The 7 Hour Bus Ride I Took To Meet Xiao Man Last Spring
I was crammed in the back of a rickety long-distance bus out of Kunming last March, the kind that smells like stale cigarette smoke and fermented pickles someone brought for lunch, when I was still telling myself I wouldn’t mess this up. I’d handled three of these child protection cases before, but this one felt different, I don’t know why. The instant coffee I’d brewed that morning had long gone cold, and I’d forgotten to charge my portable charger the night before, so my phone was at 12% and I couldn’t even scroll to distract myself. The grandma sitting next to me noticed, pulled out a chunky old power bank covered in peeling floral stickers, and insisted I plug it in. Then she gave me a roasted sweet potato still warm from her canvas bag, skin charred black. I ate it, juice dripping down my wrist, and we didn’t talk much after that. I don’t even know her name. That’s how most of this stuff goes, right? A lot of small, random kindnesses from people you’ll never see again.
The call came two days before from Auntie Li, the only primary school teacher in that remote village outside Lijiang. She’d noticed Xiao Man, 6 years old, first grade, coming to school with bruises on her forearms and a split lip three weeks in a row. When she pressed the kid after class, Xiao Man finally whispered that her stepdad had been hitting her, sometimes when he was drunk he’d lock her out of the house overnight to “teach her not to be noisy.” Her mom left six months before, moved to Guangzhou to work in a garment factory and never called or came back. Her birth dad died in a logging accident three years ago. The paternal grandma sleeps in the next room, but she’s got bad knees that can barely hold her weight, let alone stop a grown man. Auntie Li said she’d gone to the local police station once, but they brushed it off as family business, told her not to meddle in other people’s affairs. So she called our little NGO, the one I work for that’s just five of us working out of a rented apartment in Kunming.
Auntie Li was waiting for me at the dirt bus stop when I got there, wearing a faded blue winter coat, her hands so chapped they were bleeding in a couple of spots around the knuckles. She smokes that homemade tobacco rolled in newspaper, and she offered me one, I said no, she laughed and said good, it’s nasty stuff that’ll rot your lungs anyway. We walked up the steep dirt hill to their house, and I remember the air smelled like pine and pig manure, which sounds gross but it’s just what remote village air smells like, sharp and alive. When we got there, grandma was sitting on the threshold, crying, her hands twisted in her stained apron. The stepdad was off drinking in the village square, or so she said. We got Xiao Man packed, the only thing she owned that wasn’t torn or stained was a red cotton jacket grandma sewed her for Chinese New Year. She wouldn’t leave without a dented clear plastic Coke bottle cap, I don’t know why it mattered, but I didn’t make her leave it. That’s the one thing I’ve learned that no training manual ever told me: if a 6 year old who’s never had anything nice wants a bottle cap, you let her have the bottle cap.
Halfway down the hill, we heard yelling. It was him, drunk, stumbling after us, red in the face, screaming that we were stealing his property. I froze. I’d done this three times, I know what to say, I had all the legal paperwork in my bag, but my mouth went dry, I couldn’t get a single word out. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the folder with the emergency protection orders. Auntie Li stepped in front of me, yelling right back at him loud enough to scare the crows off the pine trees, and the village head who’d agreed to come with us pulled him aside, talked to him for ten minutes, gave him a pack of expensive factory-made cigarettes, and he finally stumbled back to the village square. I still get a little tight in the chest thinking about it, how scared I was. I’m supposed to be the one who helps, right? But I almost ran.
Xiao Man didn’t cry the whole way back to Kunming. She just sat pressed against the bus window, staring at the green mountains rolling by, didn’t move for hours. I offered her a lemon cookie I had in my bag, she just shook her head. I left it on the seat between us, and an hour later I looked over, and it was gone, just crumbs on the cuff of her dirty jacket. We got back to the small safe house we run late that night, and the other ladies there had a hot meal of rice and cabbage waiting, but she wouldn’t eat, just hid behind the couch and wouldn’t come out. For two weeks, she didn’t say a single word to anyone. One night I was working late, going through paperwork, and I heard a little rustling noise from the laundry closet down the hall. I opened the door, and there she was, curled up on a pile of clean bed sheets, holding that stupid bottle cap tight to her chest. I didn’t say “it’s okay” or any of that dumb stuff people say when they don’t know what else to say. I just sat down on the cold tile floor next to her, ate my granola bar I’d saved for dinner, and after ten minutes, I held out half to her. She took it.
People always ask me, when I tell this story, “Oh, so you saved her, that’s so wonderful.” And I don’t know what to say. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen. The custody case is still dragging on, his family keeps saying he’s changed, he’s stopped drinking, he wants her back, and the court keeps pushing the hearing date back. I yelled at her three weeks ago, because she kept drawing on the freshly painted walls of the safe house, and I’d just had a terrible three hour meeting with the lawyer that went nowhere, and I snapped. She ran and hid in the same laundry closet, and I felt like the worst person in the world. I went straight to the stationery shop down the street and bought her a whole pack of new crayons and a big sketchbook, and apologized, and she just nodded, still didn’t say anything that day.
Last week, though, we were all sitting on the balcony eating cut fruit after dinner, and she tugged on my sleeve, and said, clear as anything, “I want to eat mango.” I almost cried right there. I bought her two big ripe ones from the fruit stand down the street, she ate until her face was all sticky with juice, and laughed when I wiped it off with a crumpled napkin.
I’m going back to that village next week for the next court hearing. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I still don’t know if I’m doing any good, half the time. I ate a sweet potato from a stranger on a bus, I gave a scared kid half a granola bar, I bought her two mangoes. That’s all I’ve got. Some days that feels like enough, most days it doesn’t. But I’m still getting on the bus.
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