Threads

by Ami Polonsky

  We ride the elevator up to the sixth floor, and as my parents check out the hotel room for non-functioning lights and drainless tubs, I walk to the window, part the curtains, and look down at Lola’s fountain. The water sparkles in the early morning light.

  Mom comes to stand behind me and rests her chin on the top of my head, not saying anything.

  “Hey!” Dad calls. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at his phone. “Listen to this! ‘Dear Mr. Clay,’ he starts to read. ‘Thank you for your recent email inquiring after the factory in Hebei Province. Chinese authorities have located a factory fitting the description in the note and have launched an investigation. We will continue to keep you informed. Sincerely, Susan Zhau.’”

  “Wow,” Mom says, sitting down next to Dad to look at his phone.

  “Amazing,” Dad says as Mom reads it again. “I could have sworn that she was going to blow us off.”

  I press my forehead against the window. I can’t believe it. Maybe giving that note to Susan Zhau actually did help save Yuming and the other kids in the factory after all.

  I turn around. “Dad? Mom?” I say. “I think I’m going to walk across to Lola’s park.”

  Mom hands Dad his phone and jumps up off the bed. “Give me a sec, honey. I’ll come with you.”

  I need to go alone, but I don’t blame them for not trusting me—not after what I did in Sunma two days ago. “Would you mind just watching me from the window?” I ask. “I have to do something. By myself.” When I see their faces go pale, I add, “I promise I won’t do anything crazy this time.”

  Mom sits back down slowly and nods as I walk out the door toward the elevator.

  Outside of the hotel, the sky is white and there’s a cool breeze. The light angles toward me from the park. I cross the quiet street, turn around, and look up. Mom and Dad wave to me from the window.

  The park smells like wet earth and also the ocean, which is just a few blocks away. I walk along the cracked cement path that leads to Lola’s fountain—to Yuming’s fountain—and I look at the semicircle of willow trees behind it. I think of Lola when she was a baby in the narrow cardboard box before she was even my sister. I can’t believe all that had to happen to bring us together—how her birth mother couldn’t take care of her and brought her to this park, how someone took her to the orphanage nearby, how my parents wanted to adopt…So many things could have turned out differently, and then I wouldn’t have known her—I never would have known my sister.

  I take the small silver box of Lola’s ashes out of my pocket and, for the first time, I unscrew the top. The ashes are grayish white and, when I touch them, they’re softer than I expected them to be. It seems so wrong and so impossible that a person could disappear, just like that—that a person could be your sister one minute and ashes in a silver box the next.

  The stone tiers of the fountain shine under a coat of dew. The drops are sparkling like glitter—like tiny drops of life—and I step closer to the edge. I stand in the spot where Lola was found almost fourteen years ago, and I think about all the layers of living that are always passing over and under one another like threads in a tapestry.

  There’s a splashing sound in front of me. I look up. Standing on the edge of the fountain is a little Chinese girl. She’s barefoot and translucent, like a spirit, and she’s smiling at me, her long black hair blowing across her face. She’s wearing an impossibly tiny yellow T-shirt with a faded rainbow on it and blue jeans that are too short on her, and she squats down to touch the water, as though she’s testing whether it’s too cold to swim in. When she stands back up, she tucks her hair behind her ears and studies me. I can see her small chest moving up and down as she breathes, and I want to reach out for her, but I know I can’t.

  She sticks her tongue out at me and, grinning, jumps down from the ledge of the fountain onto the cement path. She pushes her stringy black hair off her face again and waves. I don’t want her to go, but I can only watch her walk away toward the willow trees, even though she’s way too young to be on her own. She becomes more and more translucent until she finally disappears completely.

  Then, slowly and carefully, I tip her ashes into her fountain. For a minute, they float on the surface—a grayish-white, dusty blob—but then they drown quickly in a clump. They fade into the water, and I put the empty box back into my pocket.

  The early morning sun seeps through the clouds and breaks over the tips of the willow trees, and I look at the tiny dewdrops on the grass and the leaves around me. They remind me of Lola—of how she’s nowhere and everywhere, all at the same time.

  Then I take out Yuming’s photograph—the photograph that I still can’t believe was taken right here, in this very spot. If it weren’t for Yuming, I wouldn’t have come back to China; I wouldn’t be here right now. I look one more time at the easy smile of the girl with long black hair—hair just like Lola used to have. I look at her brother and her grandparents, and I’m happy, because if what Susan Zhau said is true, then I really think Yuming is going to be okay.

  I pick up a stone by my feet, I turn it over and over in my hands, and I say good-bye. I say good-bye to my sister, and I say good-bye to Yuming, the girl I’d wanted so badly to save all by myself—the girl I’d hoped would fill the black hole.

  I put Yuming’s photograph on the ledge of the fountain, right above the spot where Lola was found, and I rest the rock on top of it to hold it in place. Then I walk toward the narrow archway that leads out of the park.

  When I get to the archway, I step aside to let two girls in matching blue sweatshirts pass by. The way their arms are linked, they remind me of Lola and myself—how we were, and how we could have been—and I wonder if they’re sisters. I smile at them. They both smile back, and I cross the street to where Mom and Dad are waiting for me in the hotel doorway.

  Yuming

  THE NIGHTTIME SOUNDS that float through my window are so familiar. The rustling stalks of the dry rice fields, the hooting owls, even the buzzing of the flying ants. I pay attention to them like I never did before. I breathe in the smells of the open air and hold them close.

  The sounds inside the house are even more comforting. The quiet rhythm of Jing’s breathing as she sleeps in the bed next to me. Bolin washing our dinner bowls in the other room. The way that he squints at the dishes and wipes them clean with his soapy palm reminds me of Wai Gong. I know that tomorrow morning I’ll wake to find him snoring, his head against the clay wall, while sitting in the stiff chair next to the bed.

  In the moonlight I can see my framed photograph on the windowsill. It is speckled with tiny water drops from the spray of the fountain, and there are creases in it, but Wai Po’s and Wai Gong’s faces are clear and smiling. Sometimes I think I need many, many things, but other times I think I have everything I need right here: Bolin, Jing, and this copy of my photograph.

  I think back to when Jing found it, on the day we spent in Shanghai before we took the bus home to Yemo Village. It was after we’d gone to the police about the factory. Maybe Kai was right—maybe the police were never really on Mr. Zhang’s side—but I’m still glad we used pretend names when we filed the report. We didn’t have any luck when we talked to the street vendors at Molihua Park: None of them knew of Bolin.

  But my luck changed at the fountain—at our lucky fountain.

  We arrived home the following day to find Bolin waiting for us. He had returned to Yemo Village in June to visit and help Wai Gong with the harvest. The crop had been ready for picking, but Bolin had had to do it all himself. I wish I had been here with Bolin to touch what Wai Gong had sowed before he fell ill.

  “Your brother harvested rice every morning and drove your Wai Gong’s tractor to town to check with the police every afternoon,” Mrs. Huang, our neighbor, told me. “While you were gone, he was inconsolable.” Min Li, now seven, peeked out from behind her mama’s back as we spoke, looking at me as though I were a stranger. Only when I knelt in front of her and let her touch my short hair d
id she smile, exposing a mouth of newly missing teeth.

  The wind gusts, ruffling the trimmed stumps of rice stalks outside the window. Jing is sleeping peacefully, but for me, sleep doesn’t come so easily. Too many thoughts tumble in my mind. I try to relax my body one muscle at a time, like Wai Gong taught me.

  Sometimes I sing Wai Po’s lullaby to myself. Occasionally, I can even hear her voice, soft and raspy.

  The moon is bright,

  the wind is quiet,

  tree leaves hang over your window.

  My little baby, go to sleep quickly.

  Sleep and dream sweet dreams.

  I pull her song up and over me; I wrap it around myself like a blanket. In the morning, the sounds of the birds will replace her song. Bolin will stroll to the park, hands clasped behind his back, and play xiangqi with the men until planting season comes again. Jing and I will walk the path to the school side by side. Wai Po and Wai Gong will be with us, too—in the dewdrops on the grass, in the chalk dust at the schoolhouse, and waiting in the fog over the rice fields when we arrive home in the evening.

  ON THE MORNING of April 29, 2014, I spent a long while staring at my blank computer screen. I was feeling unproductive and it seemed like a good time to procrastinate, so I got up from the couch, stood in front of my kitchen window for several minutes, and then scrolled through some news stories online. One caught my eye: an article about an Australian woman in New York who had found a handwritten note and a photograph at the bottom of her shopping bag. The note was a plea for help from an African man in a Chinese factory prison who had made the shopping bag, and the photo was of his face.

  The story was haunting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was this: In every practical and logical sense, the lady in New York would never have known this man—but now, because of the note in the bag, she did. I was struck by the fact that two very different lives in two such disparate parts of the world could become so suddenly intertwined. It felt extremely powerful to me that two lives could be linked by one piece of paper, one photograph, and one brave plea for help. As it turns out, the man was released from the prison before anyone could act on his note, but that didn’t detract from the power of the story. Certainly, the outcome was important, but I was focused on the connection.

  In Threads, Clara and Yuming are girls leading completely different lives on opposite sides of the globe. In theory, their paths never should cross. But, just like in the true story of the man in the prison factory and the woman in New York, one piece of paper, one photograph, and one act of bravery bind them together.

  I knew that, to write the book I wanted to write, I would need to do a lot of research. China is a vast and complex country, populated by a billion and a half people from many very different cultural groups. I had to read a lot and talk to several people in order to figure out what Yuming’s life might have looked like. I researched Chinese factories and Chinese thirteen-year-olds, but when it came to putting a thirteen-year-old in a Chinese factory, which is illegal, I had to make some inferences. While I used several actual locations, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and the Great Wall, most of the locations in Threads are fictionalized. I needed to create small towns, villages, temples, and parks to meet the needs of the story. There is no pale-pink factory with three of four smokestacks working, no village called Sunma with a gondola. But there are street vendors, bored teenagers on buses, helpful cabdrivers, and diligent rice farmers, all leading separate but interconnected lives.

  I am indebted to my neighbor and friend Cindy Bai, who, over many cups of tea and plates of Chinese snacks, answered my seemingly endless questions about her home country. Shannon Moffett kindly answered my many questions about Chinese emergency medicine and provided me with priceless details about the Chinese medical system. Jason Gronkiewicz-Doran generously assisted me with my research. Tammy Polonsky continued to serve as my always-on-call general medical consultant on matters ranging from lung infections to childhood cancer. My mom, Barbara Hurwitz, made the writing of this story possible. Lea Wang vetted the final manuscript and helped me put on the finishing touches. My trusted agent, Wendy Schmalz, protected my creative process, as she always does, and my insightful and talented editor, Stephanie Lurie, made Threads infinitely better than it ever could have been without her.

  Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think about the fact that my life is, in one way or another, connected to every single other life on the planet. It’s as though there are invisible threads that bind us all, and occasionally, when I envision these invisible threads, they feel charged with unseen energy. Every now and then, like in the cases of the man in the factory and the woman in New York, and Clara and Yuming, an invisible thread becomes exposed. The energy creates tangible, visible sparks and, from these sparks, come stories.

  “Sixth-grader Grayson Sender quietly doodles princesses and castles with glitter pens during class and dreams of wearing twirly skirts and long, shiny gowns instead of his limp, lifeless track pants. Those aren’t problems, but the fact that he has to repress himself is a problem—a big one. Despite knowing that he is a girl deep down inside, Grayson has learned to look and act like the boy he is not; his family would be furious and his classmates would bully him if they found out. Thoughtfully told through Grayson’s eyes, the story conveys his angst, hurt, loss, and emerging confidence as he struggles with a whirlwind of emotions. With great courage, Polonsky’s debut novel reminds us with much sensitivity that we are all unique and deserve to become who we are meant to be.”

  —Booklist

  “Polonsky’s first novel is a triumph. It is well written, insightful, and true to the world of middle school. It seems utterly realistic—heartbreaking and uplifting at once.”

  —Voice of Youth Advocates

  “Grayson’s journey is portrayed with gentleness and respect, and readers will root for the show to go on. A kind and earnest look at a young transgender adolescent’s experience.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Polonsky captures the loneliness of a child resigned to disappear rather than be rejected, and then the courageous risk that child eventually takes to be seen for who she is. The first-person narration successfully positions readers to experience Grayson’s confusion, fear, pain, and triumphs as they happen, lending an immediate and intimate feel to the narrative.”

  —The Horn Book

  “Tenderly and courageously told, Gracefully Grayson is a small miracle of a book. Its story is so compelling I found myself holding my breath as I read it and so intimate I felt as if what was happening to Grayson was happening to me. Thank you, Ami Polonsky, for creating this memorable character who will open hearts and minds and very possibly be the miracle that changes lives.”

  —James Howe, award-winning and best-selling author of The Misfits

  Selected for the 2015 ALA Rainbow List

  AMI POLONSKY is a reading and writing teacher, the mother of two children, and the author of the critically acclaimed novel Gracefully Grayson. She is passionate about guiding children toward a love of books and helping to create lifetime readers. Ami lives outside of Chicago with her family. For more information, visit www.amipolonsky.com.