It wasn't supposed to be this way. The adoption agency had advertised that China was jammed with foundlings. Female foundlings, hundreds of thousands of them, tiny girls exiled from one-child families that wanted a son. Holly Ann had read that female orphans were still sold as servants or as tongyangxi, child brides. If it was a baby girl you wanted, no one went home empty. Until us, thought Holly Ann. It was as if the Pied Piper had come through and cleaned the place out. And more than just orphans were missing. Children altogether. You saw evidence of them – toys, kites, streetside
chalkboards. But the streets were barren of children under the age of ten.
'Where could they have gone?' Holly Ann asked each night.
Wade had come up with a theory. 'They think we've come to steal their kids. They must be hiding them.'
Out of that observation had grown today's guerrilla raid. Surprisingly, Mr Li had agreed to it. They would drop in on an orphanage that was out of the way, and with no prior warning of their visit.
As night descended, Mr Li drove deeper through the alleyways. Holly Ann hadn't come exactly expecting pandas in rain forests and kung fu temples beneath the Great Wall, but this was like a madman's blueprint, with detours and dead ends all held together by electric wires and rusty rebar and bamboo scaffolding. South China had to be the ugliest place on earth. Mountains were being leveled to fill in the paddies and lakes. Rivers were being dammed. Strangely, even as these people leveled the earth, they were crowding the sky. It was like robbing the sun to feed the night.
Acid rain started hitting the windshield in sloppy kisses, yellowish and festering like spit. Deep coal mines honeycombed the hills in this district, and everyone burned the mines' product. The air reeked.
The asphalt turned to dirt. The sun dropped. This was the witching hour. They'd seen it in other cities. The policemen in green uniforms vanished. From doorways and windows and niches in the towering alley, eyes tracked the gweilo – white devils – and passed them on to more eyes.
The darkness congealed. Mr Li slowed, obviously lost. He rolled down his window and waved a man over from the sidewalk and gave him a cigarette. They talked. After a minute, the man got a bicycle and Mr Li started off again, with his guide holding on to the door. Here and there the bicyclist issued a command and Mr Li would turn down another street. Rain sprayed through the window into the back.
Side by side, the car and the bicyclist made turns for another five minutes. Then the man grunted and patted the rooftop. He detached from them and pedaled away.
'Here,' Mr Li announced.
'You're joking,' Wade said.
Holly Ann craned her neck to see through the windshield. Surrounded by barbed wire, the gray walls of a factory complex squatted before them in their harsh headlights. Bits of ominous black thread had been tied to the barbed wire, and the walls carried huge, ugly characters in stark red paint. Half-finished skyscrapers blocked her view to the rear. They had reached some sort of dead epicenter. In every direction, the stone-stillness radiated out from here.
'Let's get this over with,' Wade said, and got out of the car. He pulled at the gate. Concertina wire wobbled like quicksilver. Holly Ann's first impression gave way to another. This looked less like a factory than a prison. The barbed wire and inscriptions appeared to have one purpose: enclosure. 'What kind of orphanage is this?' she asked Mr Li.
'Good place, no problem,' he said. But he seemed nervous.
Wade banged at the industrial-style door. The brick-and-pig-iron decor dwarfed him. When no one answered, he simply turned the handle and the metal door opened. He didn't turn around to gesture yes or no. He just went inside. 'Great, Wade,' Holly Ann muttered.
Holly Ann got out. Mr Li's door stayed closed. She looked through the windshield and rapped on the glass. He looked up at her through his little cloud of tobacco smoke, eyes wishing her from his life, then reached under to turn off the ignition. The windshield wipers quit knocking back and forth. His image blurred with rain. He got out.
On second thought, she reached into the back and grabbed a packet of disposable diapers. Mr Li left the headlights on, but locked all the doors. 'Bandits,' he said.
Holly Ann led. The viciously stroked words loomed on either side of them. Now she saw the scorch marks where flames had lapped at the brick. The foot of the wall was coated with charred glass from Molotov cocktails. Who would assault an orphanage? The metal door was cold. Mr Li brushed past her and went into the blackness.
'Wait,' she said to him. But his footsteps receded down the hallway.
Reminding herself of her mission, Holly Ann stepped inside. She drew in a deep breath, smelling for evidence. Babies. She looked for cartoon figures or crayon squiggles or smudges of little handprints on the lower walls. Instead, long staccato patterns of holes and chips violated the plaster. Termites, she thought with disgust.
'Wade?' she tried again. 'Mr Li?' She continued down the hallway. Moss flowered in cracks. The doors were all gone. Each room yawned black. If there were windows, they had been bricked up. The place was sealed tight. Then she came to a string of Christmas lights.
It was the strangest sight. Someone had strung hundreds of Christmas lights – red and green and little white flashing lights, and even red chili-pepper lights and green frog lights and turquoise trout lights like those found in margarita restaurants back home. Maybe the orphans liked it.
The air changed. An odor infiltrated. The ammonia of urine. The smell of baby poop. There was no mistaking it. There were babies in here. For the first time in weeks, Holly Ann smiled. She almost hugged herself.
'Hello?' she called.
An infant voice bubbled in the darkness. Holly Ann's head jerked up. The tiny soul might as well have called her by name.
She followed the sound into a side room reeking of human waste and garbage. The twinkle of Christmas lights did not reach this far. Holly Ann steeled herself, then got down on her hands and knees, advancing through the pile by touch. The garbage was cold. It took all her self-control not to think about what she was feeling. Vegetable matter. Rice. Discarded flesh. Above all, she tried not to think about someone throwing away a live infant.
The floor canted down toward the rear. Maybe there had been an earthquake. She felt a slight current of air against her face. It seemed to be coming up from some deeper place. She remembered the coal mines around here. It was possible they'd built their city upon ancient tunnels that were now collapsing under the weight.