourth grade at Spook Rock Country Day. Finishing up the year—just two weeks ago!?—by putting on a musical called Orpheus and Eurydice—Katie so shy that she’d only take a “barking part,” as one head of the three-headed dog, Cerberus, guarding the gates of Hell. What a world. Where does she fit in?
The four bellboys escort them into the soaring lobby with a marble floor and the kind of immense flower arrangement on a marble stand that you see in the great hotels of the world. Pep wonders, again, where all the money is coming from.
While Katie swims, Clio and Pep, sitting at the bar overlooking the pool, open the envelope. Two pieces of paper. One, on orphanage stationery, from Hongyen Ayi:
Dear Macy. I find this in baby Chun’s swaddling clothes ten years ago and I ask friend to make translation and keep secret. I give it now because of good ch’i today when we meet. Good fortune to you Macy and most to beautiful Chun.
The second note is in Chinese, with the English translation:
In our country-side the thought which man is more important than woman is very popular. I myself don’t have the strength to say something against it and overthrow it. But I believe on this big world there must be some kind, good-hearted uncles or aunties who can rescue my little daughter Chun, born June 25. I would do anything for him or her on my next life if I have another life.
Her mother
They read it over and over. They stare at each other, at first unable to say a word.
“Her hand,” Clio says. “But I’m not sure we should show it to Katie now—with all she’s got to take in already?”
“Right. We’ll do it next week, when we’re home.” He fingers the document, examines it as he would an insurance contract, as if looking for a catch: the thin, fragile paper, the squid-ink-black strokes of a calligraphy brush, the “Chun,” the “rescue,” the “her mother”—all in a clumsy, concrete-sounding translation. But there can be no catch. It just is. How will their daughter react to this, the first real evidence of a mother who loved her passionately but who didn’t “have the strength to say something against it and overthrow it,” the “it” being that her girl is worthless, compared to a boy? How will Katie stand it? How will she feel? There’s no way to know. He thinks for a moment of hiding it from her, maybe until she’s eighteen or twenty-one. But no.
“Yes,” Clio is saying, “maybe when we’re all curled up together in our bed, safe and sound.” But her feelings are raging—she can almost see the young woman writing this the night before she will give up her baby, tormented but trying to hold the faith that “on this big world”—why “big”? Does she feel hers is small?—“there must be some kind, good-hearted uncles or aunties”—people like us. People who she “would do anything for... on my next life if I have another life.” As if this life of hers, with this act, is over—and she’s not counting on any other. It’s so sad! And yet, when Katie sees this, it will be with her forever. It will make whatever image Katie has of her more real, maybe even make Pep and her less so—no, not less real, but different—“uncle and auntie,” not mother and father? Clio’s spirit starts to sink—but suddenly revives, fiercely. Feel for her, yes, feel everything for her, yes! But protect Katie! Katie is ours!
“Very safe and sound,” Pep says, taking her hand. “A low-risk moment, yes.”
Clio folds the letter carefully, puts it back in the envelope, and hands it to him. “Keep it safe, Peppie, it’s a treasure.”
At lunch in the hotel. Katie seems subdued, picking at her rice.
“So what did you think of the orphanage, dear?”
Clio asks.
“It was all right, but I don’t know, seeing all the girls maybe bothered me?” Her tone is dead serious.
“How did it bother you?”
“Well, you and Dad told me Chinese families can only have one child, right?” Clio nods. “And they want boys, and keep the boys? And give the girls away?”
“That’s right.” Clio says. Or worse. She glances at Pep.
“So like they think girls aren’t special. But girls are special! I mean don’t they realize that girls are goddesses?”
“Of course girls are goddesses,” Pep says, “we feel that way for sure.”
Katie pushes her rice here and there on her plate, her face somber.
“How did they get there? I mean, how did the mothers get them there?”
“They leave them here in the city, somewhere where they’ll be found right away, and whoever finds them takes them to the police station, and then they come to the orphanage, and the birth mom goes back to her family in the country.”
“Who’s in her family?”
“Well, maybe she already had a baby girl, and then tried for a boy, and when it turned out to be a girl they decided they couldn’t keep her.”
“So I have a big sister somewhere!” Katie’s eyes are wide with surprise.
“Maybe,” Pep says. “That’s why we went to the orphanage and the police station. To see if we could find out anything.”
“Did you?”
“No, sweetheart,” Clio says. “We didn’t.”
Katie nods, but says nothing. They hold their breath. Katie’s lip turns down, and she tries bravely to stop it, breathing hard for the longest time. They don’t dare move.
“Mom?”
“Yes, dear?”
