by Jenny Bowen
Arrow straight to the heart. Parental guilt strikes. Big-time. And, I admit, never quite leaves.
July 1999
Dear Friends:
I am composing this while sitting in the lounge at the Tokyo airport waiting for my flight to Beijing. I am going this time, not to adopt a child, but to launch a very special project. It’s a project that grew from watching my precious daughter Maya blossom from a sickly, scared waif into a happy, confident little dynamo in two short years.
Last year, on the first anniversary of Maya’s adoption, I was feeling particularly grateful for the gift of my daughter’s life in mine. I decided I had to give something in return and, having listened to your stories, I thought that many adoptive parents like you might feel the same. My thoughts always come back to the children who wait and to those who will spend their entire childhoods without families.
When I was waiting for my referral, someone told me that a girl who grows up in a Chinese orphanage has only three choices in her adult life: to become an orphanage worker, to join the military, or to become a prostitute. I never was able to check out the truth of that statement, but I do believe that education and self-esteem can give every kid at least a fighting chance to do better.
With a small group of adoptive families, I started Half the Sky Foundation. Our plan is to establish early childhood development centers in China’s government-run orphanages. We’ve joined forces with Beijing-based China Population Welfare Foundation and, with their assistance, we have received approval from the Ministry of Civil Affairs to set up a pilot program in two orphanages. My trip to Beijing is to visit orphanages in three provinces and to choose those two sites!
We want to make Half the Sky a collaborative effort of all adoptive families who share our desire to give something back to the country that was their child’s first home, and particularly to its institutionalized children. Will you join us?
Well, there may have been a bit of wishful thinking in my message, but this was no time to be timid. I took a deep breath and sent the e-mail. A year and a week after I saw Maya through that kitchen window, here I was, off to Beijing to meet with officials of China’s central government. To be allowed to tour I didn’t know how many orphanages. To select sites for a pilot program. Nothing I understood of China (which was still close to nothing) told me that this would be happening. I couldn’t wait to get on that plane.
As we lifted off from Tokyo for the last leg of the journey, I took it as a great sign that the entire Chinese women’s soccer team was on my flight. Just the day before, they’d been barely defeated by the U.S. team at the Women’s World Cup final game at the Rose Bowl. More than ninety thousand fans were silent in the stadium and forty million viewed on TV as the game was decided in penalty kicks. Even though they weren’t victorious, the Chinese team could share credit for helping bring women’s sports to a whole new audience. Let’s hear it for the girls!
And when our plane touched down in Beijing, we did. The girls were welcomed like rock stars. Flowers and cameras flashing and tears and applause. What a welcome to China for Half the Sky! I smiled as I wove through the adoring crowd.
BEIJING WAS ONE big construction zone. Streets were being repaved and buildings were being put up or taken down. The muggy skies were thick with dust. My eyes stung and my throat was sore by the time I reached our hotel.
“All of China is being rebuilt for October 1, National Day—our fiftieth anniversary celebration,” the desk clerk at the Jianguo Hotel told me. “Just outside they’re going to put in a new subway line.”
“I don’t see any construction out there,” I said.
“It will begin tomorrow.”
“But it’s already July.”
He smiled.
Sure enough, when I woke the next morning, I heard lots of pounding and crunching. I looked out the window at what appeared to be the entire People’s Liberation Army (PLA) attacking the sidewalk with sledgehammers, pickaxes, and shovels. Not a sign of heavy equipment. When I asked later that year, I was told that the subway line had been more or less finished (or at least had appeared to be more or less finished) in time for National Day.
I spent my first full day recovering from jet lag. Wen Zhao, my Reggio expert from Nebraska, had arrived in Beijing sometime in the night and was bubbling with excitement about the adventure about to begin. She’d caught the fever.
We escaped the hotel and its PLA pounding and strolled through a tree-lined Beijing that was still, in 1999, full of bicycles and hutongs. We weaved among hawkers and their fake Pradas and Calvins in Silk Alley. We wandered past the elegant American Embassy, looking embarrassed behind smashed windows. (The bombing was not mentioned to me once during this entire trip.)
Little troops of tall, gaunt young men in uniform marched through the diplomatic area, saluting one another with white-gloved hands. Such perfect precision, such rigidity on such a blistering summer day.
“Wen, do you ever think the Reggio approach might be fundamentally contrary to the Chinese way of doing things?”
“You’re not getting nervous now, are you?” Wen laughed. “Don’t worry. Most Chinese people want to try whatever is new. Our plan should work if we can find the right teachers. We won’t make our final hiring decisions until after our training, after we’ve seen how open these young teachers are to new ideas, after they’ve developed some mini-projects and then shared their reflections, and most important, after we’ve watched them with the children. Trust me, they will love Reggio.”
“Oh, I do trust you,” I said. “Completely. Hey, maybe we’ll be famous. Maybe rich families will be begging to send their kids to our orphanage schools. We’ll be turning them away at the door.”
“Ha! You’re right!” Wen said. “I suggest we’ll have to name our schools Famous American Half the Sky Schools. China loves famous things and American things. Even private kindergartens are called Harvard and Princeton. With a name like that, we might even change the whole education system!”
“Let’s go get our permission to do this thing!” I said.
“We don’t have permission?”
WELL, WE SORT of did. No one had said no. In early June, I’d written to CPWF asking how the introductions and approvals were going. Two weeks had passed in silence. I then called Beijing and spoke with Zhang Zhirong, who was lovely on the phone. Yes, they’d received my letter and yes they were making plans for our visit. The next day I received a fax:
We welcome you visit China for a very significant project. For better preparation, first of all, we had meetings trying to figure out our future cooperation. Meanwhile we have also contacted the relevant government agencies such as the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the CCAA to make introduction of your foundation and to share with them your good intention and the program action plan. In general, we all recognize the goodwill of the program, but for better understanding, the following questions need to be explained further. After receiving your response, we would follow up with further coordination and writing report to the Ministry, and afterwards to respond to you as soon as possible since time is pressing for your coming visit.
The letter went on for two more pages. It sounded sort of positive, but endless. I immediately wrote back, announcing the firm date of my arrival. I answered questions as well as I could, laid out as much as I knew of our plans, then guessed at the rest, figuring it was all going to change anyway. I’d learned this from film production. You pitch a great story and lay out a careful and highly detailed plan and budget, and the moment the crew sets up for the first shot everything begins to unravel and plans are revised. Constantly. The trick is to keep the momentum. Keep moving in a more or less forward direction.
Just two days before I traveled, Mrs. Zhang finally replied, “After back and forth negotiations, we got approval from the Ministry to visit three institutions.”
Well, I figured we’d have to visit at least six institutions if we were going to find the right place for the pilot. If we failed, we would
n’t get a second chance. And there was no word about approval to actually start programs. So it wasn’t exactly a yes. But it certainly wasn’t a no. That was good enough for me. I decided not to burden anybody else with the details.
THE LADIES OF CPWF were an hour late for our breakfast meeting. “So sorry,” said Mrs. Zhang. “Terrible traffic jam. Construction everywhere nowadays. It is a great, great pleasure to meet you!”
If it weren’t for the fact that Mrs. Zhang’s boss carried herself like someone important, I might have hugged Madame Miao at first sight. Everything about her looked soft and cuddly. Chubby face, rosy cheeks, fuzzy halo of dyed hair. Yet there was no doubt who was in charge.
Mrs. Zhang, on the other hand, even though sixty-ish, was as playful and available as a puppy. She had a gigantic warm smile, dark eyes that shone behind big round glasses, almost perfect English. I felt like I’d always known her.
“Now please you will tell us how we can help you,” she said.
I explained a little about Maya, about how she’d come alive after finding the love of a family. But I sensed that I shouldn’t linger on the dark side of Maya’s story. No dredging up ghosts of dying rooms from Half the Sky.
“I represent a group of parents just like me,” I said. “We are so grateful to China for the gift of these beautiful little girls in our lives. Now we want to give something back to their sisters who still have no families.”
I told them about my idea for infant nurture programs where retired women could be trained to help the babies form healthy attachments and to give them the kind of individual attention and stimulation that would allow them to thrive. And about preschools, in which children would be gently guided to develop self-confidence and a love of learning while being prepared to enter primary schools in their communities. I told them about Reggio and threw in a few of my statistics about brain development.
“You are a teacher?” asked Mrs. Zhang.
“Well . . . no. Um, I’m mostly a screenwriter. And I’ve directed a few little films. But that’s not—”
“But why?” she asked. There it was again.
“Because . . . well, because, most of all, we want to give orphans the love they have lost. Every child needs to know that she is loved and valued.”
“But you have come all the way to China. You want to do for Chinese children? Why?” said Mrs. Zhang, her eyes now glistening.
“Well, because we have Chinese daughters. The children we had to leave behind are our girls’ little sisters. We can’t just go on with our happy lives and forget about them. They’re family, just like our daughters.”
Mrs. Zhang wiped her eyes and slapped the table.
“Understand. We must help you do this.”
“Madame Miao, Mrs. Zhang, I think we may have found the perfect partner,” I said.
Madame Miao nodded. “We think the same way.”
“Well, okay! So what I think we need, to get things off to a really good start—well, we need to visit more places, more orphanages. Three’s fine, but do you think you could get us into six? And we don’t want to go only to model institutions, okay? Can you show us the not-so-good ones too? Because if they’re perfect, there is nothing to improve.”
Somehow I doubted that perfection was going to be an issue, but I wanted our new partners to have a mission, to feel driven. Heaven knows I needed them.
HERE’S WHAT IT’S like to travel China by car:
There are eight of us plus luggage in what is optimistically called a nine-passenger minibus. Madame Miao, Mrs. Zhang, Wen, the driver, yours truly—plus assorted others. There are always assorted others.
And the driver always smokes. He is willing to hold his cigarette outside the cracked-open window, but he just can’t survive the drive smoke-free. As a result, I always feel bleary-eyed and hungover on road trips. Nobody else seems to mind.
Just about everyone is talking on a cell phone. Different conversations, all at maximum decibels. Chinese cell reception far outclasses that of its Western predecessors. On one of my rare sightseeing excursions in China, I once received a perfectly clear call from Los Angeles while at the bottom of an impossibly narrow mountain gorge. I’d walked 6,566 stone steps down to the bottom, and the line was crystal-clear.
In addition to the competing phone calls and the smoke, there is snacking. Bags of watermelon seeds and salty-sweet crackers and peanuts in their shell, along with dragon’s eye fruit and mandarin oranges and lychees and bottles of water or sweet green tea, are produced from thin air.
You would think all this would make time fly. Au contraire.
It was a five-hour minibus ride south of Beijing in interminable traffic to our first destination, a place with the unpronounceable name Shijiazhuang. It would have been three hours without the traffic, but then it wouldn’t have been China. Whenever the traffic opened up a bit, the driver went into high gear, pushing the minibus until the windows rattled, passing everything he could. He accomplished this by driving on the wrong side of the road, playing chicken with oncoming truckloads of melons, rusty scrap metal, and pigs, ancient putt-putting tractors and sleek official vehicles with black-tinted windows.
The air was hot, thick, gray-brown. The landscape was flat, green-brown, and went on forever. There was not a single piece of modern farming equipment to be seen. I was dripping and my brain had gone to mush. China in July. Avoid in future.
At long last, we turned off the expressway.
After we’d passed through the tollbooth, the driver pulled the minibus over to the side of the road behind another car. A man and a woman got out of the parked car and squeezed into our already cozy minibus. (We were up to ten of our allotted nine passengers.) The man was Mr. Bai of the Shijiazhuang Family Planning Association. Nobody introduced the woman.
We zipped into town, mostly by driving on the wrong side of the road. Then we sat in another traffic jam. The downtime was not wasted, though. Mr. Bai took charge. He shared with us the entire history of Shijiazhuang going back to 206 BC. He told us the current population—almost ten million, and I’d never heard of the place before! It seemed like no town in China had fewer than a million residents. After a while the mind is so boggled by people numbers that none of it registers.
Mr. Bai also managed to share Shijiazhuang’s agricultural output, important historical sites, and what the place is most famous for. In this case, it was smokestacks. More smokestacks than any other city in China. There was plenty of visual evidence to back him up.
When we finally reached our destination, it was not the orphanage, but a restaurant. It did absolutely no good to protest that we weren’t hungry; we’d been snacking on the drive. In China, I soon learned, hunger is not the point. No meals will be missed. Ever. I am to this day, whenever I visit government friends anywhere in China, reminded of meals I foolishly begged off from a dozen or more years ago.
“Remember when you drove all the way from Gaoyou to Lianyungang and then only visited the orphanage? You left without lunch!”
THE RESTAURANT LOBBY was palatial. Crystal chandeliers, rococo gilded wing chairs, and massive potted plants. The pseudo-Aubusson carpet was grimy, as was every single carpet in China as far as I could tell. (In the new, improved China, the carpet grime situation is likewise improved. It seems to run about fifty-fifty.)
We were greeted by a beautiful, tall young woman in a pencil-thin red-satin qipao. She was wearing a white-fur shorty cape, even though it was close to one hundred degrees outside. I was the only one in our party who was soggy from the heat.
We followed our greeter into an elevator. The doors closed but the elevator failed to move. Our driver muscled the beautiful young woman aside and punched the buttons in a more manly fashion. Nothing happened. The beautiful young woman opened the elevator doors and we followed her up three flights of stairs.
She guided us down a hallway with dozens of open doorways. Cigarette smoke poured out of every one. Raucous laughter and shouts punctured the haze. Somebody was hav
ing way too much fun for twelve thirty on a Tuesday afternoon.
The woman who’d arrived with Mr. Bai pushed ahead and entered one of the smoky doorways. A lot of pushing and shoving goes on in China, but nobody minds.
By the time we arrived, our hosts were stubbing out their cigarettes and gulping the last of their tea. They stood to welcome us with wide smiles. I’m not sure who most of them were. There was a vice mayor and a party secretary, and apparently they were the only ones who merited an introduction. Everybody else came for lunch. Mr. Bai vanished and I never saw him again. I decided that maybe I didn’t need to memorize everybody’s name.
There was a great deal of bickering about who should sit where around the big round table. I got the message right off the bat that this table-arranging business is a highly complex matter that all foreigners should stay out of. Almost as complex as food-ordering (but here you are invited to participate if you dare).
Certainly the highest-ranking person must sit at the head of the table (which at a round table is the place with the pointy napkin) and/or facing the door. And the honored guests (that would be me in this situation) are invited to sit to the right and left of him according to somebody’s idea of what each one’s respective rank is. But then there are the seats remaining. Everybody vies for the least important. At a not hugely formal banquet like this one, there’s always a fair bit of friendly shoving before everyone finally settles down to eat.
The meal featured local delicacies with a special focus on meat and seafood. The Chinese were poor for a very long time. Vegetables don’t get much respect when people have guests. Cheap stuff like noodles or rice is an afterthought. Visitors are a great excuse for a proper carnivorous feast, even in the poorest places.
The vice mayor was hosting a couple of other banquets at the same time. After he told me about his town’s historical highlights and the trip he made to Disneyland and Las Vegas and Miami and we toasted a few times, he excused himself to make the rounds. I never saw him again.