Literature / Red Thread Sisters

"It's a very old story that goes like this: There is an invisible red thread that connects those who are destined to meet. No matter what place or circumstance, the red thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break. This thread has brought you and your family together. At this orphanage, on this day. You and the McGuires are meant to be. Believe this, Wen. The red thread connects you."

— Auntie Lan Lan

Red Thread Sisters is a Middle Grade book by Carol Antoinette Peacock.

Wen is an 11-year-old Chinese girl raised in a rural Chinese orphanage, with no one to call family except for her best friend, Shu Ling. At age 11, Wen is adopted by an American family and moves to their Boston suburban home, where she struggles to adjust to her new life and make friends at school, all the while knowing Shu Ling remains at the orphanage, alone.

With the promise to help Shu Ling find a family hanging in her mind, Wen can only try to hold on to it as time ticks down until Shu Ling becomes too old to be adopted.

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This book contains examples of:

• Abandon the Disabled: Shu Ling's biological parents left her as a Doorstop Baby at a hospital, with her believing they abandoned her because she was born with clubfoot.
• Adoption Diss: In Chapter 27, Wen tries to suggest to a boy in her neighbourhood that his family should adopt Shu Ling, to which he replies he'll ask his mother. Wen, being adopted herself, is offended by the answer.
  "Sorry," said the boy, coming back. "My mom says no. Besides, she says she only wants real kids."
  "Real kids?" Wen glared at him. "Shu Ling is real."
  "Her own," said the boy. "Not adopted.
  How could the lady think Shu Ling wasn't real? Shu Ling was as real as the boy standing in front of her. The only difference was, the boy had a family and Shu Ling didn't. Wen scowled at the boy and left.
• Adoptive Name Change: Wen's original surname was 'Zhang', but after her adoption, she's introduced to others as 'Wen McGuire'.
• Affectionate Nickname: Wen's adopted younger sister Emily often calls her "Wennie".
• Aloof Big Sister: Wen repeatedly rebukes Emily, being too busy missing or trying to help Shu Ling to hang out with her. Emily's anger boils over in Chapter 24 as she yells out her frustrations in a rage and storms out of the house, soon causing the Big Sister Instinct to kick in as Emily forgot her parka in the snowy winter.
• Big Sister Instinct: In Chapter 24, after Emily leaves the house in a fit of anger without her coat, Wen rushes out to give her her parka and to administer basic first-aid when Emily is injured in a sledding accident.
• A Birthday, Not a Break: In Chapter 13, the McGuire family prepares to celebrate Richard's birthday, only to find that he was suddenly laid off by his employer earlier that day.
• Bonding Through Shared Earbuds: In Chapter 15, Hannah shares her iPod earbuds with Wen upon their first bus ride to school together.
• Bullying the Disabled: Shu Ling is subjected to quite a lot of mistreatment at the orphanage for having clubfoot, from new girls calling her a "cripple" in the showers to being called "defective" and denied an education by Director Feng.
• Calming Tea: In a flashback in Chapter 2, the auntie who found Wen and brought her into the orphanage tried to give her hot tea, presumably also to warm her up from the winter cold, but Wen refused it to go back to the gates to wait for her mother until the auntie brought her back in.
• Chekhov's Gun: Wen is gifted several drawings from Shu Ling before her departure to America, and is later sent a photo of Shu Ling wearing a new shirt Wen's mother bought for her, taken by the adoptive parents of a different orphan. She has them scanned in Chapter 19 for an adoption agency to help advertise Shu Ling's talent and to encourage prospective parents to adopt her.
• Chekhov's Skill: Wen knowing how to stop bleeding cuts from taking care of toddlers at the orphanage and supporting Shu Ling and her bad leg comes in handy in Chapter 24 as she helps Emily clean her cuts and get home after she's wounded in a sledding accident.
• Childish Bangs: Emily is described to have "bangs cut straight across her forehead", emphasizing her status as Wen's adoptive younger sister and the fact she's still in second grade.
• Christmas Episode: Chapter 22 is mostly dedicated to the McGuire family celebrating Christmas, with it being Wen's first actual time celebrating the holiday — visiting the mall for a holiday shopping trip, having a family reunion, and in Wen's case, looking out for more prospective adoptive parents for Shu Ling.
• Chubby Mama, Skinny Papa: Inverted and downplayed. While no attention has been drawn to Wen's adoptive mother Christine's body type, suggesting it's somewhat average, Wen and Shu Ling nickname her adoptive father, Richard, "Round Man" because he looked stout in the photo they sent her. When Wen meets her adoptive family for the first time in Chapter 2, she finds that Richard isn't as stout as she'd expected. Later in the story, Richard is shown to be a Family Man with a goofy streak (but can also get broody when in a bad mood), while Christine is patient and has an inner Mama Bear.
• Country Mouse: Being from rural China, Wen is surprised by life in the city during her brief stint in Beijing, and is amazed upon being taken to visit a mall for the first time in Chapter 9.
  They got off the train in Beijing, where the McGuires stayed at a big hotel at least ten stories high. Wen marveled at the hotel's huge glass windows and moving stairs. Was this what the houses would be like in America?
• Daddy Didn't Show: In Chapter 11, Hannah is greatly saddened by her father not showing up for the parents' breakfast despite him saying he'd come; Michelle points out that he usually just never comes at all after her parents' divorce. Wen starts befriending Hannah in the aftermath of this, bonding over how they miss their family living far away, biological or honorary.
• Death of a Child: In Chapter 10, Wen recalls Shu Ling taking care of a new baby girl found at a train station that she named Xiao Dan ("Little Dawn"), only for the baby to die one night and Shu Ling to be overcome with grief, "too weak to move" for two weeks.
• Disneyland Dad: Hannah's father, having divorced her mother, is suggested to be one, buying Hannah a new jewelry kit but never really attending her special events at school or accepting her gifts. Hannah believes he bought her the kit because he felt bad for not seeing her much.
• Doorstop Baby: Many babies, and in some cases like Wen, young children were left at the gates of the orphanage by their parents; she recalls waiting all day and night long there in the winter before found and brought into the orphanage the next morning. Meanwhile, Shu Ling's parents left her at that of a hospital when she was a baby, where the medical personnel there presumably sent her to the orphanage after finding her.
• Eating Lunch Alone: Wen spends her first day of school eating her noodles "at a table in the back" by herself. Hannah, one of her classmates and later friends, tried to invite her to join her and her friends, but the empty seats at the table were occupied before Wen could get there in time.
• Establishing Character Moment: Wen's adoptive parents, Richard and Christine McGuire, spend their trip to America asking Wen if she's okay and reassuring her that there's nothing to worry about. Christine then defends Wen's status as her daughter to a disbelieving immigration officer. It's an early sign that they are considerate Good Parents who genuinely care about her and wouldn't abandon her again as Wen fears for the first half of the story.
• First Day of School Episode: Chapter 7 chronicles Wen's first day of school as she struggles in class and to make friends.
• Fish out of Water: After being adopted and moving to America, Wen struggles with adjusting to the novel culture and being able to live with various luxuries she could have barely dreamt of while at the orphanage.
• Flashback: The book is interspersed with several of them, chronicling Wen's life starting around the time she came to the orphanage, and ending sometime before her adoption as the story starts.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals:
  • Wen's adoptive parents bought her many stuffed animals for her room in anticipation for her arrival.
    Stuffed animals sat heaped along the pillow. All those stuffed animals — enough for almost every baby and little kid in the whole orphanage!
  • In Chapter 22, Wen buys Emily a white teddy bear with a pink bow at its neck, and imagines her "settling her new bear on her pillow beside all her other stuffed animals".
• "Good Luck" Gesture: In Chapter 8, when Wen indirectly asks if she can call Shu Ling at the orphanage, her father teaches her that crossing one's fingers means to "make a wish" as her mother calls Nancy, the adoption lady, to ask for permission to do so.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Christine McGuire has frizzy blonde hair described to be like sunshine, and is a patient and loving mother to both of her daughters.
• Halloween Episode: In Chapter 11, Wen is introduced to Halloween and invited to go trick-or-treating with Hannah, Michelle, and Sophie the next chapter.
• Heir Club for Men: Due to a long drought and their crops failing, Wen's biological family had to leave their farm and move in with her father's uncle in the city, who had a spare room large enough for only three people, and where they'd had to give up one of their children or face legal consequences. Her father chose to give up Wen to the orphanage despite her being the older child, because she's a daughter and not a son like their newborn, to her mother's protests.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Wen's Fatal Flaw. She often jumps to conclusions about what her adoptive family wants from her, thinking they want to abandon her and send her back to the orphanage because she wasn't "grateful" enough or caused "too much trouble", egged on by her upbringing and past experiences with Unadoptable Orphans. She spends the first third of the story looking out for the "keeping sign" Auntie Lan Lan told her about that would signify her adoptive parents wanted to keep her forever, not realizing they've non-verbally made it again and again for most of the book; and part of her main character arc revolves around her learning and accepting that her adoptive family loves her unconditionally.
• Infant Sibling Jealousy: Well, Adoptive Sibling Jealousy. At the start of Chapter 8, Emily gets jealous that Wen gets to have her own cell phone because their parents thought Wen, being newly adopted, might need more help and Emily's still too young to have her own phone. Their parents are implied to talk her through her jealousy that night.
• Inner City School: The classroom in the orphanage Wen attended had only one splintered bench and table that all the children had to sit along uncomfortably.
• Interracial Adoption Struggles: Aside from a certain degree of Language Barrier, in Chapter 3, an immigration officer stares at Wen and her blonde-haired, blue-eyed adoptive mother Christine in confusion, "like something was wrong". Wen is afraid and confused for most of the scene, but Christine steps up and raises her voice to defend Wen's status as her daughter.
  As the line moved, Wen peeked at the mean man. He was stamping their papers quickly, his hands flying, his eyes directed straight down, as if he was scared her mother would yell again.
• It's Fake Fur, It's Fine: In Chapter 8, Michelle wears a light blue vest with "its edges lined in white fuzz" to school, and reassures her friends that it's fake fur and "not from a killed animal or anything".
• Language Barrier:
  • At the start of the story, Wen knows some English but spends the first few chapters too nervous to speak. Her adoptive parents mostly speak English, but try to ease the transition by speaking in basic Mandarin Chinese, using a ring of bilingual phrase cards; Wen's narration, though, repeatedly describes their Chinese as "flattened" and "toneless" and her feeling uncomfortable about their sub-par pronunciation. Wen manages to come out of her shell in Chapter 6, with a comment from Christine suggesting that they believed she didn't know any English until she spoke.
  • A few chapters involve segments where a bilingual character has to play translator for those who speak little Mandarin and those who speak no English.
    Then Wen heard her mother talk and Auntie Lan Lan translate her words for Director Feng, who spoke no English.
• Learning to Ride a Bike: Wen's family buys her a second-hand bike at a yard sale in Chapter 17. Hannah drops by for a visit and teaches her how to ride it, as the only bike she'd seen before belonged to Cook at the orphanage, who forbade kids from trying to ride it.
• Mundane Luxury: Being raised in a poor orphanage for most of her life, Wen initially struggles with having access to simple, everyday matters easily found in suburban America, like her own room, seconds at meals, not having to do chores, her own set of clothes, and being able to take a bath.
• Naturalized Name: In Chapter 16, Wen finds that some adoption sites assign all the Chinese children American names like 'Ben' or 'Erin', encouraging American families to adopt them. In Chapter 19, one of these agencies explains that the American name is used for privacy.
• New Friend Envy: Michelle is initially characterized as being "mean", blunt, and sarcastic, especially towards Wen, but Hannah later says that it's likely she's jealous that Wen might take over her spot as Hannah's best friend. She becomes a bit more sensitive after learning Wen has her own best friend waiting to be adopted in China.
• New Parent Nomenclature Problem:
  • A variant. Wen initially takes issue with her new family calling Emily, her adoptive younger sister, "mei mei" because she considers herself to be Shu Ling's mei mei. It takes until a Big Sister Instict moment in Chapter 24 for her to ever call Emily her sister.
  • Wen also struggles to refer to her adoptive mother by anything more than a Hey, You! for most of the story, though calling her adoptive father "Dad" comes easier. It takes many trials and tribulations for Wen to do so, only after her family drove around in the winter night to look for her after she got lost in Chapter 27.
    "Hi, Mom!" Emily greeted her mother, who'd just come in carrying the last shopping bag.
    How easily Emily said it. Mom. Hi, Mom, Wen wished she could say. But whenever she opened her mouth to say Mom, the word stuck in her throat. The aunties taught kids picked for adoption to call their mothers Mama ["Mom" in Chinese]. But all Wen could do was call her mother Hey.
• Nightmare Sequence:
  • Wen has one in Chapter 3 during an overnight train ride to Beijing, where she tries to search for Shu Ling in the orphanage but can't find her anywhere.
    When she woke in the morning, Wen felt as paralyzed as she had in her bad dream, only worse, because she knew, for sure, that Shu Ling was really gone.
  • Wen has another at the end of Chapter 22, that Shu Ling aged out of being adoptable and her bad leg was frostbitten in the winter cold to the point it had to be amputated, with the gangrene spreading badly enough to kill her.
• Orphanage of Fear: Tong Du Children's Welfare Institute, the orphanage Wen and Shu Ling were raised in, isn't necessarily abusive, but it doesn't have enough space, resources, or personnel for all the children to live happily and healthily and forces the older girls to have a Promotion to Parent to take care of the younger kids. The aunties also yell at the children for unsatisfactory behaviour, like talking late at night and not doing their chores well enough, and the director is ableist towards any disabled children under his care, saying educating them is a waste of resources.
  Wen looked into the boys' bedroom, its seven cots jammed tight, a lightbulb dangling from a wire overhead. Next, she passed the infant room, where twenty black-haired babies lay, head to toe, two or three in a crib. Across the way, in the small-children's activity room, Wen saw the toddlers, slouching in rusty walkers.
• Parent with New Paramour: In Chapter 26, Hannah mentions that her father has a new girlfriend that she hates, with her father and the girlfriend holding hands all while she's having dinner with them.
• Parental Abandonment: As the story revolves around the lives of orphans and adopted children, this is a recurring theme throughout the book.
  • Wen was abandoned by her family at the age of five after the birth of her younger brother, both due to a lack of space and due to China's One Child Policy being strictly enforced in the city. She still remembers her mother crying as she left her at the orphanage gates.
  • Shu Ling recalls learning she was a Doorstop Baby left on the steps of a hospital, and believes she was abandoned for being born with clubfoot. Wen looks on the bright side of this, believing Shu Ling's biological parents chose to leave her at a hospital so that the doctors there can cure or help her.
• Playing Sick: In Chapter 19, Wen feigns being sick so she can skip school and call an adoption agency, Worldwide Adoptions, about their site's information on Shu Ling. Wen's mother sees through it but lets it slide.
• Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure: At the end of Chapter 26, Hannah gifts Wen a "Special Friends" necklace that Wen struggles to accept because she thought she failed to keep her promise to Shu Ling due to inconsistent results on the adoption site and believed Hannah was offering herself as a Replacement Goldfish, causing Hannah to storm off, thinking Wen's being standoffish. They make up again in Chapter 28.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Director Feng, the orphanage director, is the closest the story has to a villain and explicitly denies Shu Ling an education for being disabled.
  "I wish you could go to school too," Wen told Shu Ling that afternoon.
  "There would be no point. Director Feng says I'm 'defective,' mei mei," Shu Ling said.
  "Stupid word." Wen seethed. "Stupid."
  Wen had stormed over to Director Feng's office, raised her arm, and knocked. Director Feng came to the door and glared. "Why can't Shu Ling go to school?" Wen asked, wishing her voice sounded bigger and braver.
  Director Feng told Wen that it was not her place to question him. Children with disabilities like Shu Ling had no future, and he couldn't waste money educating them. He reminded her that children who questioned their elders did not get chosen for adoption. He slammed his door shut.
• The Power of Family: Being a story about adoption and familial love, this is the Central Theme that Wen learns to embrace, and tries to impart to Shu Ling when she has to face the prospect of being adopted herself and to let new people into her life in Chapter 28.
  Wen: I know you think you can be on your own. I used to think so too. But it's better with a family.
  Shu Ling: How is it better? Trips to McDonald's and the mall-palace? I don't need these.
  Wen: No. Being with a family is better because if you get lost, they drive around in their car until they find you. If you feel sad, they try to cheer you up, even if they don't really know what's wrong. If you get sick, they sit by your bed and take care of you. And if things get hard, like maybe there's less money, they still love you no matter what, because they're your family. That's what's better.
• Promotion to Parent: The older residents at the Chinese orphanage like Wen and Shu Ling are tasked with doing chores and taking care of the babies. In Chapter 2, Wen even recalls helping younger children prepare for adoption when the aunties are too busy.
• Race Against the Clock: In Chapter 19, Wen finds that Shu Ling's legal age is actually a year older than her assumed age, and that she only has until Shu Ling's birthday about six weeks later to find her an adoptive family before she ages out under national policy.
• Red String of Fate: The story is half-titled after the myth, with Auntie Lan Lan saying that there is an invisible, unbreakable red thread connecting those who are destined to meet, like an orphan and their adoptive family.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: In Chapter 19, Jenny Peters, who works for Worldwide Adoptions, admits that she's going against agency policy to speak to Wen to get more information about Shu Ling and rewrite her description on the site herself, but since Wen knows Shu Ling so well and can help her get adopted, she'll help.
• Shrinking Violet: Wen was originally perceived by her adopted family to be this because her anxiety about being adopted caused her to forget most of the English she's learnt in the past. She starts opening up and being more verbal when she encounters a cultural element she is familiar with in Chapter 6: McDonald's.
• Stepford Smiler: After being laid off, Wen's father Richard still tries to look happy in front of his daughters as he struggles to search for a new job.
  Her father spoke in a cheerful voice Wen knew was forced.
• Tastes Like Friendship: A flashback in Chapter 2 reveals that Wen and Shu Ling first became friends upon the former's arrival at the orphanage and the latter brought her hot soup to warm up from the cold.
  Suddenly she heard a stomp-drag, stomp-drag and raised her eyes. A tall girl with a long braid down her back appeared at the door and limped toward her, carrying a bowl of steaming soup. Very carefully, the girl put the hot bowl in Wen's hands. Then she covered her legs with a blanket and patted her arm. "Don't worry. My name is Shu Ling. I'm your friend," she'd said. She helped Wen lift the hot soup to her lips. Wen drank. "I'm in the next bed over," Shu Ling had said. "You'll sleep right here, by me." And from that night on, she did.
• Toast of Tardiness: Hannah is first introduced as being nearly late for school because her alarm didn't go off, rushing into the classroom with a piece of buttered toast in hand.
• Translation Convention: Throughout the text, conversations take place in either English or Mandarin Chinese. Which language is being spoken at the time is generally dependent on context clues like fluency or who's talking to whom, though it's sometimes mentioned when characters are speaking or writing in Chinese specifically, with the occasional You Are the Translated Foreign Word.
• Trying Not to Cry: In Chapter 3, Wen finds that Shu Ling drew a picture of the two of them together, calling her her little sister, and tries to avoid crying in fear that she'd be abandoned by her new family if they found out.
  Mei mei. Now, the portrait on her lap, Wen read Shu Ling's words again. She told herself not to cry. If her new family knew she was sad, they might think she wasn't grateful and give her back. As soon as the plane landed in America, her mother and father and Emily might get up from their seats, say "Wait here," and then never return. And then what would happen to her?
• Unadoptable Orphan: Played for Drama.
  • After being abandoned by her family at the age of five after the birth of her younger brother (due to the One Child Policy in China), the 11-year-old protagonist Wen spent six years of her childhood in an orphanage as a "waiting child" before being adopted at the start of the story. The story itself is interspersed with flashbacks to her childhood, where Wen recalls children being sent back to the orphanage for being "bad" and ungrateful, and trying to be the best daughter she can so the same fate wouldn't befall upon her.
    As she saw the other kids get new families, Wen felt a longing even deeper than her hunger at the evening meal, when breakfast had been so long ago.
  • Meanwhile, there are repeated mentions to how older children are less likely to be adopted than babies, and the main plot revolves around Wen trying to ensure her disabled best friend from the orphanage, Shu Ling, is adopted and brought to America like herself before she ages out of being adoptable at all under national policy.
• You Are the Translated Foreign Word: Some of the basic Mandarin Chinese phrases used are transcribed directly in pinyin, followed by its English translation. In some cases, it's justified as Wen's knowledge of English is still fairly basic at the start of the story, but the rest are translated for the Anglophone audience's benefit.
  Wen cleared her throat. "Zai jian," she said [to Shu Ling]. "Good-bye. I have to go now."

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