by Ami Polonsky
One lightbulb spirit is Wai Po. Hello, Wai Po. I think of you every day. One is Wai Gong. I’m trying, Wai Gong. And the third—the third is Bolin. Where are you? I beg him silently, tears threatening to escape from my eyes. It’s only the two of us now. What will become of our home? Our rice crop? Where did you go? The bare bulb hangs still in the suffocating air. A fly buzzes around it. It doesn’t answer. Bolin never answers.
I blink away tears and pick up the seam ripper. I tug at the bright-green threads, thinking back again to the day of the note.
The door to our basement room snapped open and Mr. Zhang entered, as he does every day, to evaluate our work. I had watched him, my stomach churning, as he examined the sewing of the children in the rows in front of mine. I’d hastily attached the amber handle that I was working on; it jutted sideways from the purse like a broken bone, and I swallowed hard, knowing that if he looked closely at my sewing, he would surely notice it.
He paced stiffly up and down the rows, his hands behind his back, grasping his clipboard with pages and pages of order numbers and shipping dates as he peered over the others’ shoulders. Even the tiny ones, their clothes dirty and their noses running—some of them smaller even than Min Li, my six-year-old neighbor back home—didn’t flinch as Mr. Zhang walked past. They sewed and sewed like always, their bony backs hunched in front of Jing and me.
I stared down at my purse handle. Next to me was the seam ripper, its sharp point glistening in the glow of the lightbulb directly overhead. Mr. Zhang’s footsteps approached the last row where Jing and I sat alone on the long bench. If he saw me removing the stitching, he would know for certain about my mistake. If I didn’t do anything, he’d most likely see the messy row of amber thread and the crooked handle. He’d chastise me for my sloppiness and for not correcting my error.
Definite punishment or probable, more severe punishment? I asked myself, weighing my options, thinking of xiangqi. Probable. I pushed down on the foot pedal and concentrated on sewing a straight line. I covered the mistake awkwardly with the palm of my left hand as I worked.
Mr. Zhang was almost behind me, and my heartbeat thumped along with the quick chug, chug, chug of my sewing machine. I held my breath. Keep walking, I begged silently. Don’t stop here.
But the footsteps stopped.
Mr. Zhang’s arm reached for the purse. I lifted my foot from the pedal and watched the needle stop above the stiff amber handle and wait there. He pulled the purse off the sewing machine and slapped his clipboard down on the table next to me. With his other hand, he reached for the scissors—the extra-sharp ones with the orange handle. He cut my thread, snapping the purse free from the machine. I looked down at my lap and listened to the sound of him turning the purse over and over.
His voice was sharp. Your work is sloppy. He spit the words at the back of my head, picking up the seam ripper and yanking out the amber threads with angry tugs. Start again, he ordered, shoving the purse back at me. There were tiny holes in the fabric where my crooked stitching had been.
No lunch for this one, he announced to the guard at the other end of the room. Nobody had stopped sewing, but everyone could hear him. She needs all the time she can get to practice her craft.
His words made me furious. I was starving. I’d finish each paltry meal only slightly less hungry than when I started it.
I glanced at the clipboard on the wooden table next to me. I need to get this order to Beijing tonight, Mr. Zhang grumbled angrily.
I examined the rows of numbers and cities. Most of the ship from locations were Beijing. A few were Shanghai. All of the ship to were in the United States of America.
Get back to work. Mr. Zhang scowled at me. Get. To. Work.
There was a knock on the door behind the guard—a series of six quick taps—and he jumped to open it. Another young guard’s nervous face appeared. Mr. Zhang, he announced, there was a small fire in front.
A what?! Mr. Zhang cried.
I froze, beads of sweat suddenly dotting my forehead. The chugging slowed around me, but nobody looked up from their sewing machines.
Blood pounded in my ears as my eyes frantically searched the basement room, even though I already knew what surrounded me—four cement walls, a low cement ceiling, one filthy bathroom, no windows, and the guarded door.
It has been extinguished, but two employees were injured, and one of the machines is now inoperable.
Mr. Zhang cursed under his breath. I cannot afford to lose any machines, he bellowed. He stormed toward the guard and disappeared into the dark factory, slamming the door behind him. The guard stood to lock it.
In his haste, Mr. Zhang had left his clipboard behind. There was a pen attached to it by a string. I hadn’t held a pen in over a month.
I picked it up and, glancing at the guard’s back, pulled it toward me. It reminded me of the schoolhouse back home; of the dusty chalkboard and the whispering, giggling students; of our solid table where I used to study in the evenings; of all the places I might never see again. The pen felt alive in my hands.
The idea emerged like a bird from an egg; it came to me, fully formed, crystallized, the way the answers often came to me during exams at school. I weighed all my options and measured the risk. As I did so, the chug, chug, chug sounded to me like twenty-one panicked heartbeats—too fast. Unsteady. But then there was my heart, which felt firm in my chest for the first time since I’d arrived at this prison.
I sneaked a look back at the guard. He was seated again, and picking at his fingernails. The stack of paper on the clipboard was thick, and I flipped through it furtively. There were dozens of pages of numbers, dates, and addresses.
The sounds of the sewing machines that masked the constant grumbling of my belly would surely mask the sound of ripping paper. The guard now had his head tilted back, his eyes shut. The door was still closed.
I took a deep breath and steadied my hands. As quietly as I could, I ripped a large corner off a piece of paper in the middle of Mr. Zhang’s stack. I’d torn through some figures, but the other side of the paper was blank. After a quick peek at the backs of the children in front of me and at the guard, whose eyes were still shut, I hunched over the scrap and scribbled a few sentences in English, grateful for the education that Wai Gong had always told me to appreciate. When I was done, I folded the note quickly into a flat square.
Then I hesitated.
In my pocket was my photograph—the one that had been taken two years ago at the “lucky fountain” at Molihua Park. I was eleven at the time; Bolin was sixteen. Wai Gong, Wai Po, and I had accompanied Bolin to Shanghai, where my brother had decided that he was going to find work. When a vendor approached us and offered to take a family photograph, Wai Gong had said, I think we should do it, surprising all of us. After all, this is our lucky fountain now. Bolin will find work near here to help support our family! So we’d posed beside the water, the wind blowing my hair, and the young man had printed the photo at his stand.
I peered up one last time before slipping it from my pocket, where I’d kept it every day and night since Wai Gong’s death. It was wrinkled and tattered, and I ran my fingers over the four smiling faces.
I held my breath as I folded the photograph carefully into a square. I tucked it and my note into the small purse pocket, zipped the pocket closed, and sewed the strap on carefully—perfectly—before tossing the purse into the growing, colorful pile at the side of the room.
Jing tapped her fingernails on the wooden bench. My heart jumped into my throat. She had seen! Would she tell? I glanced at her eyes, but they were fixed on her sewing. Then I looked at her hand. She was giving me a thumbs-up.
I couldn’t help smiling a little as I breathed again and picked up another amber purse and handle. I had resumed sewing just as Mr. Zhang barged in, startling the guard. I kept my eyes glued to the purse in front of me as he snatched up his clipboard and marched back through the door, slamming it behind him once more.
And now, six weeks later, no
thing has come of it. It was a risk that did not pay off. I sacrificed the only photograph in existence of my family. I search my mind for what Wai Gong may have taught me about how to learn from such gambles, but exhaustion is moving in now. It’s clouding my mind. I glance over at Jing—at the deep, dark brushstrokes below her eyes—and I wonder once again what time it is. I wonder when Mr. Zhang will burst through the door into our musty prison and tell us that, at last, it’s time to sleep.
Clara
I WALK SLOWLY through the purses and panty hose, the shoes and men’s dress shirts, to the door of Bellman’s labeled WEST PARKING LOT. Every few steps, I look up to make sure I’m not about to crash into a wall or something, but, mostly, I stare down at the note in my hand. And the photograph—that photograph—it’s of Molihua Park. We’ve been there. It’s the giant, famous park in Shanghai where a man whose name we never learned found Lola crying in a cardboard box when she was just a few days old.
I tear my eyes away from the water flowing over the stone tiers and examine the family standing to the side of the fountain. It looks like a grandmother, a grandfather, and two kids—a boy and his younger sister. The girl’s long hair is blowing in the wind. The family looks happy—like we used to be.
I wonder which one wrote the note, the brother or the sister. Neither of them looks thirteen to me. And trapped in a factory? How could a thirteen-year-old be trapped in a factory, anyway? It sounds like something that used to happen in China in the olden days.
I look back at the fountain—the one that Lola and I threw coins into when we were in Shanghai two years ago. They could be in there; our coins could have actually been in that fountain when this picture was taken.
I push through the doorway into the blazing heat, cross the street, not looking for Dahlia anymore—not even caring—and sit down on a bench outside of Brother’s Bakery to wait for Dad. A hot wind blows and I hold tightly to my note and photograph, the backs of my legs on fire against the metal bench. The heat and the familiarity of that park make everything around me blur and boil.
In the hospital, it was always freezing; everything was freezing—the chairs, the doorknobs, the bed rails, the trays of gross hospital food. Mom, who was always worried about me and Lola being too cold, even before Lola got sick, would layer blanket upon blanket over Lola’s skinny, weak body in the hospital bed until her pale cheeks turned pink. Help me, Clara, she’d whisper when Mom wasn’t listening, trying to smile. And, with goose bump–covered arms, I’d pull some of the layers away.
A lady pushes a stroller through the shimmery heat in front of me. The revolving door into Brother’s Bakery swirls behind me. I read the note again. It almost feels like I’m not really here—like the day nine months ago when Mom and Dad sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that Lola had relapsed.
Lola left us notes to find after she died. Even though they were addressed to me, she really left them for Mom and Dad, because I was the one who had to hide them around the house for her. In the hospital, she wrote hundreds of messages on pale- pink paper—things like: I love you guys. Grandpa Morris and I are playing chess together on a cloud. I’m totally destroying him! Love always, Lola. She’d pass them to me when Mom and Dad were out in the hall, talking to the doctors in quiet, frantic whispers, and I’d tuck them into my backpack and bring them home.
After she died, when Mom and Dad went to the funeral home to make arrangements, I hid her notes everywhere. I pulled books down off shelves and tucked the pink papers between the pages. I put them under Mom and Dad’s pillows. I scattered them through their underwear and sock drawers. I stashed them with the silverware, under couch cushions, in the piano bench, under the grill lid, and in the gardening shed. I did it because Lola told me to, and because I wanted to keep her alive for Mom and Dad.
A car horn honks and I snap my head up. Dad is waving to me through the closed window, the air around his car glistening in the heat. I stand up. I don’t know what to do with this letter and photograph, but Dad will.
He’s scrolling through something on his phone—probably a text from Mom asking him how I’m doing, if I seem like myself. I open the car door and look one more time at Yuming’s photograph before getting in. Finding a picture of this park in a purse in Bellman’s seems way too coincidental not to mean something.
It’s almost like, this time, the message is for me.
Yuming
ONE LIGHTBULB IS on in the corner and a thin, solitary figure sews below it. It’s probably Xiu Lan, a girl about my age who sits near the front of the room. It must be the middle of the night by now; a while ago, the younger children were ushered off to the sleeping barracks, but only after Mr. Zhang had lined them up, as always.
“What did you do today?” he had hissed, trying to scare them.
“We played and learned!” they had chanted in unison, as they have been taught.
“Did you sew?”
“We are too young to sew!”
He had nodded in approval before shoving them through the narrow doorway.
Jing and I and the older ones lie on the benches and the cold basement floor. I could work extra hours in exchange for a cot in the barracks, but it would take more than the promise of a lice-infested mattress to persuade me to sew overtime. Before we know it, Mr. Zhang will burst through the door, startling the sleeping guard. He’ll wake us brusquely, standing on tabletops to turn on the rest of the overhead bulbs.
It’s in the darkness, with the sound of the sewing machines subdued, that the demons often come to haunt me. I turn onto my back, desperate to find a comfortable position. On the floor next to me, Jing is breathing as if she’s still awake even though she hasn’t moved. I consider whispering her name. We have exchanged hushed pleasantries during the chaos of transitions—the lining up for lunch, the shuffling for a seat in the cafeteria or a spot on the floor upon which to sleep—but I long for a real conversation. How long have you been here? I want to ask her. Where did you come from? We can’t stay here forever, can we?
But now, in the nearly quiet room, with the night guard not twenty meters away, is not the time. Instead, I pray for sleep. I know that if it doesn’t come, the other things will—the ghostly, dark things that seep into my brain like water; the things that make me feel as if I’m drowning.
I try to keep them away by remembering the breezes that rolled over the yellowing fields back home, rustling the rice stalks until they looked like the wild ocean waves I saw two years ago when we visited Shanghai. I think up crazy things, like time-traveling back to my old life. When I’m very drowsy, a lullaby that Wai Po used to sing weaves its way into my ears. Tears burn behind my closed eyelids as I hear her soft, creaky voice. The moon is bright, the wind is quiet, tree leaves hang over your window…
I block it by thinking, instead, of the amber purse holding my secret—the purse that was loaded onto a plastic cart by a woman with empty-looking eyes six weeks ago.
It’s so hard to keep my thoughts in one place. I wonder if I’m going mad.
An image bursts into my mind, and again I shift on the cement floor: Molihua Park, quiet and foggy in the early April morning, three months ago. A group of graceful men and women were practicing Tai Chi in the mist on the far side of the fountain. They arched their arms in unison as sleepy street vendors set up their stands just outside the main gates. None of the vendors were Bolin, of course. Always restless and adventurous, he had left Shanghai a year before, and since then had been traveling from city to city, exploring and working, sending money every few months. He would include a quick note wishing us well, but not a return address. Never still—just like his father, Wai Po would grumble when she thought I wasn’t listening.
It had been a year since Bolin had worked at a food stand in Molihua Park, but I went there after Wai Gong died, because I didn’t know where else to begin looking for him. Perhaps I would find somebody he used to work with who knew of his whereabouts, I’d thought; he made friends wherever he went. I dreaded tel
ling him about Wai Gong. He still didn’t know about Wai Po’s death, six months before.
I wandered up and down the street in the gray light and asked each vendor as they arranged their goods, Do you know of a teenager—Niantu Bolin? From Yemo Village in Anhui Province? But not one of them had even heard of my brother, and I didn’t know what to do. I drifted back into the park and stood by the fountain looking around, my shoes covered in morning dew.
Weigh your options, Yuming. I sat on a bench to wait for the rest of the merchants to arrive. Surely someone would know of him—the teenager from the countryside, with the easy laugh and twinkling eyes, who used to work at a stand on this very street.
I leaned my head back against the stone wall behind the bench, closed my eyes, and waited for the sun to rise completely. I had never been on my own outside of our tiny village. My groggy mind swam with nervousness and exhaustion.
The bench jostled as someone sat down next to me—close to me—and quickly, I sat forward.
Are you looking for a better life? the stranger on the bench asked me softly. I looked at the man—his yellow Windbreaker, his greasy hair. I can give you a better life.
Adrenaline surged through my sleepy veins, and I stood to leave, feeling dizzy with shock.
He stood, too.
I turned to walk away, my vision swimming, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me close. I gasped, and he smiled. I have a very sharp knife in my pocket, he told me quietly, looking ahead. Do not make me use it.
Nothing felt real. This life is not my life, I thought to myself.
The greasy man pushed me along inconspicuously, subtly looking over his shoulder as we walked. Instinctively, I curled my toes into tight knobs, as if trying to grasp the pavement underneath my shoes—as if trying to hold on to the hope of finding Bolin; to Wai Po’s and Wai Gong’s spirits; to everything that I sensed was about to disappear.