By Grace Lin
A king and queen carry an ache in their hearts that no one can explain, until a peddler's spectacles show them a red thread leading out of their chests and across the world to the baby waiting at the far end.
The king and queen have everything. Their kingdom is green and rich, their people love them, and still both of them carry an ache in the chest that no one can explain and that never lets up. Then a peddler passes through selling spectacles, and the moment they put them on, they can see it: a thin red thread coming out of each of their hearts, running away over the hills. So they follow it. They walk until their shoes wear through, cross a mountain, row through a storm, and the whole way the thread grows shorter and the ache grows smaller. At the end of it, in a cradle, is a baby girl with the same red thread trailing from her own heart. They lift her up and the pain is finally gone. Grace Lin painted the whole thing like a folk tale, flat and bright and full of pattern, and it draws on an old Chinese belief that an invisible red thread ties together the people meant to find each other.
This one is specifically for adoptive families, and it works by not explaining anything. It's a fairy tale, so instead of setting out how adoption happens it hands a child a picture they can hold: a thread was tied to you before anyone met you, it was pulling the whole time, and it never broke. Some children who came a long way to their family find something in that a plain explanation can't reach. Here the long distance isn't a problem in the story; it's the whole point of it, because the thread had to stretch that far to reach them. Grace Lin is Taiwanese-American, and the red thread comes from a real Chinese folk belief about people destined to find each other.