by Jenny Bowen
Much more importantly, we next heard from representatives of the queen of Sweden. The World Childhood Foundation had been started by Sweden’s Queen Sylvia to assist children at risk. They kindly agreed to sponsor our new center in Nanning, the steamy capital of Guangxi Province.
Nanning, Guangxi Province
Princess Madeleine, the Swedish queen’s youngest daughter, was our program officer. Unlike at World Childhood project sites in other countries, nobody in China had a clue who she was. So, despite looking like a Disney princess come to life (truly!), in China Princess Madeleine could travel freely without paparazzi in pursuit. Still, the Swedish Embassy insisted on bodyguards. Two very tall and quiet gentlemen joined her on her visit to the Nanning Half the Sky center.
The Nanning director—let’s call him Director “Big”—was a blustery retired army guy—a man’s man. When our van pulled up at the orphanage, he ignored the princess completely and bellowed a warm welcome to the bodyguards.
As we entered each room to observe the programs and chat with the children, the bodyguards stationed themselves outside the door. Director Big kept running to the door to urge the men to come in. He tried to shove them, in that friendly Chinese way. The bodyguards smiled pleasantly and remained at their posts. They wouldn’t budge. Big was perplexed.
Princess Madeleine complimented Director Big on the enthusiastic and engaged little girls, so obviously thriving in his Half the Sky programs. He wandered off before ZZ could translate.
We gathered in the reception room after our visit. The bodyguards waited outside the door. Director Big sat in the room full of women, deflated and confused.
Anna De Geer, World Childhood’s gracious representative, introduced the work of “Her Majesty, Queen Sylvia of Sweden,” and described her efforts to assist children at risk. She said the queen had a special interest in protecting and empowering young girls. Director Big barely listened to the translation; his eyes were glazed and he wore the China Smile.
Anna then introduced “Her Highness, Princess Madeleine of Sweden, Duchess of Hälsingland and Gästrikland.” As ZZ translated, Director Big saw, apparently for the first time, the stunning blond princess with her perfectly radiant smile. The old army guy blushed and shrank to half-size. He looked ten.
Someone once told me that the best way to handle meetings with creeps or adversaries or otherwise intimidating people is to envision them in their underwear. What works for me is to see them as the children they probably were. I’m rarely intimidated anymore. Big was now forever little.
Guangzhou, Guangdong Province
After our visit to Nanning, we returned to Guangzhou orphanage, Maya’s first home, to see how our new programs were doing.
ZZ and I sat in the orphanage reception room where, eight years earlier, our Maya found her family. Everything was unchanged, yet entirely different. I felt strangely detached from the room and its history. What happened in that time when Maya was placed in my arms seemed to have happened somewhere else—in our own private limbo. This room, this orphanage, and its young residents were now part of who I had become.
Now, in that place that was just another orphanage reception room among the hundreds I’d seen, I thanked my new friend, Director Zheng, for allowing Half the Sky to come to his institution and congratulated him on the work his team had done so far. I told him I hoped that Guangzhou could become the training hub for the province.
“Under your leadership, Director Zheng, Guangzhou will become the model for Guangdong Province—in time maybe even the model for the entire southern region! Your programs will set the example for others, showing them that all children, even those with special needs, have potential to make something of their lives.”
Zheng smiled modestly and sipped his tea. He looked into his teacup and said, “Of course, there are other children.”
“Other children? You mean besides the two hundred or so in our programs?”
“Many more. In the other places.”
And then he took us to see other buildings, other rooms elsewhere in the compound. Far from the place we’d met Maya. Too many children to count. Most had special needs. They sat on plastic stools or potty chairs or on rough wooden chairs with restraints. Others lay quietly in cribs in dim rooms. Some lay on the floor. Children perhaps six or seven, flat on their backs for the endless hours of their childhood. Not a single toy or book. Not even a scratchy TV this time. Just small children with blank faces.
I crouched before a frail child, maybe four, slumped in a battered wooden contraption—sort of a cross between a potty chair and a cage. She ignored me. She was focused on something in front of her. She moved her finger gently over a worn tray in what seemed to be intricate patterns. I looked around to find an ayi, to ask if she knew what the little girl was doing. There were none in the room.
“ZZ, will you see if she can speak?”
ZZ tried. The girl whispered without looking up.
“Cantonese . . . gibberish . . . wakwak or something.”
Director Zheng said, “Draw. She’s drawing.”
“What is her name?” I asked.
Nobody knew. An ayi was summoned from another room.
“Her name is Lihua,” the woman said.
Lihua
At 9:30 P.M. on June 24, 2001, policemen from Guangzhou Public Security Bureau took a baby dying with jaundice to the orphanage. The baby, born on June 17, 2001, was a girl weighing only two kilograms. The institution named her Lihua.
Under delicate care of the institution, Lihua’s jaundice gradually faded away and she turned for the better. But shortly after this, she was attacked by a brain fever, which left her with lower limbs atrophy. She is brain-retarded and her legs are paralyzed.
With a lot of help from our friends, we doubled our plans for the new Guangzhou center. A year later, we doubled the size again. Lihua entered the Little Sisters Preschool in her new wheelchair.
At first, she was so shy that she would not even look at others. We tried hard to establish a bond with her. Then she discovered painting. She has a gift. Gradually, Lihua opened up and grew more confident, and we began to hear her words and laughter. She was fully enjoying the love and warmth of the big family.
Lihua worked very hard and her efforts paid off. The next year, she was allowed to go to primary school in our community. Half the Sky has a teacher to keep her company while attending school.
Her special talent in art was obvious, so Half the Sky hired a professional teacher for her. With the teacher’s help, Lihua progressed significantly. When she was eight years old, she participated in the Jinlei Cup arts competition and won the silver medal.
Just before she entered primary school, Lihua became one of the first residents at Half the Sky’s new Guangzhou Family Village, and as we did for all Half the Sky children, we received quarterly reports on her progress.
How are you, Auntie!? I’m Lihua. I am writing to you again. Are you happy?
At the orphanage, we held a “The Mid-Autumn Festival Performance” outside. My mother, younger brother, and I attended it. Uncle Zheng director bought much food for us to eat, such as moon cakes, pears, earthnuts, and apples. They were very delicious! There were shows performed, lantern riddle games, and clapping balloons. Here I have sent you a picture.
In my picture, the moon rises and the flowers in the garden are all in bloom. Two little girls are in the garden. They are so happy to see the beautiful moon that they dance. They wear pretty skirts with flowers like the garden. When they dance, the skirts will blow in the air. The girls wear high heels. They dance gracefully. My sisters and brothers and all the children in the house stick their heads out the window, watching us dancing happily.
Wish you happy every day!
Lihua
Now correctly diagnosed with polio, Lihua is learning to walk with assistance. And while she has physical challenges, to be sure, she is a brilliant young artist. She tells us she has never wanted anything more than to paint. And in her art,
she can dance.
Chapter 17
Our Lucky Star Is Shining
Spring 2006
Big change was coming to China. In 2001, when China both won the Olympic bid and was admitted to the World Trade Organization, you could feel the pulse begin to quicken. The pace of progress increased every year. By 2005, construction cranes were appearing everywhere, even far from Beijing and Shanghai. Now change was ubiquitous and relentless.
Change. New buildings and high-speed expressways popped up “like bamboo shoots after spring rain.” Beijing was torn down and rebuilt so fast and so often that old-timers got lost in their own neighborhoods.
China was morphing into New China at warp speed. Olympic fever gripped the entire nation. And it wasn’t just about buildings and highways and Bird’s Nests. New China meant new ideas, new money, new values, new dreams.
Even in our small domain—the world of disenfranchised children—keeping up with the changes and their accompanying tangle of contradictions was overwhelming. The ever-evolving situation was just about impossible to explain to our supporters.
The new affluence brought about a new middle class, which brought about a welcome slowdown in abandonment of healthy baby girls. Infertile middle-class families even began to consider adoption in a positive light. Healthy baby girls and those with mild special needs were now easily finding new families at home and overseas.
The new affluence also brought about the illegal but widespread use of ultrasound to determine gender. A million baby girls that should have been born in China were nowhere to be found.
And word about the government’s well-intentioned Tomorrow Plan—a program to provide surgeries for orphans born with birth defects—was reaching the nation’s poor. As medical costs soared and news of the plan spread, there was a dramatic increase in abandonment of children with special needs. Although the government’s intention was to correct minor special needs so that more orphans would be adopted, rumors told a different story. Poverty-stricken parents who’d struggled to care for their severely disabled children were now abandoning those beloved children in hopes of getting them help.
In the big cities, the places that attracted China’s floating population of migrant workers, children born of brief affairs or to poor couples who simply couldn’t afford to be parents, were abandoned.
Prosperity brought disparity. And disparity brought crime. Some orphanages were filling with the children of prisoners—children of drug dealers, thieves, or dissidents. Orphanages across the river from North Korea were filled with stateless children whose mothers had defected but then had been caught and deported.
As the government cracked down on the growing numbers of child abduction and trafficking rings, big-city orphanages received children from distant provinces, almost impossible to reunite with desperately searching poor families—if, indeed, their parents had not sold them in the first place.
As for our family—the Splendids—there was no way we could leave China at the end of one year, or even two. As the situation for orphans grew ever more complicated, our great plan to train the nation and put Half the Sky out of business was fraught with obstacles. My resolve hadn’t lessened one bit, but my Chinese garden, with its most excellent and magnificent mountain in the middle, was turning into a maze.
We sold our house in Berkeley.
ZZ and I were on the road almost nonstop. Besides running our programs in twenty-eight orphanages, watching small miracles happen for children every day, perpetually fundraising, and managing a growing team of field supervisors, teachers, youth mentors, foster parents, and nannies, we were working with our program directors to develop a comprehensive training curriculum for caregivers and a plan for training the places we would never reach. Neither of us took days off anymore.
OUR SECOND BEIJING apartment was number 142 on floor 14 of building 4 in the same diplomatic compound as our office. I knew enough by now to understand that all those fours just didn’t bode well. Unlike the much sought after number eight, ba in Chinese, which sounds just like good fortune and happiness, four—si—sounds like the word for death. I wondered if I should pay a visit to Guanyin but decided that unlucky apartment numbers were too trivial, and who had time anyway? I was barely finding time to sleep in our new home, let alone figure out how to banish its bad juju.
Then stuff started happening.
First, we heard that Half the Sky was being investigated by the government. Orphanage directors started telling us not to come visit because the Public Security Bureau was in town investigating us. What had happened to our government partnership?
“Do you think it’s our bad-luck apartment, ZZ?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. Certainly not.” But she didn’t look so sure.
Then, on the May 1 holiday, we went to Gaoyou—the site of Half the Sky’s first Family Village for children who are unlikely to be adopted—to join the families in celebrating the successful first year of their new lives. (Gaoyou is so far off the beaten track, I guess no one thought to investigate us there.)
It was a lovely event. Director Ni said a few words; I said even fewer. I asked the moms and dads if, after a year of family life, they had any concerns. One mother said, “Our only worry is that one day we may lose our children. We love them so much.”
That was my worry too. I knew it wouldn’t be up to me.
“I look at all your happy faces,” I said, “and I feel so proud of what we’ve created together. This kind of family—our kind of family—is new . . . it’s different, for sure. But it definitely isn’t second-best. I dearly hope you and your beautiful children can stay together always.”
We all posed for pictures, the children surrounded and cuddled by their doting parents. The fathers set off endless strings of firecrackers in the courtyard. When the building was thoroughly obliterated by smoke, we had a feast.
It was a joyous day—made even better because our dear friend, Mr. Hu from Henan, joined the party. He toured the new apartments and chatted with the families. “Now I understand,” he said to me. “This is what children need.”
And then his phone rang. When he hung up, his face had gone as gray as the smoky sky.
“I have to leave.”
We found a quiet office to hide in. Mr. Hu and ZZ conferred in tense, low voices. I didn’t understand a word. I cursed myself again for my pathetic Chinese.
“What’s happened?” I blurted.
“That was the Henan Province party secretary,” ZZ said. “He asked why Mr. Hu was in Jiangsu. He said Hu must return at once.”
“What does it mean?”
“We think someone has reported that he brought a foreigner to the AIDS villages. And there is something about the Internet. Something found with photographs.”
I knew absolutely and with sudden dread what it was.
“ZZ, I feel sick. I used the Internet to send that report to the board about our visit to ask if we could seek funds for an AIDS Family Village project. It had photos.”
ZZ’s face turned as pale as Mr. Hu’s.
Mr. Hu said, “My colleague at the department was sentenced to prison for four years for talking to the Chinese press. He gave only official statistics, nothing more. No matter—I was in the army for more than thirty years. There is nothing that I fear.”
The two old survivors of the Cultural Revolution began discussing the best strategy. Don’t rush back. Don’t fly. Take the train. Arrive on Sunday. Call as soon as you know the score.
I closed my eyes and whispered, “If something happens to this dear man, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Mr. Hu left by slow train, bound for Henan.
BEIJING (XINHUA)—China declares all Living Buddhas must seek official permission before they reincarnate.
The minute we got back to Beijing, I asked ZZ if she could find some sort of feng shui master to give our bad-luck apartment a going-over.
“I know it’s silly,” I said. “But all those fours. What else can we do?”
The next day she brought us a Living Buddha.
The Living Buddha was a young monk with a buzz cut and a cell phone. But even Dick had to admit he seemed to know his business.
He walked in the door and greeted us all with a charming smile. From his bag, he carefully removed a prayer book, beads, a small brass singing-bowl, a twig, and some rice.
The Living Buddha instructed us to arrange people and items of importance to us on the floor in a semicircle. The girls were at school, so we put out their photos. I also put out a Half the Sky brochure and my little jade Guanyin. I had nothing that belonged to Mr. Hu, so I added a small handful of Xinyang tea. Dick shrugged and contributed his camera.
The Living Buddha chanted for an hour. Every once in a while he struck the singing-bowl and a mellow hum would fill the air. He sprinkled water and rice around the apartment. He gave us little balls of stuff to eat that were both sweet and tasted of dirt.
While he was packing up, he invited us to visit his temple, a three-day donkey ride from Lhasa. “They look after orphans in that temple,” he told us. He said our work is a blessing and we should have good fortune always.
BUT FROM OUR beloved Mr. Hu, there was only silence. I chewed on the fragrant dirt and worried.
Then, on Children’s Day, June 1, 2006, President Hu Jintao visited the Beijing Children’s Welfare Institution. President Hu played with the kids for a few minutes and, for the photo op, smiled benevolently at an adorable little girl who had cerebral palsy. Then he gave a speech:
China must increase its commitment to assisting disabled children and orphans. They are the weakest and neediest group in our society. They need care and love the most. Party committee and government at all levels must put these special children in their hearts—improve their care and education. We must mobilize the whole society to share in care and love for the orphans. We must bring them to the same level as other children, to live and grow happily under the same blue sky of the motherland.