Deca's Blog, page 4

The First Four Hundred Words: Homelands

When I was in Liberia during the civil war in 2003, I met a four-year-old girl named Patience. Monrovia, the capital of the small West African country, was under siege. Its power grid had failed. Rice was scarce. The taps had run dry. Cholera crawled in the tropical heat. Hopped-up government soldiers ran the streets in looted pickup trucks, and nobody knew what the rebels would do if their push for the center was successful.

I met Patience in a dark room off a dirt lot, in a concrete building in an orphanage placed perilously on a thin strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the river that held back the rebel advance. The night before my arrival, the woman who ran the orphanage told me, two shells from a mortar had passed overhead and fallen—crack, crack—somewhere between the orphanage and the ocean’s shore.

Patience, big-eyed, in stubby braids and a blue-and-white polka-dot dress, watched me from the shadows. Anemic, listless, undersize, suffering from dysentery, she had the measured movements of an old woman and the questioning stare of a toddler. In the same room, another orphan, ten-year-old Emmanuel, leafed through a book of photographs, color printouts, bound in black plastic and covered with a thin transparent sheet: There was green grass and a white-paneled house and a little blond girl smiling. There was a large van and an even larger play set. There was a countertop completely covered with food. “This is a very nice place,” Emmanuel said in a quiet voice. “I would like to go to this place.”

For Emmanuel, the snapshots of suburban America presented an impossible dream, a portrait of manicured abundance as distant and as glorious as a preacher’s description of heaven. For Patience, they represented something else: a promise that had yet to be kept. The pictures in the book were of her room, her yard, her kitchen, her van, her house. She didn’t have to be there, in that dark room on that concrete floor, with not enough to eat, flinching from the cracks and crashes from a war she didn’t understand. She had been adopted—by an American family.

The head of the orphanage gave me the number of the woman who had asked to be Patience’s mother, Ellen Carlson, a trainer at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That night, back in my hotel room, I used my ....

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The First Four Hundred: Homelands

When I was in Liberia during the civil war in 2003, I met a four-year-old girl named Patience. Monrovia, the capital of the small West African country, was under siege. Its power grid had failed. Rice was scarce. The taps had run dry. Cholera crawled in the tropical heat. Hopped-up government soldiers ran the streets in looted pickup trucks, and nobody knew what the rebels would do if their push for the center was successful.

I met Patience in a dark room off a dirt lot, in a concrete building in an orphanage placed perilously on a thin strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the river that held back the rebel advance. The night before my arrival, the woman who ran the orphanage told me, two shells from a mortar had passed overhead and fallen—crack, crack—somewhere between the orphanage and the ocean’s shore.

Patience, big-eyed, in stubby braids and a blue-and-white polka-dot dress, watched me from the shadows. Anemic, listless, undersize, suffering from dysentery, she had the measured movements of an old woman and the questioning stare of a toddler. In the same room, another orphan, ten-year-old Emmanuel, leafed through a book of photographs, color printouts, bound in black plastic and covered with a thin transparent sheet: There was green grass and a white-paneled house and a little blond girl smiling. There was a large van and an even larger play set. There was a countertop completely covered with food. “This is a very nice place,” Emmanuel said in a quiet voice. “I would like to go to this place.”

For Emmanuel, the snapshots of suburban America presented an impossible dream, a portrait of manicured abundance as distant and as glorious as a preacher’s description of heaven. For Patience, they represented something else: a promise that had yet to be kept. The pictures in the book were of her room, her yard, her kitchen, her van, her house. She didn’t have to be there, in that dark room on that concrete floor, with not enough to eat, flinching from the cracks and crashes from a war she didn’t understand. She had been adopted—by an American family.

The head of the orphanage gave me the number of the woman who had asked to be Patience’s mother, Ellen Carlson, a trainer at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That night, back in my hotel room, I used my ....

www.decastories.com/homelands

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The First Four Hundred Words: And The City Swallowed Them

By the time Charlotte Wood walked home—if you could call it home—it was light out and already hot. Six a.m.: Much of Shanghai’s foreign population was fast asleep. But the Chinese are early risers, and on the streets around her, the city had begun to wake. Vendors hawked breakfast snacks from wheeled carts: strips of golden-brown fried dough, sticky rice balls filled with pork floss, steaming soy milk sealed in flimsy plastic cups. Merchants unveiled their wares in small shops crammed with towering piles of fruit, on humble blankets laden with onions and bok choy and potatoes, on tricycle carts stocked with sundry cheap knickknacks. It was a Monday, and commuters trickled into metro stations and waited at bus stops. Motor scooters rumbled. Horns honked. The air stunk of car exhaust, cigarette smoke, and cheap cooking oil. As the blond woman wound her way through the dirty streets, people stared. 
 
The night before, she’d gone out to dinner with her roommate, a fellow Canadian model named Diana O’Brien. Diana was tired—she’d just returned from a two-day job in another city—and after dinner she headed back to their apartment while Charlotte went to a friend’s place to watch movies. Around 3 or 4 a.m., Charlotte decided that it was too late to walk home, and she dozed off on her friend’s sofa until dawn broke. Now she was on her way to the apartment in case their agency called her out to a casting. If that didn’t happen, she’d hang out all day; maybe go shopping, maybe catch up with Diana. Her roommate had been complaining about the jobs the agency had been booking for her. Perhaps they would talk about that.

The two women were close in age—Charlotte was twenty-one, Diana twenty-two—and they were from the same corner of Canada, which in Shanghai counted for a lot. Charlotte had grown up on Vancouver Island in a tiny farming community with one store; Diana was raised on the remote Gulf Islands. They met when they signed up with the same modeling agency in British Columbia. Things had happened fast for both of them: a few months into their modeling careers, they were on their way to China. Their new reality included funny looks, smog, and Chinese bookers with names like Tie and Seven.

Charlotte walked into the Jinsen Building. A nineteen-story...

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The First Four Hundred: And The City Swallowed Them

By the time Charlotte Wood walked home—if you could call it home—it was light out and already hot. Six a.m.: Much of Shanghai’s foreign population was fast asleep. But the Chinese are early risers, and on the streets around her, the city had begun to wake. Vendors hawked breakfast snacks from wheeled carts: strips of golden-brown fried dough, sticky rice balls filled with pork floss, steaming soy milk sealed in flimsy plastic cups. Merchants unveiled their wares in small shops crammed with towering piles of fruit, on humble blankets laden with onions and bok choy and potatoes, on tricycle carts stocked with sundry cheap knickknacks. It was a Monday, and commuters trickled into metro stations and waited at bus stops. Motor scooters rumbled. Horns honked. The air stunk of car exhaust, cigarette smoke, and cheap cooking oil. As the blond woman wound her way through the dirty streets, people stared. 
 
The night before, she’d gone out to dinner with her roommate, a fellow Canadian model named Diana O’Brien. Diana was tired—she’d just returned from a two-day job in another city—and after dinner she headed back to their apartment while Charlotte went to a friend’s place to watch movies. Around 3 or 4 a.m., Charlotte decided that it was too late to walk home, and she dozed off on her friend’s sofa until dawn broke. Now she was on her way to the apartment in case their agency called her out to a casting. If that didn’t happen, she’d hang out all day; maybe go shopping, maybe catch up with Diana. Her roommate had been complaining about the jobs the agency had been booking for her. Perhaps they would talk about that.

The two women were close in age—Charlotte was twenty-one, Diana twenty-two—and they were from the same corner of Canada, which in Shanghai counted for a lot. Charlotte had grown up on Vancouver Island in a tiny farming community with one store; Diana was raised on the remote Gulf Islands. They met when they signed up with the same modeling agency in British Columbia. Things had happened fast for both of them: a few months into their modeling careers, they were on their way to China. Their new reality included funny looks, smog, and Chinese bookers with names like Tie and Seven.

Charlotte walked into the Jinsen Building. A nineteen-story...

www.decastories.com/and-the-city-swallowed-them

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