Your Daughter is with Us (Pt.1)

Hua was a nine-year-old girl from Eastern China who had joined her parents in Paris just two months before we met. I was their neighbor, and they passed by my window twice a day. Her mother described, whisking a clenched fist over an outstretched palm, how she paid twenty-thousand euros for the necessary travel documents. Hua lived with her parents on the ground floor of an old apartment complex with several stairwells rising through two five-story buildings, home to hundreds. A stone lane runs from the gate at the street straight back to the last ground-floor door. In the evening, before the parents got home from work, there was often a knock on Hua’s door, and a voice echoed back along the lane. Hua? Are you alone? Have you eaten? Hua managed the five-minute walk to and from school alone, doing homework or sleeping until somebody came home to cook. The neighborhood has a leftist legacy, and the primary school, named after a Latin American revolutionary hero, offers a special adjustment class for the new arrivals who do not yet speak French.
One day Hua forgot to take her key. She couldn’t go home, so she decided to look for one of the three people she knew: her parents and an ‘uncle.’ She negotiated a route into the metro between the Chinese squatting in line for the sidewalk pay phones, Africans in flowing dress, Jews and Muslims opening their couscous restaurants and shops. Somehow in the jostling mass, this small, silent girl caught the eye of a transport system employee, who placed Hua in police custody. Hua lead three male officers back to her door, where they waited for the parents to return. The Police were firm about not leaving the girl behind in the care of friendly and concerned neighbors who appeared on their way home. A light rain fell; everyone waited under the stairwell arch near the letter boxes. A stoic Hua leaned against the wall, unable to understand anything that was said until I happened to come down the lane and speak to her in elementary Chinese. Hua explained that she had left her key inside, and that her parents would be home soon. I got a hint of a smile when I showed her pictures on my laptop of me in China.
The police scribbled a note to the parents (‘Your daughter was found alone in the metro. She’s with the police. Call this number’), slipped the paper into their mailbox and left. Hua’s black ponytail swung over her bright red backpack as she trotted along, keeping pace with the tall officers.