by Evans, Karin
Horns blared. It was all stop and start, with a near miss thrown into nearly every beep and lurch. Luckily the congestion kept the speeds down. From my bus seat high above the din, I watched a taxi cut off a motor scooter carrying a family of four—one child perched in front of the man driving, a second strapped to the woman passenger’s back. The scooter driver screeched to a halt, put a foot down, looked behind him, started out again.
The restaurant nightclub was empty when we walked in, but a piano player gamely burst into a medley of Western tunes. As we sipped soup, he worked his way through some Stephen Foster, and then broke into an innovative version of “Happy Birthday,” followed by “Auld Lang Syne.”
I tried to get my bearings. It was October and we were in China. Perhaps some sleep would help.
I thought of another family I had spoken with who’d come to China earlier with a different agency. They’d flown through Los Angeles with a group of other parents-to-be, been delayed there for five hours before takeoff, flown on to Hong Kong, changed planes for China, and landed in two cities before they reached their final destination, all without a layover. After traveling for a day and a half with no sleep, they were bussed, bleary-eyed, to a hotel, where they expected to rest up.
But as their bus pulled up in front of the hotel, they saw standing in the lobby, peering through the window at them, seven women holding seven babies. The women smiled at the sight of the bus and rushed toward them. Clearly these babies were meant for them. But the interpreter was elsewhere, no one on the Chinese side spoke English, none of the Americans spoke Mandarin, and for a while no one could figure out whose baby was whose. All of this on top of jet lag.
Back in our hotel, we fell gratefully into bed, bone-tired and restless. All night long, the cacophony of the traffic went on. But from twenty-five stories up, the steady honking took on the sound of a million impatient crickets, chirping, mercifully, into the background.
In the morning Mark and I stared wordlessly at our makeshift cradle. Mark looked out the window at the brown blanket of haze covering the city and pronounced Guangzhou an environmentalist’s nightmare. The air was heavy and dark. The World Bank had in fact just released a report that named Guangzhou and four other Chinese cities among the most polluted places in the world.2
We turned on the television to find a variety of amateurish shows designed to teach English to Chinese viewers. On the screen, Chinese patients showed up at Caucasian doctors’ offices complaining of sore throats and headaches, and the confident blond doctor dispensed medicine and cautionary advice in a slowly enunciated British accent.
China’s leader, Jiang Zemin, was in the United States just then, for the U.S.-China summit, and the news channel showed footage of his visit. Max had said that this was a momentous week for China and America. Jiang himself was an orphan, we learned, adopted at an early age by an uncle. He’d pledged to aid and support orphans. During one broadcast, for just a moment the camera lingered on a group of protesters carrying signs concerning the fate of Tibet. The screen abruptly flickered to a color bar test pattern.
We strapped on our money belts under our shirts—which made for an odd pregnant sense all its own—and wandered downstairs for breakfast. The hotel dining room seemed to be expecting us. There were bowls of Cheerios and platters piled with fried eggs. Minnie Riperton, followed by Elton John, was playing on what would eventually come to sound like an endless tape loop. In a small park across the parking lot, a group of older women moved in the slow dance of tai chi.
By ten, we were back on the tour bus and off for the day’s paperwork. No babies yet. Max kept a firm grip on us. “Each day I’ll tell you just what we’ll do that day,” he said calmly. “I won’t tell you the whole thing. Today we’ll go apply for the adoption certificate at a Chinese government office.” With a smile he suggested we try to be happy wherever we went. “When someone’s certificate is approved, everybody clap.” Make yourself a joy to deal with was the message. No whining. No ugly-American acts. (There may have been reason to cajole us. According to a Chinese American woman who worked at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, adoptive parents had handed her dirty diapers and otherwise behaved rudely to people they thought were “local” staff.)
The logistics were a little more difficult than usual right now, said Max, since the trade fair was on, and Guangzhou was crowded with businesspeople from all over the world. Waving a handful of papers over his head, he led us briskly on and off the bus, from one appointment to the next, marching ahead with his sturdy briefcase. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a look of constant concern.
The first glimpse of our daughter came at the Guangdong Provincial Adoption Registry for Foreigners. Before we got off the bus, Max handed us each a piece of rice paper on which tiny red footprints had been pressed. Our baby’s little foot looked lovely; small dots for toes, a high arch, a narrow heel. The lines on her sole looked like the rivers on a map of the Pearl River Delta. We all stared at the small impressions and then Max collected the footprints and took us inside. First we filled out more forms asking why we wanted to adopt a Chinese baby. (“Because we love Chinese children and Chinese culture” was apparently a good answer.) We were asked to promise that we would never mistreat or abandon our child. Mark wrote out our solemn vow on the paper they provided.
Then we were interviewed, our fingers pressed onto red ink pads and our prints recorded. We signed our names, a woman official stamped the papers with a red-inked chop, and everyone clapped for us. The woman looked at Mark and me and said, “This must be very joyful for you, a child after all these years.” Yes, oh yes, we managed to say. With a smile, she handed us a burgundy plastic folder: our official permission.
When everyone’s papers were finished and the room was abuzz with applause and camera flashes, Max finally passed out the photographs of our children, a postage stamp-sized color image of each little girl. For the first time, we saw our daughter’s face, a tiny serious child with big brown eyes, wearing yellow pajamas, staring straight ahead at the camera. She looked beautiful and worried and somehow familiar. She had quiver marks in her chin as if she were about to cry. My knees went weak.
We celebrated our clearance by dining at the elegant old Pan Xi restaurant. The famed establishment is on a lake, with waterfalls, bridges, and numerous private dining rooms. Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai were said to have dined here back in 1972, during the historic round of U.S.-China talks. In the courtyard was a birdcage with pheasants and game hens and exotic fowl I couldn’t recognize—all available to be cooked to order. Nearby were tanks containing turtles and snakes and unfamiliar-looking fish. A small cage held a sad-eyed creature with a long pink nose. A badger? A possum?
We ate dish after dish of dumplings and noodles, washed down by psychedelic orange soda pop and tea. The menu noted: “Pan Xi Restaurant wishes all guests achieve grand prospects and everything goes well after tasting Eight Immortals Dinners.” Outside, a sign decorated with dancing children said, in English, ALL’S WELL WITH THE WORLD.
For the rest of the day, we toured the city. Everywhere bamboo scaffolding chafed against tall buildings under construction. Aluminum and marble towers thrust themselves into the gray air. More than half the world’s high-rise construction cranes were on duty in China, we’d been told. Shiny black glass, granite façades, wild amalgams of style shot into the sky, boxing in the skyline. Guangzhou had come a long way since—as local legend had it—six goats had come from the heavens, bearing grains of rice to found the city.
From the tour bus, we looked into old narrow alleys, beside which large craters awaited the builder’s hand. The city’s traditional architecture—red-brick buildings with graceful glazed-tile roofs—was fast coming down, ground under the foot of the International Style high-rise. We looked down from an overpass to see the rubble that was once an old walled neighborhood, a hutong, a maze of alleyways, one-story tile-roofed buildings, and gardens. Ancient masonry lay in heaps, wiped out by the wrecker’s ball. Though
there had been some campaigns to save such places, the land is just too valuable. In Beijing, areas around temples or the Forbidden City might be saved, but in Guangzhou, it didn’t look as if much of the old world would last. A few international entrepreneurs were doing a brisk trade in antique architectural leftovers—tiles, doors, carvings.
The scenes we motored past were hard to comprehend, as if someone were clicking the remote control too fast, splicing one image into another. To the side of the road, where the bicycles clustered, I saw a young woman sitting down in the road, looking stunned. I could only guess that she had fallen, just seconds before, from the back of a scooter or bicycle. There she sat, as the rest of the world, including our bus, sped by. I watched her until she faded from sight, left behind, literally, in the dust.
One night as Mark and I lay in bed, loud rock music drowned out the traffic noises. We looked out the window to see strobe lights and a huge crowd across the street at the Garden Hotel. A new club was having a grand opening, we learned. Film stars had come from Hong Kong, and the hotel driveway was filled with limousines. The next day we ventured across the street to see what was up. The hotel had fancy terrazzo floors, what was touted as the world’s largest bowling alley, and a buzz of commerce in the lobby. Copies of Time magazine with Jiang Zemin on the cover were prominently displayed in the news kiosk. In keeping with China’s capitalist boom, Jiang’s son was at that moment making a fortune in the telephone business. 3 An Italian suit in the lobby shop had a $3,000 price tag.
In the lounge that afternoon, no rockers were evident, just small groups of tea and coffee drinkers, talking rapidly to one another. Beautifully dressed women sat with expensively suited men. The air was thick with business fervor and cigarette smoke. Seventy percent of Chinese men smoke, said one of our guides. Beside a fountain, a huge statue of the warrior god, sword in his hand and a fierce look on his face, dwarfed a Chinese businessman who sat just below. The businessman, impeccable in an expensive suit, French cuffs spilling out of his sleeves, held out his cell phone, unintentionally mimicking the god holding the sword. The drip coffee was excellent, but the air was too smoky. We wandered up to the health club, which we had to ourselves. The world’s largest bowling alley was also empty.
Later that afternoon, we heard huge, bone-rattling explosions. Rocked in our hotel room, we asked what was happening and were told it was “just” the dynamite being used at a neighboring construction site. We were amazed, thinking about our San Francisco neighborhood, where neighbors had been complaining loudly that the new Italian streetcars had a shrill whine to them, and where yet another faction was fighting a small Korean restaurant because it smelled of barbecue smoke.
Guangzhou, however, went about its business amid a constant uproar of banging, blasting, hissing, and haze. And that was apparently true of much of China: booming, rushing, one big building site. American writer Annie Dillard, traveling in China with a group of writers in 1982, had observed that the country was trying “to make it all work with bicycles and bamboo.” 4 Now it was 1997, and the Chinese were trying to make it all work with two-cycle engines and huge cranes, it seemed. Plus the odd blast of dynamite now and then.
While we were in China, a marine biologist working up north announced that the famed white dolphin—the baiji—that had leapt for centuries in the waters of the Yangtze was on the brink of extinction. In the Han dynasty, the river was filled with the playful and legendary creatures, known as the goddesses of the river. Although the baiji was declared a “rare and precious aquatic animal” by Chinese authorities in 1979, its numbers have continued to diminish. In recent years observers had seen only a handful, and feared these last survivors were not long for the river. The Yangtze, once clear, is now filthy with pollution and churning with diesel-powered boat traffic. There’s bridge building and dredging, accompanied by blasting. This is threat enough even without the specter yet to come: the world’s biggest hydroelectric project, the Three Gorges Dam, which was soon to have a devastating effect on the river.
Ironically, the white dolphin was known in China as a harbinger, warning fishermen of dangerous conditions. “Ah, thank you, Goddess Baiji,” said a Song dynasty poem, “you’ve saved us from a disaster, and we’ll always remember your favors.”5
In old Chinese scrolls, man loomed very small in the universe, the landscape very large. The man-made dam across the Yangtze was about to be the largest undertaking since the Great Wall. Nature vastly diminished by man. And not just in China, of course; China was just playing a desperate game of catch-up. The Chinese had doubled their per capita income in the last decade. The whole country seemed to be remaking itself at a frantic pace. Scanning the news for just one day brought reports of one international conglomerate after another building plants there: Kodak planned to build a factory in China to produce sensitive photo products. Chevron was coming to town. The list went on and on. In Shanghai alone, there were twenty thousand building sites.
People from the countryside were rushing to the cities for work, crowding into the Shenzhen special economic zone north of Hong Kong, and into the bustling corridor around Guangzhou and Jiangmen City. According to the World Bank, the agricultural share of the workforce had plummeted in two decades from 71 percent to just half.
Rural people were thankful for the most difficult factory jobs, reported China expert Orville Schell. “Even most children and young women laborers working under the worst conditions considered themselves lucky rather than victims. Piece-work salaries of 200 yuan ($40) a month may have put them at the bottom of the Pearl River Delta’s earning curve, but they were still making far more than they could make farming back home.”6
The rapid pace of change had produced social disruption—not just environmental hazards, but prostitution, high rates of suicide among displaced rural women, exploitation, and horrendous work conditions. Paul Ehrlich, whose landmark book The Population Bomb sounded a global alarm about the perils to the environment posed by too many people and too little attention paid to the consequences of industrialization, said that China was repeating the mistakes of the West, charging heedlessly into the future. In the frenzy, much has been lost—including dolphins, including babies.
At twilight a young Chinese woman slipped from the shadows of a small park and planted herself squarely in my path. It was our second night in Guangzhou and Mark and I were walking across the hotel parking lot, a treacherous passage through tour buses and taxis, when the woman emerged from the bushes and blocked my way. In her arms she carried a red-and-white quilted silk bundle. I stepped aside to let her pass, but she moved in front of me, said something very rapidly, a staccato, emphatic rush of Cantonese, and thrust her bundle toward me.
I stopped, said I was sorry, that I didn’t understand, and I tried to get by. She began talking more loudly, pointing at whatever she had in her arms and holding out a hand, pleading. She was thin and not more than twenty and her eyes were wild and her voice was shrill.
I stared at the rolled-up comforter, which was beginning to look very much like a baby. Or was it just my imagination? Again, I said I didn’t understand and shook my head no to whatever it was she was asking, but she became more insistent, darting in front of me every time I took a step.
She pushed her armload at me and gestured at her mouth. The more I tried to get by, the more desperate and aggressive she became. She began to yell. I was quickly becoming afraid of her and all my internal alarms were going off, warning me to stay out of trouble in China. If the woman wanted money, it didn’t seem wise just then to pull up my shirt and dig in my money belt.
Mark, who’d been strolling along ahead of me, looking at the lanterns and the murky reflecting pond beside the hotel, now realized there was some sort of trouble. He stood in front of the woman, said no very firmly and, when she stood her ground, took my arm and pulled me past her. “What was that all about?” he muttered. I looked back to see the woman and her bundle dart off into the bushes. We didn’t see her again.
What had she been trying to tell me or attempting to do? Was that a baby she held? Was she saying she needed money to feed her child? Was she trying to give me that bundle? Could she have known that the hotel was full of Americans in search of Chinese babies? Was she a young mother trying to get her child to safety by literally putting her in the hands of a foreigner? Or was she after something else altogether?
Whatever her story, it disappeared with her into the night. Guangzhou was still gray on day three, but no matter. This was the day of the babies. We woke at the first light of dawn, having slept fitfully among the honking crickets. Hauling our toy rattles and nervous jitters, we were bound for our daughter’s orphanage.
Our tour bus crunched down a gravel driveway, passing a few papaya trees and a sign pointing to a social welfare institution. We stopped in front of a tall, boxy orange-and-white building with a pile of gravel and a wheelbarrow in front. We got off, lugging video cameras and baby supplies. We were led into a sitting room and told cordially that we wouldn’t be allowed to tour the orphanage, nor to ask how many children lived there. We’d come too far by now to offer any objections, and so we followed the orphanage director, a young, animated woman with a wide smile, dressed in jeans and a blazer. She led us into a sitting room, where tea and bananas awaited us. We were told to wait while the director and Max, our facilitator, ran off on yet another mysterious errand.
We waited.
The banana peels sat limp on the tables and the tea had cooled. Just when we felt we could stand the tension no longer, Max reappeared with the director. She smiled broadly and seemed to bow slightly. The two of them surveyed our nervous faces. “We’ll call your names one by one,” Max said. “When you’re called, come to the front of the room and stand here.”