The Exact Same Moon

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  She burps like her father. The burps come out like little jokes, each followed by an expectation, a quick scan to see who in her audience appreciates how terribly funny that noise is. (She laughs, like her father, at her own jokes.)

  She sleeps like her father. Out like a light, instantly. You can open all the windows, play loud music, you could probably bring in a tuba player, and like Alex, she’ll lie motionless.

  She sings like her mother. Off-key, and with abandon. As we walked the streets of Nanjing last week, she hung off the front of me in a blue corduroy sling singing “Laa-waaa-waaa-laaa!” in a voice so loud, it turned heads.

  She is a happy-go-lucky baby. She is cheerful. In the morning she lies in her crib and plays with her toes.

  Just as I did as a baby.

  How does it work? It makes you wonder. All that business of character and personality, all those tendencies we see in our children that remind us of us. How much of it is the passing on of genetic material and how much of it is plain, ordinary old searching for ourselves to make a connection? It makes you wonder how much of what our children become is us seeing what we want to see, or us seeing what we’re afraid to see, or in any case it’s the parents seeing, and then saying, and seeing and saying until the image and child are one.

  Alex and I have been sending e-mails once a day to family and friends back home. Last night, in my e-mail to my mom, I told her about Anna playing with her toes in the morning; I told her, “She’s such a cheerful child.”

  “Just like you!” my mother wrote back. Just as I expected. I loved reading that. I loved the confirmation. “And you know, I was like that, too,” my mother went on to write. I knew she would add this, too. (This was a set-up.) I loved the confirmation; I loved thinking of my mother, me, Anna as a continuum.

  You might think: But really, now. How can Anna be a cheerful child? She was abandoned at the gate of a hospital at just two weeks old and then lived for ten and a half months in an institution, for heaven’s sake. She should be … traumatized. She should be angry. She should be spending her infant mental energy brewing up a lifelong feeling of victimization, a “Why, God, why me?!”

  I suppose you could project any of that onto her, if that was the theme you had to bring. But that is not my theme. And so I don’t see it in her. I just don’t.

  Out my window I see the streets of Kunshan bounce by. It’s a peaceful, modern city, not too far from Shanghai. China is so much more colorful than I had imagined. I don’t know what I was expecting. Something … Soviet, perhaps? I spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union, back in the early 1990s when I covered its demise for Life magazine. The bread lines, the milk lines, the vodka lines that inevitably erupted into riots—it was all so difficult and exciting and depressing. It was like being in the brain of a very miserable teenager. I remember rows and rows of drab cement apartment houses, as far as the eye could see. I remember a cab driver secretly selling me a sausage. Mostly, though, I remember an absence of color, an absence of joy.

  The China I’ve seen bears no resemblance to those sad and surreal images. In the China I’ve seen there is music in the streets, and performers doing yo-yo tricks, and while many of the buildings appear flimsy as paper, the rooftops with the ubiquitous curlicues on either end signal a playfulness that seems a mixture of tradition and hope. That design element is said to symbolize the tails of the dragons sitting on those roofs, dragons bringing good luck to all those who enter beneath.

  The China in which I’ve become immersed in the last five days has been all play and hope and color and peekaboo. Ah, yes. Did I mention that Anna plays a mean game of peekaboo? And not just on command. She’ll actually start the game. She’ll be in her crib playing with her toes, and when she sees you looking at her, she will grab her blanket and pull it up, then down, doing the whole peekaboo deal all by herself. This is a particularly fetching routine. This is the sort of thing a parent sees that helps her make the determination that her child is the most brilliant creature to set foot on this Earth—a tendency that all new parents seem to have, no matter what else they are bringing to the table in terms of projection. The thing about your child is, she is more amazing than other children, she is truly a genius, she is so-smart-she-scares-you, she is more special than special, she is an angel, a heavenly creature who, due to her own vastly generous spirit, has agreed to lower herself and appear before us mere mortals.

  This, I am discovering, is just how it works.

  Alex must have been noting this, too. I mean, this must be exactly why he said what he said a few days ago in the van when we were still in Nanjing, when our group was still quite large. It was just two days after our babies were placed in our arms. And you could tell everyone in that van was in love. There was this continued, prolonged hush of … love. And I guess that’s why Alex said it. Shouted it, actually. “So,” he said. “Does everyone think they got the best one?”

  He got a good laugh. Oh, it was so crude and so true. We could each acknowledge that the other babies were … cute. But none of them was quite as special as our own.

  “The best one,” I whisper in Anna’s ear, as I give her another Cheerio. “I still can’t believe I got the best one.”

  She has come a long way in just five days. When we first got her, on that first day, she couldn’t sit up. She couldn’t roll over. She had virtually no muscle tone. That’s not something a regular old American is used to seeing. At eleven months old many of your basic Gerber babies are already standing, or even walking, and here was this baby, belly-bound. I gave her a set of stacking cups to play with, and rather than sit up and stack them, or clickety-clack them together as most babies her age would, she would merely examine them, lying on her back, holding them up to her eyes, turning them around and around with a kind of glee. It broke my heart, watching her play like that. It was … odd. It was not the sort of animated play you’d see a blubbery baby in a Pampers commercial do.

  If I hadn’t read so much about what to expect, I suppose I would have been alarmed. But many babies coming out of institutionalized care are delayed in some way. Babies who don’t get “floor time”—the opportunity to simply play on the floor, reaching for toys and squirming around under the watchful eye of amazed and delighted and cooing parents—are going to be way behind their peers who grew up with families since day one.

  What’s amazing is how quickly they can catch up. In less than a week Anna has gained muscle tone in her torso. She is able to sit up now, and roll over. It has been the most remarkable thing to watch, like seeing a flower opening in time-lapse photography.

  We’re stalled here in traffic, and I’m watching a swarm of businessmen on bicycles overtake us, and I’m thinking that Alex and Anna and I, as a family just forming, we probably look like a flower opening in time-lapse photography, too. As a family, we’ve gone from bud to bloom in no time at all.

  Those first few days, I was so tentative. I wasn’t quite sure how to hold Anna, how to feed her, how to most comfortably change her shirt, and when she would poop, I would have to leave the room and turn the parenting over to Alex. He was remarkably good about this. He seemed to have something of a hero thing going on with the poopy-diaper deal. Like he was being a hero in my eyes and a hero in Anna’s eyes. Which, I have to tell you, he was. And that wasn’t a bad role for him in my eyes, and probably not in Anna’s either. And so as long as the hero thing was working for him, well, a dad on diaper duty was working for all of us.

  I love watching him play with her. They’ll roll around on the floor, and she’ll tug his nose and poke his eyes, giggling like Hey, this guy, this guy here puts on a helluva show. And he’ll laugh a laugh I’d hardly ever heard before, a deep, low guffaw. Before my eyes I’ve watched Alex get … young. It’s as if he’s shedding years right there on the floor, like a snake slithering out of a too-tight skin. But I guess that’s one of the things love does to people.

  Alex and Anna go to breakfast together; that’s their thing. I sleep in. That’s
my thing. Later, after a morning of some sight-seeing, we usually come back to the hotel, and I curl up with Anna on the bed for a nap. That’s our thing. (I am doing an awful lot of sleeping.) And Cheerios in the van, that’s our thing, too. We’ve already figured so many things out. I know exactly how she likes to be held; I fling her around like an old pro, and I can change her clothes with my eyes closed, and while I have not yet changed one poopy diaper thanks to a heroic husband (enabler?), I’ve got the feeding thing down, the spoon at the right angle so I can shovel in and wipe with one efficient motion, no mess, no fuss, I’m a mom.

  “You okay?” Alex says to me, elbowing me out of my mom reverie.

  “Huh?” I say. “Oh, I’m about a six,” I say. “Maybe a seven.”

  “Huh?”

  “Carsick quotient.”

  “Oh. Well, actually, I meant are you okay with what we’re about to do?”

  “I’m okay,” I say. “I’m thrilled, in a way.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, I want to see it, and I don’t want to see it.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  We have no reason to believe that visiting the orphanage is going to be some horrific experience. Quite the contrary.

  We’ve met with the orphanage director, Chen Wei Guo, several times already, and when he spoke about the orphanage, it was with pride. I get the sense that Kunshan Welfare Institute, a brand-new facility, is one of the jewels of China’s orphanage system. While many families who request a visit to their child’s orphanage are politely declined, our request was met with eagerness.

  Mr. Chen has been a constant surprise to us. I don’t know what I was expecting an orphanage director to be like, but I’m sure it wasn’t him. During one of our meetings to go over some documents, he handed me a large green box. Inside, wrapped in delicate tissue paper, was a framed silk tapestry. The image embroidered on it was of a panda and her cub. “My gift to your family,” Mr. Chen said.

  I didn’t know what to say. This was not at all how I imagined it would be.

  Then he handed me a small red box. This gift, he said, was for Anna.

  I opened the box and found in there a pendant, a rabbit carved of jade. A rabbit because Anna was born in the Chinese year of the rabbit, he said. And jade because of the name she had at the orphanage. Pretty Like Jade.

  I looked at him. Through Sophie, who was translating, he said, “She will take this home to America from me.”

  He said, “I would like to request that you take good care of this precious girl.”

  I had no words. Or the words I had seemed so tiny compared with this man’s gesture. This was not at all how I imagined it would be. I pictured a lot of things, but I never pictured a loving orphanage director handing me a prayer in a red box.

  “Thank you,” Alex said finally. “We are honored to accept this. We feel embraced.”

  That was a good way of saying it.

  Embraced. By him and by the Chinese people in general. They have been as welcoming as they have been inquisitive. Strangers selling oranges, or hats, or teapots, tend to stare at us, at our babies, back at us. I wonder what they know, what they understand of our stories. I think of what we know, what little we understand of theirs. I can only conclude that there must be quite a legend passed among these people. People who have learned to live with the notion that every family is entitled to one, just one, child. People who perhaps all know of at least one woman whose only choice was to leave her baby on a street corner. People who seem to want to believe in some happily-ever-after story, because these people, when they see us, when they see these westerners carrying their babies as we tour their cities and their gardens and their silk factories, these people don’t look at us with disdain or spite or indignation. Instead, these people cry out, in English: “Lucky baby! Lucky baby!”

  And it’s funny. I mean, each time it happens, I must have the oddest look on my face. I think, lucky? You mean Anna? Oh, well, wait a second. You’ve got it backward. We’re the lucky ones.

  It has barely begun to hit me how monumental this task is going to be. This privilege and this challenge of raising a girl born in a culture that I can never understand. Raising her with respect for a heritage that, at best, I can know only as an onlooker. Raising her with a consciousness that I can’t, myself, ever have. Quite apart from the issues any child who was adopted will have to one day face, there will be all of this.

  And there is me. I’m just a … mom. And there is Alex. He’s just a … dad. We’re just two people, making a family, longing for belonging just like anyone else. And I suppose just like anyone else who gets the prize, who is lucky enough to get the gift of a child, we have what comes with that gift, a responsibility as wide as the world. Responsibility looks different from parent to parent. And this, so far, is one thing I know about ours.

  Someone once told me that being adopted outside of your native culture means forever holding the contradiction of belonging and not belonging, of feeling at home and wondering where home is. I thought that was such an interesting observation, especially since it is the very contradiction I believe myself to be walking around with. Belonging. Where do I belong? How do I know if I really belong? And I grew up with my biological parents right there in the next room. And I never got yanked out of one culture and plopped into another. So I don’t know. Perhaps I’m not alone. Perhaps the contradiction of belonging and not belonging, of feeling at home and wondering where home is, perhaps that is the contradiction of being human.

  So, all right. So Anna spent nearly a year of her little life in an orphanage. So that’s her story. Let’s see it. Bring it on. It’s a memory we need to go get, for her. It’s a memory we’ll need to hold and protect and figure out what to do with, how to give it to her when the time is right.

  The van has stopped outside of a large complex of buildings, white with green tile roofs.

  I recognize it from the photographs that our agency sent.

  The orphanage is huge, brand new, so new the trees’ trunks are still wrapped, as if they were planted just last week. Come to think of it, it reminds me of my parents’ retirement village. Well, that’s weird. That’s oddly circular.

  “And so this is our destination,” says Sophie, standing up.

  She’s a petite woman with serious eyes and a fierceness about her. The actual orphanage, she explains, is just a small part of this campus, which also includes a home for the elderly and a hospital.

  As we climb out of our van, I see Mr. Chen waiting for us in the driveway. He’s standing in front of the facility with his hands behind his back, a polite and important stance. He’s young, maybe thirty-five, a compact man with a wide brow and a suit and a tie and a yellow sweater vest. When he sees me, he becomes animated. He is saying something to me. He is pointing to the sky.

  Sophie is listening to him, saying “Oh?” and “Oh!” And then to me: “He is telling you that this mountain behind us, this is Jade Mountain.” Mr. Chen is smiling, bowing, smiling. “This is the mountain she was named after.”

  It’s a small mountain, really just the peak of one rising like a pyramid out of the flat earth, and it has a pagoda on top.

  “Oh!” I say, unsure what to make of this.

  “Anna,” Alex says. “Your mountain!” But she is sound asleep, hanging here in the blue corduroy sling.

  I pick up her hand, wave to the mountain. “Hi, mountain,” I say, trying to figure out what Anna might have to say to this mountain. “You’re very pretty, mountain.”

  “Pretty Like Anna,” Alex says.

  We are toured through the campus, which is eerily peaceful. It could be a movie set. It’s hard to figure out where all the people are. The “baby house” is the smallest of the buildings, way off in a corner, and it has a swing set out front. As we enter, we are told to put our cameras away.

  It smells like kindergarten. That’s the first thing that bowls me over. It smells exactly as I remember kindergarten. Perhaps they use the same cleaning
solution? In the foyer there’s a bulletin board decorated with paper snowflakes, and photos of children that I scan until I find, yes, I find Anna. There she is! I pick up Anna’s hand, wave to the photo of Anna, the old Anna, the Anna who used to live here. In the photo she’s with a group of other babies, all of them in little walkers, kind of clogged there in the corner, like bumper cars in an amusement park. She appears to be studying the feet of the baby next to her, studying them as if to say, “You mind giving me some room here?”

  How strange to see her life before Alex and I entered it. How fantastic and unexpected to see her honored on a bulletin board. “Hi, Anna!” I say again, waving her little hand at the picture. But she is sleeping through all of this.

  We are moved along quickly, up the steps, down a hallway lined with pictures, the sort of artwork made by children that teachers hang to impress parents. Except there are no parents. Except, well—us. We are told that there are about sixty children living here now, and two dozen “nannies” to care for them. We are escorted into a play area.

  Anna pops awake. Maybe it is the smell? Maybe the sounds? There are four nannies in the room, all of them dressed in white. They see Anna in my arms, and Emily in Debbie’s arms, and they come rushing toward us. One of them reaches out, pleading with me. “Of course, of course,” I say, and I hand Anna to her.

  Of course?

  Anna goes without resistance, and the woman carries her away, to a corner, to a toy bear. Perhaps it is a favorite toy, perhaps it is something special they shared. When the nanny returns, she is jiggling Anna, singing a song. Then she points to me. “Mmaa!” she says. “Mmmaaa!”

  She is trying to get Anna to say it.

  “Mmmaa!”

  Anna does not say it. She looks at the woman. She looks at me, like “What, you two expect me to perform on command?”

  The nanny is laughing. I am laughing. By the time we leave that room, the nanny is saying good-bye through tears.

  Mr. Chen, who at this point is starting to remind me of a kinder, gentler Ghost of Christmas Past, leads us next to a room prepared with a banquet.