Wen’s repaired cleft lip

Wen’s repaired cleft lip leaves a thin white scar along the right edge of her philtrum, subtle enough to appear only in certain light. The mark is both a record of surgery in early childhood and a focus of Wen’s unsettled feelings about her face and her past. She sometimes wishes the scar would disappear, yet at other times hopes it will remain; tracing it, she returns to a history she cannot fully remember and an earlier version of herself she is still learning to recognize.

Identity and Medical History

Wen’s cleft extended to her right nostril, where the openings overlapped, and was repaired through multiple surgeries between the ages of two and four. She remembers her first and final hospital trips, but not the procedures in between. That gap troubles her: the missing visits are part of her history, even though she has no memories to attach to them. The scar is a visible remainder of treatment, while the process that produced it survives only in fragments of recollection and in the account of others.

When the story describes Wen at nearly eight, she is athletic, wiry, direct, and determined. Her scar is not presented as defining her personality, but it does affect how she experiences her own smile. She is outgoing and goofy, yet not at ease with her reconstructed smiles; affection does not automatically make her smile. The text thus distinguishes the repair of her lip from the more complicated work of feeling comfortable with her face. Her dads’ reassurance and care matter, but they do not settle the question for her.

Photographs and the Earlier Self

Wen’s thoughts about the scar deepen when she asks Eric and Andrew to show her the youngest baby photographs they have of her, taken before the surgeries and before they adopted her. The five pictures show her lying on a white blanket, her small fists raised beside a face she initially finds difficult to recognize. Seeing them shakes her: she wonders whether this unaltered baby is her real self, now lost or hidden. The fear is not simply that the pictures show a cleft; it is that the child in them might be a version of herself she can no longer reach.

Her response to the photographs changes through looking again. Although she asks for the wooden box to be put away and says she will not look again, she repeatedly retrieves it from beneath her dads’ bed. She first looks at pictures of Eric and Andrew in China and of the three of them together at the orphanage, then turns to the images of herself alone. With repetition, the initial sense that the baby in the pictures is frighteningly separate from her eases. She traces the boundaries of the cleft in the photographs and moves her own lip, trying to imagine the physical difference. The scar becomes a point of contact between present and past, not proof that one self has replaced another.

Adoption and Unanswered Questions

Wen was left anonymously at an orphanage in China’s Hubei Province, and almost nothing is known about her biological parents. Eric and Andrew have spoken openly about her birth and adoption, provided books about Chinese culture, and enrolled her in a Saturday Chinese school alongside her regular school. Andrew has speculated that her birth parents may have been too poor to care for her and hoped she could have a better life elsewhere; the evidence does not establish why they left her. Wen nevertheless wonders whether her appearance played a part. Her repaired lip therefore sits within an unresolved family history, but the story does not treat the scar as an answer to the question of why she was relinquished.

Being Seen by Leonard

During a conversation with Leonard, he notices the small scar when Wen turns a certain way and asks how she got it. His observation makes visible something she usually knows from mirrors and from her own touch. Wen looks down and pushes out her lips, as if checking the mark for herself, then tells him that she had a cleft lip as a baby and that doctors took a long time to repair it. Leonard apologizes for asking, and she says she is okay, though she also senses that something about the encounter feels off.

Leonard tells her that her face is beautiful. Wen wishes he would not say this and ignores the compliment. His reassurance does not match the question she is working through: she is not asking for a verdict on her appearance so much as trying to hold together the scar, the baby in the photographs, and the person she is now. She brings up Andrew’s own scar, which runs from behind his ear down his neck and is usually hidden by his long hair. Mentioning it lets her refer to her father and to another marked body without asking Leonard directly to summon him.

Meaning and Limits

Wen’s scar recurs as a small, concrete feature through which the narrative develops larger questions of bodily history and self-recognition. It is at once a trace of a repaired cleft, an object she alternately wishes to erase and chooses to revisit, and a prompt for questions about adoption that remain unanswered. The photographs make the past available but do not restore the missing memories of her surgeries; Leonard’s attention brings the mark into conversation but does not resolve Wen’s mixed feelings. Its significance lies in that unresolvedness: the repair is complete, while Wen’s understanding of what the scar means to her continues to change.