The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(106)

Ci-teh and I still avoid each other, but I hear a lot about her, as I’m sure she hears about me. She converted much of the land she subleased to coffee, as she vowed she would seven years ago. Yunnan has even become a tourist attraction for Han majority coffee enthusiasts, and it’s said that by the end of the year more than a million people in our province will be working in the coffee industry, since we provide over 95 percent of China’s coffee production. As an added benefit, growing coffee has become a way for our government and those of our neighbors—like Laos—to replace opium poppy crops. Ci-teh sells Yunnan coffee to Starbucks for use in its Asian outlets and helped Nestlé found a coffee institute in Pu’er City, while I acted as the go-between who assisted the town of Libourne in France, home of the Pomerol and Saint-Emilion vineyards, in signing a marketing and trade agreement with Pu’er City to cross-promote their wine and our tea because both share polyphenols, which are reported to be so good for health.

I pull into the garage and find a note from Jin saying that he won’t be home until late afternoon. Sitting at the kitchen counter, I open my laptop and scan through my e-mails, looking for one in particular. During my last trip from the airport in Jinghong to Menghai, I saw among the many billboards that now line the roadway one that had been purchased by an individual family. It showed an infant’s face blown up so big it was blurry. The type, however, was completely clear:

I was found outside the post office in Jinghong on May 21, 1994. My American name is Bethany Price. If you are my mother, please contact me.

The birth date and clothes were wrong, and even as a newborn, she looked more Dai than Akha to me, but seeing the billboard inspired me to send an e-mail to the girl. Could this Bethany have passed through the Social Welfare Institute in Kunming as my daughter did? Might her parents have met the parents of my Yan-yeh? Does Bethany know other girls adopted from Xishuangbanna prefecture?

Today, again, no return message.

Nor do I have any inquiries from the messages I’ve left on various websites. A year ago, after finding posts written by adopted girls looking for their mothers, or, more infrequently, mothers like me, looking for their daughters, I wrote my own:

Yunnan birth mother searching for daughter left at Menghai Social Welfare Institute. She was given to new parents by Kunming Social Welfare Institute. My baby was born on November 24, 1995, in the Western calendar. I named her Yan-yeh. I put her in a box. She was found by street cleaners. I hid to make sure they delivered her to safety. I now have a seven-year-old son. I would love to find my missing daughter. You have a brother and a mother who love you very much.

I didn’t mention the tea cake. In a murder investigation, as I’ve learned from American television shows, you always hold out the most important evidence. Would someone take the bait? But the few e-mails I’ve received ask the same basic question: Are you my mother? I respond with: Were you found with anything in your swaddling?

We’re trying to grasp fish with our bare hands.

I’ve never forgotten what A-ma said to me before I left Nannuo Mountain to give birth to my son. She wanted me to have him in America in hopes that my daughter might intuit she had a brother. I know Yan-yeh is out there. I have the photo and footprint from the Social Welfare Institute. (I’ll forever be grateful that she was cared for by the good matrons there and not a baby who was stolen or confiscated from her parents. Even the Chinese government estimates that between 30,000 and 60,000 children “go missing” each year to be trafficked illegally and exported like so many factory products. I ache for the mothers in China and the mothers here who must always wonder . . . ) Nevertheless, shouldn’t there be more clues and traces of Yan-yeh? So I search the Internet when Jin is in meetings, at night when I can’t sleep, and on Wednesday afternoons during Paul’s soccer practice.

I’ve stumbled across several sites advertising “orphanage reunion tours,” where girls (and their families) can see the cribs they slept in and meet the people who once watched over them. Could my daughter have gone to China with Our Chinese Daughters’ Foundation or Roots & Shoots Heritage Tours? Even if she did, would a tour operator take a girl and her family to a town as small as Menghai? Wouldn’t they show people like my Yan-yeh the larger Social Welfare Institute in Kunming, where she was picked up? Mightn’t she (or her parents) want to look at her file? But all the files were destroyed in the fire. Still, once a week, I go to the tour websites and examine the photos of white parents or single white mothers traveling with their Chinese daughters. The girls seem totally American with their flip-flops, shorts, and Hello Kitty T-shirts. Would Yan-yeh look like me? Like San-pa? Like my a-ma? Or his a-ma? But I haven’t seen a girl with Akha characteristics or who resembles anyone of our blood.

On a Facebook page sponsored by an international group of Chinese adoptees, I saw photos of babies from the day they were found and the day they were delivered to their new parents. One infant was dressed in a dirty snowsuit with a purple knit hat. Her cheeks were chaffed with heat rash. Another—sound asleep—wore a blouse with a flouncy polka-dot collar. Yet another, perhaps eighteen months old, wore a diaper that hung down to her striped kneesocks, which, in turn, ended in red plastic sandals. I found photos of babies in ethnic minority caps, hats, and scarves, but none of them showed Akha handiwork. My heart filled with hope the day I discovered a website looking for DNA material to match mothers with daughters. I sent in mine but never got a response.