Content warnings: Forced abortions, infanticide, racist microaggressions
起
August in Beijing is a boiling pot. The first woman to step off the plane feels it right away. She touches her curls and wonders if the palm-sized bottle of hair gel she packed will tame the frizz. Her husband hassles their suitcase onto the jetway. The bottle of hair gel is not inside the suitcase. It’s on their bathroom counter, along with her wedding ring and a box of tampons.
The next couple to deplane are a spider and a stick bug. Or so it seems to the flight attendant, eyeing the many bags hanging off the woman in the navy blazer. Her partner, a gangly teen of a man, doesn’t help carry any of them.
Following them are nine more couples, each more or less the same. All white and in their early thirties. One of the couples has a three-year-old child whom they will not allow anyone else to hold. Another couple has been trying to hold the child for the entire sixteen-hour flight.
The agency booked all their tickets together, but the woman travelling alone was placed three rows behind everyone else. When she disembarks, the couples have divided into those who get to use the bathroom, and those who get to guard the carry-ons. The woman with six bags shuffles through each of them, checking and rechecking the order of passports and documents and pamphlets.
The woman travelling alone doesn’t mind the neglect. She’s committed to doing things by herself. During the application process, she was told that China takes great pride in matching up families based on the looks of the father and the personality of the mother. It’s not clear which they used for her.
The translator meets the passengers at the baggage claim. She’s slim, late-twenties, with long black hair in a tight ponytail. She looks distracted, as if she’s doing long division in her head. In actuality, she is counting the twelve women, eleven men, and one small child, adding how many minutes they are late by, then subtracting how many minutes she can get the bus driver to shave off of their ETA.
They might as well all be children for the glacial pace at which they board the bus, pausing every three seconds to step back and admire the great shadows of mountains over the airport. There is a sense of occasion, yes, but also giddiness, like teenagers on spring break. The giddiness may also just be sleep deprivation. It’s 3 p.m. here, but their internal clocks are still set to 3 a.m.
The bus is sleek, more modern than any of them expected. It moves and breathes like a Greyhound, with fuzzy velour seats and a bathroom in the back. As the bus shuffles into traffic, a few of its windows sagging open, the curly-haired woman touches her face. The air is thick now, the sweat stewing in her skin.
At the hotel, the eleven and a half couples stream out of the bus, thank God for air conditioning. The woman travelling alone collapses into her room and into fitful sleep.
She dreams that her soon-to-be-child is sitting across from her on the empty twin bed. The child flickers—she is a year, then three years, then six then twelve then twenty. The child has long black hair like the translator, but when she opens her mouth, she sounds like tinkling bells.
The woman tries to hold her, to reach for the child who is now a child again, but her fingers slip through the skin, like combing through air.
•••
The woman wanted a child long before seeing the ad. She’d had a long-term boyfriend, one she could presumably share the child with, but after college their relationship became more convenient than intimate. They said they would stay friends, which meant that the next time she saw him, it had been six months since they’d last spoken. At a party of a friend of a friend’s, she stood in a stranger’s living room, listening to a passionate debate about whether any song on The Bends was as good as “Creep.”
Her ex showed up in a turtleneck she’d bought him. They exchanged barbed pleasantries. Two hours and six drinks later, her legs were stretched across his lap and she was sharing the list of reasons she’d devised as to why they would never work out.
“That, and I want kids,” he said.
She withdrew her legs.
“So do I,” she said.
“Well,” he said. He wiped chip dust on the chest of his turtleneck. He said the next thing, which was the worst thing, and suddenly she was pushing her way out of the living room and onto the front yard, where the same two assholes were now debating Radiohead vs. Pearl Jam. They paused to ask if she was alright, and she threw up into the begonias.
It was true, maybe, that she was a little neurotic. Could be unforgiving. Prone to yelling. Expected others to read her mind, punished them when they couldn’t.
But fuck him, she’d be a good mother anyways.
承
Knocks at the door. The translator, who does not speak in bells, is making sure she’s awake.
The woman yells that she is awake, then feels bad for shouting, but the translator is not there when she opens the door to apologize. The woman checks the clock—twelve hours in her past. She still hasn’t caught up.
She takes a shower. They have breakfast at the hotel, then it’s back on the bus for a trip to the Forbidden City. When they step into the heart of the city, the most immediate pressure is the smog in their lungs. After a couple hours, grit begins to form on their lips—small traces of coal in the air. The curly-haired woman is stopped, often, by locals who want to touch her hair. She smiles, but her mouth tightens when they approach. The translator explains that her hair texture is a rarity here, and the woman travelling alone laughs a little.
Like a good tourist, she takes too many pictures. They are miniscule before the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the jewel of the Forbidden City. Its gold two-tiered roof spreads like wings over the massive courtyard. One of the couples asks her to snap a photo of them on the marble stairs. Behind them, rows of red pillars guard the intricately carved doors to the hall.
Sheepishly, she asks for a picture as well. Just in case her daughter wants to see how she looked only days before they met. She smiles a message into the camera: here I am, waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.
The woman follows the other couples inside the hall. Cordoned off from tourists is the room’s centrepiece, a throne with five dragons curled around the back and headrest. Their daughters were born just a few seasons ago in the Year of the Tiger, but they take pictures for posterity. In the middle of the ceiling, just above the throne, a chandelier hangs with heavy metal spheres. According to legend, the spheres—meant to represent pearls—will fall to kill any usurper who attempts the throne. The woman wonders if there’s some sort of equivalent for new parents. Sit here, and if you’re an imposter, take a metal ball to the brain.
She waits in line to snap a couple photos of the throne, not really capturing the gold pillars surrounding it. She imagines that they’ll take a trip back here when the child is older. She’ll see this for herself. Ambitiously, the woman thinks that her child will be an architect. She’ll know the proper word for the slanted shape of the roof, because the woman knows it’s not “winged.”
Her child will be so smart it hurts.
Soon they’re hurried back onto the bus, to the hotel, to the airport. Time has blurred for her before, but these hours have a strange slippage to them. One moment she is waiting for a magic pearl to drop on her head and the next she is boarding another flight to a city whose name she is already forgetting. Between time travel and a lack of sleep, words and names keep escaping her.
Her body, thankfully, doesn’t need memory to keep moving. Step here. Pee here. Breathe here, here, and here.
She’s seated closer to the group this time, but she doesn’t listen as they chatter about the next steps of the itinerary. She drifts off, curious to see if the child will visit her again. Instead, she dreams of a mall where she can’t find the exit or the bathrooms.
She wakes to the nudge of the businessman next to her, who is trying to move past her to grab his carry-on. She has to pee. She holds it all the way until the gate, then begs one of the couples—the one with the child—to watch her things as she races to find the closest bathroom.
She washes her hands and face, and when she looks up the child stands in her reflection. The woman whips around, startled into anger, but it’s only the three-year-old. The couple adopted her from the same orphanage a few years back. The woman can’t remember her name either.
The child’s mother appears and the woman swallows. Her mouth tastes foreign to her.
On route to the next hotel, the translator tells them that this city has held many names. Changsha is only the most recent, and even so traces back three thousand years. The land has been inhabited for at least seven thousand, evolving from a military stronghold to a commercial city over five dynasties. A poet drowned himself in its river and gave birth to a festival. Mao Zedong converted to communism within its walls. It was devastated by war and flames and came back three times stronger.
One of the couples asks where they can get a tiger embroidery.
They have a few hours to shop before dinner, their last one without twelve new additions. Tomorrow morning, the director and the nannies from the orphanage will arrive, bearing precious cargo.
The woman takes the opportunity to wade through the crowds in search of a tiny cheongsam. Red, for luck. She remembers that much. The translator says something extra to the vendor, and they both laugh. The woman laughs too, but they don’t notice.
As the sun sets, everyone congregates at the hotel for their Last Supper, as the man in the blazer calls it. He and his wife are both professors; he teaches English, she teaches sociology. He’s made note, several times throughout the trip, that their child will be given Mandarin lessons and a trip to China on her sixteenth birthday in lieu of a car. Nobody asks, but he assures them anyway, “We’ll get her the car for her eighteenth, so she can drive it to school. U of T, obviously.”
The woman refuses to memorize his name. His wife seems inoffensive enough, but she’s married to him, so how true can that be.
There’s an array of beautiful, steaming dishes for dinner, but the nerves have made it almost impossible to eat. One of the women takes a photo of the whole fish, blanketed by cilantro and scallions and basking in red sauce. She doesn’t put any of it on her plate.
The man in the blazer is making a toast.
“I want to share with you a Japanese phrase,” he says, overenunciating the word “Japanese.” Notably, he does not actually say the Japanese phrase. He clears his throat. “In English, it means to treasure a moment that will never happen again. It can also be translated to ‘for this time only or once in a lifetime.” He raises his glass, and the others oblige. “And what is this, if not a once in a lifetime opportunity. Well, for everyone except these guys. Guess this is your second shot, right?”
The couple with the child holds her closer.
“He knows we’re in China, right?” one of the men mutters.
“Tomayto tomahto,” another man answers.
“That bodes well,” the woman travelling alone says, except she doesn’t say it out loud.
The man in the blazer takes his seat. He drinks deeply. The others aren’t sure what kind of alcohol is gleaming in his glass, but it has given him a strange, almost spiritual assurance. A few seats down, a brunette woman—the one who thumbed through a hefty King James Bible on the plane, earmarking certain passages and praying over others—stands to make her own toast. In her glass is bottled water, which she paid a vendor $5 USD for. The translator, upon hearing of this, scolded the vendor and got her money back.
“I want to thank God for bringing us here together, safely,” the Bible brunette says. A few other people mm agreeably. “I just know that we are playing such an important role in these children’s lives. He has put it upon our hearts to care for them, and with His blessing we will provide them with a life that they simply could not have had otherwise.”
“Amen,” someone says at the far end of the table. A few people raise their glasses. The translator observes this rite impassively as she sips at her steaming tea; it is unclear whether she is someone who prays.
“We are doing good work here,” the Bible brunette says. She smiles. Touches her sternum. “Such good work.”
The woman travelling alone can’t even swallow her water. As the other soon-to-be parents compare inventories and share names—two of the couples have “Amy” on their lists— she excuses herself early and returns to her hotel room.
When she sleeps, the child is not the only visitor in the room. There are others, so many she can’t count, but when she turns to look at any of them, they turn to smoke. When she looks at the child, focusing on the innocent face, she can feel them watching. She knows that they’re waiting for her to speak.
Her mouth opens.
•••
The ad said there were children who needed good homes, and the woman had one. She hadn’t dated anyone since the turtleneck ex, nor did she have any interest. There was a sort of freedom in turning twenty-eight, then twenty-nine, and still accounting to no one. There was a loneliness, yes, but no worse than loving someone who didn’t see her.
When she told her parents, they were pleased. Her father gave her the money they’d saved for her wedding. She used it to pay the agency.
Her younger sister, who was married and had two kids already, offered to come with her but got pregnant with the third before they were set to leave.
She wondered, sometimes, what her ex would’ve said. If he would’ve thought she was trying to prove him wrong. Part of her wondered that too.
When she thought about what she wanted, and why she wanted it—it should’ve felt like a straight line. An arrow that knew its target.
The ad had felt that way. Simple. It was a problem of arithmetic, not desire.
Maybe, though, she was wrong. Maybe it was loneliness, the kind she sometimes thought her mother felt when her father entered the room. Maybe it was an impulse for heroics. The fulfillment of a promise she didn’t remember making.
She waited until she was thirty to apply, as policy stated. She filled out forms, had references written. She waited. She waited.
In the spring, a Purolator truck arrived in lieu of a stork. A man handed her a photo of a child. The face was a little blurry, something about it resisting her gaze, but she knew it was the right child. Her child. There had never been any other option.
•••
The translator doesn’t need to knock to wake her up. She’s not sure she slept. If she dreamt, she doesn’t remember. She is dressed an hour before the itinerary says to.
8:45. Breakfast. Food is indistinguishable. Water is involved, maybe?
9:45. Pacing in the hallway. Listening to couples murmur to each other, occasionally argue.
10:45. They are coming in an hour. Her life is changing in an hour.
She will not let the time blur, not today. She will keep the hours distinct in her memory. She will remember the moment it happens. The moment that will never happen again. The first time she holds her. She will whisper, Here you are. I’ve been waiting. I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.
11:40. Eleven men, twelve women, one child.
11:41. One translator.
11:42. The soon-to-be parents cry. Laugh. Cry again.
11:43. They wait in the hallway.
11:44. They wait for the elevator.
11:45.
The elevator opens.
轉
Xiulan doesn’t like working for the families.
They can’t stop talking about how muggy it is, about what the humidity is doing to their hair. They hate the grit of coal on their mouths and the smells of the street that flourish in the dense air. When presented with local cuisine, she can actually see their stomachs turn. Without fail, one of them will always refuse the whole fish, insisting that the head must be diseased or undercooked.
But what Xiulan really can’t stand is their excitement. Their joy. Their tears when they hold the babies for the first time. It is breathtaking and miraculous and it makes her gut tighten like a fist. She would look away if she could, but she has to mediate their lists of questions. They want to know about the baby’s allergies, what they like or dislike, things that scare them.
What they don’t know—what they will never know—is that their children are see-through.
At least for now. It’s Xiulan’s understanding that they materialize fully after a couple years. She’s not sure of the mechanics. Before the winter of ’79, abandoned children were fully corporeal. Sad but solid little things. When a second child became illegal and a third unimaginable, the streets were full of them. Girls, mostly.
Those were the fortunate ones; sometimes they could be saved.
Everyone knows how it was in the early years. Mothers were tied up and dragged, like pigs, to the midwives. Sometimes to be sterilized, sometimes to be induced so their child could be killed sooner.
When the see-through children started appearing, rumours spread of ghosts. The babies who were drowned, strangled, left to die in trash heaps—perhaps their spirits were lingering. But no one could devise what kind of ghost they would be. They hadn’t lived long enough to want revenge. Or to want.
No one’s settled on an answer, but Xiulan thinks it’s simpler than anyone wants to admit. Longing is its own kind of power. And so the small bodies, half-wish and half-flesh, appear on doorsteps and in alleyways. Empty laundry baskets, least-travelled staircases, places unseen until morning.
In terms of bureaucracy, it doesn’t cause much of an issue. Passersby bring the transparent babies to the police. The police bring them to the orphanages. The orphanages ship them out to polite families with mostly good intentions. Sometimes the orphanages even pay per head. Currency is currency.
Xiulan has been doing agency work for a few years. It’s consistent, and the demand is only rising. A month before the Canadians came, she visited the orphanage to meet the nannies. She walked through the rows of cribs, noting how the light passed through the tiny bodies.
They are most solid at the wrists and feet, the places where one might kiss the delicate skin just to be sure of it. But their faces are completely transparent—the most difficult part to manifest, Xiulan supposes. Perhaps it’s a lapse in imagination.
On the bright side, other than being see-through, the babies are pretty much like normal babies. They cry, they make waste. They begin to dream.
They are precious little things, but Xiulan has never wanted children. She was young in ’79, only five years old. But she remembers, at six, a light in her mother’s cheeks, more roundness to her body.
And then, without explanation, a summer of screams at night.
That fall, the neighbour’s daughter started coming over to read Xiulan’s school books. The other girl was skittish and silent as a mouse. Xiulan heard she was a secret. A heihaizi.
“She doesn’t exist,” her mother had said. “The least you can do is let her read.”
So Xiulan did. It was a peaceful arrangement, with potential to be a friendly one, until the neighbour became pregnant with hope for a son. The other girl disappeared, presumably to stay with family in some other county. When their boy was born, his parents paid the exorbitant fine for papers.
Xiulan has never asked her mother about second children. It was clear to her, early on, that children are a grief that never heals. Or maybe she’s wrong, and children are wishes, promises, whatever can be stolen and broken and never held again. She’ll never know.
Sometimes she finds herself searching for girls with features like hers. In passing strangers and, against reason, in the small faces looking up at her.
There are twelve of them this time. The nannies have grown attached, as they always do. But they know what they must always remember. It is only a job.
So Xiulan does hers. She memorizes the new batch of names and semi-distinct personalities: John and Nora, the professors. Rebecca, the religious one. Louise, head of some marketing firm, and her nervous husband Elliot. Two Sarahs, another John. Patricia with the curly hair. Peter with the bald spot. And so on, and so on.
The one she keeps an eye on most is Maggie, the single one. She has a nervous energy to her, an absentmindedness that suggests a rush of thoughts rather than a lack of any. Xiulan wonders if she’ll be a good mother.
Of the twenty-three adults, Maggie seems to be the only one listening to her guided tours. That counts for something, she supposes. But Xiulan is not in the habit of getting attached. She knows Maggie is like the rest of them, even if Maggie herself doesn’t seem to think so. Xiulan catches all her smirks, the occasional rolling of the eyes. The way she barely touched any of the food either, and not just from nerves.
Xiulan tries to shrug it off. So the white people don’t like the food. They don’t like the heat. They will still, in theory, love the children.
There is one part of her job, which is not part of her job at all, that Xiulan keeps secret. When she meets the children, before their assigned parents ever do, she names them. She never says the names out loud, nor does she write them down. She knows they will be overwritten into Emilys and Amys and Stephanies. Easy syllables for lazy tongues.
Still, she chooses names as wishes. Fang, for virtue. Xiuying, for bravery and beauty. For the smallest children: Mui. Little sister.
She likes to imagine that these names will give their bodies strength. Will make them solid, unbreakable. She thinks that, in her own slight way, she is giving them form.
It is most likely a useless ritual. But for a moment, it feels as powerful as wanting. As dangerous.
As real.
合
The elevator opens.
The director steps out first, followed by three nannies. Each of them holds a baby. The parents burst into little cheers, wipe self-consciously at their cheeks.
Another elevator arrives. More nannies. More babies.
Repeat. Repeat.
Theirs quickly becomes the loudest floor. The babies scream and wail as they are handed off to strangers. The strangers, for their part, are enraptured.
The translator is more than occupied, bouncing from couple to couple as she introduces them to their children. The nannies manage not to look stricken over the cries of anguish and abandonment. They answer the translator’s questions while smiling. They don’t falter, not even once.
When the woman travelling alone holds her child for the first time, she is too shocked at the weight to say anything. There has been no gradual progression to prepare her for the sudden heaviness of the baby on her hip. Nor has there been anything to prepare for the sudden, unrelenting love of her.
When the translator finally has time, the woman asks her to ask the nanny what the child likes best. The translator nods, fulfills the request in a quick flurry of words.
She tells the woman, “She likes to be held.”
The woman nods. She holds her child. She’s not sure if she will ever stop.
She will, later tonight, when exhaustion forces her into fitful sleep.
The couple who arrived with a child now have two. They hold the one-year-old between them, tracing the swirl of fine hairs on her head. The three-year-old wanders away from the noise. In the chaos of overlapping languages and wails and laughter, no one—not even the translator—notices how, in the hotel’s fluorescent light, she looks a little see-through.
No one knows—could possibly know—that part of her that will stay this way forever.