by Samuel Shem
Nobody is on the street. No cars or trucks or bicycles. It’s quiet except for the humming of the street lights like the rays are fighting their way through the foggy night. Now she will just wait from 3:04 to 5:00 and go back in. The train will be gone and they’ll have to stay. That’s the plan. She hurries down the street a block and ducks into an alley where she sits down on a big wooden crate to wait. You go girl! That’s what Mary always says to me when I hesitate like with Velcro. “You can’t hesitate with a horse,” she says, and then when I don’t hesitate and that brat does what I want she always gives me a thumbs-up and says, “You go girl!” And I tingle all over at how I did go girl and did good.
As she waits, she goes back over what has happened. She feels that she tried everything to get them to understand how much she wants to stay to find her birth mom. She tried everything and they hardly even listened. Do they think that she didn’t hear them ask Tao if her birth mom wants her back? How can I tell them that it doesn’t matter if she wants me back? There’s no way I’d go back to her—I’ve already got a mother and father, I don’t need any others. But a sister’s a different story.
Katie finds herself staring out at a little shop across the alleyway, a shop whose sign she can’t read but whose window display has all kinds of metal parts and some tools that look already used, rescued from trash. All over China she’s seen Chinese people combing through trash barrels and junk piles, hunting for anything of value. She is amazed at how everything in China is used, how anything that is thrown away is recycled.
Thinking, Like I was.
The thought surprises her. It’s weird at first, but then something else happens. Something else seems to surround it like darkness surrounds day with a shadowy sadness and it pulls her down so that she feels like she’s fallen into a black pit in the middle of her stomach and she wants to cry but another brand-new thought stops the falling and stops the something else.
It’s not only that I want to find my birth mom. I need to find my birth mom. That’s what they don’t understand. When I see them again, when they’ve missed the train and the plane, I’ll tell them that. I never understood that before and now I do and once you understand something like that you never forget it ever how can you?
“I’ll tell them that,” she whispers to the shop, to the metal parts and orphaned tools, as quiet sitting there in their shop window as she is sitting there on her crate in the alley in the coal-y dark night. She looks at her watch—3:16. She can’t imagine waiting one hour and forty-four more minutes just sitting there in the alley, and besides, she has to pee. In China kids can pee on the street, in alleys, in corners. That’s an idea, she even carries some tissues in her left-hand pants pocket—like her dad always does. Good idea, Dad. She goes deeper into the little alley. If she just makes sure not to let her shorts touch the—God what’s that? An animal or a plant—maybe a brown furry vegetable—is hiding by the wall a few inches from her feet. She tries to hurry, but it’s hard to hurry your pee. She hasn’t touched anything but her hands feel gross anyway. Now what.
There’s a rustling nearby. She jumps, scared. A dog.
She doesn’t touch it. They told her that just about every animal in China has rabies—but she doesn’t have to touch it to be friends with it. It’s more scared of her than she is of it—she can see that. It looks like a dingo dog in Africa or is it Australia, big, wide, pointy ears and a narrow black snout, and mostly yellow but you can see her hungry ribs. Her nipples are really big and black and her breasts are full of milk so that means she’s got babies! “Hey, little dingo dog!” Her tail’s wagging. Anything she can give her to eat? There’s that dumpling Mom put in her pocket just in case. She takes it out and offers it. “Here, dingo dog, here you go.” The dog slinks back, so she tosses it. The dingo edges closer, sniffs, grabs the dumpling, and gobbles it up, then turns to go.
“Hey, wait! Wait for me!” The dog waits. Katie follows her. The dog keeps on, turning her head away and then back like she wants to show Katie her babies. “Okay, let’s go!” That’s what we say to Cinnamon Our Fluffy Pup I call him Dad calls him Our Pampered Pooch or Our Yuppie Puppy when we take him for a walk.
She is lost. She looks around, and the small street she is on looks exactly like every other small street she has been on. There are street signs and other signs, but all of them are in Chinese, and she wishes she tried to learn the language when she had the chance. She feels bad that her parents tried so hard, and she didn’t see the sense in it. She wanted to take Spanish because her friends at Spook did. Big mistake. She lost her friends and didn’t learn Chinese or even Spanish that well either. Now she feels bad at how worried they’ll feel when they wake up for the trip back and find her gone. She should’ve written a note but she was too mad. They’ll go bananas.
The night seems even darker; the air is really wet and even thicker and smells a lot like coal dust. She thought she could remember which way she came, but now she can’t. Dingo dog is looking back at her, still trying to get her to follow. Maybe if she did, she’d lead her back, because dogs have an instinct to find their way home. But maybe that wasn’t her home and she was just out hunting for food, and her babies are where her real home is. She knows she shouldn’t follow her any farther. This is no joke. It’s 3:44.
Her mother has told her that if you’re lost the most important thing is not to panic. She takes a deep breath and looks around. She decides to find her own way. Little streets have to lead to bigger streets. If she can get to a big street where there are lots of people or a park or a bus station or train station or even a police station, someone might speak English and take her back to the hotel. The Dripping Cave Hotel.
She wishes she could say it in Chinese, but all she can say is “hello” and “goodbye” and “thank you” and the word for “American,” which she thinks now is “A-mo-ran” or “Meg-oh-ran.” So she figures if she walks far enough she’ll come to a big street and maybe somebody will speak English and she will say, “I am lost please take me to the Dripping Cave Hotel?” The Chinese people are kind. If they understand her they will help her. Safer than in America, her father always says. She feels better now that she has a plan. But it’s so dark and misty and there haven’t been any people around, none! and her plan doesn’t seem that good a plan really, and she is getting more and more scared. She walks on. She tries to keep her spirits up by whistling, but the sound is so lonesome in the dark, tight streets, disappearing into the bitter-tasting coal mist like light into a long, curvy tunnel, that she stops, and just walks.
She walks for almost another half hour and has not found a main street or a person. She finds herself in a maze of tiny alleys lined by darkened shops and low, dead buildings, and once in a while, behind a high fence with barbed wire on top, a huge pile of coal glistening under a humming streetlamp. The only things she recognizes are signs for Coca-Cola. It’s after four, which means that her parents are up. Up and panicking, wondering where she is. She thinks they’ll probably figure it out, but still. And even if they knew why, they wouldn’t be able to find her.
Nobody who knows me can find me!
Exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, she sits down on the edge of a stone, next to where water is dripping out of a metal pipe sprouting out of a stone wall. It’s drinking water probably—but she knows not to drink it, it’s drinking water only for Chinese. Suddenly she feels scared, and then real scared. She is alone and unknown in the middle of nowhere and she can’t even take a drink and can’t tell anybody anything and she starts to panic—it hits her belly and then goes up into her head so everything goes fuzzy and she feels totally alone, abandoned but not out in a wilderness with nothing in sight but under something, in and under something cool and damp and all ridgy and leafy, closing in, rubbing against her, weighing down and over her so she can’t breathe and no one’s there no one hears her cries no one! She starts to cry, j
ust lets go and wails. Please God help me please let them find me please I’m sorry I’ll never do this again just get me back to them safe and sound! Her body shakes, everything blurs, she screams, “Momma! Momma! Momma!”
Stops. Hears her voice echo off the stone walls. Silence. Nobody answers. She has stopped sobbing, but keeps on shivering inside. She sits, waits, not knowing what she’s waiting for, except to be saved.
After a while, the far end of the narrow street brightens, and then glows. Dawn is a relief. The first angel rays of sun thread their way through the opening of the street, making the coal dust sparkle, and hit the tops of the buildings, changing the stone all around her to a weird-like rosy color. She checks her watch—5:21. They missed their train. She sits and sits.
Pa-clop pa-clop pa-clop pa-clop...
A horse coming up the small street toward her, totally black. He is pulling a wooden cart with car tires and a man is sitting on the cart. The man has a round straw hat like a big nipple on a bottle. It’s pulled down so he can see into the blinding low rays of the sun. Half his face is hidden but what she can see of it is all black too. He wears a black long-sleeved shirt and she can’t tell what he’s sitting on in the cart but it’s black too. Like in Orpheus and Eurydice where the Underworld People were all in black including her and the two others playing Cerberus the three-headed dog guarding the Gates of Hell. Maybe this is help. Maybe I’m going to be saved!
Pa-clop! Pa-clop! PA-CLOP!
She loves the sound of horseshoes on stone. It’s coming right along toward her. She wishes she had a carrot or a peppermint like she gives Velcro at Mary’s Farm. She wishes she had something to give him, to make friends and be saved by the man on the cart. The horse starts to turn a corner, away. She runs.
“Hey! Nee how nee how! Neeeeee HOWWWW!”
The horse’s ears turn but the man keeps on going like he doesn’t hear her. She runs, gets closer and closer, and goes around in front, stopping the horse so the man can’t miss her.
“Nee how!” she says as loud as she can. It echoes off the stone walls of the street.
The man is looking. He nods, says, “Nee how.” His voice is wobbly and loud.
“I’m lost!”
He nods and says something in Chinese.
“Help me!”
Another nod, and a smile. He’s pushing his big straw nipple hat up on the back of his head and the line above where it was is all white, where the sun never shines. She wonders why his face and hands are all black and then realizes that it’s because the cart is piled high with huge lumps of coal. The coal lumps glisten wet in the slant of dawn. That’s why the man and horse and cart and everything are totally black—the coal dust coats everything. He sells coal. Maybe if she goes with him he can take her to where there are other people. What else can she say to him?
“Pizza Hut?” He seems hard of hearing. “Pizza Hut!” He smiles, and says nothing. He doesn’t know Pizza Hut but why would he, he’s just a coal guy. “Burger King!?” Nothing. Doesn’t like burgers. “Dripping Water Cave Hotel!?” Another smile, but this time maybe he seems to understand. “Meg-oh-ran!” Point to yourself. “Meg-oh-ran!”
He definitely nods and smiles and motions for her to come up and sit beside him. She hesitates. Never take a ride from a stranger never ever take a ride from a stranger.
But she’s totally lost and there’s nobody else and maybe he can at least take her to the main street where people who speak English are. She tries one more time.
“MEG-OH-RAN?” He blinks his eyes—the lids are white!—and nods, and gets down from the pile of coal he’s sitting on, and gestures for her to get up and in. As if he’ll help her. Does that mean he knows she’s American? “MEG-OH-RAN!”
“Ming-wan,” he says. She hesitates to go with him. But there’s nobody else. She goes to the horse and pats it. It is thin and tired looking and the harness is old and worn and a big heavy yoke and just old leather and rope tied here and there. Not a happy horse, no. What’s he doing now?
The coal man is walking over to the side of the street—and he’s limping.
Like in our Delores’s Book of Greek Myths it said, “He walked like a flickering flame.” Who was it oh yeah Hephaestus the god of fires and blacksmiths when Zeus threw him off Mount Olympus he fell for a whole day that’s how high it was and crashed and forever after “he walked like a flickering flame.”
Now he’s sorting through a trash pile and he’s picking up something, looking carefully at it. He’s coming back and holding out one of the things to her—rotten vegetables. He feeds them to his horse. Again, more insistently, he gestures for her to get up on the wagon.
She looks into his eyes and sees two little nuggets of coal gleaming back at her. Terrified, she backs away. He limps toward her. She starts to run. She runs to the next twist of the narrow street, and looks back. He is standing, watching her. She runs on and on until she’s out of breath, stops and looks back again. No sign of him. Her chest feels like it’s on fire. She starts coughing and sneezing and, when she tries to get her breath, making a wheezing sound. She takes out a tissue and blows her nose—on the white tissue there are two circles of black soot! Gradually she calms down, breathes more easily.
She looks around, and finds that she is standing at the entrance to what seems like a park. The sun is now bright, melting the killer mist of this scary night. She sighs with relief.
A man carrying a bird in a cage, a red macaw, passes her and goes into the park. She takes a few steps after, and is amazed at the expanse opening up before her, and the numbers of Chinese people already in the park at dawn, doing exercises and martial arts with swords and ballroom dancing and meditations and playing soccer and badminton and basketball. Someone there must know English. She follows the man with the bird into the park.
He goes to the Men-With-Birds-In-Cages section. In a little grove are about twenty men and all different kinds of birds, their cages swinging from low branches of trees. The men smoke and talk, and they look happy. Anyone who loves birds can’t be all bad. Maybe one of them will speak enough English.
“Nee how, nee how,” she says to the bird guys, and they say the same back and start talking to her in Chinese. She makes gestures with her hands that she doesn’t understand, and points to herself and says, “Meg-oh-ran, megoran, do you speak English?”
“Megoran!” they say, and laugh, and start to show her their birds.
21
Pep sits alone in the hotel room. The Chinese police have come and gone, taking Rhett with them. Clio is out walking the streets with the sign Rhett made, while he waits in the room for any news. The police questioned Rhett harshly. They spoke no English and didn’t allow Rhett to say anything to Pep and Clio. They examined the room, the bed, the bathroom, the door lock—but seemed to find nothing. Then they sat Rhett down and grilled him. It was obvious they were not happy that Rhett had brought three Americans to this restricted zone. Suddenly they got up, and without a word hauled Rhett away. Before the police arrived, Rhett warned Pep and Clio that if they took him away, he would not be able to come back. He would need some money to bribe them to let him go—to just warn him and put him on a train back to Changsha. Pep gave him as much cash as he could.
He can’t stand it. He has to do something. For some strange reason, he finds himself staring into the bathroom mirror, shaving. He soaps his cheeks, his chin, his neck, and when the first scent of the almond oil lather hits him he stops, stunned as if he’s been hit by a plank, remembering how Katie loves to snuggle with him when he wakes her up in the morning and the scent of almond oil is fresh, how she says, “It’s my favorite scent in the world and not just because it’s almond but because it’s you, my daddy!” He watches his face crumple and distort into tears and he drops the brush in the sink and holds on for dear life. For dear life, yes.
Clio has wandered the streets around the hotel for hours. She carries the sign written in Chinese. It shows a photo of Katie, and her name and “THE DRIPPING WATER CAVE HOTEL” and the phone number and their names and “Big Reward $100.” The Chinese sometimes stop and stare and smile and go on. She searches their faces as if for clues or complicity and finds nothing.
Over and over like a dirge comes the thought, China has taken her back.
“Oww!” she cries out as a man jostles her hard, almost knocking her down. Reflexively she lashes out, slamming her arm awkwardly into his neck as he passes. He stops cold—it’s a hard hit, even for China—and stares at her with puzzlement, a thin, rough man dressed in a cheap short-sleeved shirt and smoking a cigarette. She stares back, hoping he’ll do something else. He laughs and laughs. Soon a crowd stops and stares, pointing at this crazy Westerner. She pushes her way through the crowd and hurries down an alley off the main street.
Just walk.
She learned walking meditation from reading Thich Nhat Hanh. With each step, count your breaths: three breaths in, four breaths out. Breathing in, think, Calm, breathing out, Smile. Place each foot with the awareness that the whole earth is underneath. Walking on lotus pads, greeting the earth rising up to meet you.
Breathing in, calm. Breathing out, smile. Can’t.
She holds the sign in front of her so everyone can see it, and after a while she finds herself walking not to a Buddhist mantra but to the Episcopal The Lord be with you. And also with you. Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give our thanks and praise. It is truly right, and good and joyful, to give you thanks, all-holy God, source of life and fountain of mercy. Give her back to me, and I’ll do anything...