The First Unfairness...

"Sunshine" 

Chen is almost 10 and twirls her hair round the end of a pen. Then she asks me: 
"Do you have your own apartment?" 

I'm playing a role, making her a tuna salad sandwich like a mother might. 
"Yes, well along with roommates." 

She was adopted from China. She is raised by an Italian chef with rosemary poking out of his uniform pocket and a Jewish journalist who makes lists and checks them off with certain alacrity.

Once Chen was playing with blocks. "Bet you don't know what I'm building." 

I knew, but I played along at first. I'm not sure why I knew, I just did. 
"A bridge?" 

She seems to enjoy being mysterious, the most taciturn child I've every met. 
"No." 

I tended to my own block creation a moment or two, then offered a second guess.
"The Great Wall of China?" 

I don't know how I knew. 
Her almond eyes looked up at mine, the glance saying an uninspired "yes".

"Have you ever been there--the Wall of China?" 
It was a silly question for me to ask.

"Yes." She started to take the wall down. She left the walls around her heart untouched. Perhaps she didn't even know they existed.

"Well, not there exactly." she quickly continued. "But I was born there." 

"I know." 

I notice a book on her shelf about being adopted. Her awareness of the fact seems pretty integrated into daily life. The child takes three language lessons a week outside 2nd grade--Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese. 

She can't forget that she has one origin yet four separate identities. The walls of her parent's living room hold Asian art, the kitchen is filled with pasta and parsley, a wide array of jazz standard collections swing out of the stereo system, and there is a menorah collecting dust on top of the china cabinet. 

"Would you like to go there someday, Chen?"

Her wall had become a pyramid of sorts.
"That would be a dream that won't come true." 

We never forget ourselves. As J.M. Barrie said of all humans except his eternal lost boy: "No one ever gets over the first unfairness." 

Back in the kitchen making her a tuna sandwich, we talk of her sudden interest in my apartment. 

"Does your room have windows?"
"Yes." 
"Is there sunlight?"
"Oh, lots. It faces the morning sun." 

Chen's building is like a brick peninsula, with three other buildings towering above it on three sides. Their apartment is at the backside, so despite windows, only indirect light can come through. As such, Chen goes to sleep and wakes up in the same sort of dull, grey light as the day before. 

"Wow...lucky." 

She smiles in a rueful way, then goes back to swirling her silky hair around a pen.