by Samuel Shem
“I wish I knew who my birth mom was.” Her eyes pool with tears.
“We wish that too, Daddy and me.”
“Yes, honey, we all do.”
Katie just sits there, still as a statue, staring nowhere, tears easing down her face.
“It’s sad, so sad.” Clio says. She realizes that for the first time in her life Katie has gotten it, the fact of her abandonment, the fact that they are it, for her.
Katie just sits there silently, tears lying on her cheeks like pale scars.
“Here, love, come here.” Clio helps her climb over the chair and into her lap. The little body shakes with sobs. Clio hugs her.
Pep scrapes back his chair, goes over to them, and puts his arms around them both.
10
“Even if a Changsha-ese doesn’t have enough money for lunch,” Rhett is saying, “he’ll find a way to have a big dinner.” He puffs his cigarette, laughs. “We’re Hunan Cool, man, we’re entrepreneurs.”
It is afternoon, and they are on the way to Yuelu Mountain, just over the Xiangjiang River from Changsha. When Rhett arrived at the hotel, he announced that he had found the perfect thing for Katie to see, an aviary. She asked, what’s an aviary?
“Birds, baby, birds! Free-flying birds—they eat out of your hand, and do tricks! They’ve even got lovebirds, like your little Dave.” Katie is delighted.
The minibus is clean, cool, and provisioned with bottled water. From the bridge across the Xiangjiang, Katie spots boatmen fishing with cormorants. Rhett knows about cormorants. “They’re the only diving bird without oil sacs, which is why they sit with their wings stretched out—to dry them in the sun. The fishermen tie a rope around their necks to keep them from swallowing the fish, and mostly take them out at night. They put oil lamps on the bows of their boats, ’cause cormorants are afraid of the dark.”
“Cool. When my dog Cinnamon was a puppy—he was afraid of the dark too.”
“My pets love the dark,” Rhett says. “All twenty of ’em.”
“What kind of pets?” Katie asks.
“Crickets. Fighting crickets, each in its own little bitty cage.”
“You’re like kidding me, right?”
“No way, little José! I’ll bring my best fighter—Goliath—tomorrow.”
On the footbridge that runs across the river to the north, there is a horse pulling a heavily laden wagon, and then another, and another—a horse caravan. Katie’s eyes are glued to the bus window. The traffic jam is fierce. She gets a good look. Rhett points out, in mid-river, Juzi (Orange) Island. “Mao was born near here, and as a teacher he often met with students on the tip of that island, and composed the poem ‘Changsha—To the Tune of Quin—’” His cell phone rings. With a slick movement he flips it open, barks, waits, shouts a torrent of what seems extremely harsh Chinese, flips it closed.
They drive through a pleached arbor of plane trees on the campus of Hunan University—Rhett’s alma mater—past a forty-foot-tall statue of Mao in alabaster, and then past the Yuelu Academy of Classical Learning, founded in 976 during the Song Dynasty. Rhett recites the slogan on the stone tablet entombed there, “‘Loyalty, Filial Piety, Honesty, and Chastity’—in that order—haha!”
“So, Little Britches,” Rhett says to Katie now—she recognizes the term from Disney’s Jungle Book—“what music you dig?” Katie, shy, shrugs. “Rock? Country? Reggae?”
“Mom loves Bob Marley.”
“Get out!” Clio laughs, and nods. “Momma, you are bad! How ’bout you, Katie?”
She hesitates a moment, then risks it. “Britney.”
“Britney?! No way! I love Britney!” He sings the first few bars of “Oops!... I Did It Again” in a brassy Britney falsetto. “C’mon, c’mon, I need you with me, girl!” Katie joins in, at first softly, then louder, as the bus climbs the winding road up Mount Yuelu.
At the summit they get out for the view. It’s as if they’ve entered a blast furnace. Rhett takes Katie off for an ice cream. Clio and Pep climb the pagoda, and at the top they wade through a wind-scattered deck of playing cards to the railing. To the east, shrouded in urban smog, they see the glittering skyscrapers of Changsha, surrounded by a gleam of sprawl, threaded by superhighways. To the west is a range of green mountains piled up as if by a big hand pushing earth, the far western peaks blending with haze and obscuring the horizon. Ribbons of rivers feeding the distant Yangtze curl through dark-green valleys that rise to terraced rice paddies, sparkling like shards of glass in the afternoon sun. There are rare shrouded clumps of small towns and villages.
As Clio stands there, the aura of the woman in the police station seems to coalesce—a concrete image of the dream woman she has lived with for ten years.
“Out there, honey,” Pep says, pointing toward the river valleys, “is probably where she came from.”
Clio is startled. She strokes his back. He smiles, and takes her hand—in the special way he always does, one finger interlaced between two of hers, the rest clasped. Sensual, yes, like before. Their eyes hold. His innocent, curious look reminds her of the moment they met.
Now, a gust of wind from the distant mountains catches the playing cards. They float and flicker like chanced-upon butterflies, down from the pavilion, away.
“Stop! Rhett, please tell him to stop!” Clio is up out of her seat. Rhett gets off the phone, shouts something at the driver. The minibus stops.
“Hey, this isn’t the aviary,” Katie says. “What’s going on?”
“It’s on the way, hon, it’s the Lushan Temple. We came here the day we met you—just after. I just want a quick look in. It’ll only take a second.”
They climb up the steep path to the entrance to the temple, pay their next-to-nothing admittance, and walk in.
“Pep, look! Look, it’s magnificent! Just as it was, unchanged!”
He’s already shooting pictures. “Beautiful.” He looks around. “And for the first time in China, we’re alone! It’s deserted! It’s breezy and shady and roomy... and quiet!”
Clio floats through the first courtyard to a large building. Her eyes are drawn up to the graceful oblique way that the temple columns and beams handle the stress of the arches. Song and Yuan constructions. The cantilever arms—or angs—ride freely, balancing the bracketing system, a play of forces like the arches at Chartres. She looks down to the great open space within. There, fifty feet tall, are the three golden Buddhas, each on a golden lotus blossom, each holding its hands in a different position.
This time around she feels more awed. Through her meditation lessons, she understands something of the person who gave birth to this sacred and beautiful place—and this time she isn’t focused on the four-month-old baby she’s just held in her arms for the first time and then had to leave for another day in the orphanage, but on the ten-year-old who is achingly real and right here with her and loved in a known way. She is tempted to kneel on the carpeted bench and light a stick of celebratory incense, but no. Not yet. Feeling guilty for taking time from her daughter, she moves quickly away, along through the silent courtyards and past the barred-up classrooms and through an arched moon gate framing a garden. She stops, staring at the garden. Mountains are symbolized by water-pocked rock; water is symbolized by a current of gleaming pebbles cracked off a mountain and worn smooth by thousands of years of river.
She is amazed at the layers of beauty, both in the lushly flowered terraces and pavilions and gold-leafed statues and carvings and pools with carp reflecting the red-tile upsweeping lines of the pavilions, and in the metaphor—the enduring of this spirit, two thousand years later, in the midst of China’s prestressed concrete. She looks back.
Katie and Rhett are together, he with his hand waving in front of her, conducting her in a song, perhaps Britney; Pep is clicking away.
She hurries ahead—recalling, hoping she is still the
re—up to a final level, into the largest temple and a final gold Buddha of immense proportions. She walks around to the left, past piles of yellowing documents and abandoned prayer ribbons, into the shadow behind the big Buddha where thin light comes in through a slim door, and yes!
Just as she remembers. Kwan Yin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, a bodhisattva: one who, on the verge of nirvana, turns back to help others along. The goddess of a thousand hands. Hands to reach back to all people to help them with their suffering. A twenty-foot-tall statue in shiny black wood, a smiling face filled with love, a small Buddha sitting on her head, another Buddha sitting in her raised right hand, and surrounding her a circle of arms and hands each with a small Buddha, hundreds of them, and a final outer circle of arms and hands, the Buddhas so small as to be almost unrecognizable, little buds. Clio recalls how, ten years ago, she happened to wander back here while the others lingered at the big golden Buddha, and found herself, alone, looking into these wise kind eyes. She stood there and suddenly and without thinking asked this goddess for help in mothering, in being a mother to whoever this little baby was, is, would be: “Please, goddess, help me to be a good mother. Amen.”
Now again she is alone. Her hurry to get here has given her privacy from her husband and child. She stares up at Kwan Yin. A new sensation arises—of being lifted up, of gratitude. Kwan Yin. She who hears all the cries of the world—and is still smiling!
For the first time in her life she goes down on her knees to an image of a divinity. She places her hands palm to palm under her chin and touches her forehead to the wood, and says out loud:
“Thank you, goddess. Please help me to be an instrument of your compassion and your—”
“Mom, what are you doing?”
Clio lifts her head off the wood and turns.
Katie, standing there beside Pep.
Rhett too.
Pep is raising his Olympus.
“Don’t! Pep, don’t!” He lowers it. Clio rises and turns to Katie. “I was offering a prayer to Kwan Yin. You remember, the goddess of compassion.”
“Yeah. What did you pray?”
“I asked for her help in being... kind to other people, being compassionate. And I thanked her for helping me, these ten years, to be a mother to you. Right from that first moment, at home in the kitchen ten years ago, when we got the phone call from the adoption agency, telling us that you were ours.”
“Now that,” Pep says, “was an amazing!”
“I kinda remember,” Katie says, puzzled. “Some thingee with a card?”
“Yes,” Clio says. “We were scheduled to be in the first group of eight couples to go to China to adopt, but we were too late with our documents, so instead of us, some friends went first. We decided to buy them a card to congratulate them when they came home. We found a card from the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of fortune telling. It was Hexagram Three, ‘New Beginnings,’ with a Chinese character on it. And below it was a poem. I memorized it:
Times of birth and growth start unseen, below the surface.
Everything is dark and still unformed, yet teeming with motion.
Difficulties and chaos loom.
Despite this struggle, energy and resources are collected,
and form begins to take shape.
The young plant takes root, rises above the ground, and is brought to light.
“But we liked it so much,” she goes on, “the ‘New Beginnings,’ that we kept it for ourselves—and got them another card. We even made a big poster of it, and kept it by our bed.”
“So I would be your like new beginning?”
“Yes, dear,” Clio says, “our young plant, brought to light.”
“And then,” Pep says, “a few weeks later, we’re in the kitchen and the phone rings, and I pick it up. It’s the lady from the adoption agency. She says she has good news. I say, ‘Hold on while I put you on speaker.’ She says that the orphanage has a baby for us, and that the only two things she knows about our baby are her date of birth—June 25, 1991—and her name. And her name is... Chun! The same name on the card! It means ‘Spring’ or ‘New Beginnings.’”
Katie’s mouth is open in amazement. “Wow.”
“Yeah!” Pep says. “Out of all the thousands and thousands of Chinese characters, ‘Chun’ was the one we picked out. And it turned out to be you.”
“And then what happened?”
“Dad and I started to cry, and I fell down on the floor.”
“You really fell down?”
“On the floor, yes. I fell down and I was so happy I cried. It was a miracle.”
“We knew then...” Pep says, choking up, so he has to catch his breath. “We knew that you were the baby meant for us.”
“And that you were meant for me too, right?”
Clio nods.
Pep throws big arms around the two of them, and squeezes.
Katie, released, laughs and says, “It is an amazing, yeah! Hey, I’ve got an idea—let’s light a stick of incense to it, to the Chun, and to the goddess too?”
They do. Clio says, “Thank you, goddess, for your loving-kindness and your wisdom, for this wonderful girl and wonderful dad and wonderful trip back to you.”
Another hug, and they walk down to the van.
With a final glance back at the temple, Clio says, “Ironic, isn’t it, Pep—the only permanence left in China now is from the people who specialize in impermanence?”
11
Katie’s in heaven at the courtyard of the aviary or, as the sign says:
the square of communication between humans and birds
She’s on her fourth cup of birdseed—and the birds, sensing in the profligate American an easy touch, are clustering around her. They have been an hour in the aviary, a ravine enclosed by netting strung from tall pylons, a habitat for thousands of birds. There are parrots who say “Nee how” (Hello) and “Sigh-chen” (Goodbye), and one that as you leave says “Eee-ho-yeh” (See you soon), peacocks that flaunt glorious erections of thousand-eyed featherings, and red-headed cranes wearing wheat-colored crests that, Rhett points out, look like those on the helmets of the combatants in Gladiator. In the Square of Communication an attendant throws grain up into the sky and it is snatched in midair by what must be fifty snowy egrets, swooping and fighting for the food, and then strutting like old-time parsons. The ducks and geese squatting forlornly in a dried-up pond are a downer, but nearby a Chinese guy, dressed like a cowboy, is riding an irritated ostrich around a barren enclosure. Along an avenue of caged lovebirds, the peach-faced ones remind them of their lovebird, Dave.
It is furnace-hot. Katie is fed a constant diet of ice creams and sodas to keep her hydrated in the sizzling, breezeless wet heat of the ravine—but she is in kid heaven, communing with her “second-favorite animal”—her first being, of course, the horse.
Pep walks desultorily along with Rhett. The heat and glare has Pep thinking he is seeing things, as, when a monstrous feather duster alongside a little path seems to be staring at him with snake eyes, full of reproach, it takes him a good second to place it as an emu. Strolling along, Rhett waxes philosophical, talking about his humble beginnings on a farm a few hundred kilometers down the road. His parents were teachers sent out of Changsha to the country during the Cultural Revolution. The whole family, including grandparents, lived in one big room. They heated hot water for washing and bathing over a coal stove.
“What about toilets?” Pep asks.
“You don’t wanna go there.” Rhett followed his brother Ashley into Hunan University, and then took the job as a guide in a tourist agency. “But I gotta get to the States, to Hollywood.” Pep asks why. “It’d be like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, going from Detroit to L.A.” Dreamily he recites, “Nina Ricci, Rolls Royce. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. L.A.’s the cutting edge, the center of the world! China’s heading t
here fast—as I’m sure you’ve noticed—but not fast enough.”
“It’s totally changed. Beijing looks like Dallas now. Almost a capitalist country.”
“No joke. An authoritarian, militaristic central government controlled by the multinational corporations—a tiny number of filthy rich guys lording it over an immense number of poor bastards—just like America!” He laughs. “You say ‘Communist Party’ now, everybody yawns. People are getting so rich—a guy in Shanghai built a house the exact replica of the White House. Another, the Hearst Mansion. And listen up, Pep!” He pauses. “There ain’t no more government insurance—no ‘Iron Rice Bowl’ anymore. So everybody has to buy private insurance. The market’s five hundred million—easy! Somebody’s gonna capture that space—why not you and me? Move fast, and we’re first in. Billions!” He sighs, as if wistful about perfect love and lots of money. “I’m wired in, Mr. Pep, here in Hunan. I can get in through the back door—we call it homer—bribes? Pep, with your brains and my good looks, all we need is money!”
He laughs hard, holding his belly with his hands, screwing up his eyes against the smoke from the cigarette. His phone rings, and he flicks it open, attacks it with a rattling chain of words, closes it. “Y’know how much money’s coming into China now?” Pep avers he does not. “Well, neither does anybody else, but it’s big. It’s like the Wild West here. Yu shu ju jin! ‘Watch out, world, here we come!’”
The high point for Katie is the bird show. She and Clio and Pep and Rhett sit on bleachers watching three girls, in bright-pink dresses and sashes, make cockatoos do tricks. One girl at a microphone keeps up a patter in Chinese. The volume is high and the sounds of what Pep calls the “cymbal-ic” language jar his Western ears. Two other girls put the troupe of cockatoos through their paces—one bird is able to count, another rides a tiny bicycle, a third picks a fake orange from a tree and carries it back to the stage. At one point when Rhett, in response to a question to the audience, holds up a ten-yuan bill, the bird flies over and snatches it. Katie screeches with delight and asks Pep for a note so she can try. Pep digs, and hands her another note.