China journals, ep 4
5.23.05
This morning we say goodbye to Chengdu. We are tired and ready to finish our paperwork in Guangzhou and get home, but it’s a little sad nonetheless, departing our son’s provincial capital and the place where we became parents. May 17th seems like a lifetime ago.
Yujun is good. He had his first giant bowel movement last night and it’s a relief. Afterwards, he sat on the bed and played while we packed our thousands of objects back into suitcases.
We have decided we really like this run down metropolis — its constant and mysterious shroud of fog/smog, the insane driving, the tons and tons of people everywhere. The folks we’ve met here have been incredibly warm: Charles, the hotel assistant manager who invited us out personally to the Sichuan Opera; the girls in the hotel buffet room who doted on us amateur parents and were so sad to see Yujun go; the woman in the art shop with a son his age whom we had to visit three times before we could get her attention off Yujun long enough to sell us some scrolls. The lights of the packed shopping district and the swarming bicycle phenomenon are indescribable (I didn’t even bother taking pictures) but all these people living shoulder to shoulder with such grace was a beautiful thing to witness.
Samson, our saintly Chinese adoption agency representative, talks the airline out of charging us for our mountains of overweight luggage and we’re off. Yujun’s first trip on an airplane starts smoothly and then quickly deteriorates into frantic screaming. It’s a familiar feeling, trying desperately to figure out what’s wrong, compounded by the presence of passengers around us who have paid good money to fly unmolested. We’re totally focused on Yujun – how can we not be, packed into tiny China Air coach seats.
I say to Karen, “watch TV.” “What!?” she says. I point to the little airplane televisions that have descended from the ceiling, playing random Chinese TV shows. We focus on the television and Yujun calms down almost immediately. Again, it’s against our impulse in these situations to turn away from a tormented child, but there’s nothing we can do that we haven’t done, and in the vacuum of our attention he quickly finds his own center and starts playing. In a few minutes he is smiling and nodding his head at us.
He still drinks water from his silver bowl. Like most of the kids, he doesn’t suck, so bottles and sippies that require sucking don’t work. In fact, a lot of the kids weren’t drinking water at all the first few days and some of the parents emulated Yujun’s bowl technique with great success. He personally likes to gnaw on the lip of the bowl while he drinks.
We land and walk out into the thick humidity of Guangzhou. Our hotel, the White Swan, is ridiculously luxurious. I remind myself for the hundredth time that it is good we’re traveling like middle class parents instead of starving artists because, you know, we have a baby.
It turns out that the White Swan is the ending point of all Westerners adopting in China. The examination clinics and embassies are all within walking distance. We find ourselves surrounded by hundreds of other Americans in various stages of adopting Chinese orphans. The romance of our trip drains away a bit and our little group seems less adventurous among so many other couples and their black-haired angels. We realize we’re part of a great exodus, an Ellis Island of the future.
Tonight we are dragged to yet another Chinese restaurant by our agency. Karen and I agree that this is the end of eating out with the group. We’ll spend the rest of our meals alone at the breakfast buffet or in our room. Yujun is fussy but a total trooper, coming back from the tired edge of tears again and again to smile and eat with the grownups.
A young waitress sees Yujun and stops to smile and flirt with him. Finally, she can’t help herself, pulling him right out of Karen’s arms, holding him high and chattering at him in Cantonese. Then she simply takes him back to meet the kitchen staff. We sit for several tense minutes, hearing the oohs and ahhs from the kitchen as our guide assures us that he’ll be back. When she returns with him it’s a hilarious relief.
Back at the hotel, I destroy the room, pulling the twin box springs from beneath the mattresses and stacking them in the corner, pushing the mattresses together to make a super-king on the floor. Yujun’s penchant for diving into space without fear of consequences requires it.
He plays for hours on the big open space, pushing Emergencee packets into a pile, spreading them out, then gathering them back up again. It looks like important work and we leave him to it.
Finally, we are toast. We try our best to stay awake but fall asleep before he does. We wake up in the morning and try to feel guilty about it but fail even at that.
5.24.05
We go to the clinic for one of the last official procedures. He gets a brief once over from a trio of doctors working like a factory, getting the babies in and out and not caring how rough they are or how much the babies scream.
Yujun manages to charm every one of them. They’re supposedly in a hurry but they hold onto him after they’re done and play with him, shaking rattles in his face and pinching his cheeks. He’s a sport, hardly crying at all except when they pull his pants down, smiling through all the medical manhandling.
Karen goes off to do a couple of hours of paperwork and I strap him in for a serious ride on dad’s back. We check out the Pearl River with its old hauling vessels looking like direct descendants of ancient junks. We walk around the fossilized colonial town, see retired people exercising in the park, hear the roar of an elementary school as hundreds of kids answer their teachers. We check out the tourist shops, each one aimed at Americans adopting Chinese babies.
In every shop we go into I get the same response. They figure out he’s a boy and their eyes light up. “Oh!! a boy! Oh, such a beautiful boy. You are so lucky to have gotten a boy!” Yes, we are lucky to have gotten Yujun, and yes, it is extremely unusual for us to have been assigned a boy. But why is it more lucky to have gotten a boy than a girl? Even the Americans get into it, surprised to find out he’s a boy (‘cause he’s so pretty) and cooing “oh, you’re so lucky!” It’s strange and sad.
After a nap, we go out to change money at the local bank. It is torturously slow. Many things here are maddeningly inefficient. You walk into a restaurant that can hold forty people and there are sixteen employees, yet service can be totally random. Many shops have people whose job it is just to stand outside and welcome you. Often there’s an additional person inside to open the door. In our hotel, there’s someone on every single floor (25 floors worth), right outside of the elevator who points us to our room – even though they know we know where we’re going because it’s the eighth time they’ve seen us today. This is no way to become a superpower.
Anyway, as we’re waiting there in the lobby, the policeman assigned to guard the bank comes and says hi to Yujun. For the next twenty minutes, as we wait for the queue to inch forward, he smiles at Yujun, kisses him, caresses him, plays peek-a-boo, covers Yujun’s face with his hand and plays tug-of-war with his spoon. The boy just laughs and crows and giggles.
It’s hilarious – the guy isn’t paying the least bit of attention to his job. He has no gun, but I don’t think anyone robs banks in China, so I guess police guards play with babies all day. The guy is a sweetie. I keep thinking I should be more protective of Yujun but he loves people and doesn’t seem bothered and is perfectly capable of pushing people away the second he’s had enough. He just turns his head and people instinctively pull back as his radiance is withdrawn. It seems like he’s been dealing with aggressive admirers all his life.
We get some greasy American food because we’re sick of Chinese. We are really, really tired. Yujun won’t go down for a nap, he just wants to play. He says “mamamamama” when he looks at Karen and “dadadada” when he looks at me. I’m not sure he means us or not but it seems like it. It feels weird, because he probably said “mama” and “baba” to his foster parents before us. They were the ones who witnessed his first words and his first steps.
Before we entered the adoption process, I couldn’t have imagined missing these sentimental landmarks. Once we entered the process, I blotted it out, not thinking about what we would miss, just trying to stay focused on making it happen. Now I guess I don’t really care. I know that parenting is .01% about these Kodak moments and 99.99% about the kind of thing I’m doing now, which is trying to feed him while letting him play with his food while trying to keep his hands off his clothes and mine because soon we have to go out for another embassy meeting.
Yujun finally winds himself down and falls over. We try to help him sleep but really have no clue how. All the things we don’t know, all the tricks we need to learn, all the mistakes we’ve made or will make soon – could fill a big thick book.
Yujun lays there on the covers amidst his collection of objects. Even though he’s asleep his eyes are still partially open. Apparently, his eyes are so big he can’t get them all the way closed when he sleeps. He looks like he’s watching us, making sure we are still there, but I know he’s off in baby-dreamland. And we’re not going anywhere.
5.25.05
This morning I find myself sitting on the toilet, crying for reasons unknown. Karen is in the other room, reading “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See” to Yujun. It’s his first and so far only English book and all we have to do is say “brown bear, brown bear” and he breaks into a huge smile. He reads along with her, making syllable-like sounds, laughing outrageously at the pictures and rhymes, in total baby-bliss.
Later, Yujun laughs and claps at his clinically insane mom and dad, who dance and sing “we want the poop, gotta have that poop! ohhhh we want the poop...” to the melody of “We Want the Funk” — all in the hope of provoking another impressive bowel movement. We shop for gifts, get jade chops (traditional signature stamps) for Yujun and for our Buddhist names, and eat the best Tai food ever. We try to enjoy ourselves, but mostly we are tired.
We’re tired of the Americans around the hotel, their arrogance and brutishness. We’re tired of the endless display of goods aimed at American wealth. It all manifests in one glorious symbol, given as a gift by the hotel, courtesy of Mattel: “Going Home Barbie.” It’s Barbie wearing hip forty-something clothes, holding the ultimate fashion accessory: a little Chinese baby. It’s awful and funny at the same time and we will haul it all the way home because otherwise people won’t believe us.
The weather is balmy and wonderful but all we really want to do is go back to the room and hang out with him, so that’s what we do.
Tonight he’s just erupting with joy and energy. It’s more than bliss – more like ecstasy. We think maybe they spiked his teething biscuit or something. He’s so wild and happy, going from her to me and back to his toys and Emergencee packets. After awhile he gets tired and a little manic and Karen lays him down, holding her hand on his back, and he goes to sleep.
We just watch him in wonder, giggling to each other. We have things to do but all we can manage is looking at him.
5.26.05
One more day.
We’re practically catatonic, dragging through forms and meetings. I’m so out of it I would sign anything they put in front of me, regardless of what language it was in.
The big appointment is this afternoon at the US consulate. We kill time at the pool. The sun is out, dim through the haze, and lord knows the three of us could use some sun. Yujun even takes a few steps on his own to check out the local flora.
Then we go to the consulate. They check our passports for the hundredth time. An American diplomat comes out and congratulates us on completing “the most bureaucratic process a US civilian can undertake.” We clap, half in wry anger, half in relief. We hold up our right hands and take some oath. We are free to leave China. Yujun is ours. Karen turns to me with Yujun in her arms and we hug and cry.
We go buy Swedish lox and rye bread and drink some wine to celebrate. We pick up Yujun’s passport and visa and say goodbye to our friends in the adoption group, though we are too tired to say it very well. We still have to pack, God forbid — they are picking up the luggage at 5:30 am.
5.27.05
Snapshots from a 35-hour Friday:
At the Guangzhou airport. With the help of our Mandarin-speaking friends who are part of our adoption group, we pierce the bureaucracy of Chinese emigration and head towards our gate. As we board, I feel like I’m in a 1980’s escape-from-the-Soviet-Union movie getting into our handmade hot air balloon to fly over the Berlin wall.
Yujun does great on the endless flight home, though somehow he goes through two changes of clothing. At immigration in Seattle, there’s one more sweet Asian woman we have to get through – a Vietnamese mother at the Homeland Security desk who chats and coos and makes eyes at him before finally, finally stamping his passport. Yujun is now a United States citizen.
He stands on a bench in the Seattle airport, watching the planes come and go through the three story windows. I inhale shredded beef tacos: “You’re going to like America, Yujun, because in America we have Mexican food.” After a half hour, he turns to watch the people in the atrium. Just watching, for a long time. I wish I knew what he sees.
Yujun looking outside the window of our turbo-prop from Seattle to Bozeman. He stands on my lap and peers outside the window for twenty minutes, until he can’t keep his eyes open any more, until twenty hours of air travel finally pulls him into a coma.
We get home safe. Friends meet us at the airport. As we’re chatting with them, Yujun gets down and walks around, moving more than a few feet away from us for the first time since the day we got him. It’s as if he knows he’s home and can relax and strike out on his own. He seems exhausted and kind of loopy but happy.
We are happy, too. We are so lucky, so blessed. Our poor, tired vessels overrun with grace and gratitude.
