by Jenny Bowen
Although mandatory to ninth grade, school in China is not free. But even when the orphanage can raise the funds to send its children to local schools, they face obstacles. Deprived of the nurturing and stimulation they need to develop normally, the orphans learn to speak late, walk late. They suffer so many developmental delays that, by the time they reach school age, many local schools refuse to admit them.
There is a clear and simple way we can change all this. A way people like us, on the other side of the world, can give China’s orphaned babies and small children a shot at a better future.
We can set up and support high-quality, caring enrichment programs right in China’s orphanages. We can prepare those children to enter the world. . . .
And just as I dreamed it, the money rolled in. We raised almost 100,000 dollars! Checks and faxes and phone calls flooded our dining room. The three thousand names of potential supporters I’d collected in the first year had multiplied as those people shared our story with family and friends. By the year 2000, there were perhaps thirty thousand families around the world who’d adopted children from China, and few did not ache at the memory of the children they’d left behind. I knew now, for sure, that we were not alone.
Then, days after the mailing went out, and six months after my visit, we received semiofficial approval (nothing in writing yet) from the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Half the Sky would (probably) be allowed to create its two pilot programs. We would have one year in which to prove ourselves. I don’t know if other nonprofit organizations typically begin on such a high note, but I was pinching myself every day.
I announced that we would launch our programs in the summer and invited volunteers to come to China to help us do the job. It began to sink in that I wasn’t just telling a story anymore. It wasn’t just another adventure; I wasn’t just making a movie. The story I was writing was about to affect real lives—real little girls tied to chairs and cribs on the other side of the world. Nothing would stop us.
As plans took shape and it all became more real, some on our board grew nervous. I, on the other hand, felt strangely calm. It was time for a return trip to photograph and measure the rooms we’d be renovating, to recruit teachers and nannies, and most important, to meet the children whose lives we were about to change.
I couldn’t leave Maya behind again. Dick managed to rearrange his life, and in March 2000, eight months after my first official visit, the three of us headed back to China.
ZZ MET US in Shanghai. Dick and Maya loved her instantly, and it was clearly mutual.
“There is some news,” ZZ said over breakfast the first morning. “The Ministry of Civil Affairs informed me that the coordination of the Half the Sky programs is being shifted to the China Social Workers Association, which is a new NGO under the ministry.”
“There are social workers in China?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Right. Okay. Well, will we still work with CPWF?”
“Yes. Should be. Maybe.”
“Okay.” Not that I had a choice.
“On the telephone they sound nice. The new vice president, Mr. Shi, is a good friend of our friend at the ministry. Next week we will visit Mr. Shi and bring some nice gift according to our Chinese custom.”
“Definitely.”
What would I do without her?
We took a train from Shanghai to Changzhou. As we settled in our seats, ZZ got a call from Shenzhen. A high-energy, high-volume Chinese debate ensued. I wished I’d paid more attention to my teach-yourself-Mandarin CDs.
“The Shenzhen director apologizes that she can’t prepare name list of children for us,” ZZ said, snapping her phone shut.
Swell. To help fund the programs, we’d decided to offer donors the opportunity to sponsor individual children. We would provide each sponsor with basic information on the assigned child, along with a photo that Dick would take. We knew that, as in all Reggio-inspired programs, documentation of the child’s progress would be an important component of our work, and every child would have her own “memory book,” her own history. It would be an easy matter, we thought, to share regular progress reports with sponsors so that they could feel connected to the children they were helping. Without even the children’s names, this would be tough.
“Did she tell you why?”
“She says that she needs more formal written instruction from Beijing. I’ll call our new friend, Mr. Shi.”
Mr. Shi promised to fax something to Shenzhen immediately. Even before meeting him, I already liked Mr. Shi! But now I wondered if I should be just a little bit nervous about that promised 100 percent cooperation from the Shenzhen director.
DEPUTY DIRECTOR ZHANG Yunyun, or “Small Cloud” Zhang (yun means “cloud”), met us at the Changzhou train station and whisked us off to the orphanage. Small Cloud Zhang was a super-competent pint-size dynamo with painted-on eyebrows and close-cropped hair. Her boss, the actual director, whose name I don’t remember, couldn’t be bothered to spend time with us. He was one of those I came to call the ganbei guys (ganbei means “dry glass/bottoms up”)—the minor officials who, when they’re not drinking tea and reading the newspaper or napping, spend all of their time toasting each other at banquets.
But the person who actually ran the place was Small Cloud Zhang, and although a bit nervous about what we had in mind, she seemed agreeable. Even better, she actually knew the kids—knew their names and a little bit about each one.
We photographed and measured the rooms and made lists of supplies we’d need to buy. Small Cloud Zhang followed us around on her spindly high heels.
“Do you think we could use these rooms instead of the ones you’ve chosen, Deputy Director Small Cloud Zhang?” I asked as we walked through a space that seemed inviting. I wasn’t quite sure she understood my request, but it seemed to me that she nodded her head. Wen and I conferred.
“And do you think we could knock a hole in this wall to open up the space into one big room?” Small Cloud Zhang hesitated a moment. Then nodded, perhaps with less enthusiasm.
“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 s
olemn 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.