China Journals, ep 1

Yujun’s Bowl, a love story

May 13, 2005

Thirty thousand feet up, I watch the little green blip make its way across the screen. It hovers over the Pacific for a long time, our flight plan traced in dull green light, then makes a great leap eastward. The seats in front of me jam against my knees. I consider ordering a scotch and going to sleep, but there are too many things to think about.

Karen is having no trouble sleeping. We are on our way to China to adopt a fourteen month-old boy. I imagine she has some sense of what this means, or will mean, but I don’t. I just sit here in the Airbus, hurtling towards the great unknown at five hundred miles an hour. 

In my backpack are two photographs and a medical report. The report says that the boy is in good health, that he was abandoned at the side of a road and found by villagers. It was raining and cold, and when they found him he was crying — which we’ve been told is a good sign. They took him to a local orphanage where he was dried off and warmed up. He was given food and fresh clothes and the name Yu Jun, which means “Rain Army,” a good Maoist name. The photos show a round-cheeked boy with black hair and big eyes. 

Finally, the speaker crackles in Mandarin and then in English. The plane is descending into Beijing.

A young adoption agency guide named Tong Lei meets us at the airport. She takes good care of us while we spend a few days getting over our jetlag. We visit the Forbidden City and the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. We go, we look, but we don’t really care. We are waiting to see our son.

I am six feet four and blond; Karen is five foot nine with wavy long red hair. The Chinese stare at us wherever we go. They are polite about it and we don’t mind.  We are guests here, and they are about to give us the greatest gift they have to offer.

We sleep and walk around and try a few words in their singing tongue. We buy jade and calligraphy. We are excited to be in China, yes. The city roars around us as three days pass. 

We are waiting to see our son.

5.17.05

Today is like a dream. We fly from Beijing to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan in southwestern China. They pick us up at the airport and give us an hour at the hotel to shower. Then we're scheduled to go pick up the babies. We arrive at a run down luxury hotel, unpack, look out over the haze and smog of the city, then get back on the bus. 

We remind ourselves and each other to breathe as the bus threads its way through gritty, run-down neighborhoods. Soon, much sooner than expected, the bus pulls up onto the sidewalk outside of a dingy office building.

We shuffle out, not breathing now, not reminding anyone to breathe. Our life is ending. Our life is beginning. In the large glass-enclosed atrium of the office building they bring out the babies, calling our names as quickly as the caregivers can get through the door.

They shout our names and two women come through the archway with a baby-sumo version of the boy in our photograph.

By this time, we can tell that the caregivers have been ordered to thrust the babies into the new mothers' arms, point their fingers, and say "mama." The room is full of children's screams and Chinese women shouting "mama!" over the din.

The women offer us the child in their outstretched arms. Instead of taking him we back up, drawing them into the far corner of the room, smiling and nodding.

Of the two women, one is very young, with clear pale skin. The other is 45 or 50 with the ruddy skin of Chinese working people. The young woman shocks us by speaking in clear English. "Here, you should take him!"

We have encountered very few Chinese who speak English, even in the four star hotels. We kneel down and say that we would like to talk to them first, to show the little boy that we are their friends, to show him that he can trust us and that we are safe. Then they can give him to us.

They seem confused but agree, returning our nods and glancing at each other. Agency and orphanage officials run amok, telling everyone what to do amidst the cacophony.

I focus on the older woman holding Yujun. He is calm and beautiful, but I force my attention to her, smiling and nodding, trying to communicate with her beyond language. 

Karen speaks with the young woman, and soon turns to me: "Paul, I think this is his foster mother, and the young woman here is her daughter!" Surprised, I say to the young woman, "your mother is here?" pointing to the older woman holding Yujun, "she's his foster mother!?" She nods. We look at them both in wonder.

The agency told us that adopting families were generally forbidden contact with foster parents, and this is more than we could have hoped for.  "You both must be very sad right now," I say to her. The woman nods as her eyes fill with tears, the edge of control slipping away. She says something to her mother in Chinese and all of us start to cry. 

Meanwhile, Yujun stands on the ground with his foster mother's hands under his arms. He has had enough of our grown-up business and starts straining forward. "He walks," the young woman says. He breaks free and steps forward on steady feet, pushing past us. Karen and his foster mother go after him. I ask the daughter, "Do you have a toy of his he could take with him?" She thinks for a moment, shakes her head, then changes her mind and tells me to wait.

When she returns she carries an aluminum breakfast bowl and a tin spoon. "This is his bowl," she says. Yujun immediately latches on to the bowl and for the next forty minutes he holds the bowl and sits on our laps while we visit with his foster family.

The woman's name is Li Bijun, and she has fostered two of the babies in our group, Yujun and a little girl, from the time of their abandonment . Her husband works at the orphanage, three hours outside of Chengdu, and they have ridden in this morning on a bus. Her daughter's name is Wang Dan. She is a university student. Today, Li Bijun shuttles between the son and the daughter she is about to lose and their new families.

It is a blessing to have her. Through her daughter, she tells us that Yujun eats rice, drinks a lot of water and that he moves around quite a bit in the bed at night. Then she stares at us hard: “He is very special, very intelligent. Everyone who knows him knows this.”

Later, Karen sees her standing, staring blankly into space. She approaches, puts a hand on her shoulder, then opens her arms as Li Bijun turns. She melts against Karen and collapses, sobbing.

Yujun is simply beautiful. Sitting calm with his characteristic look of slight worry, his attention goes back and forth between his bowl and the scene around him. His head is giant, which is good since his eyes are even bigger. His legs — which are so chunky in the photos we had hypothesized that they put five sets of pajamas on him — are even more chunky in real life.

We continue to engage the two women. It is clear that Li Bijun knows what she is doing as a mother. Wang Dan is smart and confident. The crises of loss and attachment rage around us. Yujun watches and plays with his bowl, dropping it occasionally with a shattering clang. We sit in our corner, ignoring the well-meaning advice of frantic staff.  

At some point, as Li Bijun lifts Yujun's hand up and down in the way of all mothers everywhere, a crisply dressed executive staff woman comes up and slaps her hand. Clearly, the state feels that this woman's job is over and that now she should disappear. Karen rises to her feet, staring the staff woman down.

Their standoff ends when I stand to answer someone’s question, towering over the room. Karen makes a funny gesture with her hands about my height. The woman laughs, then walks away.

It’s obvious how well taken care of he is. While some of the kids look a little thin or ragged, Yujun glows like the well-loved babies we know from back home. We thank them again and again.

A couple who have come to help their friends and to photograph make comments about how regal he looks, how he isn't crying. At this point, he doesn't have much to cry about. The impact of his loss will come later, but I’m glad he will have the chance to go through it in the sanctuary of our hotel room.  

Finally, he gets restless to stand up. By instinct I offer him my finger, and he leads us out the big glass doors onto the front step. He walks around in the sun, holding my finger, watching one thing after another with concentration.

A crowd of Chinese gather, mostly older people in work clothes. The Chinese show intense interest in the young in general and the adoption phenomenon in particular. They constantly call to children with their eyes and voices, coming right up to them, taking their hands, even picking them up and carrying them around with no sense of needing a parent's permission. They seem to have not lost the basic human instinct that all adults are responsible for all children, that all children belong to everyone.

Our bus driver, a gentle, dark man in his forties, watches us wherever we go, smiling and waving at Yujun. Again and again, he gives me the thumbs up, glancing at the other children and then back at us, communicating clearly that Yujun is his favorite. I'm gratified and smile back, but it's also kind of sad.  

I’m guessing the main reason Yujun is his favorite is because Yujun is a boy. This is the same impulse that leads to mass abortion, infanticide and abandonment of little girls in China. It's the reason why almost all of the children available for adoption are girls.

Though all the children in this adoption class are within a few weeks of each other in age, Yujun is the only one who can walk and the only one to have made his way outside. As the crowd gathers around his big eyes and obvious boy-ness, a sweet-faced man with big, black teeth picks him up, takes a few steps back and lifts him high for all to see.

The people smile and wave and speak to him in their whispering speech. I keep reminding myself that I am twice the man's size and he means no harm, that this is simply what Chinese people do. Still, the father-instinct fills my veins with adrenaline and the easy willingness to kill.

After a while, they call us back in for a group photo, Li Bijun clutching Yujun's hand. I get Wang Dan’s email address, we hug them goodbye and get back on the bus. The crowd of Chinese is still outside, the man with the black teeth waving goodbye as we pull away. Yujun sits on our lap, looking at us, at the people, at the city passing outside the window. Then he falls asleep to the motion of the rocking bus.

Later that night, he wakes up and has some food. I think it hits him a little that, for the second time in his short life, he has lost his mother. He cries awhile then goes down again, asleep on the blanket next to his silver bowl.