Wish You Happy Forever

by Jenny Bowen

  “Sometimes, though, if the child looks very sad,” he said, “they are counseled by a few different groups.”

  I wandered through the rows of children and sat down beside a little girl, seven or eight years old. She had a sheet of paper before her, beside a bunch of colored markers. She was looking down at the plain pencil in her hands, chipping the red paint off its outside with her fingernails.

  The paper was blank, except for a neatly drawn round sun in one corner. It was black.

  “May I sit with you?” I asked.

  The girl said nothing. I sat beside her. I touched the black sun.

  “Is your drawing finished?”

  “Uncle said to draw my home. Draw trees and flowers. Call the picture ‘Take Care of Our Planet.’”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “I want to draw earthquake, but I don’t know how.”

  “What is earthquake?”

  “Big shaking, big noise, then come aftershocks, then comes epidemic when you die for not washing hands before eating.”

  We sat for a while and pondered such a fate.

  “Do you want some help with your drawing?”

  She nodded. Then she climbed into my lap. The tears came before she’d even settled.

  “I miss my mama,” she whispered, choking on the awful words.

  IT WAS RAINING lightly, and mud flowed on the roads. The UNICEF representative decided that her team would not join us for the drive farther north to the small orphanage in Zitong.

  When we arrived, dozens of children were huddled in the courtyard, sheltered from the drizzle by a few dazed young ayis holding umbrellas. A large blue government relief tent sat in the center. It was full of babies and toddlers. The walls of the orphanage itself were too cracked to trust.

  A sign inside the gate listed the names of new arrivals, some with notations.

  Yan [female]—only mother was home

  Xianlin and Ligang [male]—brothers, parents unknown

  Cheng —her father is working in Xinjiang, mother did not survive

  Dan —her parents are working in Zhejiang

  Jun —about two years old, parents’ whereabouts unknown

  Baby Zhou? —about one year old, relatives unknown

  A toddler with a big bruise on one side of his head hurried up to me and clutched my leg. “Mamamamamama. . . .”

  “Oh baby. . . .” I lifted him up. He clung to my neck.

  “He does that whenever the gates open,” the Zitong director said. “We think it’s the only word he knows.”

  ZZ and Mrs. Gan and I (with the little boy wrapped around me) sat on small chairs and sipped hot water from paper cups. We asked the director how we could help.

  “Before the storms of Spring Festival, we didn’t know Half the Sky,” she said. “Now we know you very well. You helped us then. And this week, you helped us with a whole truckload of clothes, bedding, formula, medicine, and diapers for the new children who arrive each day. It is difficult now to ask you for more.”

  “That’s why they’ve come,” Mrs. Gan said. “They want to help.”

  “What we need is a van,” the Zitong director said.

  I flashed back to my very first orphanage visit in Shijiazhuang. What we really need is an elevator.

  And now this place—Zitong—it wasn’t a Half the Sky orphanage. Many of these children weren’t even orphans. They had relatives somewhere looking for them. Talk about mission drift—we can’t do it all. I hugged the little Velcro boy closer.

  “Half the Sky doesn’t buy vehicles,” ZZ said regretfully. “Never. We work only for the children.”

  “This is for the children. We are in the center of nine counties—all hard hit. We have no way to take the children to hospitals. Emergency vehicles are not available. A van costs only 100,000 yuan [12,000 dollars].”

  “Can’t you make an exception?” said Mrs. Gan. “It may take months to get a vehicle through proper channels.”

  “Not possible,” ZZ said, blinking back inevitable tears. “We have rules. . . .”

  Family helps family. The rest doesn’t matter.

  “Well,” I said. “Well, maybe—”

  ZZ looked at me, waiting, not breathing.

  “Mrs. Gan,” I said, “we have a problem getting relief to the children in Aba. The roads are gone. We really need a helicopter.”

  “A helicopter?” said Mrs. Gan. “You want to trade?”

  “We don’t need to buy a helicopter, just use one of the army’s. Just once. Or twice. What do you think?”

  Mrs. Gan turned to ZZ. ZZ looked stunned. Tears drizzled down her cheeks.

  Mrs. Gan looked back at me. She laughed.

  The next day a People’s Liberation Army helicopter full of baby formula, diapers, and bedding flew to the Tibetan Plateau. And somewhere in Sichuan, a van bearing the Half the Sky logo still prowls the backroads.

  Hongbai Town

  Three Weeks Later

  An aching sorrow smothered Hongbai. We had made the five-hour journey from Chengdu once before, past broken bridges and collapsed roads, to bring relief goods. We’d been there as the army boys worked to build a cemetery on a hillside with hastily poured concrete tombstones. We’d seen the parents place photographs and stuffed toys and sweet treats beside the small fresh graves. We’d looked away as they built fires and burned paper blessings and tore their shirts with agonized cries.

  Now, on this one-month anniversary of the quake, the local volunteers we’d been training in Chengdu asked if we could come back to help mark the day.

  I climbed out of the minibus. A tiny grandmother rushed up to show me cell-phone photos of the two children she’d lost. Their parents—her son and his wife—worked in a distant province. She’d been the sole caregiver for the two little girls.

  “I couldn’t save the children,” she said. She thanked me, thanked Half the Sky. I don’t know why.

  The tent school, decorated with balloons and tinsel, stood in the old schoolyard. Behind it, soldiers and dogs still picked through the much-sifted rubble of the collapsed primary school. Parents sat or stood silently in the courtyard, holding photographs of their lost children. Waiting.

  Inside the tent were the children who’d survived, with their volunteer teachers and with desks salvaged from the collapsed school. We talked and played games through the morning. The children relived their disaster experience over and over again. There was a hunger to talk about it now.

  There was also a birthday to celebrate—twin girls who should have been turning eleven together, but only one was alive. Still, the group ate cake and sang songs.

  “My sister and I loved to sing ‘Invisible Wings,’” the birthday girl said. She tried to smile, but it wouldn’t come. The volunteers and the children sang together:

  I know I’ve always had a pair of invisible wings

  And they take me flying, flying over despair. . . .

  “Sheng wu suo xi,” ZZ whispered. “Life must go on.”

  AT 2:00 P.M. we went outside. The children and the volunteers and the parents who held photographs gathered in front of the fallen school. The soldiers stopped their work and stepped away. We all looked at the pile of rubble and twisted rebar.

  A boy, eight or nine, who’d only listened in the tent, now couldn’t bear the silence. His memories came pouring out. He told us that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to attend the tent school before today.

  “I was afraid to come back here,” he said.

  He was the last student to be pulled out alive. When the earth shook, he was one of the obedient children sitting with arms crossed at their desks—some naughty boys were still outside, safe on the playground where we now stood.

  “My classroom was on the second floor. It fell and I got trapped between concrete and brick. I tried to yell for help, but nobody could hear me. Everybody was screaming and crying. I waited for a long time until it was quiet. I began yelling again. Then they came for me.”

  “And th
e other children in your class? The good ones at their desks?”

  He bit his lip, shook his head.

  At 2:28 P.M., exactly one month after their world changed forever, the children from the tent school placed their hands on their hearts, then bowed three times, saying goodbye to those who had died at the Hongbai Town Primary School.

  The boy said, “We will live our lives as best we can.”

  Although I never knew the ones they lost, I said goodbye too. The loss belonged to us all.

  Chapter 20

  Count Not What Is Lost, but What Is Left

  Dear Mr. Jenny Bowen :

  Congratulations! With the theme of “Journey of Harmony” and the slogan of “Light the Passion, Share the Dream,” it is a great pride to be selected as a torchbearer of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay. The moment when you hold up the flame will definitely be the most brilliant and memorable one in your life.

  The Olympics were the last thing on my mind. When the call came reminding me that the torch relay would be starting up again after the three-day official mourning period, I was engrossed in trauma trainings and opening our instantly popular Half the Sky BigTops for kids in refugee camps. The six giant tents each filled with children the moment they were erected, sometimes even before we were able to bring in teachers and furniture and supplies. The need for safe and caring community was great.

  Edward, my torch relay handler, said I was now scheduled to run in Chongqing on June 14—just a month after the quake and not far from the affected areas.

  “Edward, I would like to ask special permission to run with some children who survived the quake,” I said. “To show that they will not be forgotten even during China’s big celebration. Under the circumstances, I hope this will be granted.”

  “It is not possible,” Edward said. “Security is too high. Not safe for kids.”

  “Then I think I can’t run,” I said.

  “You must run,” he said. “It is a great honor!”

  “What’s the point?”

  “But it is impossible to cater for your request,” Edward said. “BOCOG takes security as the top priority. If you do what you say, thirty kids will enter the protected zone of torch relay, which is not allowed. BOCOG has strict rules to ensure smooth, safe relay. How about we can arrange for kids to be along route where you run?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Edward didn’t have the power, and he was all we had. ZZ thought we should make the best of it—get the kids whatever attention we could. The media was eager to cover the big day. Besides the Chinese news outlets, we had been contacted by some Western media—The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, Time, NPR, CNN, ABC, and AP. Most had learned about Half the Sky during the early days of quake relief, when information was hard to come by. They called us almost daily. Some wanted to bring camera crews. Maybe there was a story to be told, even if the children couldn’t run.

  But then government friends quietly informed us that there was word of protests brewing in this sensitive part of China, so close to Tibet. One told us that there were rumors of some sort of attack or bombing in the works; known activists had been spotted in Chongqing. The date and place of my run were switched, then switched again. And certainly no foreign media would be allowed.

  Dear Half the Sky Family,

  We got a call today telling us that, for security reasons, our torch leg is now scheduled a day earlier and moved to Wanzhou, a district of Chongqing Municipality that’s about four hours outside the city. I will still run for the children, especially those of Sichuan. Somehow, we will manage to bring the children to the site. I hope it doesn’t change again!

  Yesterday was the one-month anniversary of the earthquake. . . .

  That night I left to meet the torch relay in Chongqing. My destination was 360 miles and a world away from the quake zone.

  Wanzhou, Chongqing

  It was raining in Wanzhou. The bus full of nervous torchbearers made its way past an endless lineup of what looked to be the entire People’s Liberation Army. Instead of torches, they carried automatic weapons. We waved at them through rain-spattered windows. They didn’t wave back. This was a different PLA than the good-hearted boys picking through rubble in Sichuan.

  Up ahead, through the haze, in a new suburban development that appeared to be uninhabited and still under construction, I saw a camera truck and a bunch of athletically clad Public Security Bureau guards. And then, orderly throngs of spectators waiting patiently under umbrellas, waving little Chinese flags. All neatly arranged behind a phalanx of large plainclothesmen.

  As our bus approached the scene, a former Olympian, who, judging by the applause aboard, was famous, handed out torches to the passengers and told us how to use them. I didn’t understand a word. After a month of earthquake, I was exhausted and in what felt like a permanent daze.

  The Olympian showed us how to raise our hands in triumph when we passed the torch. We all practiced. As we finished, the bus stopped.

  The first runner was released. The bus moved on but stayed just ahead of the action, stopping, starting, dropping and picking up runners every fifty meters or so. Security guys lit and doused the torches, just in case dummies like me couldn’t follow directions. It was hardly what you’d call a strenuous effort on the part of those of us having the most brilliant and memorable moment in our lives. In my case, that was probably just as well.

  I did spot the children from Chengdu and Chongqing orphanages. Just barely. Peering out from behind the Public Security Bureau’s burly finest, about fifty of them were there, along with Maya, Anya, Dick, ZZ, and our Half the Sky team, all waving little flags and jumping up and down and calling out to me to Run!

  “Jiayou, Jenny! Jiayou! Jiayou—!”

  For the children, for my big beautiful family, I gave it my all. I waved wildly and raised my torch in triumph as I ran by.

  Beijing

  August 8, 2008

  At the most auspicious moment of what should have been the most auspicious year—8:08 P.M. on 8/08/08—I sat with my family and our friends amid more than ninety thousand human beings in absolute awe. Surrounded by people I loved, I watched the phenomenal display as China told the world she had arrived.

  The opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games: 2,008 drummers, 2,008 taiji masters, 2,008 parasols painted with children’s happy faces. China’s proudest, most famous night ever.

  I found myself swept to another place. Lost in the throbbing of 2,008 fou drums. Still raw from the memory of orphans in the rain—Jiayou, jiayou!—and the children with their hands over their hearts in Hongbai Town. . . .

  And maybe it was the drums and the spectacle . . . and maybe it was the lost children calling to me, all my small teachers—Jingli, Baobao, Baimei, Kailu—the ones I knew and the ones whose names I’d likely never know . . . I now completely understood that I am part of this. Not part of China. Nothing to do with borders or blood or beliefs. I am part of a vast shared humanity. I have a role to play. We all do.

  Beijing

  Spring 2009

  “The babies are coming!”

  Four nurses, a doctor, thirty nannies, and six foster moms closed in on the elevator doors, impatient for them to open.

  Thirteen years before that day, a boy—the young son of a wealthy American financier—was sent to Beijing to live with a Chinese family for a year. His parents had a special fondness for China and wanted to give their son a life experience different than the privileged one he knew. The boy learned the language, completed sixth grade, made some lifelong friends, and then went home. That could have been the end of it.

  But China has a way of getting under your skin. The boy loved the people, and he was haunted by the poverty. As an Eagle Scout project when he was sixteen, he started China Care, a charity to benefit Chinese orphans with special needs. He began by raising money from his neighbors, and the enterprise ballooned from there: China Care went on to fund corrective surgeries and medical care for hundre
ds of children with life-threatening conditions.

  When the boy was older and ready to explore new things, China Care’s leaders approached Half the Sky. It was during the earthquake days. I was only too aware of the needs we weren’t filling. I thought often of that little baby in Harbin whose heart was failing.

  So now, in the spring of 2009, we were finally ready to greet the first residents of our new China Care Home, providing pre- and postoperative care for medically fragile orphans.

  But the elevator doors didn’t open soon enough for the baby girl in Harbin. She didn’t survive.

  Among our first arrivals, there were three whose complex heart conditions could not be repaired in country. Once again, I stepped into the forbidden waters of international adoption and requested special permission to advocate for the three little girls. We had their medical records reviewed by prominent American pediatric cardiologists. Two of the girls easily found adoptive homes and lifesaving surgeries in the United States.

  The third, Fangfang, needed, at the very least, a transplant—a new heart. More likely, new lungs as well. Given her frail condition after three years of struggling to live, it was unlikely she could survive surgery. She was deemed inoperable and terminal.

  In the China Care Home, Fangfang was given a mama and siblings. Despite her weakness, and in her own way, she blossomed.

  I sat in our playroom with tiny Fangfang on my lap and showed her how to work my camera. She watched carefully with a crooked little smile. I heard her delighted laughter as, despite the congenital malformation of one of her arms, she not only figured the thing out but managed to take some great shots. I looked into the bright eyes of this enormously intelligent and spirited little being. And I simply couldn’t believe that her life would soon be over.

  Fangfang

  Fangfang is a clever girl. She can speak many words and is a quick learner. As we show her photos of some children, she can recognize them and say their names. She can walk steadily and use her little two fingers on the left arm skillfully to pinch things like spoon or ball.