by Jenny Bowen
I WALKED INTO the children’s ward behind my little crew of eager parent volunteers, took a very deep breath, and watched. I knew what they would see. I’d prepared them as well as I could. Just remember, we’re here to make it better. Keep your cool.
Okay, I could exhale. Every one of those folks handled themselves better than I had back in Shijiazhuang. They were just happy to be there with those kids. They didn’t seem angry. They didn’t seem to take the conditions personally.
I wasn’t sure why they weren’t haunted and furious. I couldn’t fathom how they’d be able to go back home and back to their lives—or why I never could. But I watched those good hearts blowing kisses and wiping runny noses and pouring love all over those babies, and I knew I was not alone in this. I would never be alone, for I was among family, doing exactly what I was meant to do. And one day, if the stars aligned and I didn’t screw it up, all of China would be with us too.
Then, whoosh . . . someplace deep inside, I completely, absolutely knew for certain that that day would come. “We can do this,” I said to nobody in particular. I could already hear distant thunder.
I found a way to touch every child in every room that morning. I smoothed scratchy, wrinkly dry skin, tiny bird-boned fingers, and oddly coarse malnourished-orange hair. I whispered to the littlest who struggled, “Hang on. We can fix this. You’re going to be okay.”
Calm now, anger safely stowed, I asked the ayis to lift the babies and toddlers out of their cribs, then started doing it myself. The volunteers joined me at once. And nervously, the ayis began to help, if only just until we were gone. But now, as I watched the volunteers, with tears in their eyes, lifting tots free, tickling and dancing and crooning, I saw how it would work.
Every day, we would come back. We would come back with reinforcements—nannies and teachers and foster mamas and babas, and before long this would be a place where babies were cuddled instead of trapped and tied, and every single vacant-eyed toddler and scrawny six-year-old would know what it feels like to be the apple of somebody’s eye.
TERRI AND DANIEL set about organizing the troops as Small Cloud Zhang watched their every move. There was something about seeing this group of large Americans scrubbing down orphanage walls that just about stopped her cold. When they began to wash away the giant fake Disney cartoon figures, I thought she’d pass out. What in the name of Mao had she let happen?
Oblivious, the volunteers merrily cleaned and then painted the walls white, adding what would become our signature pastel stripes, leaving plenty of room for children’s art and photo documentation of their projects.
Meanwhile, ZZ and I went shopping—not just once, but for the next three days.
We bought books and baskets and bikes and feathers and beads. Despite the dripping summer heat, we came to know every corner of Changzhou, a funky little town (little by China standards) laced with canals and bridges—and most famous for hand-painted wooden combs carved in whimsical shapes. We prowled every narrow street, every market, every dusty shop.
Here’s how shopping went:
“How about a cozy reading nook for the preschool?” I suggested.
“Sure,” said ZZ. “What’s that?”
“You know, a place to enjoy books together. Warm and homey—the opposite of institutional. We need a sofa to start with.”
So we set out to find a sofa. Most Chinese homes, especially in the steamy south, had wooden benches rather than plush upholstery. Finally, we came upon Furniture City, a multistory block of showrooms and warehouses all linked together. Everyone we asked pointed us in a different direction for sofas.
Soggy and exhausted, at last we made our way to the top floor of a metal-roofed building. The showroom was an oven. But we’d found the sofas!
“Wait.” ZZ clutched my arm. She didn’t look so good.
“ZZ, are you okay?”
She dug into the backpack, which she wore backward because it was stuffed with our shopping money. She pulled out a little vial and deposited some tiny brown pellets into my hand and then her own.
“Chinese medicine,” she said as she gulped hers down. “Save-your-heart pills. Eat them.”
I obeyed. Thus fortified, we cruised the sofa department—rows of red, chartreuse, and hot-pink velveteen with swirly patterns and black-leather cushions and fish gargoyle feet, and then quite a few swan-shaped, phoenix-embellished fainting couches that looked like they came from New Orleans bordellos in 1895.
As we wandered, a small sales team began to form behind us. Just a couple at first, then—as word got out that a foreigner had reached this godforsaken outpost—more and more. I don’t know where they came from; the place had looked empty when we got there.
At last we came upon a lone little blue-and-green, not-too-gaudy love seat. I could live with the tassels dangling here and there. “This one,” I whispered to ZZ, then kept on walking, as she’d taught me to do, pretending I hadn’t even seen the thing. ZZ then began to bargain.
The first price, no matter what it was, was an outrage. ZZ bargained as if Chinese pride depended on it. The crowd grew. Everybody got involved. It was unclear who were the merchants and who were the bystanders. I stood a few rows away, my foreign face forgotten, and observed total mayhem. Everyone shouted at and argued with one another. Then a moment of quiet as ZZ held the room. She spoke from her heart. The crowd looked over at me. I smiled, waved a little.
Inevitably, ZZ cried. Then the merchants, crying a little themselves, threw their hands in the air. The matter was settled. And the price they gave us for the little love seat was very, very good.
“I just tell them about the orphans and about the love that you and the foreign friends are bringing into their lives,” ZZ explained.
SOMEHOW, WHILE WE were away, the volunteers had managed to cajole Small Cloud Zhang into letting the children help. When we returned, little ones were wandering around underfoot as the crew happily sanded and painted. Even Small Cloud Zhang, in her spiky heels and minidress, was painting stripes. We set up our newly purchased boom box. Tina Turner was soon rattling the walls.
Changzhou was not yet accustomed to foreign faces. By the end of day one, the local media were on high alert. We were on TV and on the front page of the daily news. Curious neighbors came by to check out the situation. Some women from a nearby apartment block told me they’d had no idea there was an orphanage in their town. I saw the concern on their faces. If I’d had doubts before, our first build taught me that the problem is not that people in China don’t care about children. Ignorance was our only enemy.
BY THE END of our two-week stay in Changzhou, four new babies, in the arms of police officers, had arrived at the orphanage gate. Not one child had left for adoption. It didn’t seem that the orphan problem would get better anytime soon. Still, there was reason to feel hope for the children. Surrounded by caring volunteers, nannies, and young teachers-in-training, they showed the first signs that they were beginning to wake from their orphanage slumber.
“What are the babies eating?” Wen asked two little girls who were feeding their new baby dolls with plastic spoons.
“Egg,” said one child.
“Do you know where the egg comes from?” Wen asked.
The girl didn’t miss a beat.
“From Ayi.”
“But where does Ayi get the egg?”
No answers.
“This is your opportunity,” said Wen to her future preschool teachers. “When you see them begin to wonder, think about where you want to take it. The kitchen? The market? The farm? Learn about animals? How life begins? These are the moments you look for.”
THE YOUNG TEACHERS were gathered listening to one another read from their training journals. They were beginning to feel at home on the mini-chairs at the mini-tables in the spanking-new, pastel-hued Half the Sky Little Sisters Preschool. Behind them stood an array of multicolored shelves stocked with art supplies, books, and developmental toys. Around the room were balance beams, a puppet th
eater, a mirrored triangle, tunnels and trikes, and baskets full of well-loved dress-up clothes from America. It could have been a high-priced private school on Manhattan’s West Side.
“When I came to bring Tianyu to the classroom on the first day, she was so emotionless that I could not get any response from her,” read Liwei, one of the teachers. “When other kids grabbed toys from her, she just allowed it and never showed any anger or upset. Every day I spent time with her, I took her to explore the leaves and flowers. I constantly talked to her and asked her questions even though she made little response. But today, when I told her my training was finished here and I would go to train and then work at the new preschool in Hefei, she turned her head away from me with tears in her eyes. Then she ran and hid.”
“Why do you imagine she did that?” Wen asked. Liwei was silent. She looked at the floor. The room was quiet.
Liwei slowly raised her head. Her own eyes welled as she spoke, her small voice breaking. “I think . . . I think we were beginning to have a special bond. She was coming to trust me. I worked hard to be at her level, to understand what she needed. I was there for her. Now I see she’s mad at me for leaving her. She’s been abandoned before.”
Wen took Liwei’s hands and looked around at the rest of her teary-eyed young converts.
“Now you see,” Wen told them, “we can be much, much more than we were taught at teachers’ college . . . more than stern ladies at the front of the room who teach children to recite by rote. We can be, we must be, learning partners, champions, observers, explorers, friends—and, for these special, hurt children, we need to be family.”
ON THE LAST day of our build, the new teachers and nannies proudly escorted the children into beautiful spaces that promised happy days ahead. The volunteers gave out sweet treats and dress-up clothes. We served a bunch of watermelons that we’d bought from a local farmer. We turned on the music. We all signed our names on the new preschool wall. Above the names, across the top, ZZ and I wrote in English and Chinese: BUILT WITH LOVE AND HOPE.
And then we had a party. A massive, everybody’s-invited extravaganza of a party.
“THAT PARTY!” ZZ said to me years later. “You bring everyone—blind children, children who’d been lying on their back for years, the disabled children, everyone. That so touch the heart of the people like Small Cloud Zhang. At the beginning she say, ‘Difficult. No, it’s difficult. They never been out. We don’t have the equipment to take those children out.’
“But when the volunteers pick those children up and carry them to the party, then they understand. And for me,” ZZ said, “I understand. It’s really moving, how much you wanted those children at the party. And we all think, ‘Thanks for Half the Sky to bring those people to help the orphans.’ The fear begins to fall away.
“You know, I am not a typical Chinese,” ZZ said. “I’ve been working with foreigners a long time. I understand them. I have no fear of them. But what is difficult for Small Cloud Zhang is that it is one thing to allow you, a foreigner, to come inside her institution. But then you, as the leader of Half the Sky, can bring a whole group of volunteers inside and she has no control. Who knows if they are 100 percent friendly? So she feels fear. The dark influence from The Dying Rooms is still there.
“The fear from my side is that Half the Sky doesn’t make any mistake. But what taught me very early that I don’t need to worry is what you did to one of the volunteers in our second build right after Changzhou. Hefei! Remember the volunteer in Hefei?”
“The one that I asked Dick to put in a taxicab?”
“You treat her even worse than the Chinese!” ZZ said, laughing.
“She broke all our rules,” I said. “She smuggled in a camera. She roamed around the orphanage by herself. She took photos of the kids.”
“If I were you, I would give her another chance. I give her some criticism—a warning.”
“I was terrified they’d make us all leave and that would be the end of Half the Sky,” I said.
“But you say, ‘Go back to the hotel, pack, go away!’—so that really tell me I don’t have to worry about you,” ZZ said. “After that, every time I go to the institutions, when the directors or the officials—they worry that this is a whole group of foreigners come. We have rules, regulations, this and that. I always use this example and tell them, ‘You don’t have to worry about Jenny Bowen. She is one of us.’”
ANYA STOOD ON the white carpet of the Businessman’s Suite at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, the city where all Americans must go to finalize adoptions. Except for the Pull-Up she wore on her head, she was stark naked.
“You and Maya go ahead down to dinner,” I said to Dick. “Anya and I will just stay here and glare at each other.”
“You sure?” he said. “Not much of an adoption celebration.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“We’ll bring you something.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
They left. I ran cold water over my fresh-bitten finger.
If this child had come to us first, before Maya, it’s hard to imagine anything like Half the Sky emerging. But who said it should be easy? Anyway, I reminded myself, we weren’t alone. Thirty-two new teachers and nannies and one hundred sixty-five children were starting this journey alongside my family. We’d all have to find our way.
Pull-Up jauntily perched over one eye, Anya was struggling into her adoption-celebration going-out-to-dinner dress—all my byself.
“So now you think you’ll deign to join the party?” I asked.
She ignored me. Put her shoes on the wrong feet.
“We’re in it now, kiddo,” I said. “You and me. We’re going to learn to love each other. Like it or not.”
Chapter 7
Enough Shovels of Earth, a Mountain; Enough Pails of Water, a River
Just a few months after the builds in Changzhou and Hefei, the first Half the Sky success stories began to arrive. Our pilot programs would eventually spark 165 little miracles. Just as Maya did, and I prayed that Anya would, the children of Changzhou and Hefei began to heal and even to blossom.
Feifei
The police had taken Feifei to an orphanage when she was about a year old. She’d passed through a few sets of hands by the time she was turned over to their custody, so no one was clear about where she’d been abandoned or how she’d been found. In those days, record-keeping wasn’t a priority at the orphanage. If and when her file was submitted for foreign adoption, someone would fill in the blanks, make it up.
She didn’t seem in crisis on arrival, so after a brief quarantine she was bathed, diapered with clean rags, clothed in several layers, and deposited in a small blue wooden crib, in a room full of small blue wooden cribs full of girl babies of similarly uncertain origin. There she remained for the next ten months.
She was fed on schedule, a bottle propped on a folded towel. Her diaper was changed on schedule, three times a day. She was bathed in a plastic tub every morning. That was her only human contact. She was never cuddled or rocked or kissed. Not once.
When Half the Sky programs began, our caregivers also began keeping “memory books”—individual albums for each child—full of reflections, artwork, photos, conversations, and milestones. The books serve as a sort of history for children who have lost theirs. From Feifei’s memory book:
Today is Feifei’s first day in the Little Sisters Program. She is two years old and very pale and weak and shy. She doesn’t interact with other children. She can’t walk or even sit by herself. The teacher is propping her against the wall to help. But Feifei doesn’t want to sit and she cries to lie down, for that is how she normally spends her days. For a whole day she struggles with the teacher, refusing or unable to use her legs and hips. She seems to have no language at all. The teacher is having difficulties communicating with her. No one knows what is wrong with Feifei. The orphanage says it is brain disease.
Two weeks later:
After much patient help from the teacher, Feifei now is si
tting up straight all by herself. She is beginning to play independently and shows a growing curiosity.
After another month:
Feifei walks by herself for the first time! She opens her arms to reach her teacher.
And just four months from that first day, Feifei began to care for her baby doll:
TEACHER: What are you doing, Feifei?
FEIFEI: It’s cold.
TEACHER: Oh, Baby is cold, so you help her by covering her with a blanket?
Feifei nods. She is very serious, but we can see a little smile.
Two years later, Feifei was adopted by a family in the Netherlands. Feifei’s mother wrote to us once Feifei had settled in:
The idea that anyone thought that our daughter had serious brain disease made us feel very sad. There is nothing wrong with her! She rides her bicycle, plays computer games, needs an agenda to keep track of her play dates, and practices all day long for her career as a singer. She is fond of (pink) clothes and can’t wait for the time when shoes with high heels and makeup are allowed. She fights over toys with her brother and argues over who has to feed the rabbits and cats. If you could see her, you wouldn’t believe our girl was once little Feifei!
Feifei got a second chance. She learned to walk and eventually to talk and sing (and argue) because she came to know that somebody cared whether she did or not. She mattered.
Loris Malaguzzi got it right. The children, including Feifei, would become Half the Sky’s teachers. As we observed them and responded to their needs, they proved to anyone who cared to look that what had happened for our Maya could happen for every child. Half the Sky’s programs were developed from observations made within China’s welfare institutions about what children need, along with a dose of early childhood theory. Yet they continue to prove over and over again the same simple, universal truths. Every child needs to know that she matters to someone. And every child has potential. One little girl’s miracle would become an everyday story.