Choosing to SEE

by Mary Beth Chapman

  16

  Rambo Goes to China

  It’s crazy when love gets ahold of you

  And it’s crazy things that love will make you do

  And it’s crazy but it’s true

  You really don’t know love at all

  Until it’s making you do

  Something crazy

  “Something Crazy”

  Words and music by Steven Curtis Chapman

  and Matt Bronleewe

  About ten hours after our cozy evening at the Moores’, I got an email from the adoption facilitator who would help us while we were in China. We had worked with her before and had stayed in contact ever since.

  The facilitator’s email title was simple: cancel all china plans!

  The Chinese government was going to close adoptions until the SARS epidemic passed. Each province was closing at a different time, but the whole country would eventually shut down regarding adoption. We’d just have to wait it out.

  My first thought was about Stevey Joy and the pitiful picture of her, so pasty white and frail. What if SARS swept through her orphanage?

  “Okay,” I said to my safety-conscious, follow-the-rules husband. “What if I go to China today?”

  Steven just stared at me like, “Oh, no, here we go again with another Mary Beth idea that could get totally crazy.” He knew better than to say, “You’re kidding, right?” He knew I wasn’t.

  At this point it was about 8:00 a.m. I got Steven’s then-assistant, Melissa Banek, on the phone and asked her to start checking on flights to China. I had a visa; all I needed was to somehow get my official travel letter. I convinced Steven to call the facilitator in China. He asked her if by chance we could intercept the final travel documents before they were put in the mail to us, if we could fly today, go straight to the province before it closed, and have someone meet us there with the travel papers. (If those papers had already been on their way to us from China, there would have been nothing that we could do but wait . . . and wait . . . and wait.)

  The facilitator told Steven that she would check with the China Center of Adoption Affairs to see if we could pick up our documents in Hunan. She’d call us back.

  We held our breath.

  Melissa called back on another phone; she was on the line with a travel agent.

  “There’s a flight at 1:00 p.m.,” she said. “Oh, wait, it just disappeared off the screen.”

  I freaked out. China was starting to cancel flights! I had to get there!

  “Okay,” Melissa said, “there’s another flight at 3:00 p.m. It goes to L.A. and then on to Guangzhou. From there you can fly in-country to Changsha.”

  “Hold two seats!” I told her.

  I called my calm, steady, wonderful friend Jan Moore. Jan had her overalls on and was in the middle of painting her master bedroom. As far as she was concerned, our trip to China was at least a couple of months away.

  “Jan!” I said. “Whatcha doin’? Do you want to go to China, like today?”

  Silence on the phone.

  “They’re going to close China because of SARS!” I said. “Right now Hunan Province is open, but they’re going to close! I’m not sure we can pull it off, but if we go today, I think we can get there before Hunan closes. We’ve got to try! Let’s go bring our baby girls home!”

  Jan started hyperventilating and crying at the same time.

  “Here, talk to Geoff,” she said, handing the phone to her husband.

  “Geoff,” I said, “here’s the deal. China’s going to close, but it’s still open right now. I don’t know if this will really work. We may just get as far as L.A., look at the palm trees, grab an In-N-Out burger, and then turn around and come home. But you know me; we’ve got to at least try. Just dump all your adoption paperwork in a bag and have Jan bring it. We’ll figure it out later.”

  While all of this was going on, I had also realized that if our husbands weren’t going to be with us in China, Jan and I needed powers of attorney to sign the adoption papers without them. We could get the paperwork done in Nashville and have it state sealed, but it had to be authenticated in Washington, D.C. Once executed, it could be sent by FedEx from D.C. to China.

  The whole time my husband held to a relative calm but was not sure if he should try to protect me from myself.

  “This is crazy,” he said. “Am I supposed to try to stop you from doing this?”

  “I’ve got to try,” I said. “If I can just get there, I know they won’t say no!”

  I called our friend Terri Coley and gave her the rundown. “Go to Target,” I said. “Buy a suitcase and fill it with everything Jan and I might need in China: formula, clothes, medicine, bottles, pacifiers, blankets, granola bars, wipes . . . whatever. If you think I’ll need it, then buy it. I’ll cover it, and I’ll meet you in the parking lot of Target at 12:30 p.m.”

  “You’ve lost your mind, but I’m on my way,” said Terri.

  Melissa called on the other phone. She had gotten the powers of attorney papers moving through lawyers that we use for estate and tax purposes, had walked them into the state capital in Nashville for their state seals, and was sending them to a friend who lived near D.C. He was going to walk the paperwork through the proper channels at the embassy.

  I threw random clothes in a suitcase. Steven videotaped me doing so for a bit of humor later, if and when we could all laugh about it. We had to be at the airport by 1:30. Geoff and Jan were going to pick up all our kids from school and bring them to the airport so we could tell them that, by the way, Mommy was going to China that afternoon, and we loved them.

  We zoomed to the airport, stopping at the Target parking lot first to pick up the bag of baby stuff. Jan and Geoff met us in the terminal. Usually Jan is as cute as can be . . . but today she was ever so slightly stressed out, with red, puffy eyes. She looked like she’d been crying ever since I called her that morning.

  “I don’t even know if I have the right paperwork,” she sobbed. “It was all in a laundry basket in my office, and I just dumped it into a duffel bag. I can’t believe we’re doing this! I would only do this with you!”

  We kissed our husbands and kids goodbye and got on the flight to L.A. We left without even knowing whether we would be able to continue on to Guangzhou.

  We had a long layover at LAX. I called Steven when we landed. “The facilitator says the travel documents had not been mailed yet, and they can make it work from their end,” he told me. The documents could be sent to Hunan’s provincial affairs office in the city of Changsha, where our adoption – if it worked out – would eventually take place.

  I began sorting through Jan’s pile of papers. Miraculously, she had everything she needed, plus half of the papers from their first adoption.

  I love putting things in order. I organized all of Jan’s papers, put them neatly in a folder, and handed it back to her with great satisfaction.

  We boarded the flight for China. Our seats were in business class, which was unusual because we always fly coach. Oh, I thought, that’s so nice! We’re so exhausted, and the travel agent must have upgraded us because we’re under all this stress about the adoptions.

  I called Steven. “No, they didn’t upgrade you,” he said. “The only two seats left on the flight were business class, and they were $3,500 each. So Stevey Joy just got a little more expensive . . .”

  Oops!

  Meanwhile, Jan was such a trooper. “Let’s see,” she said. “What are we doing? I left behind a half-painted room! I don’t even know what’s in my suitcase. Are we really going to China?! Are we going to catch SARS and die?”

  Hours passed. I could not sleep. We flew through the skies above the dark Pacific Ocean, getting closer and closer to two little girls who needed their mommies – two mommies who were determined to rescue their daughters.

  We landed in Guangzhou early in the morning, local time, and called home while waiting for our flight to Changsha, Hunan Province. It was obvious we weren’t in Kansas anymore. The airp
ort was quiet, and every single person we saw was wearing a surgical mask. Jan got her disinfectant wipes out of her purse and insisted on wiping down everything we might possibly touch. I love that girl.

  Our adoption escort was waiting at the airport in Changsha. He told us his name was Smile, that our paperwork had been sent to the provincial affairs office, and that he would have what he needed to complete the adoption once our powers of attorney arrived from the U.S.

  “And by the way,” he said, “your babies are waiting for you at the hotel.”

  Jan grabbed my arm. We looked at each other after all our hours of traveling and said, “I think we did it!” We were overwhelmed . . . not home yet, but God had clearly moved mountains of paperwork and other obstacles for us.

  Outside, there weren’t many people on the streets. They scurried by, wearing masks, not looking at us. We got to the hotel. On other trips it had been full of American couples and Chinese babies. Now it was deserted. No other Americans anywhere. For that matter, once you left the first floor there were no other guests in the entire hotel.

  We got to our room with no time to waste. Our babies would be here any minute, and we didn’t even know what kind of bottles or formula we had for them. Jan started getting the video camera ready to capture our historic moment. I opened the suitcase that Terri had bought at Target. I had no idea what she’d bought; all I knew was that whatever was in there had cost almost nine hundred dollars.

  I unzipped the bag, and the first thing we saw were tons of Clorox wipes. Nothing could have made Jan happier. “We’ll need to ration them,” she said. We had been told we might have to be in the country for three weeks or a month, and she wanted to be sure we had enough. “Are there scissors in that Target bag?” Jan continued. “I’m going to cut all these wipes in half and put them in Ziploc bags – ”

  I was laughing, and then the phone rang. Our babies were being brought up to the room.

  We weren’t ready. Freaked out. We ran around trying to set up the video camera so it would automatically film this amazing event on tape, as both of us would be busy meeting our new children. We splashed cold water on our faces so we wouldn’t look like we had been up for five hundred hours. Then there was the knock on the door. I almost peed in my pants.

  The orphanage director, Smile the escort, and two nannies holding two babies were standing there. One nanny handed Ashley Rose to Jan. She was a plump, healthy baby, about seven months old. Jan was crying with joy, the Chinese people were all talking at once in Mandarin, and then it was my turn to receive my baby.

  There she was – I think. She was wearing a huge, red, puffy traditional Chinese outfit, and somewhere in all that puff, I found a very tiny, very pale, very sickly . . . Stevey Joy! She weighed almost nothing. She wouldn’t have had half a chance against SARS.

  As quickly as the adoption group came, they left. Jan and I were on our own. The two had become four, and all was quiet, except for Stevey Joy Ru Chapman. As Jan doted on Ashley by stripping her down and bathing her in the lavender baby wash we’d brought (thanks to Terri and Target), I was trying to console a very unhappy, loud, tiny, sick new daughter. I was so glad I’d felt the need to act quickly to get this precious little one out of China, but now I had this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Caleb and Will had prayed for a mellow new sister, and she was screaming at the top of her tiny lungs. And on top of it all, she looked like someone, I just couldn’t think who. Then it came to me. She looked like Phil Collins, the singer. I told Jan.

  “Will you stop it?” Jan said. “She does not look like Phil Collins. She’s cute as she can be!”

  The next day, Smile gave us a little update about the situation. “We don’t really know what will happen or how this will all play out,” he said, “but you could be here for about three weeks.” This was because of SARS and our uncertainties about how long it would take for the powers of attorney to arrive.

  I watched as Ashley would sit for hours playing with toys. She was a bit passive; you could tell she’d needed the love of a mom, and Jan was beginning to take care of that.

  But Stevey Joy wouldn’t even look at a toy. She was sick and sad. I had her on antibiotics now and was doing my best, but it was hard. And to top it off, we discovered that our wonderful adoption video had malfunctioned. All we had was lots of footage of some Chinese adoption worker’s butt, and then the camera had turned itself off.

  Jan was beginning to fall apart, and I wasn’t feeling much better. We were looking at three weeks, minimum, in this SARS-infested ghost town with chilled-out Ashley and tiny, sickly Stevey Joy, who pretty much did nothing but squirm and wriggle and yell and scream.

  I finally got up the nerve to call home. Caleb and Will got on the phone. “Mom, we’ve been praying so hard,” Caleb said. “Is Stevey Joy all calm and chilled out?”

  “Well,” I said, “uh . . . Ashley is.”

  Caleb could hear Stevey Joy screaming bloody murder in the background. “Is that her I hear?” he asked.

  “Well, she’s so sick – ” I started.

  “Oh, no!” Caleb moaned. “But Mom, we prayed!”

  Jan was still convinced we were all going to get SARS and die. At one point – though I didn’t know it at the time – she locked herself in the bathroom and videotaped a pitiful last will and testament message for her family in the event that we never made it home.

  Meanwhile, our friend in D.C. had gotten the powers of attorney documents authenticated in Washington. Steven had checked on FedEx. Because of the SARS crisis, the overnight company could take three weeks to deliver a package. Our friend flew to Nashville, got off his plane and handed the papers to Steven in the terminal, and then turned around and flew back to D.C.

  By God’s providence, Steven had the following week off, which was pretty unusual. Because he had his visa, he decided to bring the powers of attorney to China himself. So he booked a flight to China and took on a new job as an international adoption courier.

  “You wait,” I said to Jan. “I’ll bet you anything that when Steven sees Stevey Joy for the first time and I ask him what pop star she looks like, he’ll say she looks like Phil Collins.”

  “There is no way Steven will say Stevey Joy looks like Phil Collins,” Jan responded.

  Steven arrived at the hotel late in the evening. I couldn’t believe he was actually there. Stevey Joy was asleep. I took him over to her little crib. He just stood there, staring in wonder at his newest baby daughter.

  “What pop star does she look like?” I whispered.

  He rolled his eyes at me and then gazed at Stevey Joy carefully for about ten seconds.

  “Phil Collins,” he said.

  Smile, the adoption consultant, came to meet with us the next day. He was still saying that we’d be in China for three weeks at least.

  “At home we can get express passports if we pay extra money,” I told him. “Do you have anything like that here?”

  “I don’t know what you talk about,” said Smile in broken English.

  “Well,” I said, “usually there are lots of Americans here in Changsha, and that makes a big demand on the passport office and in all the government offices. So of course it makes sense that adoption groups usually need to stay in the province for five days to process everything.

  “But because of SARS, there’s no one here. So it seems like there would be less of a wait for us to get the adoption papers signed and the passports processed quickly. Can you see about us getting our passports soon? I mean, we like you and all, but I’d love to go home sooner rather than later.”

  Smile stood up. “You ask me to be Tom Cruise!” he said dramatically. “This is Mission Impossible!”

  We all looked at each other, trying to figure out if this was Chinese humor or what . . . but we soon found that we had no problems finalizing the adoption papers at the provincial affairs office. They had not shut down yet because of SARS, and that part of the process went smoothly.

  After that, Smile lef
t us at the hotel and said, “You wait here, I see what Mission Impossible Man can do about passports!”

  Within four hours he was back, holding two Chinese passports for the babies. “Ha!” he said. “I am Tom Cruise!”

  We had been in China for only one week. This kind of paperwork turnaround was unheard of. Even an adoption under normal circumstances usually takes ten to twelve days. It was as if SARS had been the very thing that sped up our process!

  While Jan and I packed up our things and got the girls ready to travel, Steven and Smile worked on getting us the heck out of Dodge. They booked us on the first plane home.

  Steven upgraded his ticket using frequent flyer miles, so we were all in business class together. As we settled into our nice, wide seats, we looked at each other and smiled like little kids who had just pulled off the ultimate practical joke.

  Steven reclined in his seat, and Stevey Joy snuggled on his chest, covered by a warm blanket. They both went to sleep.

  I stared at them. I couldn’t believe that after just one week, we were on a plane bound for home. In spite of the curveball SARS had thrown us, it was one of the few times in my life where God had actually allowed my plans to work out.

  “God,” I prayed, “I don’t know what just happened, but I do know You were with us every step of the way! Thank You for continuing to walk with a Rambo woman like me who has issues with taking no for an answer. I know it can get me into trouble . . . but thank You for the gift of this crazy trip!”

  I finally felt a huge wave of emotion come over me. I was exhausted. I pulled the flight blanket up to my chin and went to sleep.

  Next stop, Nashville, Tennessee!

  17

  Fingerprints of God

  I can see the tears filling your eyes

  And I know where they’re coming from

  They’re coming from a heart that’s broken in two