China Ghosts

by Jeff Gammage

  A couple of days later, Guo Hui e-mails from China. She says she is still looking for a reporter in Hunan to handle this task. I’ve already sent Guo Hui the handful of facts I have about Jin Yu’s discovery in Guangxin Alley.

  More than a month passes.

  Guo Hui writes to say she has successfully enlisted the help of a journalist in the city of Xiangtan, and that the reporter has been searching for information about my daughter. So far, Guo Hui says, there is nothing to report.

  Two more weeks pass, with no further word. I hope that means progress, that this is taking time because new and important details of my child’s life are being unearthed.

  I don’t expect the people running the Chinese government to open Jin Yu’s file and shake it out. I don’t expect everything—I just hope for something. A bit of fresh detail to build on, a little evidence that could suggest a new line of inquiry, a few facts I could use as a wedge to pry others loose. If nothing else, perhaps the next time one of my letters shows up in a government office, the people there will recognize my name. Or at least they’ll see that the same person has written again. They might surrender some scraps just to be rid of me.

  Nearly two months after I first wrote to Guo Hui, as I’m starting to lose hope of hearing any news, I log on to my computer to find that she has sent me an e-mail. I click on “open.”

  Guo Hui says she is very sorry.

  She says the reporter did the best she could. She didn’t make a couple of quick phone calls and give up. She traveled to Xiangtan to try to find answers. At the police station, where Jin Yu had been taken after her discovery, the reporter asked the officers if they retained any records, or if someone there might remember the baby or the events of that day.

  The cops told her, in so many words, to get lost.

  She didn’t stop there.

  She went to the door of the orphanage itself—where officials gave her the same response as the police, presumably in kinder terms.

  At the end of Guo Hui’s e-mail, she apologizes, needlessly, for not having discovered any new information. She says there is one thing that might be encouraging. When the reporter talked to the police officers and orphanage administrators, they already knew that somebody in America was trying to find out more about this child. They told her the Hunan Civil Affairs Office was looking into the matter.

  THERE IS only one thing to do, one option left. I see that now.

  I’ll have to go there myself.

  To China. To Hunan. To Xiangtan. To Guangxin Alley, wherever and whatever it may be.

  Finding places and people, gathering information, that’s what I do for a living. I know I can find Guangxin Alley. That’s where I’ll start. I’ll put up signs. I’ll hand out flyers bearing my daughter’s picture, let my foreignness do the work of attracting a crowd. Maybe I’ll set up a tent and camp out, force the police to come and move me. Basically I will create a small public spectacle, and word will get around about the American who has taken roost in Guangxin Alley. Maybe the local newspaper will write about the crazy man who has come looking for his daughter’s past. Maybe a television news crew will shoot some footage, spreading word of my presence far and wide.

  I am happy to play the fool, if that is what it is going to take.

  Of course, I’ll be getting there late, more than three years after Jin Yu was found.

  But this is Xiangtan, not Shanghai. Smaller cities in China don’t change that fast.

  There’s every chance that the people who walk past Guangxin Alley today are the same people who have been walking past it for years, a routine part of their trek to work or to the market. There’s every chance they were there the day the baby was discovered. And that they’ll be there when I show up.

  Jin Yu picking out a pumpkin

  11 EVERY CHILD MY OWN

  EVERY ONCE in a while, I think about that family. About that couple.

  I wonder how they’re doing. If they’re still together. If they managed to construct a protective layer of scar tissue around their broken hearts and keep on, or if eventually just looking at each other became too painful and they went their separate ways.

  Their baby boy had slipped through the belts of his car seat and strangled to death on a strap.

  A couple of days after that, I called them up, introduced myself as a news reporter, and asked if they would be willing to speak to me about the loss of their child and their decision to donate his tiny organs for transplant. The father mostly managed to keep from weeping when we talked.

  They’re not the only ones who come back to me now. There are others, too numerous to count. I thought I’d forgotten them. But I find that now, a decade or more later, now that I’m a parent myself, they come floating into my consciousness, recalled with a detail and clarity that’s both complete and terrible.

  The mother whose vivacious twenty-five-year-old daughter didn’t come home from an evening of dancing at a local nightclub. A month later a man walking his dog found her body, by then mostly bones, lying in the tall grass of a field near the airport. The father whose twenty-one-year-old son was shot through the head when a cop’s gun misfired. The bullet exited just above the young man’s right ear.

  In twenty-five years as a reporter, I’ve covered the stories of sons and daughters who have been shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, burned, drowned, bludgeoned, and run over. I have written more stories about more children killed in more house fires than I can remember or count.

  It never bothered me.

  In the early and mid-1990s, I covered the police department in the city of Philadelphia. That meant that on many days, of the neighborhoods I visited, I went there because someone was bleeding. Usually by the time I arrived the victim had been taken to a hospital, lifted into the back of an ambulance for the mad dash to the nearest trauma unit. But sometimes they were still there, their prone bodies being jabbed and pounded by paramedics frantically trying to restart their hearts or force air into their lungs. Or, other times, when I got there, the person had finished bleeding. Nobody was hurrying then. All that awaited then was a slow ride to the city morgue in the back of a medical examiner’s van, trailed by a carload of wailing relatives.

  I remember arriving at the scene of an accident in South Philadelphia where a four-year-old boy had been crushed beneath the wheels of a school bus. Ribbons of yellow police tape created a sort of three-dimensional frame for a weird, Edvard Munchian still life. A front wheel of the bus had flattened the boy’s head like it was an overripe pumpkin. His little body lay without a scratch, untouched, unblemished, a perfect child’s torso, incongruously set beside the mash that was his head. Twenty feet away the child’s grandfather sat at the front window of his small brick rowhouse, staring out at the wreckage of his grandson.

  It was the grandfather who had helped the boy off the bus and then turned away—just for a second—to assist another grandchild.

  I watched as the police investigators interviewed the witnesses and the accident technicians took their markings, waiting for a ranking officer to come over and brief the gathering crowd of reporters. When the cops finished their work, an ambulance crew loaded the dead boy into a van, lifting him with an unnecessary tenderness. A firefighter took a hose and washed the blood and gore off the street, the high-pressure stream chasing a small piece of brain tissue down the block and into a storm drain.

  After watching a scene like that, I’d go back to the bureau and file a story, writing an account of a tragedy that had taken but seconds to destroy the lives of a family.

  Then, if it was afternoon, I’d invariably do the same thing:

  I’d go to lunch.

  It’s true. I’m ashamed to say it. But it’s true.

  It’s not that I felt no sorrow for the dead or the bereaved. I felt each individual death was a loss and a shame. But I felt no more than that, because from me nothing more was required. The loss of these children was part of the daily mayhem of the city, and documenting that mayhem was my job. I view
ed the trauma the way a medic might view the carnage of a battlefield: I would do all I could. I would do my best. That meant I would tell the stories of the dead—or at least, how their stories ended—as honestly and as completely as possible. I would describe their lives and their last moments fully, offering whatever sympathy might be practicable.

  But there were many things I could not do. I could not bring back the dead, of course. In fact on many days I could barely keep up with their numbers. In the mid-1990s, people in the city of Philadelphia were murdering one another at the rate of once every nineteen hours. That meant there was usually a homicide waiting for me when I got to work, and often another one by the time I left. And the homicides were only the peak of the body count. Car crashes, drownings, falls, and suicides increased the daily toll, often without garnering more than a couple of paragraphs in the next day’s newspaper.

  Today, looking back at that time, and at the reporter who so earnestly went to interview anguished families, I see things differently. Now, I know what it means to love a child. Now I know what it would do to me, to my wife, to my family, if that child were to be lost. If that child were to be taken. Now I understand why newspapers send young reporters to knock on the doors of grief-stricken parents. It’s the same reason governments send young men to fight their wars: they’re the only ones who would do it. Young people don’t know any better. They haven’t had the life experience. They haven’t grown old enough to bear a direct personal loss, or to suffer the graze wound of a near-miss.

  Now, I wish I had the chance to go back. I wish I could return to see all of those parents and talk to them again, to sit with them as my older, wiser self, listening as they recite the details of their baby’s death, their son’s shooting, their daughter’s disappearance. Because now, with a daughter of my own, I know different. A joy—and curse—of having a child is that you are newly able to imagine every child as your own. Now, given the chance to go back in time, I would ask these parents the most obvious question, the one that years of schooling and on-the-job training had not taught me to ask, the one I now see was the most obvious and important: how did you survive?

  You whose child was here one moment and gone the next. How is it that you manage to stand upright, to draw air in and breathe it out? And after that first day, when you awoke and realized it had not been some terrible dream, how did you manage to get out of bed? And on the next day? And the next? And all those that followed?

  Tell me.

  Because I know I couldn’t do it. I look at my daughter and I know that the continuation of my existence is bound to the continuation of hers. That were her heartbeat to cease, mine would surely follow.

  I NEVER had the right words for love.

  Not even to describe my love for my wife.

  There were times early in our life together, as a young couple in our twenties, when money was tight. It’s not that we were living on the streets. We had an apartment, a table, chairs to sit in. But there were plenty of times when we had to choose between having more groceries or more heat, or to make do with less of both. Christine never once grumbled, never demanded that I forget about the newspaper business and find a job that paid real money. Instead she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders while she worked over the stove, cooking the week’s third serving of beanie-weenie.

  I have never had the words to thank her.

  So how do I express my love for my daughter? How does a father quantify his caring, collate his feelings, enumerate his emotions? Do I say that what I feel for Jin Yu is a love of depth and dimension, full and solid? Do I say that I love her with all intensity, that there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her, that were I called upon to trade my life for hers I would instantly agree and consider it a bargain?

  That’s a starting point. But it is so much more than that. Jin Yu makes me comfortable in my soul.

  I delight in the way her eyebrows dance when she’s thinking up a new way to tease me. I laugh at how, at breakfast, she’ll reach out and give me a hard poke on the side of my face and shout, “Cheeky!” I marvel at the way she insists on stopping at the entrance of every store in the shopping mall, to dance to the music flowing from the doorway speakers.

  Me, I’m always thinking about the long term—next week, next month, next year. Jin Yu finds rapture in the moment. And in doing so, she gives me a happy heart.

  I’m astonished that Jin Yu, a child for whom food was once precious, is always willing to share her Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes with our dog, doling out a portion with a fair-minded “One for Mersey.” At breakfast she’ll often insist on setting a couple of Loops aside “for the people,” a notion that strikes me as vaguely, amusingly communist. I’m staggered by the way a child whose daily existence was once dull and repetitive has embraced a rich and elaborate fantasy life, a world where Mary Poppins, Tinker Bell, and Princess Jasmine are constant visitors.

  She refuses to be bound by the past.

  Is my love for her different now than at the moment I first saw her?

  Yes, definitely.

  But it’s different in the way that turning the tube of a kaleidoscope presents a new and striking montage, sparkling gems falling into place as others slide out, all reworking their order to form a new and remarkable montage.

  I didn’t expect that. Actually there were a lot of things I didn’t expect. Becoming a father is like growing a new skin. It makes you aware and sensitive to all kind of new sensations, to experiences heretofore unnoticed and unimagined. My dad must have felt the same way. Fatherhood came late to him, too. He must have been surprised by its influence, by its demands. To see his weekend golf outings and spur-of-the moment get-togethers with friends disappear, relinquished to the needs of a little boy.

  Before Jin Yu came to us, I knew that once she started preschool I would have to get up extra early to make her breakfast. I dreaded the idea. I’ve never been a morning person, and the thought of forcing myself out of bed at 6:30 A.M.—when I was used to sleeping until 8:00—did not fill me with enthusiasm. But our household schedule dictated that I prepare breakfast while Christine got Jin Yu dressed. And I learned something: while I would never get up early to make breakfast for myself, I didn’t—and don’t—mind getting up for Jin Yu. In fact, I enjoy it. I like mixing her cinnamon oatmeal. I like pouring her milk into her favorite pink sippy cup. I like listening to the muffled conversation upstairs as Christine gets Jin Yu into her clothes, anticipating the moment when I will hear my daughter’s feet on the steps. Then I know I’m about to get to see her again after a too-long, overnight separation.

  Loving my daughter is recognizing that what is trivial to me—the fact that her parrot doll is missing, when a dozen other stuffed animals compete for room on her bed—may mean the utmost to her. That knowledge makes my trip back downstairs to search for the parrot less of a chore. Loving Jin Yu is being sure to save the acorn tops she gathers in fall, tucking them into my winter parka pocket for safekeeping, knowing the delight they’ll spark when they’re rediscovered in a couple of months. It’s noticing the way her fingers get chubby before a growth spurt. And how she gets quiet in the days before having a language explosion.

  Having a daughter has taught me to live at low altitude, close to the ground, where children live, a world where a smooth flat rock is a treasure and a straight piece of stick is a find. It’s taught me to set my body clock—at least on weekends—to child standard time, a time zone where there’s always an extra minute to examine the stem of a dandelion, imitate the goggle-eyed stare of a goldfish, or stroke the softness of a duck feather found by a pond. It’s taught me the essential, secret truth known to parents everywhere: if you’ve seen one dirty diaper, you’ve seen them all.

  I’ve discovered that children actually perform very few daily activities that do anyone any measurable good. Their actions have no utility. People say that their play is their work, but that’s not true. Their play is their play. Nothing that children do meets any deadline or adds any value. />
  It puts the lie to everything we think is important.

  Because nothing is more fun or more important than spending time with Jin Yu.

  I know that I view my daughter from a specific vantage point, different from the perspective other parents may have on their children. Other parents look at their kid running on the playground and they see the smiling face of an angel, come all the way across the blacktop to present them with a bouquet of purple wildflowers. I see that too. But when I see Jin Yu running toward me, I also see the losses she has borne to reach this point. I see all she has had to sacrifice. When I watch Jin Yu dash across the playground, behind her I see the trailing outlines of children left behind, of friends still in China, of brothers and sisters unknown.

  Those ghosts don’t seem to torment her. Not yet. For Jin Yu, life’s challenges are immediate.

  For some reason, she is scared to cross the living room, which divides her play area from the kitchen. She’ll stand in the sunroom entrance, her tiny feet moving up and down, like a track star settling into the starting blocks, her arms turning at a slow pump, as if helping her build up an electric charge of courage. Then she takes off—arms flying, knees swinging, not stopping until she emerges, safe at last, on the far side of the living room.

  There, a smile bursts onto her lips. Another challenge conquered.

  Jin Yu is terrified of loud noises, and particularly of thunderstorms. Some nights, when the crash of clouds rattles the windows, she will run crying into our room. But on others, the noise just as loud, she steels herself, refusing to flee. When I go into her room to check on her, she is sitting up in bed, fingers plugged in her ears, trying to block out the rumbling.

  I love Jin Yu because she confronts her fears. And because I know there was a time when she didn’t have a choice.