by Jenny Bowen
“I don’t want try.”
“But why not?”
“I don’t know how make music.”
“Well, that’s what a piano teacher does: teaches you how.”
“Oh. I think about it.”
It didn’t matter; we never found a decent teacher. So Anya took tap-dance lessons. Maya practiced splits and backbends. Jingli started learning “English with Mickey Mouse.”
WHILE DICK STILL took the occasional shooting job, he was beginning to reconsider his own life choices. He completed his book of photographic portraits, Mei Mei, Little Sister. Then, in a Beijing library, he discovered the world’s first telling of the Cinderella story, written in AD 768, and he began to dream a film, Cinderella Moon—a movie to be shot in China, in Chinese. Like the girls, he was finding his way.
And so was I. Even as my family struggled to adapt to new lives, I was almost instantly more at home in Beijing than I’d ever been during fifteen years of edgewise living in Hollywood. I missed nothing about those days. Maybe for the first time ever, my life made perfect sense.
I’d started taking Mandarin lessons in my nonexistent spare time, but I traveled so much that I missed just about every class. Although I began picking up the language slowly through constant exposure, I never learned beyond kindergarten Chinese; I could grasp the gist, but never the nuance. After a while, I decided things were just right the way they were. ZZ made me sound far better than I could ever hope to manage as a non-native speaker; and in meetings, officials spoke freely, assuming there was no way the foreigner understood.
Despite the fact that I could barely direct a taxi to my house, for now, at least, I felt whole, integrated—family, work, heart. Peaceful in this chaotic place.
Maybe the adventure would last more than a year.
CHINA CELEBRATES TWO “Golden Weeks” each year: the Chinese New Year Spring Festival and October 1, China’s National Day. All China travels during a Golden Week. Our first opportunity to join the hordes came on the October holiday in 2004. We would have loved to explore Asia a bit, but since, as a ward of the state, Jingli couldn’t leave the country, we opted for Sanya—a beach resort at the very southern tip of China, on Hainan Island.
On departure morning, Jingli refused breakfast. She stood by the window all morning while we ran around packing forgotten items and zipping suitcases. “What are you doing?” Uncle Daddy asked her.
“I waiting for airplane.”
“Oh, Jingli baby, the airplane doesn’t come to our house. We have to go to it.”
Why should this child know of airports?
When we arrived in Sanya, Jingli was in paradise. As if the plane ride weren’t magnificent enough, now she saw the ocean for the first time. She was stunned that there could be such a thing.
She tossed off her new AFOs and staggered through the sand, falling and laughing. She rode on Uncle Daddy’s shoulders into the waves. She shrieked when a macaque stole her bag of peanuts at Monkey Island. She danced the hula-hula with showgirls from the Philippines. She paddled around the big pool in her star-shaped floaty wearing shocking-pink goggles, singing “Wo youyong!—I’m swimming!”
It was as if the Root Cellar had never existed.
SOON AFTER THE holiday, Slick called. He was coming to Beijing and had arranged a lunch with the CCAA vice director to discuss Jingli’s case. ZZ and I were to join them. I must bring Jingli.
She didn’t believe me when I told her that I wasn’t giving her back to Slick. In a last-ditch effort to stay home, she started blurting out her secrets.
“In that orphanage, they don’t let me drink water. They don’t want me to wet. They make me sleep on floor.”
I squeezed her hand. “You never have to go back there, Jingli. Remember, I promised. I promised. We are just going to have lunch with the director. He wants to see how well you’re doing. You can tell him about Sanya and youyong.”
“In that orphanage, when I go to Little Sisters school, everything is nice and the teachers are nice, but at night, after school, the ayis hit the children, especially the little ones. And pinch them. And whip them in the bathroom.”
I climbed into the back of the cab, took Jingli on my lap, and kissed her teary cheeks. I was a traitor, taking her to see Slick. I didn’t know a way out.
“I’m so sorry that happened, Jingli. You are finished with that bad place. Please trust me.”
“When I make mistake and pee in my clothes, the ayis don’t let me have clean ones. They don’t want to do laundry all the time. Then I am smelly. Why you not send me to Shanghai?”
“Shanghai?”
“I like Shanghai. There I have operation in hospital, and after that operation, no one dares hit me.”
Jingli was silent at lunch. She ate nothing. I didn’t force her. Slick and the CCAA vice director didn’t notice. They were too busy sharing army stories. When we said goodbye, I gave them each a bottle of brandy. I asked casually if I could help find Jingli the right family. The vice director said that, as long as the prospective parents were qualified to adopt a Chinese child, the choice was mine. ZZ and I silently cheered and got out of there before he could change his mind.
“Why can’t I stay with Jenny Mama and Uncle Daddy?” Jingli asked ZZ in the cab.
“This not the family that is meant to be yours,” ZZ said, trying to sound upbeat. “Someone very wonderful is waiting for you. Now Jenny Mama can find the best family.”
Jingli blinked back tears. She turned away and looked out the window. She was quiet for a long time. Then . . .
“I do not want to go back to the orphanage. My new mama must be Jenny Mama’s friend—not a stranger. My new family must have other children so I don’t feel lonely. And I want to go to America so I can have a horse and salt on the ground.”
ZZ stopped translating. “Salt?” she asked.
“Maya showed me a picture of America. She was sliding down a hill of salt.”
“Snow? Jingli, I’m going to do my best to find exactly that family,” I said.
With an aching heart, I began to look in earnest for Jingli’s family.
A couple of months after our lunch, Slick called ZZ and told her he was in trouble. He didn’t explain, but he wanted to know if we might have a job for Mrs. Slick, the doctor. ZZ told him we had no openings. Although Half the Sky already had been able to raise the standards of care at Baling, the place took a dramatic leap forward when Slick disappeared shortly after that call. We never saw him or his wife again.
FATE, AND SOME persistence on my part, brought Jingli the perfect family, and it was not us. She would have the siblings she wanted—two of them adopted from China. Her future parents were devoted to their kids. They dearly wanted to complete their family with an older child who had special needs and could use some extra loving. They couldn’t have been more perfect. Except we were her family too.
As it began to sink in that we were going to lose her soon, Dick and I found ourselves rattled and depressed. We kept the news a secret while Jingli’s new family waited for approval. We couldn’t imagine life without her.
For our first and last Christmas together, we shopped at the Russian market. We found a cheesy little artificial tree with multicolored flashing mini-lights embedded in its branches. On Christmas Day, after our three girls raced around the courtyard on their new bikes, we flew to Hong Kong. We saw The Nutcracker at the Hong Kong Ballet. We had high tea at the Peninsula Hotel. We took a bus tour of Hong Kong run by Splendid Tours. We ditched the rest of the Splendid Tour group somewhere in Stanley Market, and from then on we called ourselves the Splendids.
And Jingli was a Splendid, through and through. She was family. Even when she left us, that would never change.
Chapter 15
Eat the Wind, Swallow Bitterness
Gaoyou, Jiangsu Province
Spring 2005
Gaoyou, a not-too-large city in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, was perfect casting. It had tree-lined streets and the friendly war
mth of a small town (population less than a million!). Every morning the street-sweeping truck woke us up with “Happy Birthday” and “Jingle Bells.” The place felt the opposite of orphanage, and that was just what I was seeking for our nineteenth site and the inaugural home of our fourth and final Half the Sky program, the Family Village.
By 2005, international adoption had become big business. Healthy babies and young children were easily finding new homes, in China or outside. They rarely stayed in our programs for long. But unless adopting families specifically requested otherwise, CCAA, in those days, was careful to offer foreigners only children they considered healthy or with minor, correctable special needs. And while a few bold Chinese were willing to go against tradition and beyond bloodlines to adopt a child, they had no interest in one who appeared less than perfect.
So what would happen to the children whose physical or developmental special needs were not minor and could not be repaired? We could see that there were more and more such new arrivals all the time—children given up by parents who’d run out of options, who couldn’t afford medical care or expensive therapies. Children, like the rest, abandoned due to desperate circumstance. Most were doomed to live their lives in institutions.
The Family Village program would offer permanent families in government-supplied housing on or near orphanage grounds. The children would grow up outside the institution and inside loving families but would still participate in Half the Sky programs. I couldn’t imagine a better way to give them a second chance at a happy childhood.
WE WERE THE first Western guests to stay at Gaoyou’s new “international” hotel. Before the volunteers arrived, we bought toasters and coffee pots and taught the cooks how to make omelets and toast and scrambled eggs.
At the orphanage, we renovated a dilapidated outpatient clinic, turning it into sparkling new family apartments complete with bright-colored prefab kitchens and a Little Sisters Preschool down the hall. We built a bridge from the preschool to the new Infant Nurture Center. It was Half the Sky’s first real construction project; we’d done only simple renovations before.
Our new Family Village program director, “Jade Dawn” Zhang (the newly retired director of the Hefei orphanage), spent a month in Gaoyou, interviewing parents from the community. All were married couples, devoted parents who’d raised their allotted one child and now had empty nests and a longing for more family. There were dozens of applicants; she chose thirteen couples for training. Then, after training, medical checks, and ZZ interrogation, we narrowed that down to six wonderful couples who happily moved out of their homes and opened their hearts to four children of strangers—twenty-four children altogether—all with special needs. We paid the stay-at-home parent a small stipend. The other parent continued to work outside the home. Each couple promised to raise their four new children until they were adults.
On matching day, Jade Dawn Zhang led the children and their ayis into a reception room where the twelve parents anxiously waited. She stood at the head of the table, a small, solid woman who had a way of taking over a room. She held up a plastic basket and grinned. “Our new families,” she announced. Then she closed her eyes and . . . ever so slowly . . . snagged a slip of paper and unfolded it.
“Family of Wang Chunli and Yang Yueming,” she read. Two trembling people stood.
“Your first new daughter is Weiping.”
Weiping’s ayi took her by the hand and led her to meet the Wangs. Weiping was five years old. She had round button eyes and a spiky orphanage haircut. Cerebral palsy gave her an awkward gait, but as her new mama and baba took her into their arms, she was transformed in their eyes. She was perfect.
And so it went. One by one, until each of the twenty-four children had looked into the eyes of a kind stranger whom they could soon call their very own mama or baba. In China, where tradition was held dear and deep, nothing like Half the Sky’s Family Village had been imagined before. In fact, there may be nothing quite like it in the world.
GAOYOU DIRECTOR NI had been nervous all month. There were all these excited new families to settle and this construction project going on day and night. Soon his sleepy little orphanage was going to be overrun with foreign volunteers. And on top of that, at the last minute he’d been told that Half the Sky was bringing in the foreign media.
It was true, CNN and Newsweek and a few others were coming, but we had permission, more or less. Or at least we had advice from our friends in the Jiangsu government that it would take too long to get official permission and the build would be long over, so the journalists should just show up as if they were volunteers. When the big day finally came and we were all gathered—new teachers, new nannies, new parents, trainers, foreigners, and assorted journalists—to celebrate our nineteenth children’s center and first Family Village along with the children of Gaoyou, Director Ni, who was gaunt to begin with, looked as if he’d lost ten pounds.
The man barely spoke to anyone. I tried to discourage the reporters from asking him any questions. I feared he’d keel over. The Newsweek journalist asked one of the new fathers, a radiologist who already had a nineteen-year-old son, why he had made the decision to add such a difficult second chapter to his life.
“We have been good parents,” the man said. “Our son has done well. He is in university now. He doesn’t need us anymore. There is . . . a hole in my heart. These children—I have known them only a short while, but . . . my new children fill that hole.”
Director Ni’s taut shoulders seemed to relax just a bit.
Xinyang, Henan Province
The following month, Mr. Hu invited us to return to Henan. Besides the faint hope that he’d made some progress on the AIDS front, I looked forward to visiting our new centers in that province. Although we had a growing team of program directors and field supervisors and trainers working to raise and maintain quality at all of our sites, and although we received quarterly reports on every child, there was nothing quite like a site visit to help me stay connected with our work.
Xinyang Director Feng had delivered. Often a new center would struggle in the early months as the teachers, nannies, and youth mentors worked to create a family-like environment while quietly integrating themselves into daily orphanage life. Under the best directors and over time, the new nurturing child-centered atmosphere would spread beyond the Half the Sky programs throughout the institution. It was already happening in Xinyang.
We visited the infant nurture rooms and watched Half the Sky nannies on the floor, playing with and cuddling the babies. No one even noticed we were there. The babies not in arms were busy crawling or toddling about, exploring their world; the nannies were busy watching the babies. The once-silent rooms were now full of life.
Just as I walked into the preschool, I saw Baobao’s chubby cheeks disappear in a cloud of pouf as her teacher slipped a lavender chiffon dress-up gown over her head. What emerged in front of the mirror was a princess. Bright eyes and a sudden, stunned smile. Now a diamond-studded tiara atop scraggly, starting-to-grow hair. Baobao looked down and fingered the filmy fabric of her gown. She looked up. She gazed at the mirror in absolute wonder. This gorgeous girl is me, Baobao!
Baobao saw us watching her in the mirror and waved happily. She turned toward us with excitement. “Ayi, nihao! Ayi, see my dress! Do you want to see my flower?”
We did. She took our hands and led us to a windowsill lined with flowerpots. From each sprouted a tiny seedling. She found the pot marked with her name and proudly held it high. “What is it, Baobao?” ZZ asked.
“Flower seeds! Hao chi [good food]!” she said. Now Director Feng was like one of the kids; he jumped in, even more excited than Baobao. “Come, let us show you the sunflower wall! See, the photos show the children planting the seedlings outside, then tending the garden. Now here’s a chart where they mark how the seedlings grew.”
“We ate sunflower seeds at snack time one day,” Baobao’s teacher said. “The children wondered where the seeds come from, so we starte
d a garden. While our seeds were growing in the garden, we learned the parts of the plant and made drawings and sang sunflower songs and talked about what makes plants grow.”
“When we harvested the seeds,” said Director Feng, “the children decided to eat only some and to plant the rest. Look how their drawings have become more complex over time. Even growing up in the countryside and working on the land, I did not learn so much!”
“I don’t know who is more proud,” Baobao’s teacher said, laughing, “the children or Director Feng.”
“Half the Sky has brought our children great good,” Director Feng said. “Even the little babies are stronger and more confident. I am proud. And I’m proud of our Baobao!”
“Ayi,” Baobao said, tugging on my shirt. “You want to see me ride my bike?”
“Sure!”
I watched Baobao, still in lavender chiffon, zipping around on her trike. I watched her give rides to her schoolmates, her face glowing with the thrill of sport. It was almost impossible to believe that this was the footless waif I had lifted from a broken stroller only a year before.
A few years later, Baobao’s new American mother, an amputee herself, would tell me, “She is fearless! She will try anything—skating, running, swimming, biking, or kickball. Anything! And our little girl is beautiful, confident, and full of love. She is the kindest child I’ve ever known.”
Like a child who had been loved all her life.
MR. HU CAME for us at lunchtime. He explained to Director Feng that he would take us sightseeing. Sightseeing? I glanced at ZZ. She shook her head.
“Don’t worry,” she murmured. “Just follow.” Of course I did.
The road to the village was carpeted with sheaves of wheat, spread over the road by wily farmers who enlisted passing cars and trucks to ease their workload. Mr. Hu’s driver dutifully rolled over miles of drying grain. Here and there, farmers winnowed with giant two-pronged forks as the car passed, tossing the separated wheat chaff in the air.