Wish You Happy Forever

by Jenny Bowen

  And especially, I see Jingli. Perhaps six or seven, she sat obediently alone on her plastic mini-chair, against the wall, away from the other kids. Her hair had been cropped not too long before. I see scabs on her scalp where the clippers had missed and bruises on her thin arms. Her lower legs are twisted. Her feet are askew; they look useless. But she sits composed, her little hands folded in her lap. And she has a fire in her eyes that glows even in that horror we came to call the Root Cellar.

  I promised those girls I’d come back. I thought of Jingli every day until the day we returned.

  A SHOWMAN ALL the way, Director Slick provided us a police escort, complete with sirens, the entire two and a half hour drive from Changsha to Baling. Leave it to him to also provide an adorable, chipper English-speaking greeter to deliver the requisite bus monologue on an ear-piercing loudspeaker:

  “Hello, Half the Sky! Welcome! Baling lies in northeast Hunan Province on the eastern shore of Dongting Lake, the second-largest freshwater lake in all of China. Dongting Lake is on the boundary between Hunan and Hubei Province to the north. Do you know, the word ‘Hunan’ means ‘south of lake,’ ‘Hubei’ means ‘north of lake’?

  “Baling is famous for many things, including Baling Tower, which is three stories of wood constructed with not a single nail! Inside, you may read a tribute to Baling written in Song dynasty by famous poet Fan Zhongyan.

  “Speaking of poets, in 278 BC, when his country’s capital was captured in war, Qu Yuan, the father of Chinese poetry, walked into Dongting Lake carrying a huge rock and drowned himself!”

  We checked into a posh lakeside resort, clearly a spot for high-ranking Communist Party officials to take their ease. After our Shaoyang experience, the volunteers were ecstatic. Within minutes, the gleaming lobby was emptied of people and luggage, and hot showers were flowing.

  “LISTEN TO THIS: ‘Today the Rolling Stones announced that their first-ever concerts in China—in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing—are cancelled because of the SARS epidemic.’”

  “You mean Keith Richards is scared?” Dick said, toweling Anya dry postbath. I showed him the article.

  “Okay, now I’m scared.”

  “Ha.”

  “Think about it. All the stuff that guy has done to his body, and he’s scared to come to China?”

  DIRECTOR SLICK HAD a dream, and he couldn’t wait to share it with the foreigners. He was building a hotel!

  Not just any hotel—this would be a place for foreign adoptive families to come and stay. They could bring their children back to visit their hometown. And best of all, it was right on the grounds of the orphanage.

  He’d hinted at this little project earlier, when I first visited. But now he had something to show. So, before we were allowed to take the volunteers to visit the children (the very idea bored him), we all had to go and see Slick’s dream hotel.

  The orphanage was at the end of a narrow lane. As our bus squeezed toward it, Slick’s fantasy was unmistakable. Still under construction, it towered over everything else in the neighborhood. Yet there had been no sign of it on my last visit, only a few months earlier.

  We followed Slick into the lobby, floorless and still coated with plaster dust. He showed off his massive cut-crystal chandelier. We didn’t know how to react. So he took us into the one already-working elevator. The doors opened onto an elegantly finished floor of rooms. We walked around.

  “Wow!” I said.

  “You like it?” asked Slick.

  “How many floors like this will your hotel have?”

  “Eleven!” he said.

  “Fantastic,” I said. All I could see was Jingli . . . her eyes, shining in darkness. “May we use two of them? One for the preschool and one for the infant center? And the preschoolers can have their dormitory on the preschool floor? This one is nice.”

  I imagined the Root Cellar kids riding trikes down these gleaming hallways.

  “But—” Slick said. “I see. Oh . . .”

  “I think he can’t say why not,” said ZZ.

  “I’ll bet he used adoption money to build this place,” Dick muttered. “What can he say?” Already my husband didn’t care for Slick. Now he started addressing Slick as Director Motherfucker. I prayed that Slick was as ignorant of English as it appeared.

  Slick made a phone call. Carol and I wandered around making plans for our newest preschool, every room with a private bath!

  ZZ found us happily plotting in one of the suites. “The director says that Half the Sky is welcome to use these two floors for programs,” she reported. “He says that was always his intention, and this is why he wants to show you first thing. He hopes you like it.”

  “Hooray! Please tell him we do like it. Very much.”

  BY THE SECOND day Slick ignored us completely, except at banquet time. So I took Dick to see the Root Cellar. He saw Jingli. Those eyes.

  Quietly, we took pictures, just as we always did before we began our programs. There was no way we would let these children be left out. The place was so dark that we took the kids outside one by one to photograph them. We asked the lone ayi to carry the ones who couldn’t walk.

  Jingli shuffled out the door, her bum legs going every which way. All my byself. She allowed Dick to place her against the crumbly wall, watching his every move—lest anyone doubt, the child was fully in control of the situation. With absolute presence and calm, she permitted him to take her picture. Her eyes were blazing. Who was this girl?

  BY THE FOURTH day Slick had pretty much vanished. I think we were a disappointment. No money to be made; no junkets to America to angle for. We seemed to have the posh lakeside resort all to ourselves. Just as well, because the littlest crew members were getting stir-crazy. The lobby rang with squeals and giggles. Hide-and-seekers darted every which way, ever-smiling ayis in pursuit.

  As we were about to board the bus bound for the orphanage that day, Anya tried a fancy slip-slide-dive-under-the-flower-display-table maneuver, then shrieked with sudden pain.

  “It broke! It broke!”

  She screamed. Then louder still. We ran.

  “I heard it broke! My leg . . . my leg!!!”

  She couldn’t stand. And then we wouldn’t let her try. This was not a five-year-old tantrum. We needed a doctor.

  After forever, the only ambulance in town pulled up outside. It was a little converted van of some sort. And it was grimy—must have been used for something else during the off-hours. The attendants lifted out an old army stretcher and placed Anya, still howling in fear and pain and unanchored to anything except my hand, on the floor of the van.

  I crawled in after her. “But Madam . . . !” they said. Then Dick squeezed in too. We held on to Anya and each other and anything else we could find. ZZ followed in a cab.

  The van had a siren, but still it bumbled through traffic. Every jolt was agony. We soothed Anya down to a whimper and moan.

  “There’s gonna be sick people in that hospital,” Dick said. “Maybe even one with SARS.”

  “We have no choice.”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy!” wailed Anya.

  “Shh, baby,” we both said. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. It’s all going to be okay.”

  Give me her pain . . . let me feel the hurt so she doesn’t. . . .

  When he was six, my son, Aaron, raced his bike into the street from between parked cars smack into an oncoming car. A single mom, sick with guilt and fear, I rode in the back of the ambulance clutching his hand, looking at the broken femur protruding from my baby’s leg. “I’m sorry, Mommy!” he cried. “I rode between the parked cars . . . you told me never—”

  It’s okay, baby; don’t worry. Give me my baby’s pain.

  I was every parent who ever watched her child suffer. There was no doubt that Anya Xinmei—who once bit and pinched and spit at me—was my precious little girl now and for all time. I don’t remember when that changed.

  THE CORRIDORS OF Baling People’s Hospital No. 1 were even worse than Dick had i
magined. The benches and any available wall space were thick with waiting patients. Most were in bad shape. Some were coughing. Some were gasping. Some were hacking and spitting. Some were doing all that and more.

  When they saw the little girl arrive on a stretcher attached to two pasty-faced foreigners, all patients who were the least bit mobile crowded in for a look. We tried to herd them back, clear a path, keep the hackers away from our whimpering baby. Anya started wailing again.

  The attendants set her down on the floor.

  “No way!” I said.

  Now Dick was frantic. “I’m getting her out of here!” He bent to lift Anya himself. She reached for him—she screamed.

  ZZ barked at the attendants. “Pick the stretcher up and turn around!”

  Somehow they did, and she marched the whole little traumatized bunch of us back outside. We found a quiet spot on the lawn and told the attendants to set the stretcher down.

  “Tell the doctor to come to us,” ZZ said. And there we waited.

  In about forty-five minutes, they returned. We must go inside for x-rays. But we could go through the back tunnel entrance.

  The tunnel was . . . well, a tunnel. The x-ray room was straight out of Stephen King.

  Against one wall leaned a massive split log. The face of it was covered in dried (but not too long ago) blood. The door was closed, securing us inside.

  Bloody handprints, these deep brown with age, ran the full length of the door.

  Dick and I did our best to block Anya’s view, squeezing her hands and holding our breath as the big machine did its thing, probably showering us all with rays.

  Anya’s leg was fractured. We went back through the tunnel to wait outside for the chief of orthopedic surgery to finish up his current OR duties. When he was available, the chief built Anya’s cast himself—the old-fashioned plaster-of-Paris way, smoothing each layer with practiced alabaster hands.

  “May we take a picture together?” he asked. Of course, we did.

  Peering out the taxi window at the hospital as we drove off, I swore I could hear Terri: “AM I TALKING TO THE WALLS HERE??!!!”

  WE RETURNED TO Slick’s dream hotel for the final party. Everybody on the crew signed Anya’s cast.

  Then, calmly as we could—as if such things happened every day at the orphanage in Baling—we led and carried the Root Cellar kids to see their new preschool. They all looked pretty shell-shocked under wizard hats and wedding veils and tiaras as they clutched their juice and cookies. The volunteers turned on the music. They blew up balloons and gently batted them through the air. One by one, the balloons began to bounce back and, before too long, there were even some smiles. It was just a start, but it felt great to see the beginning of a new life for Jingli and her sisters.

  And then, during the night, while we enjoyed a deep, exhausted sleep on our luxurious beds, Terri resigned from the board.

  To the Board,

  I can’t bring myself to continue on with the foundation after seeing the absence of procedure on the part of the executive director toward this board. . . . I completely believe in the mission of Half the Sky. I have had a wonderful time helping this organization become a reality. There have been many remarkable adventures and I will certainly miss them.

  This has been a very difficult decision to make, but I have no regrets here and I’d like to keep it that way, so please accept this as my letter of resignation.

  Respectfully, Terri

  A couple of weeks later, Daniel also resigned in solidarity. I couldn’t pretend that I would miss the angry e-mails, but still I felt sad to see them go. They’d stood by Half the Sky even when it was clear they didn’t trust my ways. Now I’d gone too far, and so lost two good friends. We’ve never spoken since.

  Always before, when criticism stung me, when I wasn’t good enough in somebody’s eyes, I would assume that my critics must be right. Then I would find a way to make my own exit—to slip away from my failures, just as I’d slipped away from my childhood.

  This time, I wasn’t about to leave. In fact, I was even more determined to push on. This wasn’t just about me. We were making quiet thunder now, and while maybe the heavens didn’t hear us yet, more and more people on earth sure did. I could feel the excitement of discovery and new resolve whenever Half the Sky came to a new place. I could see lives turning around. I couldn’t walk away from what felt so right for those little girls. It was the first time in my life that I stood up to bullies.

  I confess, however, that when I reported back to what remained of our board, I never told them about Anya’s broken leg and People’s Hospital No. 1 of Baling.

  Chapter 12

  Wait for Roast Duck to Fly into Mouth, Wait a Long Time

  Berkeley, California

  Christmas 2003

  On the eve of the lunar New Year, northern Chinese families gather together and make vegetable jiaozi. The delicious boiled dumplings are then famously enjoyed on the first day of the New Year. They taste best (in my opinion) with black vinegar, hot sauce, and cold beer. Since ZZ—now beloved Zhang Ayi (Auntie Zhang) to our girls—was visiting us for the Christmas holidays, we figured why wait? We had an early jiaozi party. ZZ was the master chef and teacher—a role she’s since played many times for little girls and their earnest, clumsy laowai parents. Every guest had a go at rolling at least a few dumplings.

  Besides our grown kids (who adored their young siblings) and their families, our local staff, and friends, we invited our newly evolved board (only Dana, Carolyn, and Dick remained from the original) to join us. It was one of those count-your-blessings days. We had it all. But in my heart, I couldn’t wait to get back to China.

  Now the guests were gone; ZZ and the rest of our big family slept. Despite our efforts well into the wee hours, the house was still covered in flour. Floors, counters, even crannies we might not discover for months. Dick and I fried up some potstickers and enjoyed the rare quiet.

  “It was fun,” I said. “Do you know, that’s the first party we’ve had in five years?”

  “Wonder why,” Dick said, not really wondering.

  “Half the Sky, right? All I do is work twenty-four/seven. I miss other kids’ birthday parties, and I even missed Anya’s preschool Back to School Night. Our house is full of people on telephones, and you make more post office runs than Santa Claus.”

  “Did I say anything?”

  “No. I can do my own guilt.”

  “Another potsticker?”

  “Uh-uh. Chibaole—I’m stuffed. So what if we moved to China? All of us.”

  “I guess it was only a matter of time,” he said.

  I poked at the last few potstickers with my chopsticks. Skewered one. Looked up at my soul mate. I’m pretty sure he was smiling just a bit.

  “You’ve said yourself that a cameraman can live anywhere. It would be a fantastic experience for the girls. And we’d all be together. We always wanted our life together to be an adventure.”

  “We’ve succeeded,” he said.

  “It’d just be for a year. But think what we could accomplish!”

  “You don’t have to carpe diem me, Jenny. Lay it out.”

  I drizzled a little vinegar lake around the lone potsticker. Added a spoonful of lajiao, hot chili. Too much lajiao, just the way I like it. I poked the potsticker into the hot spot.

  Well, who do you think you are, Miss Priss? (That would be my mother talking.)

  So what makes you think you can make a dent in the mess in somebody else’s country? (That would be me.)

  Patently inadequate. (The Greek chorus stirs in its grave.)

  Okay. Well. Despite SARS, an angry board, reluctant government officials, and a constant scramble for funds, nobody could deny we were making progress. Real progress. By the end of 2003, just three years after the first Half the Sky preschool opened, we were operating our programs in thirteen orphanages and had three hundred–plus employees—most of them teachers and nannies. In an effort to spread the word that we had at
least a partial solution to offer, we’d just held our first semipublic event in Hefei: Half the Sky’s Fifth Anniversary Conference on Nurture and Education in China’s State-Run Orphanages. Incredibly, a hundred orphanage directors and welfare officials accepted our invitation. Even CBS News and CNN showed up, and their stories had aired just before the holidays.

  “Well,” I said, “I just can’t help thinking that if we had a real office in Beijing, instead of ZZ’s apartment—and if we could be working right alongside our government partners and not just when I’m in town—we’d be more credible; we could find more supporters and reach more kids.”

  “How many are we reaching now? I can’t keep up,” he said.

  “Maybe two thousand.”

  “And how many are you after?”

  “I dunno. They say there’s maybe a million.”

  The sun was just coming up. Dick poured some coffee. The kitchen was new. We’d spent the past couple of years living in a construction zone so we could have it. Outside, in pinkish light, through big storefront-type windows, we could see our garden: fruit trees, vegetables, old roses, herbs, a tree we’d hauled up from Southern California. The irrigation system Dick had made by hand, turning all his fingertips blue with plumber’s gunk. Twenty-seven valves. Raised beds—one of them full of baby asparagus that would produce for fifty years.

  “It would just be for a year,” I said.

  “Did you ever dream Half the Sky could reach so many kids?”

  “Never.”

  “Why can’t two thousand be enough?”

  Dick swears he would never have said that. I thought he did. Probably I said it to myself.

  I dissected the last potsticker with chopsticks. Herded all the filling bits into their own little circle on my plate.

  “I don’t know.”

  Dick put his arms around me.

  “Well, the good news is—we’ll see a lot more of you in China,” he said.

  ZZ MADE HER famous congee (rice porridge, or zhou in Chinese) for breakfast. My girls could live happily on congee alone. They and their nephew, our seven-year-old grandson, Colin, were blissful in their jammies, slurping it up with little porcelain spoons.