Wish You Happy Forever

by Jenny Bowen

Six months into our search for families for the three little girls, only Fangfang was left. Finally, a couple came forward and told us she was meant to be theirs.

  Fangfang is so lucky that a family is going to adopt her. They sent presents to her and an album with pictures. We are very excited. Her foster mom at the China Care Home burst into tears and said to her, “Fangfang, I’m so happy for you.” Fangfang looks at the album every day and says, “This is my dad, my mom. I also have a sister.”

  But then, when they truly understood how ill she was, the family withdrew. Soon two other families considered adopting Fangfang, but they also decided not to pursue it. I talked to dozens of prospective parents. I tried to arrange a free heart transplant in the United States. From what I could learn, such a thing does not exist. A healthy child’s heart is too rare and precious.

  Finally, just before China Care Home celebrated its first birthday, Fangfang found her family. She would have three big brothers and five big sisters, four of them adopted from China. Her new parents said, “We knew from the moment we saw her face that she was our daughter. We were prepared to bring her home and provide her with a family and love her unconditionally for however long God would share her with us on earth.”

  We all knew they were the ones. Fangfang, of the sweet crooked smile and the iron will to live, became Teresa, the newest resident of Maryland, USA.

  She spent three joyous years treasured in the arms of family, but she didn’t survive that long-awaited heart transplant. Still, Fangfang’s spirit touched the hearts of many; urgent care for critically ill orphans continues today in her name.

  BY LATE 2009, we had five flourishing programs and operated centers in forty-six cities. Nine of them were Blue Sky Model Centers; we still had twenty-two model centers to go. Half the Sky was legal and had a bona fide partnership with the Chinese government, complete with contract. Our lives were very full.

  Despite all that, and after five years in China, the Splendids returned to America. Our daughters, now fourteen and eleven, dearly wanted to be American girls when they entered high school; and, as much as we loved China, the pollution was killing us. Once again, I became an ultra-long-distance commuter: a month in China, a month in the United States. Life was even fuller!

  So when both ZZ and Rachel Xing, our operations director, told me that I really should meet the new boss of the welfare department at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, I kept postponing the visit. I figured he was just another bureaucrat and I’d meet him in due course. They persisted. They’d heard him speak at a conference.

  “He’s different,” Rachel said.

  I did a little research on the man. He was all over the Internet, most unusual for a government official. And he had done some pretty remarkable things.

  “He’s nothing like the others,” said ZZ. “You should trust us.”

  Of course, I did. We made an appointment to meet the new director general.

  “IT HAS TAKEN you a long time to come see me,” said Director General Wang Zhenyao. “All of the other foreign NGO leaders came when I arrived, but you were the one I wanted to meet.”

  Director General Wang had a crew cut and the mild face of an academic, but the man spoke with a passion that rocked the musty walls of the ministry. His underlings gazed at their boss in open-mouthed wonder.

  He had been in charge of disaster relief during the earthquake. There were still maps of Sichuan all over his walls. From his desk piled high with reports and charts and loose papers, he grabbed our Half the Sky training manual.

  “This,” he said, “can change everything.”

  He told us that, when he made the move from disasters to welfare, like a good academic he did his homework. Every night at home, he sat down to read through piles of research and reports. He glanced at the cover of our book many times. Once or twice he lingered on the photo of a Half the Sky teacher and her young charge, each focused only on the other. The image was so foreign . . . and yet so Chinese. Finally, after many days, he began reading. He read straight through the night.

  “When I read this I felt I had failed as a father,” he said. “I only knew to push my child to study, but not to think and dream. This way of raising children is missing not just in our welfare institutions. It is missing in Chinese life. Our children grow up not feeling valued; so they have no values. No dreams! As teenagers and young adults, they suffer. Half the Sky has much to teach us. Look at you, coming all the way to China with your big dreams. Why did you come here?”

  “I felt I had to.”

  “Because you believed in yourself—in your dreams,” he said. “Most people are not so fortunate. If they have a dream, they immediately think, Ridiculous! Impossible! Thank you for bringing Impossible to China!

  “So we must popularize your way for our children! The way to big dreams. Television, Internet—reach the people. Comic books! How about comic books?”

  “Well, we need to start with the welfare institutions.” I laughed.

  “Sure! How many institutions are you in now? We have to reach them all.”

  The Yangtze River

  Autumn 2010

  Five years after the boat ride during which China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs informed the world that change would come for orphaned children, Half the Sky chartered an even bigger boat. We invited government officials, two hundred orphanage directors, and our entire board and staff (and Princess Madeleine!) to join us on an almost identical cruise—a national workshop we called Collaboration! Working Together to Make Positive Change for Children. But this time, our ship sailed upstream. Against the current.

  By now, Director General Wang had reorganized the China Center for Adoption Affairs and made it the China Center for Child Welfare and Adoption—one entity that would be responsible for all child welfare in the country. He moved two trusted colleagues from the welfare department to run the new CCCWA. One of them was our pal Mrs. Gan.

  Director General Wang set the stage for Half the Sky’s acceptance as China’s most famous child welfare authority. Working together, we would now begin to reimagine the entire child welfare system.

  AFTER TWO DAYS of lively brainstorming sessions, workshops, and, as ZZ calls them, “heated discussions,” we were back on the Yangtze’s Shennong Stream in the little peapod boats, being pulled upstream by muscular young men wearing clothes.

  Dick filmed while I interviewed Director General Wang and Mrs. Gan, both decked out in transparent purple trash-bag raincoats and orange life vests. Like every Chinese citizen I’ve had the pleasure to know, both relished a good outing. They were in great spirits as they talked about the future.

  “Just a few years ago, Chinese people didn’t have enough food to eat. Now food is not a problem,” Director General Wang said. “Now we must turn to quality of life. Especially for the children. More than orphans—all children in need—this must improve! In the next five years, ten years, China will learn.”

  “It’s an exciting time for China,” I said. “Things are changing so fast. We can see the day when all our hopes for the children will come true. Maybe still far away, but we can see it.”

  “The children shouldn’t have to wait. We don’t want to wait,” said Mrs. Gan.

  Director General Wang folded his arms and smiled at me.

  “What do you mean, Mrs. Gan?” I asked.

  She looked at Director General Wang. “Ni shuo,” he said to her. “You talk.”

  “We want to train the whole country,” said Mrs. Gan. “Every child welfare worker in the system. Right now. With Half the Sky.”

  Now they were both grinning at me. Two high-ranking Chinese government officials in silly outfits in a peapod boat. I squeezed ZZ’s hand.

  “We know we can count on Half the Sky to help us,” Mrs. Gan said.

  “You are so sure of that, Director Gan?” asked Director General Wang.

  “I knew it in Sichuan, when Jenny bought the van.”

  SOMEHOW, THE FURTHER we’d drifted from our mission—t
he more rules we’d broken—the closer we’d come to the heart of it. I think maybe I was following a different set of rules. Immediately after that fateful excursion up the Yangtze River, I returned to Beijing, I thanked Guanyin and the Living Buddha, and I went back to work.

  With CCCWA, we developed a comprehensive plan to co-train and mentor every child welfare worker in the country. Besides our Half the Sky training, we’d help the government make its own training more user-friendly. We’d create an online community for caregivers and administrators, an e-learning course for professional certification, and a video resource library illustrating our approach to child nurture, and we’d permanently station our own child development consultants at each of the provincial model centers. Along with the government, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation agreed to underwrite a large share of the costs. And, with Director General Wang’s deft and quiet leadership, a plan was made to expand the benefits, over time, to all children at risk, whether institutionalized or not. The government named our joint endeavor the Rainbow Program.

  It now seemed that the most excellent and magnificent mountain peak I’d been seeking in our Chinese garden was to be found at the end of a rainbow.

  THE LAUNCH OF the Rainbow Program was celebrated in China’s Great Hall of the People on Children’s Day, June 1, 2011.

  In typical Chinese fashion, everything came together (and unraveled again) at the very last minute. The e-mails flew:

  Okay, scratch the live satellite. I’ve got it! How about we launch a campaign and get videos of children from around the world singing the same song and cut it all together? We’ll project it on a giant screen and have a live children’s choir singing along.—Jenny

  Hi Jenny—Mrs. Gan called today:

  1. She stressed again to keep foreign guests low number.

  2. No foreign media will be invited to the event.

  3. Drinks and snacks—Only water. No snacks.—Rachel

  Hi Jenny—Gan got news from Vice Minister Dou Yupei’s secretary. The vice minister will not be available for Great Hall since he will accompany a vice premier for Children’s Day visits in other provinces the whole day.—ZZ

  ZZ, JPMorgan’s senior executives will be at the celebration. They’re key sponsors of the Rainbow Program. We’ve got to have a minister. Also, I just got a call from them. Their Asia CEO can stay at the Great Hall only until 2:00 P.M. He has another agreement signing. Can we move the event up an hour?—Jenny

  During lunch?

  Right. What was I thinking?

  The day before the big party, ZZ called me from the management office at the Great Hall.

  “Work on the backdrop is not yet started,” she said.

  “But the event is tomorrow.”

  “Great Hall team says they can’t include JPMorgan’s logo at official government event. Also, they say they are not certain that the children’s choir will be allowed. The Great Hall of the People is not a place for children.”

  “ZZ, JPMorgan is a corporate sponsor. The logo tells the world JPMorgan is helping China’s children. I think they’d really like to see their foundation president on the dais at the Great Hall with their logo in the background. We need the logo.”

  “I’ll get Gan to help.”

  “Thank you. And ZZ, it’s Children’s Day. The Rainbow Program is all about children. We need children at the Great Hall.”

  “Understood.”

  Great Hall of the People, Beijing

  Children’s Day 2011

  “As we are drowned in the vast expanse of verdant green and beautifully blooming flowers on this joyous occasion, we gather at the Great Hall of the People to present our love to the children, in a special way, an extraordinary gift—the collaborative Rainbow Training Program for child welfare workers that will benefit the orphans and disadvantaged children all over China. . . .”

  I was sitting on the dais at the Great Hall of the People listening to China’s most famous television presenter announce Half the Sky’s unprecedented national partnership with government to transform the nation’s entire child welfare system.

  Me. Unsure where the movie ended and real life began.

  I unplugged the interpreter from my ear. The presenter’s voice softened into rising and falling tones like background music . . . and I found myself drifting . . .

  It had been a long journey from the first moment when Meiying, our Maya, was placed in my arms that day in Guangzhou. I could feel her there now—that first moment, at once so foreign and so familiar. And little Xinmei, our Anya, whose physical scars so compounded her loss that she couldn’t bear to be touched by one who, at first, could only pretend to love her.

  So great was our need, theirs and mine, that somehow we managed to find that love in strangers. Surely, there is a place deep inside all of us that recognizes the need in each other—the very most basic human need, the one that truly distinguishes us from all other creatures—the need to love and be loved.

  If we are denied, we cannot thrive.

  When I was a very small girl, no more than three or four, my mother would let me take a bath with her every night. She enjoyed soaking in water that was scalding hot. She would lie there in the heat, steam rising, her body turning red.

  I sat on the rim of the tub. I would begin with my toes. The hot water was almost unbearable, but if I could hold still, the pain would ease. Then I’d slip my feet in the water, hold still . . . and so it went, until I was crouched beside my mother in the bath and I could feel the soft skin of her legs beside me. We would stay like that until the water cooled and my skin shriveled. It was the closest I ever got to her that I can remember. The closest I came to feeling her love.

  When I looked at Anya’s little burned feet, instead of anger I felt unbearable, aching, primal sadness for the love she so needed and couldn’t have. And how many others I held after that . . . the little girls I couldn’t bring home, but whose need I understood in every part of myself. In some way, I knew I had been put on earth to help them find what was missing.

  The Chinese, of course, said it best. About seventeen hundred years ago, the philosopher we know as Mencius said, “All the children who are held and loved will know how to love others. . . . Spread these virtues in the world. Nothing more need be done.”

  SWEET CHILDREN’S VOICES filled the Great Hall of the People. On giant screens, the faces of Chinese children, once in orphanages but now living all over the world, sang along, more or less all together. Then everybody joined in. The lyrics were corny but sweet. It was the China I’d come to love:

  Together we strive through twists and turns

  Together we pursue the same dreams. . . .

  Now, at this moment, in that Great Hall, as wacky and improbable as it was—with the corny song and the wrong minister and the still-wet logo—the movie was far from the one I had imagined. But it was perfect.

  I’d found my place and my purpose. Everything in my life, everything I had done, had prepared me for this.

  What a gift I had been given!

  Epilogue

  One hundred thousand children’s lives have been touched by Half the Sky. But almost a million still wait.

  As the Rainbow Program rolls out, Half the Sky, together with its partners, is reaching hundreds of thousands more by training every child welfare worker across the nation in its approach to providing family-like nurturing care for institutionalized children. China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs has further pledged to offer Half the Sky–inspired services to all at-risk children by converting now-isolated orphanages into community service centers, encouraging once-marginalized families to remain together.

  In 2012, Half the Sky’s sister organization in China, Chunhui Bo’Ai Children’s Welfare Foundation, was founded, providing for the first time an opportunity for Chinese citizens to support nurturing programs for children at risk.

  A nation fully committed to its children can bring about transformation of an entire child welfare system. We can envision a day in Chin
a when all children will grow up knowing love.

  No child should have to wait to be loved.

  www.halfthesky.org

  www.chbaf.org

  For China’s orphans, a second chance at childhood . . .

  Picture Section

  The moment I met Meiying, now our Maya. Guangzhou, 1997.

  (© Richard Bowen)

  On the set of my last movie, In Quiet Night, but dreaming of China. Carmel Valley, 1997.

  (Courtesy of Jenny Bowen)

  Maya and me, happy together. Berkeley, 1999.

  (© Richard Bowen)

  Our first glimpse of Xinmei, now our Anya. Unlike her father-to-be, Anya was not in love at first sight. Changzhou, 2000.

  (© Richard Bowen)

  Maya, Dick, me, and Anya at the notary office. The red thumbs mean Anya’s adoption is official. Nanjing, 2000.

  (Courtesy of Jenny Bowen)

  Welcome to China!

  In the early days of Half the Sky, we’d be greeted with flowers, banners, and once, even a brass band.

  (Half the Sky Foundation)

  A surprise outing on a reservoir. Anya, me, and ZZ. Jiangsu Province, 2000.

  (Half the Sky Foundation)

  A surprise outing on a reservoir. Miao Xia and Mr. Shi.

  (Half the Sky Foundation)

  A surprise outing on a reservoir. Small Cloud Zhang.

  (Half the Sky Foundation)

  The good women of China Population Welfare Foundation. The amazing ZZ, CPWF President Wu, me, and CPWF Secretary General Miao Xia. Beijing, 1999.

  (Half the Sky Foundation)

  Then: An all-too-common sight during my early orphanage visits and in some areas Half the Sky has yet to reach.