by Evans, Karin
After the shots, we fled the clinic and the other babies’ screams to stroll outside by the Pearl River, which flows around Shamian Island. The cobblestone riverbank was shady and restful, isolated from the bustle of Guangzhou. Connected only by bridges, Shamian was just a sandbar when the European traders first came. Following the Chinese defeat in the conflict known as the Opium Wars, China conceded the island to the British and the French.
Now, where foreigners once bargained and bullied, we strolled with our daughter in her backpack, her tears drying in the breeze. Under the leafy canopies of tall, stately trees, old colonial buildings had darkened with time. They now housed local offices, as well as residences, restaurants, and small shops. A sign in front of one building said, WELCOME FOREIGNERS TO OUR HOTEL ACCOMMODATION. An old French Catholic church remained, as did an Anglican church, courtesy of the British Empire. Rows of vintage bicycles were parked down the alleyways, and the shouts of schoolchildren filled the air.
The next morning we returned to Shamian Island for our very last bureaucratic stop, the U.S. Consulate, housed in a whitewashed concrete high-rise next to the luxurious five-star White Swan Hotel. We arrived with our baby and our usual clutter of papers, including three years’ worth of tax returns, to be interviewed by a U.S. Consulate officer. One of the questions asked was whether the baby we had was the baby we thought we were getting. Kelly—still officially Jiang Xiao Yu—emerged from the proceedings with permission to enter the United States, her stoic-looking mug shot glued to a pink permanent “Resident Alien” card.
Pearl S. Buck, I learned later, had something to do with our successful passage here. Buck, who grew up in an American missionary family in China, was the author of dozens of novels set in China, including The Good Earth and Pavilion of Women. In 1949, deeply touched by the plight of homeless Asian children, the late author set up Welcome House, the first international interracial adoption agency in the United States, determined to find families for children of mixed race whom other agencies refused to help.
Buck founded the China Emergency Relief Committee, supported twelve orphaned children in China one year, battled the Chinese Exclusion Acts—which drastically curtailed Chinese immigration into the United States between 1882 and 1943—and spoke out against racism wherever she found it. When the nation closed the door to Chinese immigrants, Buck observed, “We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get into heaven, but we won’t let them into our country.” After China was closed to foreigners in 1949, Buck’s organization went on to facilitate numerous adoptions from Korea and other parts of Asia. Just a few years before our adoptive journey had begun, the agency had started working with adoptions from China.
The fact that American parents now regularly fly to China and other countries in Asia and return with a child can be traced in part to Buck’s battle against the barriers to transracial adoption. She argued persuasively that race should not be a factor in finding homes for children. Buck herself was the mother of eight, all but one adopted.
Buck’s views on Chinese women, written nearly half a century ago, foreshadow some of the issues affecting the little girls who pass through Shamian Island today. The late author’s biographer, Peter Conn, writes: “A girl growing up in a relentlessly patriarchal household, Pearl was especially attentive to the Chinese girls and women she met. She found that they, too, were trapped in a sexual caste system throughout their entire lives, a system even more punishing than the one she had seen at home. She was puzzled at the embarrassment that accompanied the birth of girl children, and she grieved when she learned about the practice of female infanticide. On more than one occasion, she found an unmarked shallow grave in which the nude body of a baby girl had been buried.”
One of the Korean children adopted through Welcome House is Conn’s own daughter. “Among the success stories in the Pearl S. Buck Foundation files,” Conn writes, is the tale of a “two-year-old orphan named Kim Kyung Nim—Jennifer Kyung Conn—who entered my life twenty years ago, malnourished and covered with sores. Jennifer came from an orphanage with a 50 percent mortality rate; the children either found a home or they died. Today, she is a graduate of Smith College, an accomplished cook and writer who works for a foundation in New York City that assists the homeless. I would never have known her except for that extraordinary woman, Pearl Buck, who brought us together.”5
WELCOME, ADOPTION PARENTS, read the sign on a shop just a block away from the U.S. Consulate, the doorway hung with tiny pairs of silk pajamas. With that, any feeling of uniqueness we’d had as Americans carrying a Chinese child through the local streets suddenly vanished. With our new daughter in our arms and our purchases (a small silk jacket, a watercolor of an old Guangzhou neighborhood for her bedroom), we had become part of a crowd. Mark and Kelly and I were used to traveling en masse with our own group, but we now found ourselves bumping into other groups just like ourselves wherever we went—Americans with strollers, diaper bags, sacks of souvenirs, and Chinese baby girls.
After our visa appointments, we retreated with a few fellow travelers to the elegant White Swan Hotel for lunch. Many adopting parents stay at the hotel, a five-star establishment next to the U.S. Consulate that can boast of several heads of state who have slept there, as well as hundreds of newly adopted Chinese baby girls. The hotel sundries shop sells diapers; there’s also a fancy children’s wear shop. From the dining room, we had a sweeping view of the Pearl River with its dark barges motoring along. A lavish buffet offered foreigners all they could want and then some—from roast beef to Brie to crème caramel to Jell-O. In the ladies’ room a Chinese attendant in a silk jacket held Kelly while I went into the stall. I came out to find Kelly bouncing on her hip, happily listening to a rush of Cantonese. “Mama,” the woman said as I emerged. She gave Kelly a hug as she handed her back and waved away the tip I offered.
Mark and Kelly and I had other nonverbal moments of communication with local people, but I was hungry for more. In a park, one mother pointed at Kelly, then raised a single finger to ask how old she was, I assumed, and I nodded and held up my own finger. She pointed to her little boy, raised a single finger again, then brought him over to meet Kelly. The two stared at each other and kept their distance. I wanted less distance and wished I had enough grasp of Cantonese to ask this mother what her life was like, what was going on for the women and girls of China. But we just smiled at each other, and I was struck by how apart from it all we were on this trip, partly my own fault, of course, for speaking no more than a few words of Cantonese. We were visitors who peered through bus windows and wandered mutely. I had an uneasy sense of the unknown world we’d soon be leaving behind.
On our last night in China, we had a lavish Chinese dinner to end all previous dinners (spinning on the lazy Susans that night, ostrich meat!), plus karaoke singing, tears, and laughter. Jeffrey gave everybody a tape of Chinese lullabies as a good-bye present, and the beautiful Anna gave each baby girl a little pearl necklace. Could these children have been handed to us with any more love or good intentions? I think not.
Max sat down for just a moment at our table. As usual he seemed to be stopping briefly between tasks, rather than settling down for a meal, but I had time to ask him whether he’d get a break after our group left. “Not really,” he said, with a weary smile. He stood up, never far from his briefcase, reached in and pulled out all the children’s visas, assuring us that every one of the babies had permission to go home with us. As usual, he said he’d hold on to the paperwork until we were at the airport. He was still taking no chances with us. And then he was off, reminding us to keep track of our passports and to be ready to leave when the bus arrived the next afternoon. Jeffrey stood up with the karaoke microphone to wish us well, and Anna and Mary sang songs with tears in their eyes. The party broke up, and we wandered out into the Guangzhou night, leaving behind our usual wake of spilled tea, sticky rice, and flung chopsticks.
The next day, ten days after first holding our new daughter, having been cl
eared by all the necessary Chinese bureaus and the U.S. Consulate, Mark, Kelly, and I would be on our way home. In almost every way, we were more than ready, though by now, I realized, we seemed to be in the rhythm of China. We had figured out how to make formula with thermoses of hot water in the bathroom, had settled into a routine of breakfast, lunch, and dinner as a group of sixty, and our child seemed at home in her armchair crib. Another adoptive parent, Susan Lewis, who runs a busy Los Angeles advertising agency, later said she’d never been happier than she was in that hotel room in China with her new baby and nothing else—no job, no phone, no fax—to answer to.
That last evening Mark and I walked one final time past the Chinese Friendship Store—where we’d purchased plenty of souvenirs—and back along the hedge, from which the mysterious woman with the bundle had appeared more than a week earlier. No one popped from the shrubbery this time and everything that had happened in the past twelve days began to seem like a dream, until we looked down into the sleeping face of our daughter and were palpably reminded how our lives had been unalterably changed and blessed.
In the airport our group merged with several other groups, all American parents with Chinese baby girls, people from other agencies who’d been to different orphanages in other provinces. All were heading home with their daughters to cities across the country. As we moved down the line, Max stood at the gate, calm, smiling, standing behind the rail that separated those who were leaving and those who were staying. Anna was misty-eyed, gently saying good-bye to each baby and to each adult. A newly adopted girl of two or three was crying forlornly in her stroller, as if she somehow knew the magnitude of this farewell.
The line snaked along, and behind the barrier, Max waited until every last one of us had gone through a final checkpoint and walked toward the plane. As he raised his sheaf of papers at us to wave a final good-bye, I wanted to run back and hug him, but it was too late. I looked back and thought, I owe as much to this man as I’ve ever owed to anyone in my life. His achievement over the past few weeks alone would be enough for anyone for a lifetime. To place eighteen little girls in eighteen new homes. To watch the moment, not of birth but of something so close to it, to witness the most heartfelt coming together, each inexplicable moment of love and recognition. It would be enough for me—if I had the political savvy, bilingual skills, persistence, nerve, and grace to do it. I’d call all the little girls my nieces forever, and tack their photos all over my walls, and come to their birthday parties, and watch them grow up. I’d bask forever in this oddly made, extended family I’d helped create.
Now Max was about to go back to the hotel and his phone and his fax machine and prepare to do it all over again. Within a month, he’d have another group of anxious people arriving in China, clutching their passports and their hopes, and he’d walk them through two momentous weeks of baby-gathering. Sometimes, I’d heard, when he walked through the orphanages, he touched the babies on the heads and whispered to them, “Hey, you will have a home very soon.”
Nothing is simple in China, but Max had guided us all safely and patiently through the maze. If God is in the details, so was Max. Uncle Max we have called him ever since, or often when we are feeling particularly grateful, Saint Max.
Looking very small in her airline seat, tiny Xiao Yu, born somewhere in the Pearl River Delta in 1996, was now named Kelly Xiao Yu and on her way to California, leaving her homeland far behind. She was traveling on a maroon People’s Republic of China passport as a resident alien with a U.S. visa. We held her up to the window to look out at the sights, and as the engines started to roar, we told her to wave good-bye to China. Always eager to raise a hand, she did, waving and pressing her face against the window. She seemed content as the plane, filled with tiny Chinese girls, thrust its nose into the air and took off. This Great Chinese Baby-Gathering Expedition was over.
I felt a tremendous sadness to leave China and all that Kelly had known in her short life, and all that she’d have to leave unknown, possibly forever. A Trump Resorts T-shirt, a pair of yellow shoes, a story about a marketplace—we weren’t taking much away that we could someday offer her by way of explanation or history. Yet I knew that somewhere in the landscape that was fast disappearing from sight I had a Chinese soul mate, a mother who had by her own unfathomably sad loss allowed me to realize an almost impossible dream. Where was she, and what was she thinking in that moment that her tiny daughter was being lifted high into the air and out of the land of her birth? My mind was swimming with unanswered questions. I didn’t know when, or if, we’d ever be back.
It was only hours later, when we were on the final leg of the journey, heading from Hong Kong to San Francisco, that I allowed myself to breathe easily and let go of the gnawing fear I realized I had been carrying for ten days, the fear that someone could take this baby away.
Twenty hours after leaving Guangzhou, we passed through immigration in San Francisco, presenting Kelly’s U.S. visa, while she wriggled around, eager to be unconfined after nearly a whole day of plane travel. Now, for some reason, she chose to entertain the INS official with her loud donkey-like greetings. He stamped her papers and gave us a wry smile. “Boy,” he said. “You two are in for it.”
Friends had stayed up late to greet our baby when we got to our front door, but we three were too bleary-eyed to say much more than hello. Whatever time zone applied to us at this hour and in this place, the clock had spun way beyond our mental, physical, and emotional limits. When I fell into bed, I saw a vision of a lazy Susan spinning round and round, laden with the ubiquitous dish of huge, shiny black mushrooms, whirring faster and faster, until the dish became airborne, sending flying mushrooms everywhere. In the shower the next morning, my ears still rang with a cacophony of crying babies and honking traffic.
Kelly woke upin San Francisco smiling. She hesitated for just a moment before she reached a hand toward Maddy, the little refugee from the dog pound, who was shivering with excitement and trying to lick her face. Annie the old husky was in her usual spot, lying on the back porch resting her bones, and we carried Kelly out to meet her. Then came a parade of friends. Our families came forth to welcome Kelly. My former mother-in-law called to say she wanted to be an honorary grandmother. Everybody was delighted to have a girl in the family at last; all the grandchildren on both sides—nine so far—were boys.
Wherever we went those first few days, Kelly looked at everything with a wide-eyed expression, pointing a tiny finger and saying, “Ohhh! Ohhhh! OHHHH!” When we first set her down on a patch of green grass, she was afraid to move. She stood stock-still, looking all around her feet at the strange stuff, lifting her arms to be carried out of it. Within a few days, she’d come to terms with lawns and was padding comfortably around the yard and house as if she’d always been here.
To me, for a while, it all seemed surreal. Even after a week, I was still in a state of disbelief when I looked down to see this mite in her OshKosh overalls and her orphanage burr haircut looking up at me. I was surprised, too, to feel an unexpected sense of loneliness, and realized I missed all the other parents and children who’d become our extended family for the past couple of weeks.
Whatever Kelly was going through, she couldn’t tell us. But I knew she was accustoming herself to a huge emotional change and a sensory transformation. Having heard nothing but Cantonese for her first year, she was now hearing English exclusively, and that coming from strange new voices in a strange new world. Some toddlers who’d been speaking words of Cantonese or Mandarin go silent once they are with their new parents. They have to regroup, psychologists say, get their bearings. They need time to listen to new patterns of language and begin speaking all over again. Kelly, though, seemed game to try new words. Some, like “Mama” and “Dada,” I knew she’d already been encouraged to practice at the orphanage. Others, like the word “dog,” which she mastered very quickly, and “Mah-Mah,” an attempt at Maddy’s name, came of her own volition.
Within a few weeks, Kelly was becoming
adept at making her preferences known (cookies, milk, apple juice), and she was clearly transfixed with what she called “mooms”—motorcycles. She never missed one, whether it was parked or roaring by. She waved to all the drivers and occasionally a helmeted head nodded back. She pulled down a book of Mark’s from a low shelf and pored over it. An Encyclopedia of Motorcycles had her about as quietly engaged as I had ever seen her. A few nights later, she insisted on taking to bed a booklet of old Harley-Davidson advertisements. Where this enthusiasm had come from, I couldn’t say. I wondered whether she was one of the tiny riders on a motorcycle or scooter back in Jiangmen City. Maybe her parents had roared up to their house on one each night while she was still with her family. Maybe she just liked motorcycles because they are noisy.
Sometimes out of the blue now she’d pat my cheeks and say, “Mama, Mama,” and then give me a huge, openmouthed kiss, crinkling her eyes. One day when I was in a coffee shop and a stranger approached and started talking to her, she looked the man in the eye and began patting me and saying very emphatically, “Mama, Mama,” as if she were making it clear that we were a pair, as if she were telling the world that she had a mother.
Yet every once in a while she awoke in the middle of the night and was for a time inconsolable. I know this happens commonly to small children, but knowing our daughter’s particular history, we couldn’t help but wonder if she was having a nightmare of having been left in the market, or if she was missing the routine of the orphanage, or one of her caregivers, or all the other children. When she first awoke in this state, she seemed in another world, bereft, her mouth wide open, her eyes scrunched shut, huge tears bathing her cheeks, wailing so hard her small body trembled. A sound to break your heart. We held her and talked to her, and after a while she calmed and looked around, still shaking, still gasping, but back with us. I wondered just what had happened to her when she was left, and if this is what she felt like before someone found her. It was almost impossible to imagine anyone letting her go. I became more and more sure that they must have held on to her until the very last minute.