Wish You Happy Forever

by Jenny Bowen

  ZHENGZHOU (NEW YORK TIMES)—AIDS is creating an explosion of destitute orphans here in China’s rural heartland and is driving large numbers of families into such dire poverty that they can no longer afford to feed or clothe, much less educate, their children. . . .

  Wang Beibei, 10, a star pupil from Suixian, a county in northern Henan, was expelled from third grade last year after school officials discovered that her father had died of AIDS.

  “They were afraid to let me in, and my friends stopped playing with me,” she said. . . . In June, Beibei’s mother died of AIDS. School is out of the question. There is no one to work the family’s land, and she and her brother struggle just to look out for each other. “My brother cooks for me, and we eat noodles. We have no money for eggs or meat.”

  I knew we had to find a way to try to help. Sure, these weren’t abandoned baby girls, but orphans were orphans. The hurt was the same. When I asked ZZ to make some calls to our few friends in high places, we quickly learned that the subject was closed. Off-limits. There were no AIDS orphans in Henan. In fact, according to the authorities, there was no AIDS in China.

  So we asked permission to set up Half the Sky centers in “ordinary” orphanages in Henan Province—for just normal, everyday, abandoned kids. Old Yang told us that was impossible. He said the province was closed to foreigners.

  Guanyin, my favorite goddess, must have been listening. A few months later, and with no explanation, Old Yang was again replaced by dear Mr. Shi, our first and best friend at the Social Workers Association. Mr. Shi somehow wangled permission for us to visit a small group of Henan orphanages and possibly open centers. He said he must particularly recommend Luoyang.

  “But why Luoyang?” I asked ZZ. I knew they were getting plenty of foreign aid. Even the Gates Foundation was helping Luoyang.

  “It’s China,” she said.

  Despite the fact that Luoyang was the only place in the entire province that wasn’t struggling to keep its doors open and tummies full, there was no avoiding it—the Luoyang director had both guanxi and chutzpah. So we would choose Luoyang, to make the officials happy, and then one other place—one deep in the heart of AIDS country. Then, somehow without succumbing to mission drift, we would find a way to reach the children who didn’t exist.

  I knew by now that the next step must be to make friends—local friends, preferably in high places. Mr. Shi introduced us to the director of the provincial welfare department, Mr. Hu. Our first Henan friend turned out to be our best. He was a gem. “Many Chinese even think all Henan people are thieves, criminals,” Mr. Hu was saying.

  ZZ whispered, “Yes, they do.”

  “Instead, we are victims of misfortune. Constant misfortune.”

  He lit a new cigarette from the butt of one still burning. I rolled my eyes at ZZ. Grabbed my throat.

  “Mr. Hu, you shouldn’t smoke so much,” ZZ said.

  “It’s not good for me, I know. But it’s part of my wife’s free benefits. She works at a cigarette factory. I try to stop. Not successful.”

  He turned to look at me. “Does the smoke bother you?”

  “Oh no.” My eyes stung and my head throbbed, but I really wanted to keep my only friend in Henan happy.

  Now, as we neared Xinyang, the landscape turned greener, the heat more intense. I could see mountains rising in the west. “Xinyang is a tea-growing area,” said Mr. Hu. “Xinyang Maojian green tea—one of the top ten China famous teas.”

  “It is the place I was sent during Cultural Revolution,” ZZ said quietly, looking out the window.

  “Xinyang is where you came?” I took her hand. I knew that was the time she’d had to leave behind her baby boy when he was only six months old and, like other young intellectuals of her generation, go “down to the countryside” to learn about the roots of communism from the farmers. She’d slept on a dirt kang (communal bed) and moved from house to house, working in rice paddies with leeches clinging to her legs. The farmers thought she was useless. The only food was a watery porridge sprinkled with a few grains of millet. She didn’t complain; her hosts ate the same.

  Her breasts ached until the milk dried, and even after, she dreamed each night about her tiny son, her first and only child. She was away from him for almost a year. She was still haunted by that . . . abandoning her baby to come to this place.

  TO ME, XINYANG looked like yet another smallish Chinese city struggling to come into the twenty-first century. To my foreign eyes, these cities all looked the same: a patchwork of single-story, tired-looking shops selling cell phones and dresses, a couple of McDonald’s and KFC look-alikes, assorted tiny cafés with grimy windows, a block where merchants sold only giant coils of wire, another block of only used electrical parts, another of funeral wreaths, the occasional shiny new department store (still under construction), and a China Unicom tower. The government buildings, each on its own block, were always the most impressive.

  “It was completely different then,” ZZ said.

  A woman bicycled past, wearing a visor and a filmy “butterfly” scarf floating over her shoulders to shelter her pale skin from the sun. A small boy, perched on the crossbar, peered from between her arms. A young family cruised by on a motor scooter, baba and mama sharing the single seat, baby in the basket.

  We turned off the main drag onto a rough road leading to the orphanage on the sleepy outskirts of town. These were more like village streets, the few houses and shops more ramshackle. I tried to imagine a young ZZ arriving here thirty-five years before.

  “Not even like this,” ZZ said, reading my mind. “It was much more rural. Primitive. They had nothing.”

  AT THE ORPHANAGE gate, we were greeted by Director Feng, a cheerful, open-faced farm boy who clearly relished his job. As we walked through the sad little rooms of his orphanage, he was kind to the children and truly eager to help them. With no one to train his team in how to do anything like running a children’s home, Director Feng had put his ample good energy and rural know-how into designing gadgets to make the children’s lives more bearable. He’d cooked up hoists for kids with cerebral palsy and gizmos to correctly angle bottles into baby mouths.

  Still, and as usual, the children were pretty much on their own. Nobody was holding or playing or talking with them. Every child I saw that bright summer day languished in bed. Except one.

  She lived in a beat-up old baby stroller that wasn’t going anywhere. She was about three years old. She had lost both her feet. Both of them cut off. Her name was Baobao.

  I lifted her from the stroller and sat her on my lap. She allowed me to hold her close. Not tense or fearful—just unaccustomed to any sort of intimacy. She gazed at me with a sort of foggy curiosity.

  Baobao

  She’d been abandoned at the gate of Xinyang Central Hospital. The police report says that she was severely burned; both lower legs had turned black. She was dying. The doctors kept her alive, but her burns were so bad that one-third of each lower leg had to be amputated. Baobao spent eight months in the hospital, including the Spring Festival (the Chinese New Year holiday), when everybody who could went home. The nurses took turns looking after her. When I met her, she had just arrived at the Xinyang orphanage. Like so many of the children, the rest of Baobao’s story was a blank.

  “You are a very brave girl, Baobao,” I told her. “We’re coming back to help you.”

  I peered up at Mr. Hu. “I think Director Feng is wonderful, don’t you, Mr. Hu? There is a great warm feeling about this place. They only need some training. If you are agreeable, we’d like to work here in Xinyang.”

  “I can see that is true,” he said. He ruffled Baobao’s stubbly hair.

  IT WAS MY first (and only) Chinese “camping experience.” We wouldn’t actually sleep in the place, my hosts explained, but the Xinyang officials wanted to give us China’s “famous camping in nature” treat. (I don’t think there was much camping going on in China in those days.) First we drove through a mountain resort area, one of the countr
y’s four most famous resorts. Before every gorgeous view spot, there was a billboard with a cheesy inflated rendition of what we were about to see, along with a sales pitch for something irrelevant—cigarettes or skin lightener or a villa by a lake that didn’t actually exist in China but looked suspiciously like Switzerland.

  And then we bumped along an endless dirt road in black night. As far as I could tell in the darkness, there was no sign that anything like camping had ever occurred anywhere in the vicinity. Somehow we arrived just in time for dinner.

  It was an outdoor kitchen on the shores of a reservoir—also famous. Bare electric lightbulbs were strung from assorted tree branches. We sat at a big round table covered with sticky oilcloth. It was a hot and humid night. Countless flying things batted themselves against the lightbulbs and the dinner guests. Cicadas screeched in the trees—deafening. But the food was great and the ice-cold bottles of local beer, a gift from the gods.

  “Do they have cicadas in America?” shouted Mr. Hu.

  “Not where I come from—not in San Francisco,” I shouted back.

  “The cicada lives underground in larval stage for sixteen years,” he said, leaning in closer so we could hear him over the din of cicada romance. “Then it pushes to the surface, develops wings, and flies to the trees. From the trees, it sings for six days. And then it dies.”

  “A strange and sort of beautiful life,” I said.

  “Not over,” he said. “Then we eat it.”

  “We do?”

  I looked down at the crunchy, formerly delicious nugget poised between my chopsticks. Set it down quietly. Sipped and sloshed the icy beer.

  “Mr. Hu, this morning when you told me about the bad fortune of Zhoukou, you mentioned the problem of AIDS. Do you think there are children, AIDS orphans, who might need help?”

  “Oh yes. Many. It is sad. Our provincial government is working on the problem.” He explained that the government plan was to spruce up the hardest-hit villages, adding clean wells and clinics and methane digesters to turn pig manure into gas. And then take the children away.

  “Expert teams are working in many villages already,” he said. “And we are moving all the children who’ve lost both parents into special new housing. And the grandparents too, if they are still living. They are called Sunshine Villages! Nineteen are under construction right now!”

  “You mean like orphanages? And so the children have to leave their own village?”

  “Of course, if the grandparents are healthy and not too old, the children can stay in their own home. No one else will take them.”

  “Not the aunts and uncles?”

  “Often they are sick too. If they are not sick, some will take the children just to get the land.” He stopped eating. Lit a cigarette. “It is not an easy life in the countryside,” he said.

  “Mr. Hu, will you take us to see some of those children?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time.

  “This is difficult,” he said slowly, blowing smoke into the night. Just us and the bugs. “We know Half the Sky. We know your heart is good and you help many children. We welcome your help here in Henan. But . . . this is difficult—”

  I waited.

  “Foreigners are not allowed in the villages,” he said finally. “The people are embarrassed. They are very poor. The AIDS, it came from selling blood, you understand. It was a way to build a new roof, educate their children—they didn’t know.”

  They didn’t know that their blood would be drawn into a centrifuge to extract blood products to sell to pharmaceutical companies. They didn’t know that their good blood would be mixed with bad blood lurking in the already-used needles and centrifuge equipment—blood tainted with HIV—and then passed back into their own clean bodies. They knew only that each time they sold their blood, they received fifty yuan . . . six dollars. So they went back again and again. Now they could pay school fees, pay their debts, patch the mud walls of their homes. They shared what they knew with their sisters and brothers and even their aging parents.

  And then some began to get sick with fever and sores. A few died. The lucrative blood stations, some of which, although they were official Red Cross stations, were owned by the relatives of a high-ranking provincial official, quietly shut down.

  Over the years, more and more villagers got sick. They could no longer work, so they sold their few possessions. Their children stopped attending school; they couldn’t pay. They stayed at home and took care of their parents as best they could. Many of the children were still very young. They knew that the blood money had been used to give them an education and a better life. Knowing that, they watched their parents die.

  “I wonder,” I said quietly, “if children like that, who have known only family life, village life, will be okay in those Sunshine Villages. They have already lost so much.”

  “Yes,” he said. His eyes were glistening in the dark. “And I do understand you wish to help. You must be patient.”

  AT DAWN WE drove back to the Zhengzhou airport. Our Air China flight to Nanchang was canceled. The only remaining flight that day between Henan and Jiangxi, two “underdeveloped” provinces, would be on a forty-seat Dash 8 turboprop.

  “Would you like to wait and take the Air China flight tomorrow?” ZZ asked hopefully. She was not a fan of small planes. But I needed to get back to our build in Nanchang to hold my little daughters.

  The plane looked old and tired. With some trepidation (well, a lot on ZZ’s part), we squeezed into the last two seats.

  We taxied. We stopped.

  “There’s a problem with the brakes,” said a voice on the intercom. “Please wait a moment.” A few seconds passed. We taxied again. Now I was worried we were going to take off with bad brakes. We stopped again. Two flight attendants passed out boxes of some sort of green juice. They had enough for only six rows. I was in row seven, ZZ in ten. I was debating using my foreign status to get a green juice for ZZ, when suddenly everyone stood and started getting off the plane.

  I followed the crowd and climbed down the flimsy air-stairs. We all stood in a huddle in the shade of an engine and wing, watching a lone mechanic trying to fix the brakes. Some of the passengers were right next to a propeller that was still lazily coming to a halt. I tried not to look at them until I was certain the thing had completely stopped.

  “I’m sorry, ZZ,” I said. “I guess we should have waited for the big plane.”

  “Mei wenti,” she said. “No problem. Eating bitter is Chinese way.”

  Ten minutes passed. Most of the passengers were squatting now. Some shared fruit and watermelon seeds.

  “Must eat bitter to taste the sweet,” ZZ said.

  We stood under the plane wing for almost an hour. Not a single passenger complained.

  FINALLY BACK IN Jiangxi Province, I scooped my beautiful little daughters into my arms. I thought about Jingli and Baobao, hurting and alone. I thought about the children in Henan, their parents gone for blood money.

  Children eating bitter.

  “You two are the most precious gifts in my life,” I said. “How can I be so lucky?”

  “Mommy, that’s a big squeeze,” Anya said. “Don’t squeeze our dinner out.”

  “I just love you so much.”

  “We do too, Mommy,” Maya said.

  “Wo ai ni,” Anya said.

  “Anya said Wo ai ni to Feng Ayi, and she told us Chinese people never say ‘I love you’ like that to children,” Maya said.

  “Really?” I said. “Well, Wo ai ni anyway. Wo ai ni big-time. Forever and ever.”

  IN THE MORNING, I went along with the volunteers to Lushan National Park to see my second of four most famous resorts in China. After checking out the posh villa where Chiang Kai-shek, and later Mao, liked to cool off in summertime, we spiraled slowly up the mountain road behind a line of tour buses. More billboards. Ford Motors, then some giant swimsuited babes on surfboards—not a clue what they were selling. When we’d gone as far as we could go, we climbed
one thousand steps to the Rock of One Thousand Clouds to see the Three Ancient Trees, planted by monks fifteen hundred years before. We washed our hands in a lucky stream and threw coins in the Cave of the Immortals.

  My two little girls lit incense and said a prayer to Guanyin to thank her for helping us to help the orphans. I knew I was utterly and completely blessed.

  Chapter 14

  A Sparrow Sings, Not Because It Has an Answer, but Because It Has a Song

  Beijing

  Autumn 2004

  Once back in Beijing, it was time to find a real office for Half the Sky. ZZ’s living room would no longer do. My first choice was right in the heart of Ritan Park, “Temple of the Sun.” The place I had in mind was a modest imperial changing room dating only from the 1950s but fashioned after the original 1530 model. It was empty, dust-covered, and storybook elegant. Perfect. Across the courtyard, a little company of some sort had an office. Why couldn’t we do the same?

  “Well,” said ZZ, “there is no air-conditioning. There is no toilet. There is no water.”

  “But look at those roof tiles, ZZ. And the painted ceiling—magical! Half the Sky should live in the Temple of the Sun!” I was clearly still in movie mode.

  We ended up a few blocks away in Jianguomenwai Diplomatic Residence Compound—Jianwai for short. There were a number of more pleasant, less Soviet-looking options even before Olympic fever rebuilt the city, but the location (just blocks from Tiananmen Square) and the rents (fair) were incentive enough to keep the place fully occupied. After the Cultural Revolution and during the period of “opening and reform,” all foreigners had to live in a place like Jianwai—especially anybody connected with the media. Chinese had not been allowed entry without a special permit. Now Jianwai was home to assorted foreign media, international NGOs, and embassy staff from all over the world. Anachronistically and for no good reason I could think of, our Chinese staff still needed a pass to enter. Foreign faces zipped right past the guards. Some things about China weren’t changing fast enough.