by Scott Simon
You feel useless, worthless. You feel that somewhere deep inside your cells, you have betrayed and failed the person you love most.
You lower your drawers, give injections, jump at the jangle of the telephone, and wait for results. You wait for a miracle. A miracle was ahead. We just didn’t know yet that it would take the form of two small girls who would be born to people we didn’t know on the other side of the world.
MY WIFE AND I had talked about adoption during our whirlwind courtship. But it was one more dream on our list, along with seeing the Taj Mahal, living in Europe, and working in a Masai village.
We were going through some old framed office photos one day when we came upon one of me surrounded by laughing, smiling young boys, my arms outstretched to try to hold them all. It was a picture taken in an Ethiopian orphanage. I remembered that day—their blindingly bright smiles, their thin, soft arms as I hauled them onto my shoulders and held them to my chest, and most of all, the beautiful musical peal of their laughter. One of the orphanage officials said, “They’re not used to someone loving them, picking them up and kissing them, almost like a mother.” I went to sleep that night thinking of those boys. I felt them against my arms. I had always gotten on well with children (or at least seemed to amuse them), but it’s safe to say that any parental instincts I had were invested in my cat.
Then I went to a party at a friend’s house in Brooklyn, hit my head on the door getting out of the taxi, met Caroline Richard, and finally felt a love so huge it had to be shared, which I still think is the best reason to have children. When we got married a few weeks later, friends said, “But I thought you were the one that got conked in the head!”
ALL KINDS of adoptions are done today, in all kinds of ways. Expectant mothers can find lawyers who will look for a good family for the baby they know they do not want or cannot keep. This kind of private arrangement used to be done across town; today, it can almost as easily be worked out between a mother in Tashkent and a couple in Topeka. Couples can locate expectant young mothers and work out ways to take parental responsibility for the child they will bear that will keep the birth mother in their lives, too. There are women who bear children for other women, in which a formal adoption may or may not be part of the agreement, but some legal instrument is drafted to fix parental rights and obligations.
So many various technologies—communications and legal devices as much as fertility sciences—have created scores of new, cunning, complicated, and rewarding ways to have a family in addition to well-established agencies and programs. Caroline and I didn’t weigh and reject them. But we’d been around the world, after all. My wife is French, so we were already a family of different nationalities. International adoption reflected where we had been, what we had done, what we learned, and who we were. I thought about the little boys in Ethiopia. I remembered sleeping on the streets to do stories about children who lived in roving bands in Rio and San Salvador, and all the little boys and girls in Kosovo, Calcutta, and Bangladesh whom I had held when they reached out, only to give them back. We weren’t trying to do anything good—which meant that we also didn’t reproach ourselves for not investigating domestic adoption more deeply. International adoption just seemed to fit.
So first, we looked into some areas of the world in which we had some personal experience, including Ethiopia, Bosnia, and India. Some programs were closed to us because of age (mine, to be sure, not my wife’s). Others permitted adoption only in “special circumstances,” which usually meant being the relative of an orphaned or abandoned child (covering the siege of Sarajevo and writing a novel about it didn’t qualify). Some countries in which I’d covered conflicts—and this is good news—just didn’t have substantial numbers of children available for adoption. Extended family members (and this is humbling) take children who are sometimes only distantly related into their lives.
We explored programs in other places, especially central Asia, that were known to have an abundance of orphaned children. But we got confusing information about the length of the wait, and we heard too many stories about families who had made multiple trips and paid manifold bribes only to be told, “The child that was supposed to be yours? There’s been a delay. You’ll have to come back …” We didn’t mind slipping an envelope to some apparatchik with an open palm (I am a Chicagoan, after all). But after all our frustrations in the lab, we couldn’t bear the thought of making room in our hearts, then returning empty-armed.
Coming back from Amman once, I sat next to a UN official (Egyptian) who had recently been to orphanages in North Korea. His voice broke as he described seeing hundreds of frail, abandoned infants smiling and reaching up to him with matchstick arms. “You want to scoop all the children up,” he said. “My wife and I want to adopt at least one little boy.” Impulsively I told him, “So would my wife and I. No attention, no news story. We just want a child to love.” We exchanged cards and embraces, but nothing worked out for either of us. Nor, as of this writing, for any of North Korea’s orphans.
MY WIFE AND I had fallen in love in New York’s Chinatown. Some nights, we’d trip home at dawn to the industrial a cappella of the iron grates over Chinatown shops being rolled up to reveal tiny, jam-packed storefronts, and see men in high boots bearing huge, bewhiskered, bug-eyed fish destined for tanks and crags of ice. Caroline led me by the hand through a twisting alley into a nondescript building that thrummed with the clack of mah-jongg tiles and the keening of Chinese opera. She had been to Shanghai on business and loved it. As a lover of great cities, I had learned a long time ago that if you need to find a restaurant, pharmacy, or grocery open late at night in New York, London, or Toronto, head to Chinatown. We cherished the late night and early morning energy of Chinese places around the world.
Thus when we began to look into international adoption programs and got to China’s, we stopped. There were millions of orphaned children (fifteen million, according to the current estimate) in China. The reasons were hideous. But the Chinese program seemed forthright, reliable, and—forgive me for putting it this way, it was reassuring at the time—businesslike. You met certain tests, paid fixed fees, and received a child within about a year, no spurious delays or hidden charges. You could trust that there would be a baby at the end of China’s onerous process.
So we filled out forms. And more forms. Financial disclosure, credit history, medical, legal, and personal forms. You have to submit to a criminal background check, and while unseen bureaucrats spend weeks fussing in fusty old files (well, probably sleek new digitized ones) to ascertain that you are a stranger to them, your anxious, idle mind roams wildly. Could my name be among a hundred that an international drug kingpin, arsonist, or desperado maintains as an alias? Could the three books that I neglected to return to the Chicago Public Library in the eighth grade have accumulated enough daily fines to earn an arrest warrant for grand theft? That weekend in French Lick that I have a hard time remembering—could it be that …?
We had to get letters of recommendation and found ourselves pondering which friends’ names would be the most impressive. Politicians and press agents probably feel similar perplexities over endorsements. “Well, he’s nice and all,” you hear yourself saying. “But really, what does his name mean in Lijiang, Tianjin, or Chengdu?” You overhear yourself asking each other, “Don’t we know some doctors? The Chinese love doctors. What about the one—oncologist, urologist, I forget—that we met someplace, remember?” Actors? Useless, unless we knew Jackie Chan. My oldest boyhood friend, the rabbi, might go over well in New York. But do rebbes rate in China? Another close friend is a Franciscan priest. Whoops—too close to a missionary. The Boxer Rebellion was not a protest by Muhammad Ali, after all. We have a lot of close friends who are journalists and writers. Journalists and writers? Not exactly high in the Chinese hierarchy, unless you count political prisoners. We have several close friends who are Chinese. But they weren’t living in New York or Chicago because they were fans of the Chinese government (and besides,
they had a discouraging habit of writing searing personal memoirs).
And then we were told that the Chinese distrusted Western journalists (come to think of it, so do I). We were told that they worried about Western journalists inserting themselves into the adoption network in order to travel around and see a different side of China. The thought that an American reporter would go through the stress, duress, and expense of adoption just to get some kind of inside story on China was, of course, preposterous. Still, on the advice of our adoption agency, they listed me as “Author of sports books.” I hoped that we wouldn’t get into an interview and have an official ask, “How ’bout those Jiangsu Hopestars?”
NO SINGLE HOOP that we were asked to jump through was onerous or ludicrous. Criminals should not adopt children. Neither should drug addicts, excessive drinkers, abusive spouses, louses, or tax cheats. But the overall effect of all the questions and tests can be oppressive, especially as months roll on without word of a child. Most of the documentation that you have to complete expires after twelve months, for reasons I respect (over the course of a year you can get sick, go broke, or get arrested). So when the wait that you were told might be six to nine months goes past twelve, you have to complete new forms (and pay new fees) all over again. Grrr, grrr, grrr. It’s not the cost (though that pinches), or the time (though that grinds). After a while, it’s the sheer galling indignity of being asked to prove, pay, and prove all over again that you’re a worthy parent. Any true parent will tell you that that is impossible to prove in advance.
We had several interviews with a thoroughly nice and wise social worker. Those sessions were fine, even enriching. We posed for a “family picture,” which naturally included our cat, Leona. Then our adoption agency told us that Chinese people do not consider cats to be pets (what do they consider them, God forbid—plat du jour?) and we should leave her out. We posed once more, careful to flick the cat hairs from our living room sofa.
Friends we have in China are puzzled and amused to learn that they do not consider cats to be pets. They own cats themselves. More telling yet: the first word that we heard from Elise when we brought her home was when she wiggled a small arm at Leona and said, “Mao! Mao!” I asked my wife, “How young do they start brainwashing these kids?” Mao, I soon learned, is Mandarin for “cat.” It’s a fair guess that Elise saw one or two in her foster home or orphanage.
We had to have fingerprints taken to clear our criminal records. I turn out to be afflicted with light fingerprints, a condition shared by about two percent of the population. The grooves and ridges of my finger pads are too light to satisfy the criterion for positive identification. (Oy. First, doctors question my sperm motility. Then light fingerprints. Will the humiliations never cease?) I kept returning to a grim third-floor office downtown to have another set of prints made, waiting my turn among a group of sullen parolees who had to do the same. As each new batch was rejected, my exasperation grew. “The Internal Revenue Service sure knows who I am,” I pointed out. “They don’t send back our checks uncashed and stamped, ‘Who He?’”
During both our adoptions, we were seriously concerned that we might get the summons to travel but be unable to leave because of my undistinguishable digits (against all expectation, we light-fingered Americans are actually easier for law enforcement authorities to identify, because we are so few, which made our predicament seem especially silly). We asked members of Congress to intercede on our behalf with Homeland Security (they will do that for just about anybody). Each time, the FBI supplied a letter at the last moment, confirming that I was not (at least not yet) on their Most Wanted List.
All the conferences, forms, documents, and even expenses fill time, at least. What’s hardest is the wait, and the months—or years—of what seems unfathomable delay. People ask, “What’s up with your adoption?” You say you’re just waiting. “But everything’s okay, right?” You say you assume so. After hearing this two or three times, even good friends will say, “That’s a long time. You know, maybe you should have …” followed by some friend-of-a-friend anecdote claiming that some fantastic bootleg scheme would have worked better than your naïve belief in observing the rules.
But worse were the associations and lists that posted reports that purported to explain what was going on. We heard that adoptions would be stopped, and we heard that they would be hastened. We heard that adoptions would resume in six weeks, in six months, and not for two years. We heard that China was so disgraced by all the stories in the Western press about the thousands of abandoned Chinese children adopted overseas that it would stop international adoptions before the Beijing Olympics. Or that the government would step them up before all the international media could arrive. It reminded me of the nervous talk among soldiers in the field who know nothing but have everything figured out. “Well, I heard from someone who has a friend who works at a bank in Dayton that does a lot of business in China that …”
To join these lists is to understand why the Internet has become both the greatest instrument for communication and the preeminent means of relaying misinformation in the history of the world. People who know nothing pass on misinformation and inferences to people who are so hungry for information that they prefer hearing nonsense to no news.
IN THE END I had only myself to blame if, after all the waiting and indignity, our adoption was not approved. We had Elise in our arms for our final interview with Chinese officials. A man on the other side of the desk sitting under the red flag with the yellow stars asked, “What kind of education will you give your daughter?”
I guess I had just grown weary of all the questions, the prying, the feeling like a pincushion for barbed official requests and an automated teller machine for agencies discovering another fee to be paid. Caroline says that I began to swagger before her very eyes, as if sitting up on a horse, tucking my reins and my rifle beneath my chin, and announcing, “Enough of this chitchat, hombres. We’re taking our girl and getting out of this dusty one-horse town.”
“She will have the best education we can give her,” I told the officials. I could hear my voice rising and tightening. I could feel cords knotting in my neck. “She will learn whatever she wants to and whatever she can. You see, she’s going to be an American. She can be anything that she wants to be.”
Caroline noticed the bureaucrats shifting in their seats as I delivered my Rooster Cogburn speech. She held up her hand to take over.
“She will be an architect or a ballet dancer,” she told them, and they sat back and smiled with relief. They just wanted to know that we had a plan. French is the language of diplomacy, even when spoken in English.
There was one more moment to make us squirm. As we bent down to sign more sheaves of paperwork for Elise, an official praised the care children received in state orphanages and in foster homes. “Very fine people work for us,” he said. “But every now and then we have a problem. Sometimes, one of the workers falls in love with a child. They will take the child and disappear in the middle of the night, and run off hundreds of miles away, because they do not want to give up that child.” My wife and I stiffened as he leaned over.
“Don’t worry,” he cooed with reassurance. “We find them. We deal with them. We bring the children back.”
Caroline and I muttered. Small grunts and rumblings to ask only each other, “And throw the poor people who love that child into a dungeon? Why not just let them be?”
Elise was in our arms. We would say nothing, including what we believed, to risk losing her.
IT IS HARD to want to adopt just one child from China. Even the briefest glimpse of the vast scale of the adoption network, and the number of children languishing inside it, leaves you shaking your head and thinking, “We want another.” That may be why the Chinese insist that you wait a year before applying to receive another child. A full year of sleepless nights, tantrums, and leaky diapers may be meant to burn away solely sentimental interest.
We were convinced that a sibling for Elise, and
a second child for us (almost certainly another daughter), would apply the right amount of orbital gravity to all concerned. The wait for children from China had lengthened. But there was no question that we would return. We weren’t trying to put together any kind of all-star team of children adopted from different datelines of distress, and we thought that two sisters from China could amplify and support each other for life. Parents can make only part of the journey with their children. We wanted each of our daughters to have a running mate through life.
The day after Paulina came into our lives, we went to the adoption center in Nanchang to fill out more paperwork and present ourselves to another committee, and then another. Caroline carried Lina in her arms. Elise wanted a little special attention and asked to ride on my shoulders. I scooped her up and settled her behind my neck. As we walked up the gray stone steps of the building, she sang a little song over the din of car horns and bicycle bells in Nanchang traffic: “I’m … riding on the shoulders … of our daddy!”
ANY PARENT’S CHRONICLE of their family will jump between times and stories, because every mother and father sees their child in composite. In our eyes and hearts, they are several ages all at once. The headstrong teenager in front of us gets all mixed up with the infant we used to carry and cuddle, the grown, well-spoken father with the sniffling, babbling tyke.