Picture Us In The Light(90)

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.

A smiling white woman opened the door. “Hello!” she said loudly, the way people talk to you when they aren’t sure if you speak English, like maybe half shouting will help stamp the words into your brain. “Can I help you?”

It was an office building—there was a reception area with lounge chairs and magazines, and there was a front desk and then three open doors leading into offices. There were no children. Their daughter wasn’t there. The awful possibility my parents had refused to speak of all this time—that she was forever lost to them—reared up like a shadow behind them in the night.

“Our daughter was brought here,” my dad said. I didn’t know him then, obviously, but I know the way his accent gets more pronounced when he’s nervous. He held out the picture of her—now a year and a half out of date—they’d brought along. “We’ve come to get her.”

The woman’s smile wavered. “Well!” she said brightly. “How nice of you to think of us—I’m not sure if…” Her voice trailed off, and she glanced behind her toward the rest of the office. There was no one else there. “I’m not sure I understand your question, but I can put you in touch with—”

“We know she was brought here. She was sold here.”

The woman’s smile slid off. Nothing of the sort happened here, she insisted. This was an organization that provided homes to the orphans of the world, rescuing them from lives of suffering. They were bringing light and hope to children, not snatching children away from their parents. When my parents told her they knew about Hu and about the orphanage, they knew about the babies bought and sold, she denied it, her voice rising higher and higher.

I’ve never known my dad to be anything remotely approximating violent, not even close, so I can’t imagine what happened next. He lunged forward and caught the woman by the throat, squeezing until her face turned red. This time it was my mom who screamed.

“My daughter,” he said. “Tell me where she is.”

He let go. The woman doubled over, gasping for breath. She clutched at her neck. She tried to reach for a phone, but my dad caught her wrist. “Tell me where my daughter is.”

The woman gave in. Her hands trembled as she went to a filing cabinet and pulled out a stack of files.

“These are just the files on the children. The adoptions are closed. The information about adoptive families isn’t kept here.”

She let my parents comb through the files, looking for their daughter. In the bottom third of the stack, there she was: Baby Girl, with a photo. According to the file, the unnamed man who’d brought her to the orphanage was her father. He had chosen to relinquish her for adoption to give her a better life.

“This is her,” my mom said. “This is our daughter.”

The woman was having difficulty breathing, less because of any injury and more out of fear. She stared at the file.

“You have no proof,” the woman said, her voice shaking. “You have an outdated photograph, and that’s all. We were told the man who brought her to the orphanage was her father. We would never participate in stealing children.”

My dad was trembling. His fingers burned from where he’d used them to hurt another person. “Tell us where she is,” he said. “This is our daughter. We have proof. We’ll tell the authorities you’re trafficking children.”

“Please believe me,” the woman said. She reached out a hand to my mother, imploring. “Please. I have two children. I’d tell you if I could. The information isn’t here.”

“Then where is it?” my mother said. She didn’t feel some kind of shared maternal bond, if that’s what the woman was getting at—she felt rage and injustice, since the other woman had her two children still, and my mother had none.

“We don’t store it. Some of our adoptive parents don’t want their children coming back to search.” She looked at my dad again, and shrank back. “I can—I can give you the names of everyone who’s done business with us. That’s all I can do.”

And so she let them go through all the files and make copies of all the charges billed to adoptive parents from the past year. It was nothing. Compared to the feeling of their daughter safe in their arms, it was less than nothing.

They wanted vengeance. They wanted someone to pay for the loss of their child. But the woman was young and had children herself, and in the end it was impossible to blame only her. So they left her there, the same way they’d left the baby and their homeland to begin with, the same way they’d leave so much more. That was the beginning, maybe, of how my parents had grown so skilled at leaving things behind.



They were going to tell someone, but who was there to tell? Back in the US, my parents looked for a lawyer, but they had no remaining money and no real case. Their daughter was gone, that part was true, but it was going to be next to impossible to prove that any kind of crime had occurred on US soil. Likely none had.