The box of salted, dried plums bounces in my lap as the bus grinds through the city, lurching with the Sunday morning traffic. I finger the gold lettering on the clear plastic box before I go back to staring out the window. Six-lane avenues, stores and apartment buildings that span entire blocks, parks with bare trees, the leaves long fallen away. We pass through the city center, and when the streets get narrower and the buildings smaller and shabbier, I know we’re getting close to Gujiao Children’s Social Welfare Institute 17.
It’s been two weeks since I’ve seen or heard from Yun. The only clue I have is that she picked up her things late in the night after Ming and I went to the Cradle Club to look for her. Gatekeeper Wu said that she had come for them when the other guard was on duty. He had no information as to where she was going or how she carried her things away or if she was with anyone. He could only say that he had found it in his generous heart to give her one more night before he chucked it all to the rag pickers. And that she was lucky she got everything when she did.
A few days after she disappeared, I bought a cell phone and got Yun’s number from Ming. I’ve tried calling her, but the phone just rings and rings and eventually goes to voicemail. She hasn’t answered my texts either. Her other friends have gotten the same treatment. They tell me that if something was really wrong—if she’d been hurt—her phone would be dead by now. The fact that the calls still go through means she’s just ignoring us.
I still feel as if I’m waiting for her. That she’s somewhere nearby and will get in touch with me soon. At the end of my shifts, as I walk by the other factory buildings, I always stop to scan the faces of the girls flooding out.
Ming says it’s unlikely she’s still at our factory working in another division. He said he was sorry for leaving me at the club, and I’m glad we’ve made up. But he still doesn’t want to dwell on Yun. He says not to worry about her, that finding a job will probably be easy for her despite what his dad said about her being an orphan. He’s sure she moved on to another factory, embarrassed that she was fired.
I want to believe him, but an embarrassed Yun does not sound like the Yun I know. And Ming still doesn’t know that Yun is pregnant. Or at least that she was.
By now she must’ve gotten rid of the baby. Once she calmed down, I’m sure she went back to the clinic. She didn’t want to keep it, and the government wouldn’t allow it unless she could pay the fines for having a baby against Family Planning rules. I don’t know why it makes my heart pull to think the baby is gone. I don’t know why I wanted her to have it.
Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about the orphanage. I can’t help wondering if maybe Yun went back there to see if she could get a position. Although she didn’t much like taking care of the babies, it’s work she knows how to do. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.
Now, the bus pulls up to Xutan Street, close to my old elementary school. I get off and watch the bus pull away with a screech and a hiss before I start walking to the Institute. The air is thin and sharp. I hug my new coat tightly around me, glad for its coziness.
The coat is the first big purchase I’ve made aside from the phone. My cheap polyester coat was useless once the weather turned truly cold. So last week Ming went with me to the underground market on Bai Street. I spotted the quilted, purple coat at the third stall, but blanched and started to walk away as soon as the seller told me the price. Ming stopped me and haggled the price down by 15 yuan. “You’ll have to learn. That’s how it’s done,” he said.
Now, just outside the Institute, I stand for a moment, gripping the high collar of my coat close around my throat. At first, the gatekeeper in his box doesn’t notice me. I knock on the window, and he comes out and opens the gate for me. He’s the same gatekeeper who’s been there for as long as I can remember, letting us in and out every day we went to school. He doesn’t recognize me.
I go through and cross the courtyard toward the main building. The three stories of windows look down at me. At the second floor, near the end, where I know the dayroom to be, I expect to see Guo or one of the other Down’s kids standing there, but there’s only the reflection of the gray-white sky.
It doesn’t feel right to enter through the big glass doors at the front of the building. I’ve only gone through them the first time I came to the orphanage when I was eight and then when I left.
I glance back to the gate. The gatekeeper has already gone back into his guardbox.
I go around the main building and enter at the back door near the big laundry room. The two washers and dryers are churning under the frosted windows, and a dozen colored plastic buckets sit on the floor and in the long, tiled sink, but no one is here. The hall is quiet, and I feel the chill of it, not much warmer than outside. I quickly go to the stairs.
As I reach the first landing, Caretaker Deng lumbers down from the steps above, a basket overflowing with dirty sheets on her hip. She stops on the second landing when she catches sight of me below her and peers at me from under the messy hanks of her home-cut hair. Her eyes run up and down my long coat, then to my face. I pull off my hat, and she recognizes me.
“What’s this? Luli?” Of all the caretakers, Caretaker Deng was the least gruff. “Miss Luli, I should say.”
Miss Luli. Her voice is laced with friendly sarcasm, and I’m embarrassed—as she intended. “How are you?” I mumble.
“What are you doing here?” She drops her basket on the landing and puts her hands on her hips, leaning back as if to relieve aching muscles.
“I . . . I just came to visit.” I hold back about Yun.
“Came back to see us old folks?” Her mouth is open, amused, showing her tea-stained teeth. “Like other kids come back to see their parents, huh?” She points to the box of fancy plums I’m gripping. “What did you bring us?”
I scuttle up the steps between us and hand her the box.
She takes it with a satisfied smile as she eyes the gold lettering. “Well, I could use a break. Come on, I’ll take you to visit the wards.”
I follow her down the second-floor hallway, the quiet broken only by the slap, slap of her plastic shoes on the tile. We pass the baby room and then the toddlers’. I only glance in the open doors as we go by, again struck by the eerie quiet. I’d gotten used to that when I lived here—the strangeness of so many subdued children, with only the littlest ones raising a terrible noise at feeding time.
Near the end of the hall, Caretaker Deng flings open the door to the older children’s dayroom. “Someone’s come back to visit us!” she shouts above the noise of the television. She waves the box of salted plums in the air. Three caretakers standing at the television, sipping from jars of hot tea, tear their eyes away from the screen to look over at us. The dozen or so children see the treats and start shuffling toward us, but they’re quickly shooed away by Caretaker Deng. I feel a little bad. I didn’t think to bring them anything.
The caretakers crowd around me and are soon fingering my coat, asking me how much it cost, where I’m working—they know I’m working since I have such a nice coat—how much money I make. I answer all their questions while my eyes flick around them toward the children. I don’t see Guo or Pengjie, who had been closest to us in age. In the back of my mind, I’m wondering about Yun, but I know without asking that she hasn’t come back here. One of the caretakers would’ve remarked on it by now if she had. Their surprise at seeing me makes it clear that no other former wards have turned up.
After they run out of questions, the caretakers take the plums and drift back to their show. I notice now that the walls are brighter and cleaner than I remember. Though they’re still the same shade of tan. All the years I was here they’d never been painted. “New paint?” I ask Caretaker Deng as she chews a salted plum.
“Yes! We had a foreign couple come here recently. The director wanted to make a good impression, so the walls got a new coat. And they actually adopted Pengjie! You remember him? They didn’t mind that he was eleven years old, that he had Down syndrome. The wife’s brother had Down’s, and she wanted a brother for her daughter just like she had. Can you imagine?” She shakes her head as if she’s never heard anything so bizarre.
She has to get back to the laundry now. She asks me if I want to visit the director, but I shake my head and say I’ll go out the back way.
I follow her along the dim hallway, dumbfounded about Pengjie’s amazing luck. It’s hard to believe.
“Caretaker Deng, I didn’t see Guo.”
“He turned sixteen last month. He’s in the other building now.” She means the one for disabled adults.
We’ve reached the stairs, and Caretaker Deng hoists up her basket. “Well, it was certainly a surprise to see you come back to visit us. Every once in a while a child comes back, brought by their parents. Only the foreign ones, of course.” She trudges down the stairs. “Maybe to make them feel grateful. How about you? Are you grateful you got out?”
I am, but I only incline my head slightly when she glances back at me.
“A good job in a factory! Well done! You know, I was the one that recommended you for the position in the bathroom. But you had your own mind, huh?” She stops at the bottom of the stairs, drops her basket, and leans against the railing to rest. “I honestly didn’t expect you to get a better position. It’s not easy to go out as a ward.”
“Remember Yun? She left the year before? She helped me.”
“Oh, I remember her. The one with the four pocks on her face. The two of you were always together. She got work in the factory? Really! Why didn’t she come with you to see us?”
“She left the factory a couple of months ago. I lost contact with her. Actually, I was wondering if she had come back here.”
Caretaker Deng frowns and shakes her head. “No. Like I said, hardly anyone comes back to visit. Huh! I understand now. You came just to ask after your friend!” She fakes a hurt look. “And I always thought you were a little different than the foundlings who grow up here.”
She bends to get the basket, but I rush forward and pick it up. She grins and starts toward the laundry room as I follow.
“It’s too bad your grandpa didn’t release you for adoption when you first came here. Even though you were an older child, you might have actually gotten a family since you didn’t have any defects.”
My heart squeezes, and I quickly blink back the tears that rush up to my eyes.
“You should forget about Yun,” she says as we turn into the laundry room. She raises her voice over the swish and hum of the machines. “The ones that grow up here don’t know how to connect to people. Though I have to say, that girl wasn’t as unlucky as everyone thought if she found a job in a factory. Why did she leave the factory?”
I shrug, unwilling to give her any reason to criticize Yun.
“Yes, you should forget her.” She takes the basket from me and swings it to rest on the sink. “But I know you won’t, because you had people for a while. They tried to hang onto you as long as they could, and you never forgot about them.”