Wish You Happy Forever (10 page)

“Those cartoons will have to come off the walls,” I said.

Every orphanage had primitive Donald Ducks and Mickey Mouses on the walls. What was later called piracy was then just the way it was.

The cartoons? Small Cloud Zhang blanched. But she didn't say no.

“Of course, our crew of volunteers is going to be painting everything. The walls will be beautiful.” Better get the worst over with.

“Volunteers?
Foreign
volunteers?”

“Just a small group for the build. Most will be adoptive parents. And their children!”

The China Smile twitched. Just barely.

WE SET UP
in the reception room to take photos and a brief history of each child. More important than giving us something to offer our child sponsors, this information, in combination with some baseline developmental assessments that Dana Johnson's International Adoption Clinic would perform, would help us track each child's progress.

The children were brought in one by one. Dick took photos of each, and I wrote down what little information the orphanage had. Approximate date of birth, date of abandonment, medical condition . . . anything else? There was never anything else. Even the medical condition seemed like a best guess.

I watched as each tiny girl was marched in and plunked on the sofa. Each one carrying her own sad mystery. Not one of them cried as they were stuck in front of the foreign man's camera. There was not a single boy. I tried to focus on my notebook, swallowing tears for these brave little girls.

“Be still, my heart,” Dick whispered.

“What?”

I looked up at him and then at the little girl he was photographing. She was perched on the doily-draped blue sofa. She did not look pleased to be there.

“She looks like Maya!” I said.

“Like Maya's sister,” he said.

Xinmei

She was twenty-eight months old when we first saw her dark, quiet eyes and solemn face. Abandoned at birth, Xinmei had been taken to a welfare institution that cared solely for old folks. They had no adoption program, foreign or domestic, so Xinmei had spent her infancy as the institution's first child resident.

She had a large hemangioma—a tangle of misplaced blood vessels that caused a swollen mass to bulge from her neck. “As big as her head when she was brought to us,” a caregiver told us later. I imagined some poor country couple seeing their new baby,
this
baby, for the first time—their one and only child.

The very day we arrived in Changzhou, Small Cloud Zhang returned from a visit to Xinmei's welfare institution. She'd seen Xinmei there and felt she might have a chance at international adoption—it was the rare
domestic
Chinese family that would adopt a child considered less than perfect—and so she brought the little girl back with her. Xinmei had not been in the Changzhou orphanage twenty-four hours when we met her.

She looks like Maya's sister
, Dick said. And if fate would have it, that's who she would become.

We still have the photograph Dick took of Xinmei that day—almost Victorian in its posed formality. But now, strangely, the child in that picture looks nothing at all like Maya.

OUR RETURN TO
Shenzhen was far less promising.

The Shenzhen director greeted us warmly again but noted that she needed something even more official than a fax from Beijing before we could photograph the children or do any baseline testing. And, despite the fact that there were about a hundred infants in residence, our infant program would be allowed to work with only fifteen babies in one small room.

We did our best to make a plan for the rooms allotted to us, but with trepidation. That 100 percent cooperation was starting to feel like 50 percent at best.

 

WE FLEW BACK
north to Beijing, and in the morning ZZ and I visited CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs). The vice director had summoned us. He wanted to know more about Half the Sky. Exactly what were our intentions?

I told him about the gratitude we felt to China, how we wanted to give back. In my new chameleon habit, I slipped into his skin and figured he might be worried that Half the Sky would lure foreign adoptive parents' donations to places unknown, beyond CCAA's control. I assured him that we hoped for and needed CCAA to help us. We knew that there was no one more familiar with the institutions than he was. I asked for his help in selecting the sites that could most benefit from the programs.

The vice director warmed up a bit and shared his carefully phrased view of conditions in the orphanages. Then he passed along a few pointed warnings.

1. Don't grow too fast.

I wasn't sure what he meant but readily agreed. “We won't,” I promised.

2. Don't put children's pictures on the Internet in a way that they can be identified.

Made perfect sense. “Certainly not,” I said.

3. Stay away from adoption.

In other words, adoption is government business. No trespassing.

“I understand,” I said. “Our purpose is only to help the children who are living in the institutions. We will not touch adoption. Not ever.”

Fingers crossed behind my back, I wondered if our hopes for little Xinmei could possibly count as adoption meddling. Was I breaking the rules before I even got started?

 

BEFORE WE LEFT
Beijing for home, I made a last attempt to seal the deal. I booked a room at the elegant Fang Shan, a Qing-era restaurant (supposedly the imperial dining hall of Empress Dowager Cixi) in the middle of Beihai Park and invited all of our new government friends. Mr. Shi of the Social Workers Association, a shy man with a sweet high-pitched voice and a perpetual smile, arrived at the stately retreat an hour late, red-faced and puffing. He'd ridden his bicycle from the other end of town.

The food, all thirteen elegant courses, was tasteless. Maya, indifferent to the cuisine, adored the pretty young waitresses in their bright silks and seriously high platform clogs. The next time we entertained our Beijing colleagues, they asked to go to TGI Friday's.

Chapter 5

Pick the Roses, Live with the Thorns

I've been a mother since I was nineteen years old. When I was a girl, it was what girls were supposed to aspire to. Marriage and motherhood. I wasn't too keen on the marriage part, but went along with the requirement. I wanted the baby. I'm not sure what drove the desire; maybe I wanted to know what unconditional love felt like. At the time, all I knew was that I wanted to leave my childhood behind and start living a life like I imagined in stories.

When I was ten, I won a writing contest sponsored by the
San Francisco Chronicle
and received a big book as a prize. It was a picture encyclopedia. I thought it was babyish, for little kids, so I gave it away to a friend. My mother gave me the worst beating ever for that. She was furious; she kicked me and pulled my hair. I got a tirade of
ungrateful
and
spoiled
and
That book was worth a lot of money
and
Who do you think you are, Miss Priss?
and
I wish you'd never been born
—words I pretended not to hear.

I didn't understand why she was so angry. But somehow, maybe from reading all those library books, I understood, at least intellectually, that she didn't know any better. She was probably giving what
she
got. Anyhow, when I grew up and had a child, I would be different.

I might have stopped writing that day, for all the grief it brought me. Instead, I opted for the theater. I wrote plays and studied acting. No one in my family ever came to see me in anything, but I told myself I didn't care. It didn't matter. I didn't need anybody. I'd found out I wasn't the only misfit in town. Theater was full of them.

So I married too young, and when my young husband (who was about as mature as I was) wasn't around much because he was busy trying to make it as a folksinger, I quietly left my marriage and threw myself full-time into theater and motherhood. I pretty much grew up alongside my daughter Cristin and my son, Aaron. I didn't have a clue what children needed, but I knew that my own upbringing was not the model to follow. I went in the opposite direction. My children played backstage and traveled where the work was, and somehow we all survived and, in many ways, flourished.

From time to time, I'd hear my mother's words starting to come out of my mouth—
I'll give you something to cry about
—and I'd swallow the words and hold my children tight instead. It wasn't easy and I didn't always succeed. Sometimes my babies and I would cry together. My love for them came naturally, even though its expression did not. Like Maya, I suppose, I had to
learn
loving and being loved—as basic as those things are.

BY THE TIME
Maya came into our lives, my first children were grown. Dick (then a longtime loving stepdad and my spouse for twenty years) and I loved having a child in our lives again. I guess it was natural that, as Maya settled in, we began to talk of a little sister—someone who shared her background and who could grow up with her. They'd be there for each other, even if something should befall their not-so-young parents.

The dossier for our second adoption was already in Beijing when I called Norman one jet-lagged morning right after our return home and told him about Xinmei.

“It's not so easy,” he said. “Pre-identified adoption is not allowed.”

“I know, Norman, but will you ask? Richard and I . . . we just have this feeling that she's meant to be Maya's little sister. She looks exactly like her!” I was still delusional on that front.

“It is difficult.”

“Please, Norman. Just try? Oh . . . and when you call, please explain that this has absolutely nothing to do with Half the Sky. We didn't know this would happen. We had no idea. Will you tell them that, Norman?”

Dear Jenny,

The e-mail is quite like magic! I am thrilled to see such quickest ways of communication like we were talking face to face!

I am returned to Beijing. The baseline testing of children in Changzhou is complete and went very well. We are not so fortunate in Shenzhen. Approval documents still have not arrived from Guangdong Provincial Bureau. I will contact Mr. Shi to find out the result of his further negotiation and report to you afterwards. If negative, you have to consider the change of pilot institution.

Zhang Zhirong (ZZ)

Ugh. We'd come so far—things
couldn't
unravel now. Almost two weeks passed before I heard again from ZZ.

Dear Jenny,

I finally found Mr. Shi who is right now in Shenzhen for a meeting organized by the ministry! Mr. Shi agreed to do the negotiations there to find out the attitude of all parties and reasons. For the last two days, I almost called him every few hours. The answer from him yesterday afternoon was that we have to change the site from Shenzhen, for the reason now, even the ministry does not agree to set the pilot there.

Also, from our conversation yesterday I know that we do not yet have official permission to begin the project. Why it takes so long, the problem is because of the shifting of our project to the Social Workers Association. Now we are asked to report to a new department which does not know much about the project. Usually they would like to know the whole story from the very beginning.

I understand the heavy responsibility as a representative of Half the Sky. I should do my best to make your load lighter if I can. However, certainly if you will come to China it is quicker to resolve.

Zhang Zhirong (ZZ)

THE PEACE HOTEL
in Shanghai had seen better days. Once the Cathay—a glittering symbol of British occupation and opium booty—in its heyday the hotel hosted Charlie Chaplin, George Bernard Shaw, and Noël Coward (who wrote
Private Lives
there).

The night I arrived, I couldn't have cared less. My flight out of San Francisco had been delayed seven hours. I had missed my connection in Taipei. I was exhausted and grumpy when I checked in.

Knowing the Chinese penchant for making phone calls without apology up until 11:00
P.M.
(ZZ being no exception), I unplugged the hotel telephone and collapsed on the bed.

Within five minutes, somebody was outside my door, pounding and shouting and ringing the doorbell. I crawled out of bed and opened the door.

A security guard was screaming at me.

I did my best to respond. “
Wo bu hui
—ah . . . look, I don't speak Chinese.
Meiguo
. . . American—”

“The telephone! The telephone—!” he sputtered.

“I unplugged it so I could sleep,” I said, pointing impatiently to the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on my door.

“Not allowed!” He tried to shove past me. “May I come in?”

I shoved back. “No! I'll plug it in. I'll plug it in.”

I shut the door as forcefully as I dared—and plugged in the darn phone.