The first of which, I know, is having to withdraw my RISD enrollment. I keep trying to find a way around it, but there isn’t one. I can’t sail off across the country to a place I’ve always dreamed of, to seize the life I always wanted, while my parents—who I put at risk, who I physically harmed—cower inside a faded locked apartment. I can’t put myself hours away by plane when it could mean, conceivably, that something could happen to them while I’m gone. I imagine it: my mom coming back from the Lis’ one weekend and finding the house empty, my dad vanished.
And I know it’s the right thing and that I’ve signed away any right to complain, I know that, but the whole way up to the city I feel like I’m riding to a funeral. I wish I’d realized somehow at the time when I saw my work up on the wall at Neighborhood it would be the only time. I wish I’d stayed longer, maybe taken photos or something. Maybe I would’ve tried to hold on to it all a little differently.
We go through Brisbane, where when you’re going north on 101 the hills rise out your left and the Bay comes almost right up to the passenger side windows. “It’s very pretty,” my mom says.
I force a smile. “Yeah.”
“Daniel, I never imagined you would already be having gallery showings even before art school. I never expected that until next year.”
“I got lucky, I guess.”
I watch as a flock of seagulls lifts from the surface of the water and fills the sky. It’s beautiful here, I remind myself. The Bay is part of me, my history and my blood, and maybe I was just never meant to leave. And Harry and Regina will come back for breaks, probably, at least at first, and there are worse places to spend your life. You can choose to be grateful, to remind yourself that life is still a gift, and I’ll do that. Dreaming about something all your life doesn’t mean it’s yours.
“But Rhode Island is very beautiful too,” my mom says. “Sometimes I look up pictures. Very picturesque. You will be very inspired there.”
“Right,” I say. I turn back toward my window and watch as the road veers away from the water and back through the city again.
When we get there the gallery’s closed to the public, and they’re in transition: a few of the walls are already blank, a constellation of holes where there used to be an installation of cutout books nailed, crucifixion-style, to the wall. My mom spots my section immediately. I see it happen, that moment she finds mine: her whole face transforms, something in it opening up. She takes a few steps closer, transfixed, and puts her hand over her mouth as she takes in the collection, the gallery lights they have shining on each piece, the placards with my name.
“Oh, Daniel,” she whispers, almost reverently.
I can feel my face turning red. “Looks better here like this than all stacked up on my desk, huh?”
“I wish Baba could see this.”
I should’ve brought him. “I’ll take some pictures with my phone.”
“He would love this.” She points to a picture I drew over the summer of Harry, one of my favorites. “I like that one.”
“Thanks.”
She looks at me and then, fast, back at the picture. “I like your friend Harry very much.”
I nudge at a loose nail on the ground with my shoe. “He’s a good guy.”
“Relationships are very important,” she says, still looking at the picture. “Your life will change next year, and you should be careful to remember who you are and the people who care about you.”
“Mmhm.”
“Sometimes—sometimes you think you have more time for a relationship and then things change. So sometimes it’s important, Daniel, not to wait.”
“What?” There’s a tightening feeling in my chest, a heat trickling from my cheeks down my neck. What is that supposed to mean? I can barely handle watching movies with my parents where people so much as make out—I’ve never been able to imagine myself having that conversation with them. “He’s not—he’s just—”
But she turns hastily toward another picture, the one of Harold Chiu, and starts chattering about it, and then goes—slowly, with effort—up to the wall to look at them up close.
“Which one sold?” she asks, turning back to me.
“It was the one I drew of you. Remember it?”
“That one? Aiya, they should have picked another one. Someone not so old.” She waves her hand dismissively. But she’s pleased, I can tell.
One of the employees, a slim white guy wearing dark clothes and a thin gray tie, comes over to ask me how I want to carry everything out, and my mom hangs back. I’m aware of the clock running, the Uber fare racking up while the driver waits outside.
My mom’s still staring at the pictures when I turn back to her. “The Li children—they grow up so coddled,” she says. “They have everything. But you—” And then she surprises me; she reaches up and wipes her eyes, opening her mouth the way she does putting on mascara, like maybe she’s about to cry. “We never taught you this. You did it on your own. You are strong and independent and you work hard. You have accomplished so much already.” Impulsively, and fiercely, she hugs me—another surprise; I can’t remember the last time she did. “Daniel, you make us very proud.”
It takes them fifteen minutes to wipe all trace of me from their walls. The driver brings the car around again, and my mom goes to sit while I make a couple trips back and forth to carry everything. On the last one, I stop one of the girls working today. “Can I ask you to look something up?”
She smiles and leans a little closer. “Sure, what?”
“Mrs. Padilla said someone bought one of my pieces, and I was wondering if you could look up who. I’m just curious.”
“Sure.” She goes to open a cabinet and comes back with a ledger. “What was the name of the piece that sold?”
“It was called Ma at Home.”
“Do you know the date it was sold?”
“It was last month sometime.” It’s hard to believe it’s only been that long.
“And you’re Danny Cheng, right?”
I won’t pretend I’m not flattered that she knows that. “Yeah.”
“I like your work. It’s deceptive. When I first saw the installation I thought, Okay, so they’re tricked-out portraits, but they made me feel so weird I couldn’t stop looking at them. I couldn’t believe it when they told me you were eighteen.” She runs her finger through the notebook. “Okay, here we go. C. Ballard.”
I feel the little flare of shock pass over my face.
“Thank you,” I manage. “You weren’t here when he bought it, were you?”
“No, I was off last week.” She straightens and smiles at me again. “Hey, good luck with everything, Danny Cheng. I’m going to keep an eye out. I think the world will be seeing a lot more of you.”
I should’ve taken pictures of everything my dad had in that file. I don’t remember enough of it. But when we get home and my mom, exhausted, passes out on the pullout bed, I look up everything—everything—I can think that might have any connection at all.
C Ballard San Francisco. C Ballard assault. C Ballard Tseng Huabo. C Ballard Danny Cheng. Nothing, nothing—either too many results, or too few. I can imagine my dad tapping out these same internet trails on these same keys. C Ballard Neighborhood. I get desperate: C Ballard art.
And I can’t say what it is that makes me click on a link from a few months ago, an academic paper from Ecology: Age-related variation in reproductive output and success in Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis) breeding at low latitudes. The paper’s behind a paywall, but there’s a list of names that begins: C. Joy Ballard. Art Gomez.
C. Joy, huh.
Searching C. Joy Ballard and then just Joy Ballard hands me pages of meaningless results; it’s the same on Facebook, too much to wade through. I go back to the bird paper again. I am my father’s son; I know the last author listed on any academic paper (in this case: Jonathan Perez) is almost always the PI. I look up Perez lab and am rewarded: a sterile-looking UC Berkeley page with grad student mug sh
ots. C. Joy is halfway down the page: Joy Ballard, a Kim Geefay Tu Rogel Fellow, is conducting research at the Tule Field Station in Modoc County, California. She’s Asian (didn’t Harry say Clay Ballard was talking about Chinese American daughters?) and something about her face—it looks familiar. I can feel the room around me dimming, and my eyes start to burn the way they do when I get too locked into something on my screen.
When I look up Joy Ballard on Facebook again I add Berkeley this time, and this time I find her. Most of her profile is private, but a few people have tagged her in pictures that’re public. I scroll through them. I feel overheated, even though I’m pretty sure it’s cold in here. The nagging idea coursing through my head seems on the one hand ludicrous, but then what about the past months hasn’t been?
The picture I think I was subconsciously looking for is posted by a person who must be her sister (Ruth Ballard; she’s Asian too, and looks nothing like Joy). It’s a small kid sitting on a counter, eating some kind of batter off a spoon: Joy, according to Ruth’s caption. She’s young, probably three and a half or so, with short-cropped hair and wearing nothing but polka-dot shorts and a huge smile. And because every face has its share of the generic you can see what you want to in anything, in any image, any situation. I know this. I have taken advantage of it my entire life to draw the things I have. But seeing her there something in me lights up all at once, something primal and electric, like bioluminescence—the plankton my dad took me to see once in Santa Cruz during red tide, that shock of water throwing off a glow where there should’ve been nothing but dark. And I can feel bright blazing lines slicing across all the vastness of the universe between me and her and I can feel how those lines sink coordinates into the gallery, our footsteps and fingerprints there crisscrossed over each other’s, the time that separated us distilling and flattening into a single heavy point. And I am certain—I am certain—that the person who bought my picture is the same person in that picture my grandfather drew in the letter home to my parents.
I get up and leave my room before I can talk myself out of it. The apartment is wavering around me like heat rising off asphalt. My mom is lying on the couch still, and when I come in she stirs and opens her eyes.
“Ma,” I say, my voice coming out shaky. “I need to ask you something.”
With visible effort, she hoists herself up. “What is it, Daniel? What’s wrong?”
“Who is Joy Ballard?”
I won’t ever forget the look that goes over her face—her features frozen sharply in place and the well of pure pain that pools in her eyes. “I don’t know who—”
“Joy Ballard is the one who bought my drawing.”
“She what?”
“She bought my drawing.”
My mom grips the edge of the blanket thrown across the couch/bed. Her hands are trembling. “You spoke to her?”
“No, the gallery told me.”
She presses a hand against her chest, hard, and holds it there. She takes a long, shaky breath, and then another one. She’s shaking still.
And I don’t know what makes her decide. Maybe it’s that I already know the rest of it; maybe it’s that you can only bury things for so long. Whatever it is, she finally drops her hand and says, “Come sit down, Daniel. I’ll tell you.”
Hu Yongyu is the name of the man who lives across the hall from where you and your parents and your grandfather all used to live together, your whole world contained in a single apartment. He is a factory worker who lives with his elderly parents, both of whom suffer health problems and are descending into dementia, and his life with them, stuffy and cramped, is filling him with rage and terror at the trajectory his own storyline seems to be hurtling toward—that this will be his own future, too, dying alone cooped up in a tenth-story apartment somewhere, only he’ll have no child to care for him or cook for him or bring him books and postcards and bootlegged DVDs from the outside world, no wife to meet his needs. Or, worse, he’ll work his factory job until he no longer can, and then he’ll probably be reduced to begging on the streets, taking his last gasping breaths ridiculed and alone.
There are dark villages in the internet, and Hu, who has never been able to feel all the pains and heartaches and graces of the outside world, travels toward and then through them, absorbing their languages and culture, their ideology. It’s easy to distill the universe into the imbalance he finds in their embrace—what exists in the world versus what of it he can personally claim, which is far from enough. And it’s in there that he learns about how much money the Americans will pay for babies, and in those faceless worlds Hu meets people—people who know someone, people who know someone who knows someone. He hears of the mindlessly easy fortunes amassed, the jobs quit, the fancy cars bought and cities visited and of course the women everywhere.
How lucky to change one’s entire life in a single move that way. People, he has learned, are useless; he is not skilled enough to extract from them the life he deserves, and absent that, they provide him nothing. His own parents, whose duty it is to provide him with all he is entitled to, have failed. But the things he read online fill him with hope and promise, and he files away the names and locations and details.
It’s a few months later that Hu comes home to the commotion inside his building. He is stunned at first, unable to believe what’s happened. But this is the opportunity he’s been waiting for—it is easier than he ever dreamed—and he brings you inside his apartment. (Later the investigator will find your DNA inside; Hu’s fast-deteriorating parents, who will let him look at Hu’s computer, will not register what this means.) His parents are delighted by you. His mother asks to hold you, but you thrash your way out of her arms, frantic. His mother coos over you, unreached by your screams, and pads to the kitchen to find you a snack. You are trying to open the door—you understand that your own home is outside it—but you’re too small, and his mother, smiling, holding a bowl, finds you and pulls you away.
Hu goes to his computer. It’s easy to go back and find that online village—always open, always populated—and track down all the information he needs, reach out to his contacts and make arrangements.
He takes you by taxi—multiple taxis, to make it harder to trace, as has been suggested to him. He has no car seat, so he has to hold you on his lap. You have never liked strangers, and you are afraid. You beg for your grandfather and your parents, ask for milk, for a snack, for the stuffed bird your grandfather gave you. Hu is irritated. He snaps at you to be quiet. You break down into sobs.
The orphanage whose location and details he’s siphoned from the internet is four hours away. You scream most of the way—he is furious—but finally fall asleep sprawled across the back seat. You stir as he pulls you out of the taxi.
“Hello,” he says to the woman who appears before him in the orphanage when he pushes open one of the doors. “I heard you might be able to help me.”
The adoption agency was on the second floor of a four-story building, above a pharmacy. The sign outside the door was in English. My parents arrived nearly a year after my grandfather died and the investigator they hired, who’d cost them their entire savings and drained the loan they’d managed to take at the bank, had finally pieced together what had happened to their daughter.
They’d retraced all her steps, spoken to the people he’d fingered as being involved, and so far they’d been met with denial, evasion, and stonewalling at nearly every turn. It had been impossible to pin down any one person. Hu had vanished—his parents, in the throes of dementia, were confused by his absence, sometimes forgetting he was gone at all and incoherent when my parents tried to speak to them—and no one from the factory knew where he’d gone. At the orphanage where Hu had brought my sister the staff had acted confused, claiming not to remember her, then claiming the baby had been dropped off by her destitute father and released to an aid worker. (It was all lies, probably, but what could they prove? According to the investigator, the orphanage was desperately poor and needed the money to care f
or its older children, who were unlikely to be adopted; it asked no questions about the money it was given in exchange for the babies dropped here for a few days and then taken again. One of the staff there remembered my sister only because of how she’d screamed and screamed when she was taken away.) At every step they’d hoped beyond hope the inspector had been wrong and that they’d find my sister waiting. They imagined over and over what it would feel like to burst in and scoop her up and have her melt into their arms, cling to their chests with her little fat hands, bury her face in their shirts, how she’d feel relieved and safe. She would know them, after all these months. They had gone multiple times to the police, who told them their daughter was probably long gone—that twenty thousand kids were abducted in China every year, most never to be heard from again. Stop looking, the police told them. You won’t find her. One of the officers, trying to be kind, had added, It’s better not to know.
And now they were at the adoption agency. On the way here they’d assured each other it would be fine. She would be taken care of; no one paid twelve thousand US dollars for a child and then harmed her. It could’ve been worse, my dad said; she could’ve been sold into—
But my mom cut him off. There were places her mind wouldn’t let her go.
My mom smoothed her hair and practiced a smile for her child. Her heart was pounding so hard she put her hand against her chest to try to calm it. My parents clutched each other’s hands and my dad knocked.
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