China Ghosts

by Jeff Gammage

  The more we read and the more we talked to other parents, the more we were drawn to China. The adoption system was operated by the central government. The rules were posted, the same for everyone. You didn’t need a lawyer to figure it out. You didn’t need a lawyer at all.

  All applicants had to complete the same three-part procedure. First, the paper chase, the creation of a dossier in which would-be parents must document virtually every aspect of their lives, from the shape of their house to the size of their bank account, to their philosophies of religion and child-rearing, to the health of their hearts and their heads. Second, after all that data have been gathered and forwarded, comes the wait, the months of torturous inactivity while the Chinese government sets about matching the prospective parents with a child—a child almost invariably female, abandoned by her Chinese family. Third, and last, comes travel—the exhilarating two-week journey to China to complete the final stages of the Chinese and American paperwork, meet your new daughter, and bring her home.

  To Christine and me, China promised stability and certainty. At the end of the process, however long and demanding it might prove to be, we would have a child. And no one could take her back.

  Surprisingly, picking the country was easier than choosing an adoption agency. On the surface the agencies all look pretty much the same. They’re not. Adoption agencies are alike only in the sense that teachers or doctors or attorneys are alike: all have a basic certification to practice, but beyond that there’s wide disparity. Many agencies are highly skilled and experienced, others moderately staffed and able, some barely competent. Some programs trumpet narrow advantages and ignore major failings.

  Christine and I eventually signed on with a Texas-based agency, Great Wall China Adoption, informally known as Great Wall. Friends teased that the name sounded like a Chinese restaurant. But we liked that Great Wall handled strictly Chinese adoptions. We thought the staff would know the intricacies of the process and the country. Great Wall even maintained a satellite office in Beijing. We figured that nonprofit businesses are still businesses, and we wanted an agency whose financial interests were inextricably entwined with our familial desires. Because it worked solely in China, Great Wall couldn’t expect to offset a failed Chinese adoption with a successful one in Guatemala or Russia. The agency had all its eggs in one basket, and that was exactly how we wanted it.

  Still, as we explored Chinese adoption, we never felt like we were hearing the full story or getting all the information we needed.

  As we evaluated half a dozen agencies, reading their literature and Internet websites, we couldn’t find a single one willing to openly acknowledge a few hard truths: That the smiling, teddy bear–cuddling kids pictured in the brochures can bear little resemblance to the real children who arrive malnourished or sick with parasites. That some adopted Chinese children may be slowed by painful joint ailments brought on by chronic inactivity. That they may suffer from nightmares that go on for years, or even from diagnosable psychological conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. That in the isolation of the orphanage, some kids may have learned to comfort themselves by bashing their heads against the sides of their cribs.

  Except in the finest of fine print, the agencies tend not to mention that between the time you fall in love with the photograph of your daughter-to-be and the time you arrive in China to claim her, she may have become desperately, irreversibly ill.

  These things we found out for ourselves.

  THE CROWD at the front of Mary’s hotel room door is a full-scale scrum, all elbows and knees, people jostling for position. Christine and I are nearly the last to arrive, stuck at the rear of the pack. All I can see are the backs of people’s heads.

  Mary’s door is open, a last invisible barrier to parenthood.

  Those at the front of the crush can see the children, can hear them, call out to them.

  “Ni Hao! Ni Hao!” the grown-ups shout. Hello! Hello!

  The only response is an occasional loud giggle.

  Cameras flash like faint lightning, the dim corridor illuminated by the weird sway of video camera lights. The hall smells like dust. It’s stuffy with body heat. Someone in the center of the crowd begins to break down, taking in loud, tear-drawn breaths. I can hear Mary but can’t see her, approximating her location by the sound of her voice. Her English is sharp and formal as she takes roll call, counting the families by number.

  We are minutes from becoming parents.

  I think, This is a moment I’ll remember the rest of my life.

  And I feel terrible.

  Not for myself. For the child who is about to become my daughter. For the children who surround her.

  The little girls in this hotel room, at this moment so busily chasing one another across the carpet, have no idea how perfectly their lives are about to be rent. They have no way to imagine the wrenching change they’ll be forced through, to comprehend how neatly their existence is about to be severed into Before and After, how completely they’ll be swept from everything they’ve ever known.

  Christine leans against the hallway wall. Throughout this long and winding process, through endless, unexpected delays and reversals, she has been calm to the point of tranquillity. Nothing could dent her spirit or knock her confidence. Now she is near tears. She has waited so long for her child. Through eighteen years of marriage. Two years of adoption procedures. A month of travel preparation. Three days in China.

  And now, apparently, we’re going to wait a little longer.

  Mary has disappeared back into her room to juggle some last piece of paperwork.

  Our travel group is not just big, it’s gigantic, two or three times the usual size—fourteen families accompanied by an entourage of helpers and older children. Even if Mary moves quickly, which she probably will, and if everything goes smoothly, which it probably won’t, the joining of parents and daughters could take an hour or more.

  I find a spot against the wall beside Christine. At forty-two, she is still slight and girlish, the first lines of gray only now beginning to weave highlights into her hair. We settle back for this last wait, this final delay, when Mary reappears at her door, papers in hand, all crispness and efficiency.

  “Okay,” she calls out. “First family, the Gammages.”

  People turn toward one another, trying to sort out who is who. Are you the Gammages? Are you? You?

  Slowly, every head swings toward us, the couple at the back.

  Why are we first? I don’t know. On the travel roster we’re family number three. Later, when this trip is over, I will have other, more important matters to consider, and the time to ponder them, to contemplate the things that happened in China and the things that didn’t but should have, to mull how events that seemed trivial at the time will weigh on us forever.

  The crowd begins to part, people shuffling back to create a narrow aisle. I grab hold of Christine’s hand. It is only a few steps to the door.

  2 CHILDREN LOST AND FOUND

  AT BADALING, the steps of the Great Wall are as smooth as river rock.

  The center of each thick slab bears a deep indentation, the stone worn away by the small, steady pressure of millions of tamping feet. As sojourners move upward, they must carefully fit each foot into each succeeding groove, lest they land awkwardly and trip. It’s a long fall to the bottom. Here the wall goes nearly straight up, more the Great Staircase than the Great Wall.

  As I trudge on, I’m thankful that during one of the wall’s periodic restorations, someone had the presence of mind to equip this most ancient of structures with the most simple of modern conveniences: a handrail. The thick metal tube is warm in my grip, heated by the summer sun.

  The first sections of the Great Wall were built three hundred years before the birth of Christ, the last nearly two thousand years after that, a defensive barrier to block Mongol and Manchu invaders from the north, a deft psychological warning to all who would question China’s resolve. The wall stretches nearly the breadth of Chi
na, from the eastern fortress of Shanhaiguan, near the Yellow Sea, to the Gobi Desert stronghold of Jiayuguan, which marks its western terminus and once marked the western edge of the empire.

  The Great Wall at Badaling

  The wall’s precise length is a mystery. It’s not contiguous. The Great Wall began as several different segments, built in stages across millennia, its sections connected or left separate as the current ruling dynasty decreed.

  Today, some parts lie buried beneath sand or water, and others are crumbling, battered by harsh weather, encroaching desert, and perpetual neglect. The visible sections traverse an estimated 4,100 miles. To walk from one end to the other would be like hiking from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah—and back.

  The wall at Badaling is relatively new, at least by Great Wall standards. Construction began in 1368—just after the Black Plague wiped out much of Europe, just before Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales—and continued for two centuries. It’s guarded by nineteen watchtowers, early signal posts from which messages were transmitted by firelight at night and during the day by black clouds of smoke created by the burning of wolf dung.

  Today, no one burns animal dung on the wall. And the only soldiers who prowl its battlements are People’s Liberation Army troops on leave. These days the wall is under attack by a different invader, one against which it can offer little defense: tourists. Thousands of them are just like me. Americans looking to wander across one of the world’s great monuments, to make some small, spiritual connection with old China, and mostly, to kill a day or so while they wait for their life to change, wait for the flight that will carry them north, south, or west and into the arms of their child.

  Our adoption agency has dropped our travel group here a day before we are scheduled to receive our daughters, part of a twenty-four-hour cram course on Chinese history and culture. It’s a chance to pacify our psyches with exercise, to try to take our minds off the only thing anyone can think about while our bodies figure out whether we should be eating dinner or breakfast.

  I stop halfway up the mountain to the first watchtower, trying to catch my breath. The air is thick, the view hazy. Christine is a dozen steps behind. My legs are weak, from strain and suspense. Standing there, panting, one thought is clear:

  I never wanted children.

  Not one. Not once.

  That’s the truth.

  I never saw the need.

  People nurse their pet peeve. Mine has always been redundancy. Needless duplication. When I was in my twenties, prime child-raising years, I saw no need to add more demanding voices and hungry mouths to an already noisy and starving world. Nor did I wish to take on the hour-to-hour grind of tending a new baby. However much people may coo and cluck, the fact is there’s nothing as boring as a baby. Food in, food out. That’s pretty much the day.

  Christine and I had crafted a satisfying life, both of us working at jobs that kept us engaged and fulfilled. We got used to living on two salaries. If we felt like going out to dinner, the only question was Italian or Indian. If we wanted to go on vacation, the question was mountain or ocean.

  The prospect of scrimping to buy Huggies did not fill me with joy.

  Older kids I met—not that I sought them out—often seemed to be saying something rude to their parents, the people who labored to feed and clothe them. The people who, in the face of their children’s shocking disrespect, opted to sit mute, wearing frosted smiles, unable or unwilling to assert themselves or even acknowledge that their kids were ill mannered.

  Now, twenty years on, a day from my own fatherhood, I can see that I was judging these kids not as small people-in-training, but as full-grown adults. That was unfair. But at the time it hardened my view: Who needed the headache? The financial burden? The responsibility? Assuming stewardship of a human infant—a creature that would die if left to its own resources—was not a challenge I wanted.

  By temperament and profession, I’m an outsider, an observer. Politically I’m a registered independent, voting for whomever I think might do a better job. As a journalist, I’ve long honed my detachment. My job—my passion—is to tell people’s stories, not to heal their souls or bind their wounds. I’ve watched parents weep on their children’s caskets and seen demonstrators beat one another bloody with sticks, and never felt an inclination to intervene. So why would I deliberately create a being who would require my constant intervention?

  Besides, and most of all, I had Christine. And with her I was complete. I didn’t need a family. In her, I had a family, less a separate person than my other better self. To me, our “we” was a fully populated universe, one in constant, pleasurable motion, filled with travel, concerts, movies, books, plays, and sports.

  We married at twenty-four—kids by today’s standards. Lord knows what she saw in me. I didn’t see it. But I know her gentleness softened me, made me a better and more caring person, and I reveled in being the man she loved.

  It was also true that, even after marriage, after years away from my parents and my childhood home, living in different areas of the country, part of me continued to enjoy the limelight that came with being an only child. I liked having each new job and promotion applauded, as all my achievements had always been, since the day I’d taken my first steps. If a family is a play, with different members assuming different roles, then I had the lead, and I’d grown comfortable in the part. When it came to the subject of having children, the role of Most Important Person in the Story of My Life was already filled by someone infinitely better suited for the job: me.

  I didn’t need an eight-pound understudy.

  But by my mid-thirties, the chorus of family members who had cheered at every hockey game and graduation was growing old, and those already old, frail. More and more, instead of being the person for whom others felt responsible, I became responsible for other people. A life comfortably structured as a triangle—a thick base of attentive support at the bottom, ascending to me at the pinnacle—turned inverse, the pointed weight of others’ age and illness pressing down. I learned—later than most, to be sure—that people you love can die quickly, without warning. And that others can die too slowly, after long and needless suffering.

  Once, when I was a teenager, I was desperately sick with mononucleosis, two weeks racked with fever, unable to eat or even stand up. I remember my father sitting next to me. He was not a demonstrative man. In all the years I knew him, I never heard him say, “I love you,” though of course even as a teen I knew he did love me, knew that if I’d asked him for a limb he’d have gladly hacked one off. He sat there beside me, silent, and when he finally spoke it was almost as if he were speaking to himself.

  “Jeffrey,” he said—he only called me Jeffrey when he was deadly serious—“If I could, I would take your illness from you.”

  And at the time I thought, Whatever does he mean?

  By the end of his life, I knew too well. Listening to every heaving rasp as he fought to breathe, his ruined lungs unable to draw air, I found myself speaking the same words to him, telling him how, if only it were possible, I would eagerly trade places.

  When he died, it was plain, at last and even to me, that this supportive group of family members had always had other demands on their time, other people they needed to see and things they needed to do. I saw that their faithful participation in the details of my life was not my gift to them, but theirs to me.

  Where children were concerned, that realization did little to change my mind. But perhaps it opened my heart.

  Most of all, as Christine and I edged into our late thirties, she became impatient to have kids. To her, children were the biggest and most important part of a long-imagined future. Children would make everything better—holiday celebrations, vacation trips, outings to the grocery store. Home would be a place where we wanted to live, strewn with toys and happily disorganized, not just another temporary rental in a new city.

  Time was running out. The human body was not designed to readily repr
oduce after forty.

  And I wanted Christine to be happy. She deserved it. She is a person who asks for little, who gives more to others than she ever seeks for herself. A woman who faces hardship without complaint, whose instinct in the face of calamity is to roll up her sleeves, not crumple in a heap. She had always done all she could for me. I could do this for her.

  So I gave in. We tried. And we failed. The details are unimportant.

  What’s important is that at the end, when the doctors with their magic patches and glistening balms had done what they could, Christine was bereft, as wounded as a human being can be. She is by nature an optimist, discarding every bad today in belief of a better tomorrow. Now it was as if she had lost the ability to envision a future, as if she had taken a blow from which even she did not believe she could recover. She was hurt in her soul.

  I came downstairs early that morning, not long after we’d learned that we two would not produce a third. Christine was already up and sitting at the dining room table. The newspaper lay folded in front of her. Her cup of coffee was untouched and growing cold. She loves the sunlight, but that morning she seemed not to notice the beams streaming through the dormer window. It might as well have been raining.

  She sat very still, as if painted onto a canvas background, and she looked so tired and beaten that I didn’t speak. It took her almost a minute to notice me standing there. Finally she lifted her head.

  “Would you be willing to adopt?” she said.

  “Of course, definitely,” I said.

  I had no idea what I was agreeing to.

  I only knew that she was in pain, and I wanted it to stop. That I had the power to make it stop.

  That morning, I didn’t know much about adoption or about China. But I learned fast.

  EVERY SCHOOLCHILD hears how the Chinese invented gunpowder. And kites. And cannons.