China Ghosts

by Jeff Gammage

  On a rough scale of “needs” to “needs met,” she is perhaps better off.

  But to me, Jin Yu is not lucky. To me, what has befallen my daughter is the opposite of luck.

  Three days after she was born, Jin Yu was discovered alone in an alley, dressed in rags. She has lost both of her biological parents. She has lost her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all the members of her extended family. She probably has lost an older sister—often the abandoned girls are second daughters—and if the hopes of her Chinese parents eventually came to pass, then she has lost a brother too.

  She lost her home, her language, her religion, her culture. She lost her country.

  When people tell me Jin Yu is lucky, I want to gag. My daughter carried exactly one thing out of China: her name. Everything else—every single thing—she surrendered.

  In China, I learned that without the freak accident of an American adoption, these girls would be regarded the same way as their stay-behind sisters: the refuse of society. I learned that these children are in effect held responsible for the actions of their Chinese parents, made accountable for their lack of name and lineage. I learned that they are given less because they are regarded as less. In China, I learned that for these children, my daughter, her orphanage sisters, there is often not enough medicine, or warmth, or clothing, or food. In China, I learned that in some orphanages, those who die outnumber those who live.

  In China, I learned to be angry.

  IN CHINA, I learned—or rather, finally came to realize—that information about the reality of Chinese adoption is selectively presented to would-be parents. That in the United States, among the dozens or scores of adoption agencies vying for customers, nobody actually tells a lie. They just leave out certain parts and emphasize certain others.

  The ad in the American adoption magazine implores, “Chinese orphans need you!” At one time I thought that was true, a challenge to be answered. Now, I marvel at how a single sentence can contain so many distortions.

  For one, the girls aren’t orphans. An orphan is a child whose parents are dead. The Chinese parents of these children, the people who gave them life, are missing, hidden, unknown—but by and large they are alive and well. The repercussions of their absence are but the beginning of what goes unsaid. The beginning of what is briefly mentioned.

  The process of adopting a child from China requires you to accept a vast amount of uncertainty. The health of your child, her age, where she might be living, all of these details are known only as percentages of likelihood. Until you meet her, the rest—character, personality, temperament—is mostly mystery.

  I was ready for that. But I wasn’t prepared for a few obvious truths, because nobody bothered to tell me, and I didn’t know enough to ask.

  In China, I learned that although American adoption agencies will readily mail you reams of colorful brochures and expertly shot DVDs and videotapes, they never tell you what you really need to know. Amid the photos of gorgeous, dark-eyed Chinese children and the lengths of pious texts imploring you to help, expounding on the difference that you alone can make, there’s not one word about the pounding emotional assault of the experience. Not a line about the disorienting attack of conflicting feelings.

  They never tell you what it might be like to venture inside an orphanage at a place like Xiangtan. To confront the life that your child, the person you love most, would have been left to lead in China. To see the life that children just like her—every bit as bright and beautiful, every bit as deserving—are living now.

  They don’t tell you that the children of the orphanage are all coming home with you. That these kids with their wan smiles and growling stomachs are going to follow you across the ocean, move into your house, inhabit your dreams. They don’t tell you that from now on you’ll never push back your chair from the dinner table without thinking of small children—just like your daughter—whose ribs are tight against the skin. That now, when you saunter through Toys ’R’ Us, your child happily choosing a prize from among rows of pink-boxed Barbie dolls, you’ll recall that during a morning-long visit to the orphanage, you did not see a single toy.

  They don’t tell you that when summer burns hot and steamy, and you’re picking out a toddler’s matching wardrobe of colorful pants sets and bathing suits, your mind will summon images of children wearing whatever came out of that morning’s laundry—a small boy in a rumpled T-shirt, a thin girl in a washed-out gown, wafting across the concrete carpet of a sun-scorched orphanage. Or that, in winter, as you pull thick blankets up to your child’s chin on a bitter night, you’ll wonder whether the children left behind are warm as well.

  They don’t tell you that on Christmas morning, your girl’s gifts piled halfway up the wall, the extended family delighting in her presence and her excitement, your thoughts will turn to the children who will never see so many toys or experience such an outpouring of love and affection. They don’t tell you that even the celebration of your daughter’s birthday will be tinged with sadness. That as you watch your child lean forward to blow out the candles on her cake, you’ll think of a nameless woman across the ocean, and know that, for her, this is a day of grief.

  People think adopting a baby from China will be the answer to their prayers and problems, the fulfillment of their long-delayed dreams of parenthood, the antidote to their infertile physical forms. What they learn, what I learned, is that it’s mostly exchanging one set of complications for another. I could write a much better brochure for the adoption agencies. One that would convey all the things that soon-to-be parents don’t realize, what no one tells them, what in their deepest heart of hearts, they may not really want to know.

  It would say: don’t think you’re going to walk into an overcrowded orphanage, take one child out, leave ninety-nine behind, and be the same person when you sit down to breakfast the next morning. You won’t be. It’s too cruel a lottery. And your participation in it will mark you.

  It would say: from now on, wherever you may go and whatever you may do, the faces of the children left behind will come to you, unbidden, glimpsed in the eyes of a child scampering across the street in front of a crossing guard and in the smile of a girl skipping rope on a playground.

  It would say: when you travel to China, you think you’re bringing home one little girl. Only later do you realize that a host of specters have moved in. You think you are tying your fate to the life of a single child. You find out that you have been inextricably bound to the lives of dozens of others. And that there is little you can offer those children besides prayers.

  ANGER IS not all I learned in China.

  The country is too vast, its people too diverse, its culture too deep, to foster but a single reaction, a solitary emotion.

  In China, I learned that madness—of the most delightful and entertaining sort—can be as close as the hand in your pocket. That things can happen in China that could not happen anywhere else in the world. In China, I learned, the hard way, that airport tarmacs are noisy, smelly places. And that the cargo holds of major airliners are smaller than they look.

  We were running late, the weather threatening, nerves tight, fourteen families with new children preparing to depart Changsha for Guangzhou, to begin the final leg of our journey. Inside the airport, the line to the security checkpoint seemed endless. Finally we reached the front.

  I stepped through the metal detector, which emitted a loud screech. I let out a loud curse, realizing that my Swiss Army knife was in my pocket and would now be confiscated. I slapped my knife into the plastic basket atop the machine.

  I hated to lose that knife. It was a gift from Christine’s uncle in Bienne, Switzerland, not just a useful tool but a reminder of a happy trip.

  I heard Mary talking to Christine behind me.

  “Why is Jeff upset?”

  “He had to give up his knife, and it’s special to him.”

  A second later, before I could consider what Mary might make of a guy who holds sentimental feeling
s for a pocketknife, she was beside me, speaking urgently to the security officer. I didn’t know what Mary was saying, but I could guess the gist: Can’t you make an exception? For this foreigner and his new Chinese baby? Surely you don’t think this American, with his Nike sneakers and EMS backpack, is some kind of terrorist?

  I could tell the guard’s answer by the look on her face: rules are rules.

  Mary kept talking. Finally the guard picked up my knife and began to walk away. I figured she was searching for a trash can, a big metal one, one that would produce a loud, echoing thunk when she slam-dunked my knife, making a proper example out of this pushy American and his fast-talking guide.

  But no.

  “C’mon,” Mary said.

  We followed the guard back behind the checkpoint to a row of glass offices, waiting as she ducked her head inside the one on the corner. A minute later, a large man in a blue police shirt emerged. A supervisor. He looked rumpled, as if we’d woken him. The guard handed him my knife. Mary renewed her argument. I stood there, trying to seem pathetic.

  The supervisor didn’t look at me or Mary. He looked at the knife, turning it over and over and over in his hands, as if the next time he turned it, it might change color. Finally he looked up, dismissed the guard with a word, and waved over a younger, male security officer. He handed my knife to the kid, who started off. I figured this little drama had reached its end, that my knife was headed into a disposal and I was headed back into line.

  Instead, the officer motioned for us to follow.

  “C’mon,” Mary said again.

  The guard led us deeper into the warren of halls and offices, all the way to the back of the airport, to a security door marked with big, bold Chinese characters that I’m pretty sure must have said, DO NOT OPEN.

  He pushed the door open.

  I was hit by a rush of wind and rain. Two steps forward and I was outside, atop a steel-mesh platform, eye level with pilots seated at the controls of big jets. One of the pilots glanced up, looked at me, then returned to checking his dials and gauges. Apparently he was used to having Americans show up outside his airplane, staring at him in the cockpit. The guard led Mary and me down a flight of stairs and from there out onto the tarmac. The asphalt was greasy underfoot. It smelled of fuel. It wasn’t a comfortable place to stroll, among the tires of giant airliners, staring up at the planes’ bellies, hoping none of them started to move.

  The guard hurried across the tarmac as Mary and I hop-stepped behind him. He led us to the base of a tall, stairlike stepladder that reached up and into the stomach of a plane—our plane. There he halted our procession and called over a baggage handler. A three-way conversation ensued in Chinese. The guard took my knife—he had it all the while—and dropped it into Mary’s open palm.

  “C’mon,” she said to me, for a third time.

  The three of us—Mary, me, and the luggage guy—hustled up the stairs. I had never been inside a cargo bay, although this seemed as good a time as any to go. At the top of the stairs was a small platform. One by one we squatted, then duck-walked through the hatch and into the hold. It was dark inside. And cramped, too small for us to stand.

  Worse, from my perspective, was that the bay was packed floor to ceiling with suitcases of every color and shape.

  “We’ll never find my bag,” I said.

  Mary answered, “We don’t need to.”

  She explained: We needed to find a bag that belonged to someone in our travel group. We would slip the knife into their bag, then retrieve it after the plane landed in Guangzhou. Luckily, the hotel in Changsha had slapped an orange sticker onto every suitcase owned by someone in our group. That sticker was now our grail.

  The baggage guy, crouched in the half-light, pulled a suitcase toward him and turned it over. No sticker. Mary reached for a bag. I grabbed another. Nothing. On his third try, the luggage handler flipped over a big navy blue suitcase—revealing a bright orange circle. Mary checked the name tag. The bag belonged to Tom O’Dea, a travel companion from Kansas.

  “Okay?” she said to the luggage handler.

  He nodded.

  Mary unzipped the outer compartment of Tom’s bag, tucked the knife inside, and sealed the flap. The three of us crab-crawled back across the baggage hold, edged out onto the platform, and scurried down the stairs. The luggage guy went back to his work. The security guard, who had been waiting at the foot of the stairway, led Mary and me in a fast walk through the rain, back across the tarmac to the airport offices.

  Ninety minutes later, I was standing in the baggage claim area of the Guangzhou airport, watching suitcases and duffle bags topple off the conveyer belt and onto the luggage carousel. Somehow I still wasn’t sure that my knife would turn up. It seemed too weird an adventure. But after a few minutes I noticed a familiar blue bag winding its way toward me. I pulled it off the carousel, set it down, and zipped open the side pouch. Nestled beside a Civil War novel was my Swiss Army knife.

  I slipped the knife into my pocket and resealed the bag.

  Looking around, I picked out Tom, whose suitcase I’d just rifled, standing on the far side of the luggage area. I carried his bag to him and explained what had happened, how his suitcase became the conduit for a peculiar little exercise in fulfilling airport regulations.

  Tom’s eyebrows rose behind his glasses. I’m not sure if he believed me. From the look on his face, I don’t think he was entirely certain that somebody who tells such wild stories should be allowed to handle sharp objects.

  IN CHINA, I learned that while anger and gratitude appear incompatible, even opposites, they can sit side by side as the bookends to experience.

  I learned that people you’ve never met in a land you’ve never seen may be willing to consider what you most need and want—and what a child might need and want—and try to maneuver each of you into a position to help the other.

  In China, I learned that wishes can come true, granted by the most unlikely of wizards.

  Whatever I might think of China’s birth-planning policies, its system of orphanages, or its general treatment of women, I recognize this reality: the people running the government did not have to let me have Jin Yu. They didn’t. There is nothing in international law or nation-to-nation politics that compels or even encourages the People’s Republic to allow me to have my daughter.

  A lot of people think China does it for the money, that letting wannabe parents adopt its lost daughters is a way to bring in hard dollars. I don’t try to argue, because I know it’s bunk. The researcher Kay Johnson has shown that while the money that flows to the orphanages is substantial—$100 million during a decade, now $25 million a year—it’s a pittance in the overall Chinese economy. In 2001 China’s total exports totaled $133 billion. The fees from international adoption, Johnson determined, equaled less than two ten-thousandths of that.

  As strange as it may sound, coming from a cynical journalist living in a cynical world, I think China allows me and others to adopt our children for two main reasons: First, because, at the end of the day, these children are worth little to them. Second, and more important, because the people running the government believe it’s a good thing to do. That it’s a right thing to do, a benefit for the kids and the parents, a logical way to create loving families from among groups of people in need of both love and family. I think they see foreign adoptions not only as a way to save a little cost and trouble, but as a means to build links between countries, to forge connections between cultures at the most basic level.

  Obviously the people charged with matching parents and children take care in their work. Among the untold numbers of children in Chinese orphanages, among the thousands of people who ask if they can adopt a child, the government of the People’s Republic decided that only Christine and I should be allowed to have Jin Yu. Only we would be granted the joy of her smile and the pleasure of her laugh. Only we would get to be parents to this phenomenal girl. I wish I knew who in the government made that decision. If I did, I wou
ld kowtow before him, knocking my head on the floor.

  I wish I knew who in the bureaucracy looked at a stack of children’s files on one side of the desk and a stack of American applications on the other, and decided that, among all the possible combinations, our lives belonged together. I don’t think the choice was random. If you were you to take Jin Yu’s referral photo and place it beside a picture of me as a toddler—me in a crew cut, she with her head shaved—you would see a resemblance that borders on the identical. Same mouth, same cheeks, same ears.

  Somehow the government also matched our personalities.

  Christine has long believed that I am the most stubborn person on earth. And I believe it’s not me, it’s her. But both of us agree that Jin Yu is a contender for the crown. The thing is, being who we are, Jin Yu’s stubbornness doesn’t bother us. To us, stubbornness is normal. In another family, Jin Yu’s obstinacy might have driven her parents and siblings to distraction. In ours it’s the opposite. If Jin Yu had proven to be pliant, quick to change her opinion and surrender her will to ours, we’d probably have thought something was wrong.

  I wonder, who took the time to find likeness in our faces and in our hearts? How did this person know that Jin Yu was a good fit for us, and us for her? How did he or she create a family as similar as family could be, consistent and alike but for DNA?

  I know many parents who grapple with those questions, but none who have the answers. Partly that’s by design. The mechanics of the Chinese government’s “matching room” are rarely glimpsed by outsiders. Technically the matching room is called Department 2. By the time an application arrives there, it has already been examined by officials in the Registration Department, and then passed through Department 1, the review room, to ensure that all the paperwork is in order.

  The matching room staffers consider the age of the applicants, and as a result an older pair of parents may be matched with an “older” child. But not always. Photographs too are used as a rough guide, because many Chinese believe that a person’s face reflects his personality.