Dateline: Lakeview Hotel, Hongdu Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, China, 19 August 2004
It was a day totally lacking in profundity, surprises, or larger meaning—and very welcome at that.
Today was the day to catch up on everything possible: emails, organizing schedules, what was going on in the world back home, reorganizing our gear, washing lotsa laundry, another trip to Walmart and a local department store for supplies, getting those last items on our China shopping list (e.g., tea set from famous local porcelain maker)—and birthdays for all these Chinese babies.
Actually, on the last one, it wasn’t a matter of catching up for our little girl, since she’s well short of her first birthday. In fact, while most of the other seven babies are more than a year old, Vonne Mei has just passed nine months, making her the youngest of our group—neither good nor bad, just the way it is. Actually, we feel like we got her just in time. Why? After nine months Vonne Mei was slated to return to the orphanage, apparently having run out her allotted string on foster care time. So our clocks synched up right on schedule: she needed a new family and we wanted someone just like her.
It is amazing how quickly we have come to know her—inch for inch through all the holding, cuddling, kissing, bathing, sleeping, feeding, diapering, and so on. By now, just under a week after meeting her, I feel like I know her as thoroughly as I did our biological kids one week after getting them home from the hospital. In fact, it feels an awful lot like that: like she’s a newborn, born again, or something very similar to that. I guess I now understand the concept of Gotcha Day: it will always feel very similar to her actual birthday of 4 November, at least to Vonne and I.
Got up early this morning and fed the little lady with Vonne. Then snuck off to the Business Center as it opened at 0730. Sent off yesterday’s long missive, which I wrote the night previous, then checked the emails. Usual three or four notes from readers of the book, which I always love getting—no matter what mood I’m in.
Also heard from CSPAN via Steve Oppenheim, director of PR at Putnam: they are finally going to broadcast the brief I gave at National Defense University back in early June. They’ll run it sometime before Labor Day. They won’t try to schedule me for an in-studio Q&A from call-ins following the show, because that would make the program too long and it’s an election season, so competition is tight. Anyway, the brief runs well over two hours, so how can I complain if it gets shown in its entirety? No indication in the email if CSPAN will come through on Brian Lamb’s original promise to me back in late April (when we taped Book Notes) to show it in prime time, but I am optimistic it will happen. Hopefully I’ll be back in the States for the show, because I really want to see it on TV and not just on DVD after the fact, but I’ll take it when I can get it. Ideally, they’ll run it during the first week of September (Labor Day is very late this year). That way we’ll be back in country to take advantage of whatever bounce it gets me and the book and—hopefully—more people will probably be watching.
As they say, baby needs a new pair of shoes . . ..
Also got some interesting invites for government-related speeches: to the Air Force Academy and Special Operations Command down in Tampa again. Those invites, plus the response the book seems to be getting from colleges, suggests long legs for the Pentagon’s New Map, and that’s something I needed to feel with this very long vacation from the world (e.g., no cell phone, no Blackberry, no papers, no news-oriented blogging, no briefings (okay, just since the 12th), no consulting gigs). It’s like I left the world and disappeared deep into China, which is pretty much how Nanchang feels, despite being such a booming metropolis.
But today, while a day for catching up on such real-world concerns, had little to do with such things beyond simply cataloguing them for future reference in my Handspring calendar. Today was a day simply for hanging out with Vonne Mei.
Yes, we went to Nanchang’s big landmark (towering pagoda temple) for our morning sightseeing trip, did some shopping there (some butterfly-oriented stuff our daughter Emily is going to love), and had the group birthday party this evening with pizza ordered in from a local Pizza Hut (yes, they have one here in little ol’ Nanchang), but the bulk of the day was just Vonne and I hanging out with Vonne Mei—and it was great.
At one point, while Vonne made a trip to the local Walmart by taxi for supplies, I simply took Mei on a long stroller trip around the waterfront, interacting with the locals who were moving as slow as I was in the sweltering heat—a totally lazy afternoon full of absolutely nothing. The most I got accomplished was to give away all my loose change to beggars and sit for close to an hour on a park bench while Vonne Mei slept soundly in her seat. After that, we laid together in bed for about an hour while Mei practiced pulling herself up on my raised knees.
That was a good day.
Maybe I just feel totally caught up—finally—in terms of jet lag.
Maybe the Cipro finally nailed the gastro-intestinal whatever that had turned me rather pale on the flight into Nanchang last Sunday.
Maybe somewhere along the line I just stopped feeling like some tourist trying out my new Chinese baby souvenir and started feeling totally and unalterably connected to this child—a growing sense of certainty that thickens with each passing day.
Maybe today was just a tipping point all over the dial, with everything finally synching up, and all I needed to do was reboot the system to enjoy all the new features of my software upgrade packet.
We have passed the halfway point on this seemingly marathon emotional journey of three weeks, and that feels really good. Tomorrow it’s paperwork and a first passport for Vonne Mei and Saturday we fly as a threesome to Guangzhou in Guangdong province to formalize our adoption with the U.S. Consulate there. In effect, we have begun our very long journey home. It’ll be Nanchang to Guangzhou to Hong Kong to Tokyo to St. Paul to Indianapolis to Providence to Portsmouth, and it’ll take ten days. But I think the three of us are ready to go.
The Chinese are celebrating the mid-August holiday in which they traditionally purchase moon cakes, which symbolize family reunions. There’s a stand in the lobby selling them. Vonne and I will buy one tomorrow and eat it up with Vonne Mei before we fly out. It’ll be the first of our family reunions over the next two weeks: we’ll reunite with my siblings and Mom in the Twin Cities on the 27th (when Vonne Mei will meet her Chinese-American cousin Ally for the first time), then with our kids and Vonne’s family in Indy on the 28th, then with our cat Sophia on the 29th. It’ll be one big series of reunions, and I can’t wait. It feels like we’re rebuilding our family all over again, but come Monday night, the 30th of August, when our family of six sits around the kitchen table together for the first time (and kitty watching over us from her cat palace perch), our journey will finally come to a close.
