Your Daughter is with Us (Pt.2)

In pt. 1 (see May 2007 archive), the young Hua was last seen walking, nearly skipping, down a boulevard in Paris, hand-in-hand, with a tall police officer. She had been found alone on the street, or perhaps inside the metro, it wasn’t clear, and with no parents at home to receive her, she was taken into protective custody by the authorities who said she would be held at the Office for Minors.The neighbors witnessing her departure agreed that the law preventing the police from turning Hua over to non-parental adults was a good one.

But the neighbors also knew that the parents were illegal aliens. When the father arrived, he struggled to understand where his daughter was. He understood almost no French. One neighbor had called a businesslike woman to the scene: a representative of a local solidarity network, offering support and assistance to illegal aliens. She was good at sifting through incoherence and despair in search of factual information, anything which could be used to weave a story. No story meant anonymity and deportation. This woman’s network operates as a buffer zone between the shady practices of human traffickers and the grim world of detention cells.

Hua’s mother rushed in, and the ‘Uncle’ appeared. The more that was said, the more muddled the tale. The ‘Uncle’ produced the parents’ passports (and collected them again at the end of the evening). The solidarity worker called the Office for Minors and spoke to the social worker, who promised through the phone that the girl would be returned to the parents if they could show papers proving their status as father and mother. The social worker, proceeding on the assumption that the parents were illegal, also promised that no immigration-related questions would be asked. The social and solidarity workers shared the view that it was better for the little girl to be returned to her only home in Europe, with the people who were possibly her parents, than to remain in police custody, terrified and alone.
The social worker kept her word: the English-language Chinese-stamped ‘document’ identifying Hua as the daughter of the two Chinese adults present was accepted as valid, vague accounts of the parents’ work in ‘sausage sales’ were polished up for a report drawn up for the Office for Minors files, and signatures were collected from the mother and me, registered as ‘official interpreter’ for the occasion.
Little Hua entered the room, burst into tears and collapsed into the arms of the ‘Uncle,’ who comforted her and whispered soft words over the side of her head. Until that moment, he had been allocated the role of the scheming trafficker in the story. The solidarity worker and I had been exchanging subtle furrows of the brow as the evening wore on, but now, we watched him in the role of affectionate elder.
The ‘parents’ barely reacted to Hua’s return. Although relieved not to have been handcuffed upon arrival at the police station, they were still cowering from all the questions posed, unable to hide their anxiety. The social worker and the police who offered full assistance in arranging Hua’s return continued to lean towards the ‘couple’ and to repeat ‘Don’t be afraid!’ in a language the parents did not understand, in loud tones that made them lean back to avoid the sound, eyes wide open in fear. The message conveyed by their body language was insulting to the helpers, who could not tolerate being viewed as mean people. But rather than express anger, they displayed sarcasm, indifference; resignation to their inability to set anyone at ease. As Hua and her entourage were hurrying out of the Office for Minors that night, eager to treat their helpers to late evening refreshment at a fast-food restaurant, the police guards at the door had simply looked bored - this happens all the time.