by Ami Polonsky
I look at Kai, Li, and Jing—all in dirty, stinking T-shirts, like me, and with identical haircuts. For a minute—just a quick minute—I can’t believe I’m here. I feel like I’m separated from the others by a clear curtain. I can’t believe the splintery, damp wood beneath my feet, or the humid wind in my hair. I can’t believe that these are my companions—filthy and wise—and I can’t believe myself, what I’ve survived.
Next to me, Jing shifts. Tears are running down her cheeks as she stares at the ramshackle factory in the distance. “Jing?” I ask, suddenly believing it—suddenly believing it all.
She turns to me. “Almost five years” is all she says, and I nod and put my hand on her shoulder.
The cat leaps onto the railing and meows until Li pets it. Somewhere above us thunder rumbles, and the moon disappears completely behind a cloud as the first raindrops hit our faces.
Clara
WHEN WE LAND in Beijing, rain is splattering so hard against the plane windows that it looks like we’re in a car wash. Mom and Dad edge into the aisle along with everybody else, and Dad opens the overhead bin.
Lola and I were both terrified of the car wash when we were little. I remember this one time when the two of us huddled on the floor of the backseat as soapy water slammed against the windows of Dad’s car. The brushes came next. They looked like giant, evil Muppets swooping in to get us, and Lola and I screamed and cried. Dad turned around, looked down at us, and said, I told you you could have waited inside with Mom.
I like a challenge! Lola had sobbed, practically choking on her tears, and Dad had laughed and laughed.
I wonder what it’s like in Yuming’s factory when it’s raining. I visualize the huge, open room that I’ve been picturing, rain slamming against its windows.
On the plane ride I had closed my eyes, but I had tried to stay awake while Mom and Dad whispered next to me about the reservations that the Chinese International Travel Service had made. I’d overheard Mom the day before, talking on the phone to someone named Alma. Alma must have pulled up our information from last time on her computer, because Mom had to correct her, explaining that only one child would be traveling with them this time. Then Mom said she had to take another call. But there was no other call.
“According to Alma, the train station in Beijing isn’t sending out tickets ahead of time anymore,” Mom had told Dad during the flight. “We have to pick them up at the station.”
“And a sleeping car isn’t available?” Dad whispered back.
“No, but we got first class. It will be fine. Remember, the seats recline?”
They whispered back and forth. Every now and then one of them nudged me and reminded me not to sleep too much. We changed planes in San Francisco and, for the rest of the journey to China, every time I opened my eyes, I could almost see Lola’s ghost perched on Dad’s armrest. Make a plan, Clara! You have three days in Beijing, and then it’s off to Shanghai. How are you going to find Yuming?
“Try to stay up, if you can,” Mom kept reminding me. “It will be close to bedtime when we arrive.”
I nodded, my eyes heavy. I’ll ask around when we’re there, I imagined saying to Lola. At the hotel, at restaurants…People speak English. There’s gotta be someone who knows of a pink factory. I’m sure there’s someone.
Finally, Mom stopped nudging me and I fell asleep, thinking those words over and over as the plane streaked toward the country where my sister was born. I’m sure there’s someone, I’m sure there’s someone, there’s got to be someone.
Now, in a cab, we make our way toward our hotel along crowded highways that turn, eventually, into small streets. Rain pounds the windows. My head is foggy with exhaustion. “What time is it here?” I ask.
“I think it’s seven fifteen,” Dad says. “Dinnertime, and then bedtime.”
“It’s eight fourteen,” Mom corrects, looking at her phone. I lean my head against the window.
“Yes, eight fourteen,” the cabdriver chimes in, in a heavy accent.
“Oh, you speak English?” Mom asks.
“Yes, little bit,” he says, smiling at Mom and me in the rear- view mirror.
Cabdrivers! I imagine Lola shouting from the front seat. I can just imagine her up on her knees, between Dad and the driver, looking back at me. Cabdrivers are a great place to start! You’ll be taking cabs constantly!
I press my lips together to hide my smile and close my eyes again as Mom and Dad ask him about the weather forecast and how crowded some of the tourist sites have been lately. The next thing I know, Dad is waking me up. We’re in front of our hotel—the same fancy stone building where we stayed three years ago. Above the glass revolving doors, in gold glowing lights, GRAND BEIJING HOTEL flashes on and off in both Chinese characters and English.
I sit in a puffy red chair in the lobby, surrounded by our luggage, while Mom and Dad check in and exchange money. I remember running through here with Lola. We loved the carpet—the swirly yellow design on the red background. Follow the Yellow Brick Road! Lola had yelled, and we’d twirled around the room until Mom and Dad made us stop.
“Remember last time?” I ask Mom and Dad sleepily as we wait for the elevator. “The shower?” They both laugh a little, and I can tell they’re thinking the same thing as me: I wish Lola were here, too, laughing along with us.
Lola had called first shower as soon as we got to the hotel. Maybe ten minutes after she turned on the water, she screamed for Mom and me to come into the bathroom. I remember peeking around the shower curtain in the steamy bathroom. The tub was about an inch away from overflowing. It’s a shower-bath! Lola had said, giggling. She plopped down into the tub and sudsy water sloshed over the sides onto the fancy bathroom floor.
Lola! Mom had yelled. Open the drain!
There is no drain! Her hair was thick with suds, and she was laughing.
Mom reached around Lola to shut off the water while Dad called the front desk. We’d like to move to a new room, I remember him saying. One that has a drain in the tub. There was a pause. A drain, he said again. You know, where the water goes down? Into the pipes? Soon, a pretty Chinese lady knocked on the door and ushered us across the hall to our new room. Lola was wrapped in a fancy hotel robe and suds were sliding down the sides of her face.
“This time, we do a room check first,” Mom announces, unlocking our door. The room is big and extravagant, just like before. Mom and Dad walk around and try out the light switches and faucets. They open and close the mini fridge and the drains before they decide that everything is in working order.
I watch them from one of the beds. I’m so tired it feels like I’m dreaming. “This room looks exactly like the one we stayed in last time,” I say. Outside the window, the city lights twinkle through a curtain of rain, and I lie back on the thin pillow.
Dad tugs at my feet. “Don’t go to sleep,” he says. I close my eyes. “The only way to conquer jet lag is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Open your eyes, Clara! Closing your eyes is the beginning of the end!”
“I’m not hungry anyway,” I mumble. I’d rather just forget dinner and go to sleep. Then we can wake up in the morning and I can get to work, tracking down Yuming.
“I just need to grab a quick shower,” Mom announces. “I feel gross from the planes.”
I nod.
“Up, Clara, up!” Dad shouts. I can’t move. Finally, he lies down next to me. “Wake me up when you’re out of the shower, then,” he mumbles to Mom.
Lola was way better at dealing with jet lag than me. Last time, I fell asleep in the middle of the day on a cement bench in the center of a wide-open room in the Beijing National Art Museum of China. I remember waking up and staring at the far-away ceiling, disoriented, as Lola pulled my shoes and socks off.
Lola! I remember Mom yelling.
I just wanted to see how asleep she was, Lola had whined, trying not to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Dad asks me now.
I turn my head in his direction. “Huh?” I ask.
“You were giggling.”
“I was?”
“Yup.”
“I guess I was having a funny dream,” I say.
Mom comes out of the bathroom, her head wrapped in an orange towel. “Everybody up!” she announces. Dad stumbles into the bathroom to shave. I change my clothes, making sure to put Yuming’s picture and note into the pocket of my clean jeans. As soon as Dad is ready, we ride the elevator back downstairs to the restaurant.
It’s the fancy one where we always ate last time, since even fancy stuff in China barely costs anything. The hostess seats us in the back, in front of flowing red curtains with swirly gold decorations. I don’t remember these curtains from before. Lola would have loved them. She would have jumped up from her seat and hidden behind them. She would have parted them and stuck just her head through and giggled. She would have done it until Mom and Dad stopped laughing long enough to tell her to quit bothering the people around us.
“Earth to Clara,” Dad says. I look at him. He and Mom are already seated on one side of the table. I’m staring at the curtains.
“Someone’s a little tired,” Mom teases. “Me, too. If I fall asleep in my food, will somebody carry me up to the room?”
“Of course,” Dad says, kissing her cheek and resting his head on top of hers. If Lola were here, she would make fake gagging noises. Dad opens the menu. He’s about to start reading when he looks up, his eyes damp. “Should we still play the translation game?” he asks.
I shrug. I’m so tired.
A few months before we went to China last time, my cousins moved to Spain. Whenever we FaceTimed with them, they’d tell us about funny English translations they’d seen around Europe. Lola’s favorite was one from a museum in Paris that said: QUIET! DO NOT BREAK OTHER EARS. I thought one from Seville was better—DANGER! NO YOU FALLS IN THE RIVER!
While we were in China, we took pictures of funny English translations we saw and emailed them to our cousins. You can usually find good ones on menus. During the flight home, my family voted for the funniest. It was a tie between a sign Lola saw in a park near the orphanage—NO HOOLIGANING!—and a label I found in a market: SPICEY CHICKEN PAWS. I had spotted it as we wandered past booths of flowers and plants and gross-looking raw meat. When I pointed it out to Lola, we started laughing so hard we could barely stand.
Now, I wonder how many of the Chinese words on American signs are wrong.
Mom rubs Dad’s hand. “We can play that tomorrow,” she says. “For now, just order anything veggie that looks familiar.” She looks down at her lap and then back up at me, a small smile creeping across her face. “Unless, that is, they have spicy chicken paws.”
Dad laughs and covers his face; it looks like he’s laughing and crying at the same time. I wish I could just skip dinner and go upstairs. If Lola were here, maybe Mom and Dad would let us go on our own. Straight to the room and straight to bed, they’d say. No fooling around!
The waitress comes over to take our order, and Dad points to a few things on the menu. “Being here brings back so many memories,” he says, wiping his eyes with his napkin when she walks away. “All of a sudden, I can’t stop thinking about Lola’s adoption—the first time I held her. She didn’t even seem confused, you know? She seemed perfectly content when she was put into my arms—like she knew she belonged with me. With us.”
Nobody says anything. “What’s your earliest memory of your sister?” Dad asks me.
“Earliest?”
“Yeah. I mean, obviously Mom and I both remember her adoption like it was yesterday.” As he talks, Mom looks at her lap. Her eyes are puffy, and they seem too big in her thin face. “But you don’t remember that, of course,” he goes on. “What’s the first thing you can remember about her?”
“Um, I’m not sure,” I say, searching my mind and feeling Yuming’s photograph in my pocket. “I mean, I remember dropping her off somewhere with Mom, and I was so upset that she was going somewhere that I wasn’t,” I say. “Maybe she was starting kindergarten?”
“Preschool,” Mom corrects quickly. “I bet it was preschool. Were you crying?”
“Yeah!” I say. “She was wearing blue jeans and a yellow shirt.”
“With a rainbow on it?” Mom asks.
“Yeah, a rainbow, and she was walking through a door with a teacher or some lady and she stuck out her tongue at me, like ‘Ha-ha, I’m going somewhere cool and you’re not.’”
“That was preschool,” Mom says, nodding and smiling. “You were so sad. It was probably ninety degrees that day, and she insisted on wearing those jeans.” Dad is playing with the cloth napkin in front of him. Mom continues, “I think she wore them every single day that summer. They were too short on her, but she would not give them up. I have no idea what she saw in them.” She takes a drink of water. “I wonder what I did with them. I should have saved them.”
Dad puts the napkin down, looks at Mom, and gives her a little nod. “Clara, honey,” she says, all serious, breathing in and out slowly, “your father and I—well, there was—I should say, there is another purpose for this trip. One we tried to tell you about, but…Well, anyway, it’s something we didn’t tell you about. But we need to tell you now.”
I think immediately of Yuming, and, for a second, I feel dizzy with relief. We’re going to save Yuming, I picture them saying, smiling. But they’re both looking down. They’re looking down, and they’re not smiling. Dad wipes his eyes again as Mom opens her purse and takes out a tiny round silver box—like a jewelry box, which seems ridiculous, because why would they be giving me jewelry? I don’t even care about jewelry. Lola—she was the more artistic one. She was the one who would have appreciated—
“Clara,” Mom goes on, “we—Dad and I—we want you to take this.” Slowly, I reach for the box. She presses it into my hand.
“What is it?” I ask. They’re acting so weird, and I’m so tired. I’m not even hungry.
“So,” Dad says, as I wrap my fingers around the box, “when your sister was cremated, Mom and I, well, we had in mind that maybe, if it felt right, maybe we’d eventually make a trip back to China. We had a small portion of Lola’s ashes put into this—”
I drop the box onto the table. It clangs against an empty glass, and a family at the next table looks over at us. Lola would be disgusted. She would be so horrified to think of herself as dust in a silver box on this table. In a restaurant! In a restaurant where people eat and—
“Listen to us, sweetie,” Dad goes on firmly. “Your mother and I, initially, we did it for us. We did it because we thought that maybe, maybe we would feel more comfortable if part of Lola was, eventually, back in China. But now we think”—Mom and Dad look at each other again—“now we think that having this”—Dad picks up the silver box and holds it out toward me again. I don’t take it—“That having this could be more helpful for you,” he finally finishes.
“We think this is something you need. More than us,” Mom adds, wiping her eyes with her napkin again.
“What do you mean, it’s something I need?” I ask, staring at the box. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
Mom puts her hand on top of Dad’s. “We don’t know,” he says quietly. “But we think you’ll be able to figure it out.” He stares down at the table to avoid my eyes. “We think it will help you, to figure it out.”
I flush with embarrassment. I imagine Mom and Dad whispering about me at night, when I’m asleep. Clara needs help. She’s struggling. She’s suffering. She needs help. Lola would have known how to deal with this. I feel like such an idiot.
“We want this experience of being in China again to help you process your sister’s death,” Mom goes on. “To help you understand and accept that she’s”—she looks me in the eye—“To help you understand and accept that she’s not with us anymore.”
I turn my head. Before I can figure out what to say, our waitress walks toward us, smiling, with a tray.
“Here you go,” she says with a
heavy accent, placing several bowls of food in the center of the table. I don’t want her to see the silver box, so I shove it into my pocket next to Yuming’s note and picture.
Mom and Dad thank the waitress, and she bustles away. I wonder where she lives, and whether she knows of a pale-pink factory anywhere. I look around, almost like I’m searching for Lola’s ghost, but all I see is the dimly lit restaurant, the tables occupied by rich-looking Chinese families on vacation. Glasses clink. The family next to us laughs. I try to ignore the silver box in my pocket and the fact that part of Lola’s body is inside of it. Lola would hate that. She’d hate the whole idea of it.
Rain slams into the windows at the far side of the restaurant, and I can hear thunder rumbling. As I push some weird-looking food around on my plate with my chopsticks, I think, There’s got to be someone in this hotel who has seen Yuming’s factory. There must be someone who could tell me how to get to her. The silver box presses into my thigh so I shove it deeper into my pocket.
That’s the only thing I need from this trip.
Yuming
THE GRUMBLING OF my stomach is loud enough to be heard over the groans of thunder, and despite the fact that we’re huddled under the awning of a closed store, I’m soaked. Massive puddles have already formed in the dirt road. The moon, visible just a little while ago, is completely hidden; it’s pitch-black now.
“Well, I guess we’re officially safe from Mr. Zhang,” Kai says from somewhere to my left, a hint of anger in his voice. “He couldn’t see or hear us even if he was across the street right now. We should have gone to that bar. Maybe someone would have let us stay in their home overnight if—”
“No way,” I say. “That would have been stupid.”
“Okay,” Jing pipes in, “enough debating. What are we going to do? I’m starving.”
“Me, too,” Li announces.