China Journals, ep 2

 5.18.05

We're holed up in our hotel room in Chengdu, traffic raging around us twenty floors down. We order room service while Yujun examines the vast amount of stuff we have hauled all the way to China. 

He isn't interested in toys. Anything remotely baby-oriented is anathema. He loves his bowl, of course, and its tin spoon with perfect depth and pitch for feeding. He also likes Pedialite packages, travel toothpaste tubes, water bottles, Rice Chex (not to eat, just to feel through the ziploc), and Sharpies. But toys and blankies and bears are useless. Yujun likes containers.

Later he'll start looking around in that way again, and start to cry. We hold him and feed him and sing to him and love him and remind each other that that's all we can do. Each night will be better than the one before. He's happy and sad in what seem like reasonable proportions.

We can't imagine loving him more, even as we wonder at his separateness, his complete personhood apart from us, his utter human wholeness. He isn't a human-in-waiting, or a person-in-the-making. He is complete here and now, just as any of us are — growing just like all of us grow. His life arises one moment at a time, just as it does for each of us.

And, like I said before, he is beautiful.

5.19.05 

Today's hard. He sleeps for four or five hours, then goes into narcolept mode. Between three and six in the morning he gets stressed — whining, crying, thrashing, pushing up on all fours and adjusting his position to lie on his back, on his stomach, on his face. He'll go into this intense state of distress for twenty or thirty seconds then collapse, asleep. He'll sleep for a minute or two — dead asleep — then he's up and at it again. We try everything to soothe him but there's nothing we can do. He’s absolutely inconsolable. He wants us and he pushes us away; he reaches desperately for Karen then bats at her outstretched arms.

It feels like he's in a trance, journeying through some land of deep torment and loss. At times he heads towards the edge of the bed and arches his back in screaming rage when we pull him back. Karen and I try to take turns at staying up with him but she has way more endurance than I do. At one point, we're both out cold but somewhere in me I feel his frantic progress on top of the quilt as he crawls down my leg and over my feet. In one motion I wake, reach down and catch him by the waist in midair as he goes over the edge. After that, we both stay awake with him.

The sun comes up and we're all listless, exhausted and crabby. We go to breakfast and even the black Chinese coffee doesn't help. The other parents and kids are in various stages of misery and bliss. It's weird how competitive things are — whose baby is more mature, better adjusted, better looking. Whose baby is sleeping, eating, drinking, bonding, crying — or not. But it's also great to be here with them. We balance each other out. We see the baby who had a good day yesterday have a bad day today and we remember that things change.

Yujun seems depressed, not looking at us, refusing to stand or walk on his own but not really reaching for us. We get him back to the room and he screams for an hour. Finally he calms down and gets a little sleep, but wakes up crying again. Karen straps him into the ergo carrier for the first time, determined to take him for a walk while I work on getting us online. She comes back after an hour and he's crying. The walk had gone well but we’re in for another long session of screaming.

We try to remember what he's been through and let him feel it. We try to soothe and try not to make it better when we can't. We try not to stuff food in his face to shut him up. We try not to enter his emotional feedback loop — his misery is his misery. This is his life and he has to live it no matter how much it is killing us inside. We try not to despair, try to remember how much better it is that he is crying than if he wasn't crying. We want to love him so much and be so good that he doesn't have to feel it, just like all parents do, and over and over we remind ourselves that it can't be done.

I go diaper shopping with the group and Karen stays behind with Yujun. We go to the biggest, most insane store I've ever been to, like the Ikea of grocery/drug stores, or WalMart squared. There are people-movers going between floors that are magnetic so that the overloaded shopping carts don't roll down the slope and run people down. It takes me about twenty minutes just to focus and adjust to the number of people, items and Chinese characters everywhere. The prices are tempting. It seems like everything costs 5 Yuan (about 58 cents).

Karen had put juice on the list but I get ambitious and buy the most wicked little blender you've ever seen. The guy gives me a demonstration of how it works with an apple and water. We don't speak more than two words of the same language but he gets across how awesome the thing is. A crowd gathers to see the giant foreigner buy a blender. Here in Sichuan there are almost no white people, and everywhere I go people look at me. They're polite, but they stare. It's a little weird. Being watched at all times makes navigating the chaos of the store and the language gap that much more daunting.

I buy diapers and batteries and every kind of fruit they have that has a peel. We load back in the bus and I realize how much I miss him, how happy I am every time I walk through that hotel room door, craning my neck to get him into sight as soon as possible. It's a weird new feeling, just wanting to be with him, even if he's crying, even just to watch him sleep.

He's asleep when I get back. He sleeps through the afternoon and we help him wake up for dinner. He seems to be feeling better. I strap him in and we walk to a nearby restaurant. It's wonderful to have him on my back. He sits there calm and watching. He rejects interaction with anyone other than Karen, but he lets me hold him and I take him for a walk when he's finished dinner so that Karen can eat.

The weather is misty and warm, wonderful just to be in. There are a million people on bicycles everywhere you look. We extend our walk back to the hotel, looking around the neighborhood, peering into shops and smiling at the people smiling at Yujun. Everyone is looking at the big-eyed boy on my back, grinning and waving, the old women clasping their hands at how gorgeous he is. We wish for the thousandth time that we spoke the language; all we can do is return their smiles and nods and say "Yujun," and "shay shay," thank you.

Yujun seems happy with the motion and activity of the walk and when we get back to the hotel goes right to sleep, spread-eagle on his lush blue blanket.

5.20.05

We wake with a shock. It's daylight. Yujun has slept through the night — all of us have. It's a wonderful luxury and we bask in the feeling of being rested.

Yujun wakes up and drinks some milk. He's irritable but quiet and feels a little more solid today. We go down to breakfast and I take him for a walk. I set him on a balcony to watch the sea of bicyclists below, but he doesn't stand. He lets my arms take most of his weight. The boy who wanted to walk everywhere two days ago has become a baby again, just wanting to be held. This is good — he's letting himself be vulnerable, reverting a little to establish attachment ties with a new set of parents — but I miss getting to follow him around.

This is how the mind is, always wanting something different: he's too attached or not attached enough, too sad or not sad enough given his loss. I want him to smile at me but when he does it's so unbearably wonderful I want him to stop. Humans are insane.

After breakfast he sits on the bed in his diaper and, after a brief orientation, actually plays with some little farm animals. He also plays with the tube they came in. He sits with his back to us as we do a major cleaning of the room, occasionally turning to check us out. He is secure that we are there and content to play. This seems right, us being available but not focused on him. He's relaxed and happy, even when we lay him down and pull on his high fashion duds from America.

We take the bus to an exquisite park built in honor of a Tang dynasty poet. The mist hangs heavy on the streams and bamboo gardens. The atmosphere is ridiculously Chinese. Yujun rides around on my back for over an hour, a placid prince surveying his land, munching on rice crackers and watching the doves and carp. The old Chinese people mob him, but he just looks at them, turning his head away if they get too close.

He watches the city pass through the bus window on our way back, shanties and trucks and monuments. I realize how happy I am, how in love with him I am, how I don't need to do anything other than be with him. It's as if my brain has turned off and I'm just all about him. I've been a basket case for eight weeks, ever since we got his photos in the mail, and somehow I thought I would get my heart back once I got here and met him.

But now I'm truly an emotional wreck. I can't even type this stuff without bawling like a baby. I see him and my heart breaks, over and over and over. Karen just smiles at me, her poor sad husband, a child and a father all at once. I feel like a cliche, but something in me is melting, some old glacier has begun to crack under Yujun's big sun. I can't bear how much I love him and I know tomorrow somehow I will love him even more. Scary and wonderful.

We make it back to the hotel and Yujun doesn't fuss at all until we get upstairs. He has a good, brutal cry for about an hour and then passes out. So does Karen. I tap away on my laptop, helpless, waiting for them to wake up and play with me.

This afternoon, a woman who has two grown kids comments that Yujun is exhibiting some symptoms of teething, and that she has some nice homeopathic pills. We also have some homeopathic medicine for teething as well as gum-numbing ointment, but he hasn't been gumming or drooling, which is what we've been looking for. But he is sucking on her shirt and grinding his little front teeth.

We ask around. Turns out half the babies are on Motrin for teething. Wow, I guess we're total idiots. Maybe it's not the bottomless pain of existential loss. Maybe he's crying 'cause his mouth fucking hurts.

We give him a couple of her pills and the ointment for good measure. In a half hour he has stopped crying. He's laughing, he's making squeaks and strange proto-language sounds. He shakes his head when I sing to him. Oh my God, he smiles and I think I'm going to die it's so sweet. Definitely. I'm definitely going to die. Oh my God he is so sweet and cute.

Later, after much fun and playing, he cries again. We give him Tylenol and it seems to help. But he's still sad. He's a serious boy. Hopefully the medicine will take the edge off the situation. We're on a steep learning curve here. No matter how much experience Karen has had with other kids, it's different when it's you in the middle of it with your own.

We go out for hot pot and Yujun laughs and shouts in delight at the sea of black haired people filling the streets, the bright lights, and the music blasting from a dozen different sources. I might worry about sensory overload if he wasn't so happy and calm, so solid. We drink a little beer at dinner and the world seems like an absolutely wonderful place.