by Evans, Karin
By early September, the facilitator said it wouldn’t be too much longer.
We didn’t do any packing.
When I was twenty-two months “pregnant,” on an evening in early October, the phone rang. “You have a daughter,” said a man we’d never met, the U.S.-China liaison. “She’s a year old, healthy, and weighs eighteen pounds. She’s in a social welfare institute, outside Guangzhou.”
You have a daughter. While Mark and I were gasping with disbelief, the man (whom I’ll call Max15) offered some further information. Her last name, he said, was Jiang, meaning “river.” Her first name was Xiao Yu; Xiao (pronounced zhow, but soft on the zh sound) means “little,” and Yu (almost a yer sound) means “education.”
“Little Education”? Perhaps he meant “Little Scholar”? But the phone call was brief—he had other families to contact—and there wasn’t time to pursue explanations. The man said in closing that we could request a photograph of the baby, but advised against it because, he said, people can get attached to photographs and sometimes things change. We said okay; I’m not sure why. Maybe because we had so much news to absorb already. Maybe because we knew we’d soon meet our daughter in person. Maybe because we were too scared to get too riveted on a little face, even then.
“Get your visas,” Max said. “We’ll be leaving for China in two weeks.”
Unfortunately, on that October evening, the phone rang twice. The second time it was my mother, the sound of defeat in her voice. She was calling from the hospital where my father had been undergoing a series of tests. My dad had cancer, she said, inoperable cancer, and was not expected to live. In a few moments, life as I had known it completely rearranged itself. It’s uncanny how such life-shaking events like these can move together, tossing us high into the air with one wave, and dashing us down with the next—though it wouldn’t surprise the Buddha, who described the normal course of life as “one foot in suffering, the other in joy.”
At least one thing was clear: The minute we heard the news about my father’s illness, we both knew what to name the baby. We’d add my father’s name to her Chinese name. “Little Education” would be Kelly Xiao Yu. I hoped my father could outlive the diagnosis, that he could somehow hold on long enough to meet her.
I flew to Phoenix the next morning, praying there had been some mistake, but I found my father lying in a hospital bed and the news was worse than I thought. Although he was seventy-nine, it of course seemed too soon for my father to die, and it felt as if our life together had gone so quickly. My father was thin and suffering. He lay in bed, looking out the window at the cloudless Arizona sky. A morphine drip was in his arm and he wasn’t eating. “I wish I could talk to the doctor,” he said forlornly. The day before, he’d gotten the worst kind of communication that modern American medicine has to offer. A physician had walked into his room and summarily announced the biopsy result. “It’s cancer,” he said, then left before anyone could ask questions or swallow the verdict.
Today, though, Dad in his usual generous way turned from his own troubles to ask about our news from China, and to say how happy he was for me. “We’re going to name her Kelly,” I said, “for you.” He reached for my hand and in a voice raspy from pain and medication, said, “I’m so proud.”
I told him we’d be leaving for China soon to pick up our little daughter and carry her home, and I promised to bring her to meet him just as soon as possible. He looked out the window and said that would be nice.
During that next week, I sat beside my father’s bedside and we talked when we could. When he was sleeping, I watched him and thought about his life and how desperately I was going to miss him. Time slowed. I felt as if we were underwater, moving through some murky, unknown passage. Within just a few days, it was clear that my father wouldn’t live long enough to meet his namesake from China. “You know, I don’t feel like I’m here anymore,” he whispered. “I feel as if I am someplace else.” He was slipping away and nothing could help.
How quickly my father was gone. On the last night he was alive, my brother and sister cranked his bed up as high as they could so he could see the full autumn moon outside the hospital window. He died within hours.
A few days later, my brothers, my sister, my mother, and I were standing in a cemetery, our heads tipped back, watching the airplanes my dad had flown in his years as an Air Force pilot dip their wings as they passed over his grave in a final salute. A few leaves blew across the grass and the planes droned out of sight. Taps sounded.
That was on a Monday. On Thursday, Mark and I were due to leave for China.
I was feeling dazed, stretched between sorrow and anticipation, stumbling through the necessary motions to fly home and get ready for the trip. I had wished so fervently that there would be time for the two Kellys to meet. My Chinese daughter was about to be the third generation in a chosen heritage. But I was left with only stories to tell her about my adoptive father, the man she’d been named for. My mother gave me a tiny pair of Dad’s pilot wings and I put them away for my daughter, along with an opal ring he’d given me on the day he’d adopted me.
A friend who’d known my father thought it was wonderful we were naming our daughter after him. “Every time you say the name, you’ll spritz her with love,” she said.
2
From China with Love
When the evening lights are lit
It looks like sparkling trees
And silver flowers everywhere
And then the park is full of hearty
laughs.
—Tourist atlas of Guangdong province
The trip to China turned out to be a passage beyond imagination, almost impossible to absorb, much less describe. What would a travel brochure say? Join several dozen American adults and eighteen Chinese diaper-clad infants (all seriously off their schedules, some with rashes) in a diesel bus tour of southern China, including visits to a number of bureaucratic high spots, traffic jams, and noisy restaurants.
The timing, so soon after losing my father, felt awful, of course. And looking back, large chunks of the trip still seem surreal. Diaper changes in midair aboard a bouncing vehicle. Chaotic meals; grains of rice scattered everywhere. One infant sitting placidly in her new mother’s lap at a restaurant, a stray noodle draped on her forehead. A required visit to the local medical clinic where the babies got shots and screamed bloody murder. A bunch of Americans with Chinese infants on a tour bus singing “Que Será Será” in the middle of a sea of traffic. “Will she be happy? Will she be rich?” Buddhist monks in a quiet temple, chanting prayers for us all.
The journey officially began with a confirmation letter from Max, our U.S.-China facilitator. “Wow! Finally!” it said. “You can pack and leave for China to meet your child, who has been waiting for you for a long time.” There would be a few dozen people traveling together, we were told, heading for several different orphanages.
And so, we leapt into action—rushing to obtain a China visa and dusting off our luggage. While some people had been packed for months, I hadn’t begun, afraid that making assumptions would anger the gods. All I had were my long, long lists of what to bring. Diapers, formula, baby clothes, baby medical stuff, lots more paperwork, including three years’ worth of our tax forms, and several thousand dollars in cash. Complete medical kits for babies were mentioned, but I could not imagine using much of what was in them. “First, do no harm,” I reminded myself, and settled on the basics—diaper cream, baby Tylenol, a thermometer.
Some people recommended we bring familiar snacks to make ourselves feel at home. Cheetos to China? We decided we’d rather try the local fare, and besides, we had enough to worry about just figuring out what to feed the baby. Soy formula or milk? From adopting parents who’d been to China came conflicting advice. Chinese infants tend to be lactose intolerant, we were told. Take the soy. Chinese orphanages use powdered milk formula, we heard. Take milk.
Mark said it reminded him of an old Little Rascals episode in which the kid
s learn that one of the mothers is expecting a fourth child. Since they’ve also just learned in school that every fourth child born in the world is Chinese, they figure that the baby will be Chinese, and this sets off a quest to the local laundry man about what to feed the child. We were as clueless as the rascals. So we took soy and milk—some of it in cans, which weighed a ton.
We bought the suggested sleepers, undershirts, and two outfits per day (guessing at what would fit an eighteen-pound baby), plus slippers and socks. We doubted she’d be walking, since we’d heard that babies from the orphanages often had developmental delays. Next on the list was a thermos, and a baby carrier of some sort. We also needed what the child psychologists called a “transitional comfort object” for the baby. I bought most everything at the local discount chain store and found that the thermos was “Made in China.” So was the comfort object (a fuzzy Winnie the Pooh bear, copyright the Disney Corporation), and so were the baby slippers, my walking shoes, the two money belts, and the baby backpack.
It felt more than a little strange buying all these China-made objects and clothes to carry with me to China (in my China-made suitcase) with which to bundle up a tiny baby, one of China’s own, and bring her home. It’s a fact of life these days that so many of the material goods that fill American stores are made in China. By now I had done enough reading to have an idea of how low Chinese wages were, and what the conditions were like in some of the places turning out plastic trinkets for the insatiable American shopper. I had read Harry Wu’s account of Chinese labor camps.1 But it seemed a bit hypocritical to be politically correct in the discount store when I was about to be involved in a far larger transaction. And to be truthful, I was too concerned with my own plans at the time to think much further about such issues.
We left San Francisco at midnight, heading for Hong Kong. Eight hours into the thirteen-hour flight, crammed upright in a tiny airline seat, reeling with fatigue and stiffness, panic set in: What on earth were we doing? How’d we get here? Were we insane? We’re going to China to bring home a baby? I was far, far too tired even to think about it. I actually comforted myself with the thought that when we got to Hong Kong, we could just forget China and this whole adoption idea, go trekking in Nepal perhaps, and fly home later. We could explain to family and friends that things just didn’t work out, that they ran out of babies. The more I thought about it, the more strongly Nepal—or Bali!—beckoned.
When we finally reached Hong Kong, it was morning in the East and I’d either returned to my senses or lost them altogether. The now closed Kai Tak Airport was still in use at the time, and our plane made a nerve-jangling descent through a dense urban corridor, sweeping so close to the high-rises in Kowloon that it seemed as if its wings would snag the laundry drying on the balconies. But we swooshed through unscathed and were soon dragging our disheveled selves into the airport. In the baggage area, we met up with a few of the other families in our group. We recognized one another by the papers we were clutching—instructions from Max, our China liaison, our tour guide, our stork.
By the time we got to the hotel lobby, our group was nearly complete. We were probably a fairly typical cross-section of those who’ve adopted from China. The majority of us were Caucasian, but there were people of Japanese and Chinese descent as well. We ranged in age from just under thirty-five to over fifty. We had among us a songwriter, a truck driver, an engineer, an architect, a kindergarten teacher, a college professor, a policeman, a physician, a psychologist. There were couples and singles. One of our fellow travelers was two and a half, adopted from China herself, coming back with her family to adopt a baby sister.
We spent a few days resting up in Hong Kong, riding the Star Ferry, walking along the waterfront, having high tea in the lobby of the stately old Peninsula Hotel. Walking up Nathan Road in Kowloon, I had a flashback of a day more than twenty years earlier when I had walked up that same street with my friend Mei Li.
I was working in Hong Kong back then, and Mei Li was one of two beautiful sisters I knew from Shanghai. When the Chinese Revolution heated up, the parents thought the only hope for their daughters’ future was to smuggle them out of China. Mei Li, then six years old, spent a year at home in bed, and the whole family conspired as the girls invented all the symptoms of serious illness, in hopes that they’d be allowed to leave for Hong Kong, ostensibly for life-saving treatment. The ploy eventually worked, and the two youngsters were put on a train and sent to relatives in what was then the British colony. But it took their parents another ten years to get out of China. And when the family was finally reunited, the daughters and the parents didn’t recognize one another.
When I met her, Mei Li had long dark hair with a wild perm. She was pencil thin and apt to wear startling outfits—an ankle-length yellow T-shirt, for instance—when she walked around Hong Kong, often stopping people in their tracks. I remember a bird fancier following us down a narrow street, dangling an old bamboo cage from his finger, pleading with Mei Li to stop. “My bird can sing,” he called out. “My bird can talk, my bird, my bird . . .”
The two of us prowled the back alleys. We searched for jade and we sipped chrysanthemum tea. One day Mei Li said she had a special outing planned, so we took the Star Ferry across the harbor, riding second class on the lower deck, where we could be closer to the water, hanging over the rail and breathing in the pungent undercurrents of Hong Kong—jasmine and exhaust fumes and fish.
We walked way up Nathan Road, farther than I had ever been, where we entered a huge concrete city of resettlement estates. We climbed five or six flights and entered a small apartment that smelled of incense. There, sitting at a low scholar’s table, was a blind man. A renowned fortune-teller, said Mei Li. In front of him was the first copy of the I Ching I’d ever seen, a deep dip worn right through the pages on each side where his hands kept moving, fingering the words.
He began by asking us to sit and offering us tea, and then he ran his fingers over the bones of our faces. He spoke in Mandarin and Mei Li translated. At one point, she hesitated. “What?” I asked. “He says you’ll have a baby boy but he’ll never live under your roof,” she said. At the time, I couldn’t imagine what he meant, any more than I could understand how he gleaned anything from the book lying under his fingertips. But years later when my infant son didn’t make it home from the hospital, I thought of that fortune-teller.
I don’t remember what the blind seer told Mei Li. I know she must have told me, because she relished talking about such things, but I was probably mulling over my own news. Now I think he might have told Mei Li that she’d marry and have a daughter, and that she’d cut her hair short and leave Hong Kong. She had done the first three things when I last heard from her. By now, everyone I knew back then had moved on. How strange it seemed to return, so many years later, poised on the brink of an event I could never have foretold (and which even the fortune-teller somehow missed, which made me a little nervous when I thought about it).
The next evening Mark and I and our entourage boarded a plane in Hong Kong and were whisked to Guangzhou, on the Pearl River Delta in southern China, just eighty miles away. As we descended, we looked out into blackness, then into a blinking maze of neon. In the airport corridor we encountered a huge Marlboro poster. We went through various paper-stamping stops, and then our guides collected our mountain of luggage and herded us toward a tour bus.
We were soon cruising through the China night, cooler than Hong Kong, the streets congested, the storefronts lighted up. From the bus window, I saw a familiar face decorating the sidewalk trash cans. Painted in trademark red, white, and black, Chinese characters emblazoned beneath his goatee, was the Kentucky Fried Colonel.
It was past nine p.m. local time when our bus swung into the driveway of the hotel. We were given ten minutes to check into our rooms, wash our faces, and report back to the lobby for dinner. Being bussed to a restaurant did not sound like a happy alternative to flopping on the bed and trying to get our bearings, but we were a
docile group. “Max is trying to get us on the babies’ time schedule,” said one of the veterans.
Our room on the twenty-fifth floor faced the street and a bigger, fancier hotel across the thoroughfare. Each floor had a central desk, where smiling young women in brown uniforms dispensed huge stainless-steel thermoses of boiling water for tea (and soon for the infant formula we’d be mixing up). Out the window, half a block away, Mark and I could see the golden arches, one of the twenty McDonald’s restaurants in Guangzhou. The largest one in the world at the time was in China, smack on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
In between the two beds in our room, two armchairs had been wedged, facing each other, front feet tied together, thick towels laid down under a crisp white sheet to form a crib. In something like sixty hours, we were going to fill those two roped-together chairs with a child. We looked at each other. Could there be any more exotic maternity suite, any stranger way to “have” a baby?
We’d come to Guangzhou during the fall Chinese Export Commodities Fair, and the city was decked out for wheeling and dealing. The hotels were festooned with yellow-and-red banners, lanterns, and balloons. Young women in red dresses handed out free cigarettes to the businessmen. Serious-looking men in suits, most of whom seemed to be making use of those free cigarettes, filled the hotel lobby and elevators.
Back on the bus, we peered out at the China night. On one side of the hotel was a Chinese Friendship Store, an official outlet for Chinese products from jewels to silks to herbal remedies, and a dress shop called Reason for Being. On the other side was a Mickey’s Corner shop. The traffic was incessant, an endless flow of buses and taxis and motor scooters weaving in and out like bugs surfing a concrete current. Cyclists on rusty bicycles darted in front of rattly two-ton trucks. Motor scooters wove through the crunch, more than one rider with a cell phone to his ear. On the sidelines, street sweepers walked impassively, swishing bamboo-and-straw brooms in the gutters.