Driftwood by Tai Dong Huai

My adoptive mom's Canadian family is friendly and frightening. I meet them on a beach at Kamaniskeg Lake where they own a string of weather-beaten cottages. I am nine and they have never met me before.
    "This is your Uncle Donald," my mom says, pointing to a smiling, wrinkled man wearing a too-small bathing suit. "And this is Aunt Martha," she tells me indicating a woman with purplish-gray growths on her shoulders. "Down in the water I see your cousins Jamie and Robin. And who is that? Is that little Chee-Chee all grown up?"
    They come at me slowly and slightly out of focus. They smile and hold out their arms to be hugged. They are, despite their sunburns, the whitest people I have ever seen and there are far too many of them for me to keep straight.
    "Welcome to the family," Uncle Somebody says.
    "Those squinty little eyes are cute," a cousin tells my mother.
    My mom – who had made this place sound better than Disneyland – has rented a trailer on the other side of the lake. "Just so we can do our own thing if we want," she explained. My adoptive dad, usually an ally in these situations, has stayed home with some excuse probably even he doesn't remember.
    The aunts and uncles are full of questions. "Does that color skin burn?" "Don't you think she'd look prettier with shorter hair?" "Is she always this quiet?"
    Tonight my mom plans to "wow 'em." At the family talent show, in one of these large wooden shacks, I will play "The Star Spangled Banner" on my violin.

This will apparently not only show my patriotism to my adoptive country, it will prove it.
    Like salvation, a small dog trots out of one of the cottages. I bend to pet it, but a teenage girl yells, "Mannix!" and it runs down the beach and out of sight.
    The other children my age have huddled together in the water. They whisper, giggle, glance my way, giggle some more. I think to myself: Hand me my violin. I will play the most difficult piece I know – Bach's Chaconne – and I will play it well enough to make your eyes grow even more round and your slack mouths fall further open.
    When the adults group together under a large canopy and begin drinking gin-and-tonic, I walk off to a secluded stretch of sand on the other side of the dock. I find a piece of driftwood, drop to my knees, and begin to dig. I think of a warm day years ago. I was at the playground close to my adoptive home, digging a hole in the dirt beside the zip-line. My dad was sitting on a bench talking to a girl with a Red Sox cap on. One of his students perhaps. A second man – a second dad – passed by where I was working, stopped, smiled.
    "Digging a hole to China?" he asked.
    I look up, out at Kamaniskeg Lake, and it appears as vast as any ocean. Nearby, kids play 'Marco/Polo,' and I hear an adult say loudly, "Better than Viagra!" Others laugh as I return to digging. I know that before long, water will fill my hole from below. But for now I ignore science. I put my ear to the hole, but I hear nothing.
    I dig deeper.

About the author:
Tai Dong Huai was born in Taizhou, China. Her work has appeared, or will appear in elimae and Meeting House. "Driftwood" is from her collection in progress, I Come From Where I've Never Been.