She gestured him closer; he spoke again. As he did, her eyes widened.
She set her chopsticks down with unsteady fingers. He could see her hands shaking, her eyes lighting up with hope.
Slowly, she stood.
“She asked him to repeat himself,” the translator murmured to Grayson, “and for everyone else to be quiet so she can hear his words.”
After the friendly babble of the past few hours, the silence seemed strident. The man spoke. Next to Grayson, the interpreter whispered. But he hadn’t needed a translator to know what was being said. He could tell from Amelia’s face already.
“He said that someone told him the story about Mrs. Smith, and he needed to come by. He thinks that this sounds like Madame Lang. She goes to Fuzhou every year looking for her daughter. Do you think that’s her?”
When Amelia had imagined finding her mother, she’d always envisioned them alone—Amelia at one end of a long and dusty road and a dimly remembered shape at the other.
But when she asked for directions to Madame Lang’s so that she might make the journey in the morning, the entire crowd laughed at her.
She couldn’t understand most of what they said. They spoke to her in swift, accented Mandarin and Northern Wu. But she did understand the woman who shook her head with a smile.
“Silly,” said one woman. “We’ll take you now.”
“There’s no need—” she started to say.
An elderly man clucked at this. “There’s every need,” he’d told her in careful, slow Mandarin. “Between the rebellion and the wars, do you know how many of our children have not come home? And here you are. This is for all of us.”
In the end, they ventured out in the night in a large group, armed with lanterns and laughter. As they passed through the streets, people asked what was going on. Once they heard, they followed along.
“Didn’t you hear?” someone shouted to someone else. “Madame Lang’s daughter has come home. We’re going to—” She couldn’t understand the rest.
“There,” someone said after they’d been walking for fifteen minutes and their numbers had swollen threefold. “That’s it. That’s the Lang household.”
In the dark of the evening, the blue-gray compound they stopped in front of looked like any of the other buildings they’d passed. A wood gate was opened to the street. Little flowers grew outside the blue-gray walls.
“Come out, Madame Lang!” someone next to her shouted. “We have your daughter!”
The light from the paper lanterns flickered through the shadowed courtyard. Amelia caught the silhouette of some tied animal—a mule perhaps—shaking its head. She could count the beats of her heart as the crowd cheered around them. Then a door opened and a figure stepped forward.
“Madame Lang!” someone called.
“She’s here!” cheered someone else. “Madame Lang, come out!”
“What are all you fools shouting about at this hour of the night?” the woman called out.
“Ei, don’t sound so—!” She couldn’t catch that either, nor the rest of the exchange.
Then she felt hands on her shoulders. She was being escorted forward—not quite pushed, but moved faster than her feet seemed capable of taking her. The press of the crowd behind her brought her to the forefront of the throng with firm hands. Amelia felt dizzy with want, dizzy and uncomprehending.
It wasn’t a dusty road. She wasn’t alone. The woman’s silhouette was dark in the night, and Amelia was blinded by the lanterns shining into her eyes.
“Madame Lang,” someone called out by her side. “Come out, come out! We’ve brought your daughter home.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Amelia took a deep breath. Or, rather, she tried to. Her lungs seemed to be constricting. She glanced over at Grayson. He’d said nothing the entire walk—not that she would have heard him through all the ruckus—but he gave her a warm, reassuring nod.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the woman in the courtyard crept forward cautiously, poking her head outside the gate and peering around.
The lantern light fell on her face.
Amelia had planned a speech for this moment. She’d been planning it for over a decade. She’d recited it three times last night on the boat until it was perfect down to the very word.
She couldn’t remember a single syllable of it.
The woman looked at Amelia. Amelia couldn’t hear anything—not the clamor of voices around her nor the sound of her own feet on hard-packed dirt as she took one step forward, then the next.
What Amelia remembered was a woman who was tired and weary. She remembered smudges of dirt and dark hair, disheveled and unkempt from an arduous journey. She remembered more the impression of a woman than an actual woman.
And yet as this woman came toward her, eyes widening, she felt…something. Some deep sense of recognition, as if time were drawing a line between those useless recollections and this moment. As if that whispered, remembered promise—I will come back—had always been heading here.
In the end, Amelia could manage only one word, squeaked out. “Ah Ma?”
The woman rushed forward, taking hold of Amelia’s arms, looking into her face.
She looked a lot less weary than Amelia’s memory and a lot cleaner. Tracks of wrinkles were visible around her eyes, but they seemed the sort of wrinkles that laughter would make.
“Mengmeng?” she asked. Her voice shook. “Is it you?”
Had that once been her name? Perhaps. But Amelia was apparently no better at remembering her own name than anyone else’s. She felt not a flicker of recognition.
“Madame Lang,” someone called in the crowd. “Is this your daughter? Is this Limeng?”
Amelia couldn’t answer the question. Her mouth felt dry; her hands were chilled.
“I’m sorry.” Amelia bit her lip. “I don’t know that name. I don’t remember what I was called. I am now called…” The words of the name that she used seemed foreign here, as if they would set her apart. “Amelia Smith.” The diphthongs felt odd and strange, as if they had no use in the Chinese sentence.
“Amelia Smith,” her mother repeated with a frown, and then, to Amelia’s great shock, she spoke in halting English. “Do you like that? What is the meaning?”
“You speak English?”
“I learned. A little.” Her mother’s jaw squared. “I thought one day I might meet my daughter again. The missionaries told me she had gone away to be an English lady. I needed to know how to say…” She trailed off before smiling and switching back. “Everything. I needed to know how to say everything. But my Limeng was taken by a Madame Acheson ten miles outside of Shanghai, not a Smith.”
“Oh.” Amelia’s whole body felt fluttery. The whole tableau seemed very distant. She’d dreamed of this so long that now she wasn’t sure this could be real. “That’s my… That is to say, I was taken by Madame Acheson. I suppose that’s me?”
“You hear?” someone called. “It’s her!”
Cheers rang out. She could make out some of them—“Madame Lang’s daughter has come home!”—was simple enough and composed of words she’d repeatedly heard throughout the evening. But someone said something that sounded maybe like cow? Her whole brain ached trying to understand. Amid the din and confusion, Amelia took a step forward, close enough to hear what her mother was saying.