by Evans, Karin
From Spain, I have heard from adoptive father Jaume Josa, who has translated parts of this book into Spanish (Las Hijas Perdidas de China) for families in that country. One of those readers wrote recently, “I can assure you that the red thread (hilo rojo) really exists. You couldn’t go before or after, it can’t be in one city or another. It has to be that day and in that place, since your daughter is already waiting for you there.”
I have heard from people whose daughters lived in the same orphanage as mine did. “Shayna was one of the first out of the Jiangmen orphanage,” Stefani Ellison wrote. Shayna came away not with a green plastic cup, as Kelly did, but with an apple. “We pried it out of her hands at night and she grabbed it first thing in the morning. When we went back the second time, the director, Mrs. Chen, sent us home with a clock for Shayna. She wanted it kept on Chinese time, so that Shayna would always know what time it was in China. Shayna may never know the love of her birth mother, but she was truly loved in China.”
After the first edition of this book was published, I heard from the father of the little girl adopted from China who had died of cancer, Steve Allen, who lives in Akron, Ohio. He wrote to say that he’d donated a copy of my book to the University of Akron library, inscribed in memory of Natalie Xiaoqing Allen, who’d come from the same orphanage as my first daughter.
Months later, Allen wrote again: “I thought you would be as excited as anyone to hear this. We got word tonight that an eight-month-old girl named You Qi is waiting for us in Hunan Province.” He quoted from a “progress report” he’d received from China, and his recounting of the story echoed so many of the thousands and thousands of accounts of little girls lost, little girls found: “On December 23, 1999, Mr. Lou Wen found a [nine-day-old] baby dressed in an old green coat and red cap. He brought the baby to our orphanage. Six months have passed since the baby arrived. The baby is healthy, development is good. She shows a great interest in everything around her.” In late October, Steve and his wife, Shelley, composed a letter to You Qi (soon to be renamed Joni Qi), pledging their love and thanking her for coming into their lives. And then they left for China, carrying Natalie in their hearts.
Cory and Marlene Barron journeyed from St. Louis to Wuhan, and discovered the deepest possible meaning of that favorite Chinese phrase “double happiness.” First, they took into their arms a beautiful ten-month-old, their new daughter, whom they named Abbi. They met the foster family who’d taken care of her for most of the first year of her life, and then they went off to get to know their child.
Five days later, the Barrons were in their hotel lobby when a Chinese family walked in and began waving to them. The Barrons recognized Abbi’s foster father, and in his arms was another baby. Not just any other baby, but a child who looked identical to Abbi. “She was smaller, not as healthy,” recalls Cory Barron, “but all the same features were there.”
Marlene Barron will never forget that moment of recognition. “Both of us were thinking, It’s her twin. She must be Abbi’s sister. We knew in that moment we could not separate them.”
The foster family, the Barrons learned, had boarded a bus on their day off, traveled several hours from their home to Wuhan, and gone searching, hoping to find the Americans who had walked away with only one girl. “They probably just felt that we had to know before we flew out of China that a twin would be left behind,” says Cory. “They took a risk. They had no way of knowing what our reaction would be.” Marlene Barron looked into the second child’s face and said, “We’ll take her.”
Within days, after concerted work by the adoption facilitator and Chinese officials, word came that the adoption of both girls would be approved. A DNA test confirmed what the eye could see. The girls were identical twins. The other adoptive families in the Barrons’ group spontaneously showered them with the money they needed to complete the adoption.
As they were handed their second daughter, a Chinese official noted that the child seemed to have “dropped from heaven.” And so, a week later than they expected to head home with one daughter, Cory and Marlene Barron flew home with two, Abbi and Grace. Almost three years old now, the twins are inseparable. The Barrons are planning a trip to Wuhan when the girls are ten or eleven. “We want to take them back to visit the foster parents,” says Cory.
By 2008, thanks in part to the well-connected community among adoptive parents, many other families had found that the child they adopted had a twin or close sibling who’d been adopted by another family.
Since that fateful trip in October 1997, the group Mark and I first traveled with to China has stayed in close touch. United by fate, we have grown into a close-knit extended family, and always feel blessed and eager to see one another. In another world and another time, what could possibly have pulled us all together? And yet here we all are.
“My thoughts on the trip to China were initially that we were going to go, get Claire, and come home,” said one mother, Sharon Ogomori. “Now I am tied by the hip to all of you. I relish any news of our girls and their parents.”
Susan August-Brown was another who’d never imagined becoming part of such a group. “But in a hotel lobby in Hong Kong in October 1997,” she said, “I was folded into eighteen families, and I have had a change of heart. We have stayed connected, some individually, some as the larger whole. I wish to watch these little nieces, whom I have come to love, grow. There is also a greater hope: One day my daughter may find within this little band a soul mate with whom to share her feelings for the unknown family left behind.”
After Congress passed the Child Citizenship Act, which became effective on February 27, 2001, granted automatic citizenship to children adopted abroad by American parents, spontaneous parties broke out across the country.7 “We’re celebrating today,” Richard Caballero told me from Los Angeles. Earlier in the year our family had welcomed in the Chinese New Year with Richard and his wife, Rosalie, their daughter Roxann Dawson (a.k.a. Lieutenant B’Elanna Torres on the TV series Star Trek Voyager), her husband, Eric, and their daughters, Emma and Mia, who was adopted from China. The law was an important milestone; at the very least it represented one less pile of paperwork that adoptive parents had to face, since applications for citizenship earlier took some doing and a wait of a year or more.
If there is one more reflection to be made on our side of this transcultural exchange, it’s this: I have never anywhere met a more grateful or happier group of parents.
10
Double Happiness
Here they were again—
Spring’s tender buds of hope, rinsed
With rain and eager.
—Karin Evans
The small faces haunt everyone who sees them. In China’s institutions they peer up at visitors, sometimes only mildly curious, as if they know people will come and go, but their own curious, as if they know people will come and go, but their own lives will remain the same. Sometimes, there is a small sea of babies, rolling around the institution floor in wheelie chairs, whiling away their time. Or an older child, sitting alone, who shyly smiles in your direction.
If you are allowed into a crib room when you visit, you wander through the rows, looking at the tiny faces, crib after crib, baby after baby, and it’s all you can do to keep from lifting each child up, and then another, and another. . . .
Well, you want to take them all home, and of course you can’t. But maybe just one? One more? By the time Kelly was four, several families in our adoption group were heading back to China for a little sister and it wasn’t long before we, too, began talking about the possibility. Kelly, now four, liked the idea of a little sister—she said she wanted to name her Pokémon Snow White. We weren’t so sure about that, but we thought it would be good for two girls to have each other. So in 2000 we set off down the paper trail all over again.
This time, I was angst-ridden in a different way. I didn’t worry so much about all the paperwork and our passing muster. Somehow I knew it would all work out, in its own time and in its own w
ay, and it did. We said we would be willing to take an older child or a child with special medical needs. When a two-year-old showed up, a little girl with a congenital heart defect, we took one look at her photo and, again, fell in love. That’s when the hard part began—seeing her face, longing to get to her, worrying about her.
She was in an orphanage in Changzhou, where one of the first Half the Sky programs had been put in place, so we knew she had good care. Still, she had surgery ahead of her and her medical condition wasn’t fully known. According to the details we eventually were given, she had been taken to a local hospital at eighteen months and left there, presumably by her birth parents. Given her age and condition, they were probably desperately seeking medical help for her, but couldn’t afford to pay for it. Their child had a large ventricle septal defect, a hole between the two chambers of the heart. This is a relatively common congenital malformation that’s usually easily corrected in infancy in places where early medical help is available. Lacking surgery to correct the hole in her heart, the child could not thrive.
After the hospital and police tried to find her family, to no avail, this small girl was taken to the local social welfare institution, where she was given the Chinese name of Yi Xuan. Her Chinese nickname was Xuan Xuan, pronounced shwen shwen. To English speakers, she was known as “Peanut.”
A pair of Chinese American pediatricians who were visiting institutions with an agency, offering what help they could to children who needed medical attention, saw her—standing quietly, not much energy, pale, so tiny—and knew she needed help. They arranged for her to go to a Project Hope hospital, and they offered to pay the bill. Yi Xuan was taken to Shanghai, where she underwent surgery to repair the hole in her heart, and she came through fine. We heard she was soon toddling around the hospital, winning friends, “running the place.”
We bought another made-in-China Pooh bear to send to Changzhou, a red silk thread tied around his arm, to keep her company until we could get there. Four months after her surgery, we received permission to travel to China to adopt her. Mark, Kelly, our dear friend “Auntie” Mary Adrian, and I flew to Shanghai, then to Nanjing, and then took a car trip to Changzhou. Kelly carried a white wool lamb into the orphanage to give to her new little sister.
When we met her, our new daughter was not quite three years old. She weighed just nineteen pounds. She was wearing a little turquoise blouse-and-shorts outfit, and shoes with soft silk socks, and she looked very delicate. In the orphanage waiting room with its white lace table cloth and bowls filled with huge red grapes, the ayis—the “aunties” who’d cared for her—and the orphanage director explained to her in Chinese that we were her new family, and she burst into tears. We tried to console her and the ayis peeled grapes for her, to no avail.
She had already traveled a hard road, we knew. And seeing it from her perspective, it was not just one loss, but a series of upheavals: You are left in a hospital, your birth parents suddenly gone. Then you are taken to an orphanage, and later to another hospital where you undergo heart surgery, then back to the institution. Just a few months later, you are told by your caregivers that you are going to meet your new mother and father, who intend to take you away. Forever.
One day the big strangers arrive. They turn out to be Caucasian people bringing a little girl, older, who looks like the people you are used to, and who seems to have a place in the family already. She seems sweet, and she brings you a present, but really, what is going on here? You will soon be taken away from everyone and everything that has felt familiar, from the moment you woke up in the morning until you closed your eyes at night. You will miss the babies in their cribs that you used to check on each day, walking between the rows, saying good morning. You will miss the bowls of familiar food and your own crib. You have no idea who these new people are or where you are going.
When the staff tried to take the official family portrait for our paperwork, Yi Xuan wailed inconsolably. They decided to wait awhile. She cried and cried and finally they took the picture anyway—a photo that still wrenches my heart: Kelly leaning toward her new sister, looking baffled, Mark and I trying to look cheerful, and Yi Xuan trying to struggle out of our arms, sobbing.
The orphanage director took us all for lunch at a restaurant near the institution, where Yi Xuan briefly cheered up when Mark gave her a lollipop and she found she could threaten to bop him with it and make him flinch. He threw himself into the game, rearing back dramatically, and she finally began to laugh. When lunch was over, she bravely, silently, followed us out into the waiting car and her new, unknown life ahead, as all the orphanage staff stood and waved, and the director brought out a little bag with our new daughter’s belongings—a pair of sparkly red shoes, a soft blanket decorated with red hearts, and her Half the Sky memory book.
We were driven back to Nanjing to our hotel, and both girls fell asleep in the backseat. Leaving Changzhou, we saw quiet streets lined in sycamore trees, piles of watermelon on the sidewalks.
Over the next few days, we went about completing the paperwork, which meant Yi Xuan walked away as Frances Yi Xuan, nickname Franny, named for a beloved family friend who was then in her late eighties. While the details were taken care of, we toured around Nanjing—museums, temples, parks. It was summer and it was hotter than hot. “Nanjing is one of the five furnaces of China,” our guide said cheerfully. It was also the site of the tragic Rape of Nanjing, and the museum there commemorating that event is one of the most horrific places I’ve ever seen and no place for children.
As we visited the sights in Nanjing, Franny sang the “Mama Hao” song for us, which every child in every Chinese orphanage seems to learn, with its sad refrain, “Mama is best . . .” Sometimes Franny got so frustrated with our inability to communicate with her that she muttered and mildly swore at us.
One day we visited the Sun Yat-Sen mausoleum. In hundred-degree heat Yi Xuan climbed every one of the 392 steps leading to the top, refusing help, plodding ahead on her own. I stopped her several times, offering to carry her, but she pulled away and said no. I bent down several times to listen to her heart, afraid she’d overdo it, but she seemed okay, and she gallantly marched on, making it very clear to us that she was no frail flower and had a mind of her own.
She was going to fit into our family just fine—and it was going to take some time. Again we felt that sense of the miraculous, how everything had fallen into place so perfectly, how we’d been led to China at just the right time for just the right child.
The red-thread idea, I think, having lived with the concept for a while, could be an adoptive parent’s spiritual substitute for the more concrete link of DNA that occurs in other families, a sort of poetic version of the umbilical cord. Mark and I have talked at length about the difference between the profound kinship we feel with our daughters and the actual genetics of attachment. Do we wish, for instance, that they had our genes? Not really. I could go so far as to say there are certain things I’m glad they didn’t inherit, at least not from me.
When Kelly and Franny turn out to love music, singing beautifully, taking up instruments, or dancing across the living room, it would be natural, were they our birth daughters, to credit the genetic contribution of Mark’s grandfather the accordion player, say, or my mother the dancer. Yet the process of falling so completely in love with these girls has changed whatever thinking I might have had about genetic inheritance. Whatever Kelly blossoms into is completely hers. What Franny enjoys and brings to our family is all hers alone, too. We’ll probably never know who their talents and inclinations came from or through, and it doesn’t matter.
I know not everyone shares this point of view. As I read Jill Ker Conway’s book True North, I came across this passage: “I wasn’t interested in adopting children. It wasn’t the experience of caring for adorable infants and toddlers I wanted. It was a much more primitive desire to produce the combination of my genetic material and John’s.” That kind of desire is obviously a natural and strong motivating f
actor for lots of people who want to have children. According to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, “One-half of the American public believes that adoption is ‘better than being childless, but not as good as having one’s own child.’” But for those of us for whom reproductive biology has broken down, other powerful forces seem to be at work.
I find myself, in fact, circling right back to those first thoughts I wrote to my unknown daughter in my early letters—the belief that any infant, whether the genetic patterns are traceable or not, is a gift and a mystery, a spirit conceived in the vast imagination of the world. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “Your children are not your children, they are not of you, but they come through you. They are the gift of life’s longing for itself.”
At the least, there’s no tracing anything easily. To balance Gibran the old mystic, I turned to scientist Richard Dawkins, author of Unweaving the Rainbow and other books. In his own, more intellectual way, Dawkins seems to hold a rather similar opinion. Even if we could identify our child’s biological parents, apparently there would be no nailing down which traits came from whom: “A child’s chromosomes are an irretrievably scrambled mishmash of its grandparents’ chromosomes and so on back to distant ancestors,” Dawkins wrote in River Out of Eden. “All early living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor. We are much closer cousins of one another than we normally realize.”
Search through distant time, and we all wind back to each other. It’s that old stuff of exploded stars and dinosaur dust. To put it another way, perhaps the red thread is longer than we can possibly imagine, winding around us all, back to the beginning of time.