Dateline: Lakeview Hotel, Hongdu Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, China, 18 August 2004
A lot happens in the last 24 hours.
First to mention: when I checked my email last I got a message from my sister Maggie saying that her Great Wall of China Agency guide back in the summer of 2001 had also been named David. So when we were in the Nanchang old-town district book store yesterday, I asked David if he remembered a Maggie Barnett and her mother Colleen and he said yes, noting that he has always been the only “David” at GWCA in China. He said, “For some reason, I really remember that name.” He was surprised somewhat to hear I was her little brother, but not too much. Two couples in our larger group have had David before, so such connectivity is not that uncommon. Small world.
Yesterday afternoon after we got back from the mall, I went off and did email for a good hour or more while Vonne stayed with Vonne Mei in the room, just chilling. By the time I got back Vonne Mei was pretty unhappy and crying in a way we hadn’t seen before. Based on the excessive drool, the diagnosis was pretty easy: a quick exam of her mouth revealed that her lower two front teeth are soon to be joined by her two upper front teeth—but not fast enough.
We try the Baby Orajel—no luck. We try a dropper of Tylenol—no go. Finally, weary of the wailing, I throw her into the new stroller/car seat combo we brought along for the trip and start wheeling her around the 16th floor corridor.
Now, to explain why that works so well you have to understand the layout of the Lakeview: basically, it’s a grand circular hallway that opens out to a multistoried atrium that extends from the top floor (18) down to the 3rd floor—so quite a stunning space. The diameter of the inner, empty circle is a good 40 yards. You can look across the giant space for about 5/6ths of the circle, the last 6th being a central column of interior enclosed offices. At that point in the circle your inside view is blocked but you are exposed to an outside view that is floor-to-ceiling glass, giving you a stunning panoramic view of the Nanchang skyline, which—quite frankly—beats most cities in the U.S. that I’ve ever been to and I’ve been to quite a few.
So, all in all, it’s a pretty cool circuit that’s designed to catch your eye, which is just what I needed for Vonne Mei. Amazingly, despite her obvious discomfort, she would immediately quiet down so long as I kept the stroller moving around the giant circle. If I stopped for an instant, the wail would kick in. As soon as forward motion resumed, it would stop. It was really quite funny, for the first 45 minutes or so. After 90 minutes she finally conked out. Meanwhile, I had worked up quite a sweat. For you see, while the rooms are kept wonderfully chilled, the halls and giant atrium are barely AC’d, so with the temp above 30 degrees Celsius and the humidity stunningly high, you sweat through your clothing just standing there, much less walking this circuit vigorously for an hour and a half.
Sad thing is, with all this eating of Chinese food, I am not losing any weight, despite all the workouts, like climbing the Great Wall, etc. Food is just too damn good.
Which gets me to my next story: Tuesday night is a group night out arranged by guides David and Kitty—but mostly David. He has a restaurant in mind just off the little island in the middle of the river where the Lakeview Hotel stands in all its neon glory (remembering that it’s in competition with the giant office building across the river with the neon thermometer that runs 20 stories in height and it lit up every night). The plan is a simple one: we congregate in the lobby at 6pm, walk en masse along the river to the restaurant, and then eat family-style around a couple of big circular tables with the requisite glass lazy Susan in the middle, our babies firmly in hand. David would pre-select the menu and it would run us 50 Yuan per adult—or about $15 a couple. Hard to beat for a 10-dish extravaganza replete with Tsing Tao beer and all the green tea you can drink.
So we congregate even though both Vonne and I are feeling a bit drained after working to such lengths to get Mei to finally fall asleep in the stroller. As we wait in the grand foyer, I spot a “Pearl River” stand-up piano, walk over, and start playing “Blue Lagoon” because I can’t remember how to start Pachel Bell’s Canon (yes, it slips from your memory that quickly). After I’m politely shooed away by the staff for messing with their piano (they have professionals come in every evening to play for hours, filling the grand atrium with Beethoven et. al, we head out for our meal in the early evening heat, which is still stunning.
Reaching the restaurant, I note two things: it is extravagantly luxurious and it’s crammed full of Chinese. As usual, we are the only Westerners in sight, so we get a few stares, but less so than out on the street since everyone is here doing their own thing (and the Chinese are pretty boisterous at restaurants here in Nanchang, as our local guide Kitty notes).
Here’s where it gets tricky though: I have never been good with chop sticks in my life, always holding them incorrectly despite many attempts by my brother Jerry to explain how you use them. Well, in Beijing, new friend Zhang Yu showed me very carefully how to hold the sticks and what the basic dynamic principle was (bottom stick doesn’t move, upper stick does all the pinching) and for whatever reason, it just clicked for me then, like when I figured out the high hurdles in track in high school one afternoon after weeks of trying. By the end of the Beijing portion of the trip, I was so good I could eat spare ribs using chop sticks and pick up big pastries end to end, biting off pieces and then putting the main piece back down on the plate. Zhang Yu and company were extremely pleased and all the joking about how bad I was had finally stopped, which pleased me to no end.
Anyway, in the restaurant last night, here was the test: balance Vonne Mei on my left knee and then using the chop sticks with my right, grabbing food off the center circle as it rotated by, feeding myself in short bursts from my plate but mostly feeding Vonne Mei tiny little bits (biggest trick being cutting up breaded pork balls with the sticks and then grabbing small portions and shoving them into her little, always moving mouth). But you know what? Couple of beers in and I’m having a lot of fun here.
Suddenly it hits me: what in the hell am I doing in Nanchang China feeding Chinese food to a Chinese baby using chopsticks? I mean, how exactly did my life turn out like this?
Then Vonne Mei lets loose one of her really big grins and her twinkling eyes betray some much longing and love simultaneously that I got that tingly feeling deep in my gut that I experience every so often—this overwhelming sense of inner joy. I’ve had it maybe a couple dozen times over my life (the first time being a particularly happy Christmas Eve as a kid) and I’ve come to understand it in my adulthood (especially my parenthood) as this karma-like explosion of self-realization—I am exactly who I should be, where I should be, and with whom I should be. Everything fits perfectly. It all makes sense. It is all crystal clear. I haven’t a doubt in the world about anything—at least what I can bring to mind. Complete inner peace. The planets have aligned and I’ve been granted a glimpse of understanding of how amazingly fortunate my life has been.
So I say a little prayer of thanks, grab another bit of pork, flick it expertly into Vonne Mei’s open mouth, and life goes on.
And I think I have a handle on this whole adoption thing, which at moments still finds me oddly ambivalent when I know deep down I can’t possibly be. So what in God’s name am I not getting about this whole thing? What am I not yet seeing in this child?
Vonne Mei’s teething pain returns by the end of the meal and no amount of stuffing baby full of pork is going to alter that, so we beat a hasty retreat to the room where we end up walking and feeding her until fairly late into the night.
For some reason the next day Vonne is up at 0400 and organizing for our big day trip to Yongfeng “county,” which is where we’ll visit the orphanage where Vonne Mei was abandoned back on 5 November 2003, the day after her birth on 4 November. We have a chartered bus for ourselves and three other families, plus guide Kitty and the orphanage director. It’ll be a three-hour ride there and back. Two-thirds of the trip will be on freeway, but one-third will unfold bumpily on a very rough and beat-up road that run for about 60 clicks through a vast plain of rice paddies, ending up in the mountains where Yongfeng begins (Yongfeng being sort of a distributed “city” of many villages collectively known by the county name—the main city in the middle also being known as Yongfeng, with the exact neighborhood where the orphanage is located being Anhui).
We’re riding a mid-sized bus armed with a very aggressive driver. Not too scary on the freeway, as it’s very similar to driving in Rhode Island (lotsa passing on the right and weaving in and out of lanes). But once we hit the raised county trunk that extends through this vast plain of rice paddies, it gets more than a little heart-pounding. Frankly, this guy passes everything in his path, and when I say, “passes everything,” I mean he passes whether or not there is traffic coming in the other direction. If he sees a truck ahead of him and wants to pass, it doesn’t matter if there is another truck or motorcycle coming from the other direction, they just damn well better find a way to let him through. I can’t remember how many close calls there were, just how tired all my sphincter muscles were after a couple of hours of this. About every five minutes the group of passengers as a whole would gasp in unison. There’s nothing quite like roaring down a pothole-filled highway bouncing like crazy while a truck is headed right for you and your driver seems oblivious to the fact that he’s driving in the wrong lane! I got a bunch of it down on video, like I was watching “America’s craziest drivers” or something. It was completely unreal. After a while the hair-splitting misses became almost abstract to me, like I was experiencing it all out of body. I just kept imaging how strange it would be to die in a mangled chartered bus way in the middle of some rural province in interior China.
Here’s a weird foreshadowing to what comes next: on the ride to Yongfeng guide Kitty answers a host of questions about what it was probably like for our babies to be raised by foster parents in Yongfeng (as all four of them were, vice living full-time in the orphanage). In the process she offers this rule of thumb: the browner the baby, the poorer the foster parents, meaning the more tanned the baby at time of adoption, the more likely it was that the foster parents were very poor, meaning baby spent a lot of time outside, perhaps even in the fields along with foster mom.
Now, first thing I noticed about Vonne Mei was her deep golden hue—this beautiful child has spent a lot of time outdoors. This observation is confirmed by the orphanage’s director, who is along with us on the bus in order to tell the driver how to find this out-of-the-way address. She lets us know that Mei’s foster mom was a single woman whose husband had long ago left her for reasons unspoken. She seems a bit uncomfortable telling us that, even as she expresses a lot of deep affection for Vonne Mei, as though they’ve spent a lot of time together.
More on that later.
Anyway, after miles and miles of rice paddies dotted every so often by small groups of oxen and lotus flower clumps (I’ve discovered I pretty much love lotus no matter how it’s prepared), we really hit some back roads and it’s almost like I’m on some remote county trunk in Grant County Wisconsin coming up on Boscobel. The small rounded hills and tight valleys look amazingly like my hometown, although the housing is a lot older and more beat up and it’s all rice paddies instead of corn fields, but topographically speaking, it’s very similar—just add about 10 degrees Celsius and double the humidity.
So after 3 and a half hours we finally arrive at the gate of the compound within which stands the orphanage building, which looks very new (more on that later). So immediately I shoot photos of the gate and its surroundings, because we know Vonne Mei was left at the gate of the orphanage last November, a day after her birth. Once the bus stops inside the compound, kids start running up, none of them belonging to the orphanage, but to the numerous families living in the housing that surrounds the football field-sized compound. If ordinary Chinese stared at us in Nanchang, they went close to gaga over us in Yongfeng, where it seems that Westerners are somewhat rare (we didn’t see one in all our driving that long day). So as soon as we’re off the bus, people are running at us from all directions, including an entire construction work crew which runs over like we’re dignitaries or something.
Actually, a local government official is there to welcome us, even though he has nothing much to say, other than to mutter “knee how” every time we offer the greeting in our own clunky Chinese. So we head into the building with the director, immediately intermingling with the staff of a half-dozen young women, all of whom start reacting very excitedly at the sight of the babies they know so well after these many months, for even though all four were in foster care their entire lives, each spent significant time at the social welfare institute on a regular basis for various “common times” (like health checks).
The orphanage is pretty small really, only the bottom floor of the building. So once you cruise up and down the hall, you’re pretty much done. So while Vonne went deeper inside to meet with and hold various babies living there, I wandered back outside again with Vonne Mei in the baby holster, armed with our Polaroid that takes instantly-developing pictures (yes, that one from the 1970s that spits out the hard-copy immediately, with the picture materializing on the photo paper before your very eyes!).
We brought one along in addition to the digital camera and camcorder because—as always—Vonne had researched this on the Internet and had learned in various chat rooms how much the Chinese love getting a visual reminder—on the spot—of your visit. It had gone over beautifully with our guides in Beijing (Zhang Yu and Jennifer, who declared immediately upon receiving the photos that they would treasure them forever) and it went over just as fabulously this time—yet another tribute to my wife’s amazing ability to visualize a complex and lengthy trip in advance and decide in advance exactly what we would need and know exactly when we would need it. This was only the latest in a very long list of situations where we were the only couple that had THE necessary thing/substance/device. And since we’re talking Vonne, we typically had six of them, meaning we could share all our extras with whoever needed one. This is how I could pull two down Polaroids out of my hat magically in the middle of China one afternoon in August.
First, I offered to take a photo of all the neighborhood kids flittering about. When I tried to snap the photo, all of them dispersed like deer after the first hunter’s gun shot, except for two older girls about Emily’s age, who, bravely smiling, stood their ground and let me capture them on film. When the photo popped out, all the kids immediately surrounded me jumping up and down asking for the picture. Once the image started appearing, they went absolutely bezerk and in the melee one young boy snatched the photo from my hand and the race was on.
After a few moments of them wrestling over the photo and laughing at the image of the two girls, who were acting like immediate celebrities on that basis, I offered to shoot another photo. This time a good dozen kids instantly formed themselves into two lines and mugged vigorously for the camera, the resulting photo producing even louder squeals of delight once the image came into view.
Having accomplished my magic there, I head back inside the orphanage, where I caught on video the director going over Vonne Mei’s original file with Vonne. The file had a six-pack of photos of Vonne Mei’s face on the day she was found, proving that our little girl had a big head of hair the day she was born. Attached to the file was a scrap of the red cloth from the outfit she was wearing when she was abandoned—red being a very big color to the Chinese as it’s a favorite of gift-wrapping.
The date of her abandonment was reported as 11 October 2003. Now we were confused! How could she be abandoned on 11 October if she was born on 4 November? I started getting this weird feeling like something odd was being revealed. The picture was clearly Vonne Mei, and we confirmed that we were all talking about the same person originally designated Zou Yong Ling (the surname Zou being the director’s, the other two given names being ones pulled out of a name book almost randomly by the staff).
Much confused conversation followed but then we got the real explanation: 11 October refers to the Chinese lunar calendar date. The actual normal calendar date of abandonment was indeed 5 November.
First surprise down, more to follow.
After shooting a number of close-ups of the file page, the assistant director cuts off one of the six photos for us to have, something we instantly treasure. No, we couldn’t have the scrap of cloth and no, they did not keep the abandonment note from the parents. As for the person who allegedly found Vonne Mei outside at the gate, this John Doe-like name was recorded without any phone number, as was the norm. The director had gotten rather closed-mouth when Vonne had asked her previously on the bus about what we could find out about this person.
Hmmm. Not exactly suspicious since it’s a touchy subject. Finding out too much about how the abandonment process went down gets you uncomfortably close to finding out who the original parents might be, and keeping them anonymous is pretty much the whole point of this abandonment process—such being the Chinese way of solving the problem of “unwanted” babies (a loaded term if ever there was one).
After that bit of excitement the director started going through the other three kids’ files, so I peeled off and wandered outside again to shoot more detailed video of the front gate for posterity’s sake. Then I came back inside the orphanage after all the files had been discussed and offered to shoot a family portrait of all four families to leave behind with the staff. The director loved this idea and we quickly got the four Polaroids together, with Kitty shooting the three of us. Then the director, clearly ecstatic over the photos (as was her staff, who started playfully fighting one another over who would get which photo), asked it I could shoot a series capturing each new family posing with the entire staff on the stairs. Popping in a new cartridge, I said I would be delighted and we kept snapping out more Polaroids until everybody on the staff had their own pair. To say the camera was the hit of the party would be an understatement—it was the party.
When all the photos were developed and distributed among the staff, our visit came naturally to an end. So off we headed for a pre-designated lunch at a local restaurant with guide Kitty, the director and her assistant.
This was when the surprises started coming in waves.
First, Kitty says, we shouldn’t have bothered shooting pictures of the front gate, because Vonne Mei wasn’t left there, but at another gate. It turns out that the orphanage had moved to this new building just last March. Vonne and I looked at each other in disappointment, only to be told immediately by Kitty that we would stop at the old orphanage location on our way to the restaurant.
Wow, that seemed very nice of them. So we drove to this gated compound that is actually the county government HQ, where the orphanage used to be housed. The director gets out with us and shows us exactly the spot where Vonne Mei was found. We document it all with pictures and video and then have Kitty shoot a family portrait of us three together on the spot. Looking at the picture later on my laptop, both Vonne and I look awfully serious and I guess I have to say in retrospect that we were fairly solemn about the whole thing. You know, it was all very sad despite this strangely joyous moment of discovery: months earlier on this spot someone very deliberately gave up this gorgeous baby girl, knowing very well what would happen, perhaps even hoping openly that this child would find her way to America. How might this person know this? Jiangxi supplies more babies for overseas adoptions than any other, and the Yongfeng Social Welfare Institute had been in the pipeline since 1998, with a very high reputation. “Lucky baby”? There clearly are ways to cut down those seemingly long odds
After this unexpectedly moving moment, we’re back on the bus just like that. Minutes later we’re in front of a restaurant. Kitty announces that in the back alley she will show another couple where their child was found. She heads out with them and the director and we’re left sitting on the bus in front of this restaurant, wondering if it’s the place we’re supposed to have lunch at or not. Most of us guess no, figuring we’re here simply to check out the abandonment site.
As we wait in the bus, Vonne Mei starts getting very excited at the sight of the restaurant, like she recognizes it or something. Vonne’s a bit puzzled at this startling reaction. Then a young Chinese lady rushes out of the restaurant and up to the bus, acting as though she recognizes Vonne Mei. Then, in an instant, she’s inside the bus, asking Vonne if she can help her deal with her obviously agitated baby. This woman is so amazingly forward, we’re not sure what the hell is going on, but Vonne takes her up on her offer of help and goes into the restaurant with her. As I watch, this woman and other staff in the restaurant encourage Vonne, who is holding Vonne Mei in her arms, to go upstairs, where they take turns entertaining baby.
About ten minutes later Vonne emerges down the stairs (I stayed in the bus, figuring our momentous moments were pretty much done for the day) with Vonne Mei clutching a plastic rose in her hand. She tells me what happens, and we agree it’s a bit weird, like these women knew we were coming or something, and like they already knew Vonne Mei.
Both guesses turned out to be true.
When the director and Kitty return with the couple, they announce that we are indeed in front of the restaurant where we’ll be eating. Thus we file upstairs into a private dining room where the very same staff that had fussed so knowingly over Vonne Mei minutes earlier served us a sumptuous ten-dish lunch.
Sitting next to the director at the meal, she seems a bit nervous and anticipatory toward us specifically. So I offer to shoot more Polaroids of the dinner for her to take away, and I do this to her obvious delight.
Then, about halfway through the meal Kitty turns to Vonne and I and suddenly announces that today is our “very lucky day.” Then, boom, the door swings open and in walks a young woman escorted by the same staff that had spontaneously reacted to seeing Vonne Mei on the bus. Kitty announces that this is the “sister,” who happens to work at this restaurant. At this news I am rather stunned.
“The sister?” How in God’s name could anyone know this young woman is Vonne Mei’s sister if she was anonymously abandoned?
Slow down, I am assured, this is not Vonne Mei’s sister but the sister of her foster mother. Turns out the foster mother had her sister watch Vonne Mei many afternoons, and this sister often brought her to this restaurant, so the staff knew our little girl quite well.
Too many coincidences for you? Well, it seemed like a bit of piling on to us too. But what else to do? I shot video and snapped photos, figuring we’d never see this woman again. No one was volunteering her name or contact info. Nor was anyone giving off any vibe of wanting to reveal who her sister was. I shot two Polaroids of her holding Vonne Mei while the director fed her rice with chopsticks, and she seemed almost tearfully grateful to receive them. When we asked if her sister might like a shot of the three of us together, she shook her head no, saying it would be too painful for her to bear.
Then we said good-bye and she was out the door just like that. At this point, the director seemed a lot more relaxed, like she had gotten past a difficult moment.
And frankly, by this point I felt like I was in some Moses story or something, like everyone around us knew the full story and we were basically the only ones in the dark. But you come quickly to the conclusion that this is the answer that has been devised. In this movie mystery, Vonne and I won’t be shown the “killer scene” in which all is revealed. That one was shot by some second-unit director unbeknownst to us, ending up on the cutting-room floor. The process wasn’t set up for us to have that information; it would simply be too painful for some people in this fairly tight neighborhood. We had been invited into that community for a last good-bye—perhaps several more good-byes than the one we were allowed to witness openly.
In the end, our “movie” is the kind where the main characters walk away in a very ambiguous ending, knowing they don’t know everything or perhaps really anything about what really just happened—and that is completely by design.
So we felt awfully grateful on the long bumpy ride back to Nanchang, after this strange day full of weighty and surprising moments. As Vonne Mei slept the whole way back on my chest after a bottle from Vonne, I suddenly felt myself so incredibly bonded to this child. There was no accident in this universe that brought this little beauty to our arms; she was meant for us.
We sleep truly as a family tonight, and for the first time in this trip I feel a strong urgency to bring Vonne Mei back home to her new family—to see Emily, Kevin and Jerry embrace this child each in their own way. We have grown by one and by many at the same time, and we have come to understand both the sacrifice and the generosity that made this glorious event come to pass. We have adopted far more than just Vonne Mei, and I know that now after this very profound day.
As always, what has happened has been fundamentally of Vonne’s doing. Of all the parents in our group, she was the first one to push hard for this trip, working the issue the moment we first met David in Beijing last Saturday. She personally talked all of the other parents who came along with us into going, some of whom were at first quite reluctant to do so, fearing awkward moments would ensue, but all of whom seemed deeply touched by the experience at day’s end.
My wife has a rare vision for life. As an acclaimed futurist and strategist, I can only say that she continues to put my seemingly formidable skills to shame. Today has only reminded me yet again why I fell in love with her and decided to place my entire happiness in her hands.
Tom (for the Vonnes)
