The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(100)
“I’m not going on one of those stupid heritage tours,” she said.
Once upon a time, she would have loved to have gone to China. She’d wanted to get information about the object she’d been found with. Most babies abandoned in China were left with a special gift from their birth mothers: a locket, a good-luck charm, a hand-knit sweater or hand-sewn quilt, maybe even a little Chinese money. Amy knew this because she’d seen those things in pictures: some new mom and dad posing with their baby and holding up her little gift like it was a soccer trophy. Amy’s memento from her birth mother, however, was a little unusual: a round cake of tea, decorated with meaningless symbols, and weighing about a pound. When Amy was little, she used to take it out every night and stare at it. It had to mean something, but what?
Then there’d been this incident in the second grade when she’d done a project and told everyone in the entire school—and their parents—that she was the first person in her family to come to America. It was the truth, but she’d caused her adoptive parents pain, which hadn’t been her intention, at all. Amy had gotten really scared. Would they send her away? She still struggled with her identity, and she sometimes searched the Internet to see if she could find anything about her birth mother or the tea cake. In secret, because she’d never forgotten the repercussions of the second-grade episode. She didn’t want to hurt her parents again, but they just weren’t getting it. After all, what did they think she’d get out of a trip to China now? She wouldn’t find her roots, she wouldn’t get any answers about the tea cake or her identity, and—here was the kicker—the trip would make her feel worse. She already ached with loss over her birth mother. Traveling to China would be no help. Besides, practically all the girls she knew who’d been adopted had already gone there with Roots & Shoots Heritage Tours, a company that specialized in expeditions for families with adoptees, so a trip like this wouldn’t make her special or anything. She was merely part of a big wave that had brought thousands of girls like her to these shores. Pretty weird. Pretty sad. And no big deal.
“Have we ever taken you on a tour—anywhere?” Alice asked. “We don’t do tours. You know that.”
“But—”
“This might be the last time we all travel together,” Adam said, and again Amy flashed that something might be wrong with him. “After you graduate, you’ll probably want to go on a trip with your friends.” Damn straight. “And after that, you’ll likely be spending your vacations in a lab somewhere, or out in the field, or helping some scientist change the way we view the world, like your mom—”
“Oh, Adam—”
It went on like that—some stupid lovefest—but Amy didn’t put up much of a fuss, because what if this was the last vacation they all took together? Still, did it have to be China? Why not go back to the South of France or do something new, like hike the Outback? And, of course, once the itinerary came in, Amy saw how her parents were shaping the trip to be a heritage tour, even if it wasn’t called a Heritage Tour, because their last stop before flying home would be Yunnan province, where she was born.
The Bowen family left LAX at night. They were all half dead by the time they landed in Beijing thirteen hours later. They went through passport control and customs. Then they pushed through a set of double doors and oh my God! Always Amy had felt like the one Chinese face in a sea of white faces. Now here were a bazillion people who looked like her, and it was her parents who stood out.
They spotted a young woman holding a card with the Bowen name printed on it. She introduced herself as their Beijing guide, and her English was pretty pathetic. She wore a wrinkled skirt, a little white blouse, and scuffed shoes. A supercheap plastic purse hung off her shoulder. She led the way through the writhing throng with her arm extended to clear a path for the mismatched threesome. Amy was seventeen, but she clung to her mother like you wouldn’t believe.
They went through another set of doors, and it was like stepping into an oven. Truly. Like you got a baking sheet all ready with cookie dough and your mom was going to let you slide it into the oven, but when you did, all you could think about was Hansel and Gretel and the way the witch wanted to cook them. People pushed and shoved as they loaded their suitcases, beat-up cardboard boxes, and these satchel things made out of some kind of plastic woven material in red, white, and blue into trunks, the underbellies of buses, even onto the roofs of cars. They shouted. They noisily sucked junk from their noses, coughed, and spit on the ground. It was beyond gross. And the smell? Too much garlic—like Amy had landed in a gigantic mouth with really bad breath. Add to that too much sweat and too much cigarette smoke wafting off people’s clothes. Nasty.
“Honey,” Alice said, “you’re cutting off my circulation.”
Amy loosened her grip on mother’s hand, but not by much.
They piled into a minivan. The guide sat up front with the driver, who didn’t say a single word. The traffic? It was crazy! And it was the middle of the night! They crept past apartment buildings—gray, with dim fluorescent lights illuminating a room here and there. It took Amy a while to figure out what was hanging out all the windows: bamboo sticks draped with laundry.
They arrived at the hotel, and it was ginormous! And superfancy. Adam handed over their passports and his credit card. A uniformed boy put their luggage on a cart and escorted the family to connecting rooms. Alice and Adam were excited, talking nonstop about all the things they were going to do. Suddenly Alice stopped midsentence to stare at her daughter. “Do you have to sneer?” she asked. “We’re doing this trip for you!” Later, after she got in bed, Amy heard her mother say, “Teenagers!” A part of Amy wanted her dead.