by Evans, Karin
Eight months after we’d begun, Mark and I were able to pack up all our papers and send the bulging dossier off to a U.S.- China facilitator, along with a sizable check. Some agencies handle arrangements, from start to finish, from the first paperwork to the trip to China. Ours handled all the U.S. details, then turned clients whose domestic paperwork was all in order over to a separate liaison who handled all the details on the China side. The China facilitator would take the paperwork to the next step, authenticating and notarizing all the documents, making sure everything was in order. His office would then translate everything into Mandarin and send the papers off to China. He’d handle all the arrangements from now on, letting us know when a child was assigned, and then escort us to China to pick her up.
Now it was this man, plus the People’s Republic of China, rather than the conscientious social worker, the FBI, the State of California, or U.S. immigration authorities, who held our fates, as well as our future daughter’s, in his hands. We were given a new deadline—six to eight months more until we might hear that we’d been approved by the Chinese government and had been assigned a child. We had to keep on top of things, someone said, or we might drift to the bottom of a huge pile. There were new pitfalls to worry about: every bit of throat-clearing or hint of strained relations between the United States and China; any rumbling of discontent in Hong Kong.
What had begun as a year’s wait was now stretching into a year and a half. In adoption, there is no due date such as nature kindly provides for pregnant mothers, no periodic checkups or reassurances. We marked our progress by obstacles cleared, but no sooner did we leave one behind than another seemed to pop up. A few families who’d begun the process when we did had already been to China and back. But until we got that magical call from the China facilitator, saying a child was waiting, it was premature to think about getting our visas or time off from both our jobs to go to China. Waiting had begun to feel like a full-time career in itself, and there were no guarantees.
A friend sent a note of encouragement: “I am sorry you are having to wait so long,” she wrote, “but maybe your little daughter hasn’t been born yet.”
Whether or not our daughter had come into the world by now, one thing soon became clear: we weren’t heading for China anytime soon. At the moment, rumor had it, a huge document jam had developed in Beijing.
To calm my nerves, I took up qigong, the ancient practice from which tai chi emerged. Qigong is meant to enhance and maintain health. It means, literally, “cultivating energy,” not a bad idea for someone my age who was hoping to tend to an infant or run after a toddler. In the beginning class, we learned how to “recover prenatal energy,” as our instructor put it. “When energy changes, everything changes,” said Master M. He had begun studying qigong in China as a child of five, learning it from his aunt, an expert practitioner who was killed during the Cultural Revolution. For someone who’d been through much hardship himself—perhaps because of it—my qigong master was a man of profound equanimity.
Since the paper chase had slowed down, I also took to tossing the I Ching to see what the future held. The ancient Chinese oracle—the popular modern book on the subject graced with an introduction by C. J. Jung—offers mysterious, engaging advice. One thinks of a question and then tosses sticks or coins that lead to one of the book’s sixty-four readings. The “answers” come in allusively packaged chapters with esoteric titles: “Pushing Upward,” say, or “The Taming Power of the Small.” It’s a reflective tool, meant to be mulled over. When I tossed the coins to ask what the future held for that hoped-for daughter in China, the I Ching answered with trigram number fourteen—ta yu, “Possession in Great Measure.” That seemed an encouraging response.
Yet the wait went on, the sands shifted beneath our feet. At work, a friend who had a two-year-old and had offered me outgrown baby clothes kept dropping by and asking about progress. “By the end of the year,” I had said at first. Now? It was hard to say since we weren’t quite sure where we were. “The gestation period of an elephant,” she said with a sympathetic smile.
I taped an old Chinese story on my bathroom mirror:
“Traveling at such a slow pace,
Do you think you can ever get there?”
A fast steed asked a lame turtle.
“Yes, as long as I keep going,” said the turtle.
—From the Chinese saying “Bo bie quian li,” or “A lame turtle goes
a thousand miles”13
It wasn’t surprising when Mark said one weekend, “Let’s go to the dog pound and just look around.” For a long time, we had been thinking about getting a companion for Annie, our aging Siberian husky. I knew from the first words out of Mark’s mouth that we were not going to go to the pound and just look around. I had never successfully done that, ever. Both knowing what we were up to, but not quite admitting it out loud, off we went.
Behind bars, dozens of dogs sat forlornly on cushions in the corners of their cages. At the end of one row was a little black pup of uncertain origin, no bigger than a cat, nose between her paws, looking bereft. She wouldn’t come when we wiggled our fingers inside the cage or called to her. A staff worker came up and said we could visit with her if we liked, but first we’d need to fill out the paperwork to see if we—déjà vu—met the criteria to be allowed to adopt a dog. I can’t say how good it felt to sail through five minutes’ scrutiny and be handed a slip of paper on which the desk clerk had scrawled, “OK to adopt.”
The little black puppy was quiet and wary. The shelter volunteer said she had probably been abused because she was terrified of people, men especially. She tentatively licked my finger, then retreated to a corner. “Let’s take her,” said Mark. She was just about human infant size—ten or twelve pounds—and perfect for two baby-hungry people.
It was no mistake. During the long months ahead, I thought often that God or the Buddha or whoever might be in charge knew what he or she was doing when this little creature came to us. Christened Maddy after English folk singer Maddy Prior, one of our favorite singers, the puppy walked up to our old husky, licked her a few times, and then lay down, and that was where she spent her days, curled up against Annie, alternately licking her face and trying to play. Maddy was also the perfect outlet for our frustrated parental urges. I walked in one day to find Mark on the sofa, puppy on his lap, lovingly brushing the long, tangled fur of her ears.
During all this time, when there was very little communication from the mysterious people working on our behalf, we eventually found some comfort from an unexpected quarter—the Internet. We discovered an information-sharing network for people who were waiting to adopt from China or who had just come back. It was the closest thing to hand-holding that we had experienced.
I would scroll through the site several times a day, gleaning tidbits, following the threads of discussions. People from all over the country broadcast good news and bad, posed questions, sent off bits of advice. All were in similar boats—awaiting a home study, or approval by the immigration service or a referral, having sent their papers off to China. Others had been looking at a little photo of someone for several months and were anxiously counting the days until the Chinese government said it was okay to come and pick her up. There was a warm spirit of encouragement among the people on the computer list, a generous sharing of information, and an occasional outpouring of frustrations.
A single father—Richard Smith, the man, in fact, who had started the Internet connection in the first place—posted a love letter to his new daughter on the site as he went off to China to meet her. Smith asked the other waiting parents to bear witness to his promise to always care for this little girl whom he planned to name Rebecca. A week after he brought her home, he wrote that she had been to the beach, looked at the ocean, and touched sand for the first time. She had also eaten ice cream and carrot cake and swung in a swing, laughing. “I know what it is to be reborn,” Smith wrote. “I know what it is to love again.”
The Chinese Ne
w Year was just a couple of months away and the Year of the Rat was about to turn into the Year of the Ox as we entered our second year of waiting. According to Internet rumors, China was reorganizing its adoption bureaucracy. While the various ministries regrouped, dossiers being processed by Beijing had slowed to a trickle. Soon the system would be up again and running; capable, the Chinese said, of moving applications along at a more efficient rate. But at that moment, the foreign adoption agencies that had been moving their paperwork quickly through were stalled. Somewhere between San Francisco and Beijing, evidently, we were caught with hundreds of other people in a monumental backlog.
Waiting began to do strange things to me, and somehow it seemed more and more appropriate to look to the East for comfort. I found some solace in an old fairy tale, a “good news, bad news” story called “The Lost Mare,” which I stumbled on while leafing through my stack of Chinese reading material. Although there are many versions, this is the spirit of the story:
A boy living in northern rural China had a prized mare. But one day the horse disappeared. The boy was inconsolable, but his father, a very wise man, said to him, “How do you know this isn’t a blessing?” Sure enough, a few months later, the horse turned up, bringing with her a stallion. The boy was elated, but this time his father cautioned him, “How do you know this isn’t a curse?” Sure enough, when the son took the stallion for a ride, he fell off and broke his leg. When he complained, his father said, “How do you know this isn’t a blessing?” Sure enough, when war broke out with the neighboring nomads, almost all the young men in the village were killed, but the boy with the broken leg stayed behind and was spared. As the father summed it all up, “Sometimes disasters turn into blessings, and sometimes blessings become disasters. Who knows what lies ahead?”
As the Chinese saying associated with this story goes, An zhi fei fu? or “Who could have guessed it was a blessing in disguise?” Our U.S.-China facilitator was now extending the estimates for waiting times by months and months. We felt like jet passengers held hostage on a runway. You’ve made it this far, but you don’t know when—or if—you will take off, and no one will tell you the reason for the delay. Mark and I had clearly entered into some unfathomable territory. Were we falling behind? If we were, was that a blessing or a disaster, good news or bad?
I thought about the course of my own life so far. Some events I had viewed as blessings when they happened clearly looked like disasters in retrospect. And in hindsight my perception of things I thought disastrous at one time had shifted around, too, having woven themselves so thoroughly into the fabric of my life that it was hard to tell now where the thread of despair left off and the thread of hope began. As for the present series of events, what we were learning every day was how little of this process—or anything else in life—we could understand, much less control. There were just too many unknowns.
The timing and protocol by which waiting parents were matched with Chinese children at the time seemed to vary enormously, depending on the ways particular agencies worked. A tiny picture and a health report could be sent months before travel approval was granted. Some people traveled to China on the strength of a phone call, having never seen a picture or received any written information about their child at all. Some applicants seemed to speed through the process; others met inexplicable delays.
I continued to seek assurance where I could find it. When I found a single baby bootie lying under the redwood tree in front of our house, I took it as a sweet sign of hope. When I complained about the agonies of waiting to a Buddhist teacher I’d been studying with, she suggested I spend some time with children right here, right now. “Some of them could certainly use the attention,” she said.
It was wise advice. I soon found myself following a group of volunteers who were taking some “pet therapists”—bunnies, a miniature pony, a gentle dog—into a children’s hospital. There is probably no better antidote to self-obsession than to spend some time in a ward where children are struggling with cancer and third-degree burns and brain damage from swimming accidents. Each time I walked out through those hospital doors, I felt incredibly blessed.
When that same Buddhist teacher announced plans for a daylong ceremony to honor children who had died, I decided to go, not only to remember my own lost son, but also to give some thought to the mothers and daughters of China, who seemed to be losing each other every day now. The priest conducting the ceremony is one of the few people I know who speaks openly of the emotions women go through after they have lost a baby, whether through happenstance or choice. At a Zen center not far from the Pacific Ocean, she periodically holds these ceremonies of remembrance and letting go.
Over the years, many women have come to share a burden they have often carried silently for far too long. (Men are welcome, too, but they don’t seem to come.) The participants are for the most part American women like myself, blessed with opportunity, education, prosperity, options. Yet those who had lost children, particularly through abortion or placing a child for adoption, had often grieved the loss alone, if they allowed themselves to grieve at all. Though the conditions may have been less extreme, the decision certainly less forced upon them than what I had heard was true in China, they had often lost more than they had admitted. Memories and dreams haunted them, weighed them down.
In the United States at the time it was estimated there were six million women who had given up babies for adoption. A writer who has conducted interviews with dozens of these women had found that denial, grief, and anger were common states for them, as were nightmares, phobias, and depression. Those who felt they had little choice in the matter had high levels of unresolved grief.14 Women who’ve had abortions had also suffered from lingering emotional aftereffects.
On the day of the ceremony, as we all stood in a circle, stepping forward one by one to light a stick of incense in memory of our lost children, there were tears and deep sighs. I thought about all the mothers in China who had also lost children—in all the same ways that the people gathered here had suffered loss—and who most likely had not had the chance to stand with other women, as I was now standing, and share their burdens of sadness or regret.
As one year changed into another, I went down to Chinatown in search of a statue of Guan Yin, the Chinese Goddess of Mercy and protector of women. It seemed a good way to welcome in the Year of the Ox—surely our daughter’s year, and ours. What I found instead, sitting on a shelf with dozens of others, was a carved soapstone Buddha, a red sale sticker of $4.99 on his head. At first I thought all the Buddhas on the shelf were alike, but when I looked more closely, I saw that some were crudely carved, but this one was exceptional. Someone had put his or her heart into it—though I felt uncomfortable knowing how very little the artist could have been paid for the work. Still, I thought, someone can be forced to carve a Buddha, no doubt, but not to carve a Buddha with such feeling. Perhaps by honoring the object, I could also honor the maker, and so I bought it. It seemed a fitting symbol: Out of conditions I hadn’t a clue about had come something of great beauty.
I added the Buddha to a little shrine I had made upstairs in our house, reminiscent of my time in Hong Kong. The collection had begun with an old Chinese temple box and another figure of the Buddha. I’d added the necklace I had bought down at the San Francisco waterfront on that day I was particularly discouraged. As our wait went on, I had added an Egyptian scarab, a silver lizard, two turquoise Zuni bears, a carved bone horse, a jade duck—until the scene had come to resemble a kind of Nativity tableau in which a bunch of creatures had come to pay respects to the Buddha. Two miniature Indonesian temple vases held freshly picked small blossoms, surrounded—just to cover the bases—by a tiny silver-and-turquoise Navajo child’s bracelet, a laminated card with a Catholic prayer for motherhood, and one baby bootie, origin unknown.
I liked the spirit of the shrine. I thought it might attract the universal baby-giving spirits to look down on Mark and me and smile.
There was one o
bject I did not bring to the gathering. Years ago in Hong Kong, someone had given me a little carved male figure on a silk cord, explaining that it was a good-luck talisman, worn by women in hopes of giving birth to a son. It was a nice bit of folk art and I had kept it over the years without much thought. Now, given what I knew about the fate of so many Chinese baby girls, I saw it in an entirely different light, and one morning I took it out to the backyard and gave it a simple burial.
That was in the early spring. Summer came with flurries of expectation but no word from China. I was getting a little better at living day to day. And according to the Internet reports, things were picking up again in China. Day after day came the postings from parents who’d just been paired with a child. “Referral! Referral!” they announced. News came that the group just ahead of the group Mark and I were in was preparing to leave. Then departure was delayed. Summer was waning. We gave up again.
On the Internet link, tempers were soon fraying. For a while there were grumblings over TV host Kathie Lee Gifford’s rumored plans to adopt from China. Would her dossier move along more quickly because of her celebrity status? people asked. When that controversy wore thin, I amused myself by following the threads of the Barbie doll discussion. Some adoptive parents were trying to locate Asian Barbies for their daughters; others were boycotting Barbie because of the working conditions in the overseas manufacturing plants. And always, there were people sharing the frustrations of the long wait. Some already had a little picture of a baby who was waiting for them, but they couldn’t get approval yet to travel to China to meet her.