Adam blinked awake. “What’s going on?”
“Let’s put up a flyer,” Amy announced. “Like for a lost dog.”
“Where would you put it?” Alice asked, doubtful.
“On telephone poles. In restaurants. Like what people do at home. Please.”
“What do you think, Adam?” Alice asked.
He sat all the way up and propped some pillows behind his back. He had the same grave look on his face as he’d had yesterday when he told Amy she needed a starting point for the map.
“We picked you up in Kunming, but you aren’t from here,” he said. “You were brought from another orphanage.”
“I know, but what if she’s visiting?” Amy wasn’t going to let this go. “We’re visiting. What if she’s visiting too? What if she moved here? What if she’s outside right this minute?”
“What if,” Alice echoed, shaking her head sadly.
“Please,” Amy begged.
“If we do this, we don’t want you to have false hope,” Adam said.
“We don’t want you to be disappointed,” Alice added. “You have to consider the odds.”
Amy went back to her room, opened her laptop, and signed in to the hotel’s Internet service. Numbers came easily to her so she expected to find a quick set of figures to noodle with. Except true numbers didn’t exist. The first 61 adoptees came to the U.S. in 1991. That number continued to rise—to close to 63,000 between 1991and 2005. After that, the stats were harder to find, with a steady decline in adoptions from China. But if there were something like 100,000 Chinese adoptees, and approximately 650,000,000 females in China, then Amy had a one in 6,500 chance in finding her mother. The chances got a lot better if you considered only women in their childbearing years.
“If the numbers on the Internet are accurate,” Alice said after Amy presented her findings.
Amy pulled up a story she’d once found and bookmarked on the laptop’s screen. “Look at this, Mom. Here’s an article about someone who found her mother! It says here that twenty families have been reunited!”
“How?” Alice asked as her husband picked up the laptop and began reading.
“She was on a trip like this with her parents. They were walking down the street when a total stranger came up and said, ‘You look like my sister’s daughter.’ And guess what. That woman turned out to be the girl’s aunt!”
“That’s a one-in-a-million occurrence.”
Amy leaned over her dad, hit a few keys, and pulled up a different story. “Then what about this one? Another family was on a trip, just like ours. Her family made a flyer to post. The first place they went in was a café. They asked if they could hang the flyer. The couple who ran the café looked at the flyer and burst into tears. It was their daughter! Now the two families spend every Christmas together.”
“Those sound like made-up stories,” Alice said. “There’s all sorts of nonsense on the Internet.”
Adam looked up from the laptop. “Actually, honey, what Amy’s telling you is from an article in The Boston Globe. The first one was in The New York Times.”
“But what are the odds?” Alice asked, repeating her earlier concern. “I don’t want Amy to be disappointed.”
“I promise not to be disappointed,” Amy said.
“Mom’s right, you know,” Adam said.
“Please, Dad, please,” Amy pled, turning all her focus on her father, because he rarely said no to her. “Will you let me do it? Please?”
But Alice gave in first. “There’s no harm in trying. Get some paper from the desk. Let’s figure out what you want to say.”
They spent the next hour working together, narrowing down the details and keeping the English simple:
My name is Amy Bowen. I was born on or about November 24, 1995. I am looking for my biological family. I was found in a cardboard box. I was wrapped in a blue blanket. There was a cake of tea in the box with me. I am short. My skin is dark compared to most Chinese.
In case you want to know more about me, I am good at science and math. I like to ski and ride horses. I also like to hang out with friends. I am very nice. I hope you would like to meet me.
To contact me, please e-mail my father at
[email protected].
After breakfast, they went to the business center. They hadn’t brought the photo of Amy taken when she was first found or any of those that Alice and Adam took the day they got her. All they had was the fourth-grade school picture from Alice’s wallet and Amy’s current passport photo. She positioned them on the piece of paper with the note and pushed the button to make copies. Then they walked around the neighborhood where they were staying and tacked up the notices. By the time they were done, Amy knew that nothing would come of her plan: maybe her birth mother didn’t read English, maybe she didn’t have a computer to send an e-mail, maybe she didn’t know what a computer or e-mail were. And so many people lived here. What kind of coincidence could there be in the world for Amy’s birth mother to be walking down this particular street, see a picture of Amy in her school uniform, and think, Oh, there’s my baby!
Amy was very disappointed, and she felt herself spiraling into sadness. Her mom and dad worried about her, because she had a history of anxiety and depression. Her dad tried to distract her with jokes. Her mom offered to take her shopping for souvenirs to give to her friends. But Amy had a serious case of the blues. On the last night of the trip, Alice knocked on the door that connected the two rooms.
“May I come in?” she asked, opening the door a couple of inches.
“Sure, Mom.”
Alice sat on Amy’s bed. “I’m sorry this didn’t work out. I’m sorry we brought you here. I’m—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, honey, I wish I could make you understand . . .”
The way Alice’s voice trailed off forced Amy to ask, “Understand what?”
“How your dad and I felt when we got you. What you meant to us then. What you mean to us now. In the months leading up to the phone call that told us we could come and get you, I did everything I could to understand Chinese culture. I went on a walking tour of Chinatown, I devoured Amy Tan’s books, I watched Chinese movies. And we had all the practical stuff to do too. Our finances were critiqued and notarized; we were interviewed and authenticated. We traveled with six other family units. Three couples were married, two were gay, and there was a single woman with her mom. The way you cried—”
“I’ve seen the photo album,” Amy said. In those pictures, you could see the family-unit people weeping and laughing. All the babies were crying too, but her mouth had been a giant gaping hole, her eyes were squished shut, her legs and arms—her whole body actually—were as stiff as a board, and her cheeks were bright red because she was screaming her head off. “I cried, and I didn’t sleep.”
“The other babies cried, but you howled,” Alice agreed. “You howled and you wouldn’t sleep. I’m sure you understand the objective cause-and-effect reasons for that.”
“Objective cause-and-effect reasons? Can you for once speak to me from your heart and not like a scientist?”
“I’m trying.” Alice sighed. “I know I can be frustrating sometimes, but I only want the very, very, very best for you. I wish for you to feel smart and invincible.”
To Amy’s ears, her mother’s wishes sounded more like pressure to do more and achieve more, but she didn’t say that.
“You see,” Alice continued, “your crying was only natural. You were older than the other babies. You’d never seen a white person before. We don’t think you’d been picked up or held very much. You needed a lot of love. We gave you the love and you stopped crying, but, honey sweet, we’re still waiting for you to sleep.”
Ha, ha, ha, and blah, blah, blah.
“I know. Stupid humor. I’m sorry.”
“Would you please stop saying you’re sorry?”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that I’ve always wondered if you were crying because you missed your birth mother. I’ve tho
ught about her every day since we got you. I couldn’t have a baby myself, so I’ve wondered if she was afraid when you were born. Was she in a hospital? Was she alone? Was your birth father at her side?”
“I’ve wondered the same things too,” Amy admitted.
“Not a day has gone by when I haven’t wondered if I hurt you more than helped you by wresting you away from your homeland and your culture. Even when you were a baby, I wondered when you would start to resent me for that. Maybe even hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Mom.”
“The first night your dad and I had you, we piled pillows on the extra double bed in our room to make a protective nest for you. Your dad fell asleep, but I stayed awake all night. I wept when you grabbed my finger and held it tight. Your birth mother gave me the greatest gift of my life—a beautiful, talented, and kind daughter. Every day I take a moment to thank her for that. Your first smile, your first tooth, your first day of preschool, your first everything—I thought of her and thanked her. And she is with you always. Your birth father too. They’re in your tears. They’re in your laugh. They’re in you in ways you’ll never be able to count. And their love is what sent you to me.”
Tears began to well in Alice’s eyes, and Amy felt herself being swept into her mother’s ocean of love.
“From the first moment I saw you all the way to today and for as long as I live, I know that you are the daughter who was meant for me. I can never be a replacement for your birth mother, but I’ve done—and will continue to do—everything I can to complete what should have been her journey. I love you, and I’ll always love you.”
Amy held on to those words like they were a lifesaver.
* * *
Evaluation
Haley,
While you completely ignored my admonition not to write about the immigrant experience, I congratulate you for coming at it from a unique angle. There’s much you can work with here as you begin to think about your college app, but bear in mind that there will be other young women across the country who may write similar essays about their own adoption experiences. A few nitpicking points: Amy, Alice & Adam feels a bit cloying to me. (Do they really all need to start with an A?) Watch your language usage & remember that a thesaurus isn’t always your friend. And of course you’d never want to use bazillion or ginormous on a college app, but I’m sure you know that.
I’m quite conflicted about the ending. As your teacher, I would have hated to see you fall back on the Shakespearean trope of coincidence. As a mom, I really wanted your main character to find her birth mother.
For a math-science girl, you did an excellent job. Now take the nonfiction elements and run with them, making sure you keep the emotional resonance of your fictional narrative.
CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN SPRING
“A-ma! A-ma!”
My son’s screams pull Jin and me out of sleep.
“It’s all right,” I say, patting my husband’s arm. “I’ll go.”
I pad barefoot down the darkened hallway to Paul’s room, where he sits up in his bed, shaking, his hands clutching his duvet, tears streaming down his face. Dr. Katz, our pediatrician, calls what Paul gets night terrors. They’ve worsened the past two weeks, which the doctor says is completely normal. “Usually children are scared when they start first grade. They’re with all the big kids now. But in second grade, a lot of kids are scared about space aliens. Maybe that’s what’s happening here.” The ruma, nima, and A-ma would see things differently. They’d say Jin-ba is being stalked by bad spirits. Deh-ja has taken precautions, but stringing ivy around his room hasn’t seemed to help. In fact, it may have made things worse, because the kids who’ve come over on playdates see it as tu, whether they’re white or Han majority.
“Paul, look at me,” I say gently as I sit on the edge of the bed. “Do you see me?”
The saddest thing about his night terrors is that he’s not asleep but he’s not awake either. He looks at me but sees something beyond or through me. His eyes are wide. He trembles. He screams again. “A-ma!”
I hold my hands out to him and rub my thumbs against the tips of my fingers in the traditional Akha gesture to bring him to me. He climbs onto my lap, but I won’t know he’s fully conscious until he calls me Mom. Rarely is he lucid enough to tell me what his dreams are about apart from “monsters.” Tonight, though, he tells me a little of what he remembers.
“I got lost in the forest. The trees looked cracked and broken. I didn’t hear any birds. It was quiet and hot. So much sweat was running down my legs I thought I’d peed my pants.”
I tighten my arms around him. He’s had a few bed-wetting episodes lately. If he’d been raised in Spring Well, the liquid would have just spilled down between the slats of the bamboo floor. Here, Dr. Katz calls it “something we need to be concerned about.”
“Then the rains came,” Paul sputters. “Monsoon, like you’ve told me about. I felt like I was drowning. Drowning in the forest is a terrible death, isn’t that what you said, Mom?”
Mom. Good.
“You aren’t going to drown in a monsoon. You live in Arcadia. We’re in a drought—”
“But, Mom—”
“Shhh. Close your eyes. I’m right here.”
I hum to him until I feel his breath deepen. I don’t need A-ma to help me interpret my son’s dream. He’s scared about school. I understand that. But he’s also picked up on some of my anxieties. I need to be more careful when I’m talking on the phone to my brothers, and I need to be extra-vigilant in my conversations with Jin. Over the last couple of years, the dry seasons in the tea mountains have lasted longer, while the monsoons have become more intense. Our tea leaf bud sets are bursting early, and the ten-day picking season has been prolonged. Worse, the new weather pattern is stunting growth—just as Paul saw in his dream. I can taste the change in the leaves, but I’m not a scientist and I don’t know what it means. Still, I worry, and that worry has invaded my son’s sleeping hours.
Nothing is worse than seeing your child suffer. Every morning I ask about his dreams. Did a tree fall? Was there a fire, a dog on a roof, or a broken egg? Instead of these questions calming him and helping him understand his place in the world, he’s become even more scared and his dreams more tormented. I feel terrible about it, and I honestly don’t know what to do.
I slip out of bed at sunrise, heat water for tea, and roll rice balls in crushed peanuts for Paul’s lunch. Jin wanders in, kisses me, sits down, and opens the paper.
“May I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead?” Paul begs when he comes to the kitchen and sees what I’ve prepared. “Just today. Just this once.”
As if I would ever do such a thing.
Into my silence, he says, “Auntie Deh-ja would make one for me.”
Deh-ja would too—she spoils him to the extreme—but she’s in Yunnan for a month visiting her natal family, as she now does every year.
“Mom,” my son persists, “why is what I want different than a ball of rice with peanuts on the outside? White outside, brown inside. Brown outside, white inside. Same thing!”
“Is that what the Han majority children eat?” I ask, because if they aren’t eating Chinese food in school, maybe Paul shouldn’t either.
“Oh, Mom! Everyone brings Chinese food from home.”
“Then—”
“Addison likes peanut butter and jelly—”
“Addison.” I taste the three syllables on my tongue. I glance at Jin, who looks up from his copy of the Chinese Daily News. Addison? What kind of name is that?
I drive car pool in the mornings, so Paul and I pick up two other kids on the way to school. Music plays on the radio. The kids sing along. I pull up to the curb for the car pool drop-offs and hit the button to unlock the doors. Paul’s the last to get out. He lingers by the door as he puts on his backpack.
“Is this Addison white or Han majority?” I ask.
But he just waves, slams the door, and runs to a group of boys I recognize?
??all born here, all Han majority. I can’t stay to watch him enter the building—too many cars and minivans behind me—but I feel a tug on my heart. We may not have strings tied around our wrists any longer, but I’ll always be connected to my son.
Driving home, I have time to reflect. I’m thirty-seven, in the summer of my life. My husband is successful. He’s kept his cardboard business, but that’s not his real focus these days. During the darkest days of the recession, when stocks kept tumbling and real estate prices crashed, he began buying houses at the bottom of the market, which he fixed up and sold to men like himself who wanted a foothold in America and a safe place to park their money. When our son turned five, Jin underwent yet another transformation. He was finally able to put away the ghost of his father. “Paul is the same age I was when I betrayed my father,” he told me. “I now understand that he would have loved me no matter what I’d done, as I’ll always love my son.”
With the burdens of a lifetime lifted from Jin’s shoulders, he started building housing tracts in Walnut, Riverside, Irvine, and Las Vegas—for Han majority people—featuring wok kitchens and following feng shui construction practices. Still not content, he opened real estate offices in the lobbies of the Hilton and the Crowne Plaza—the top San Gabriel Valley hotels for Chinese tourists—and hired “jumper consultants” to provide information on mortgages and schools, help people through the U.S. EB-5 visa process, and sell properties ranging from modest houses for speculation to luxurious mansions starting at $10 million for sons and daughters attending USC or Occidental.
I’ve found success as well. Since 2008, the price for good tea has steadily risen. Then this year, boom! Pu’er’s value skyrocketed again. My company is large—with offices in the San Gabriel Valley and Guangzhou. We sell raw, processed, and aged Pu’er from inexpensive to extremely rare and expensive blends that are given as gifts to the most powerful leaders in China. I have plenty of capital, and I do my own sourcing. I have arrangements with nearly every village on Nannuo Mountain. Farmers come to me each year, hearing I pay fairly and reliably, to tell me they’ve discovered ancient tea trees or abandoned tea gardens high, high up on the mountain. I tell them their tea must come from trees at least three hundred years old, and the farmers themselves need to drink from the leaves first to make sure the trees aren’t so wild that they’ll make people ill. My three brothers check every batch. And, if a farmer ever attempts to sneak poor-quality leaves into what he sells me, we’ll never do business again.