This week marks the two-year anniversary of when Henry joined us in Lanzhou. We will have our usual family celebration, remembering that cherished event and so many milestones since, a lot of them noted in posts here. Henry, our little special man, is progressing well. But these private celebrations are really about all three of our children and all of us together, and tucked near to the heart of each are our first memories from when we somehow started all this for our oldest daughter Dorothy-Rui. The call came for Dorothy on October 3, 2002, after a couple of years of first-time paperwork and a lot of wondering. We knew in advance that a large batch of adoption referrals, including our own, was coming from the government ministry in Beijing where our file had been matched, lottery-like, to one of so many thousands of little girls waiting at the time in state controlled orphanages mostly in south central China. The call would be from our agency with translated news of who and where our daughter was, her estimated birth date, and her length, weight, and head circumference. A package would later follow with a couple of small grainy photos. Also coming was Hurricane Lili, a late-season storm that had caused us to batten down our shutters and hole ourselves up with the usual flashlights and supplies. We were holed up too with the nervous hope that our doomed phone connection would last at least until the call came through. It did and notably there is absolutely nothing we remember about Hurricane Lili after the call. By mid November that year we were in Jiangxi Province, staying in Nanchang at the old Lake View Hotel, a strange cylindrical tower that has since been demolished to make way for new construction. Nanchang that fall was cold and rainy, its air thick with hazy smoke from rice straw the city's residents then burned in small cooking stoves outside their grey block-shaped apartment buildings, many that have also since been razed. But the whole thing can be recalled in scenes still more vivid to us than those from any classic film: scenes from the hotel and the day trips to Lushan and the Yangtze River near Juijiang that we took while waiting for our documents to clear; scenes from that first revelatory visit to a nearby orphanage within the large Nanchang Municipal Social Welfare Institute; haunting scenes from a trip to Gao’an, 75 miles to the southwest, where Dorothy was said to be from and the location of both her orphanage and finding site; scenes from our treasured first moments with her, our precious first child, so fragile and small. How, before handing her to us, civil affairs officials collected the tattered outer layers of her tiny clothes to bring back for the other children and how the remaining layers, which we saved, were just rags. How we cried as we handled them. How Dorothy, called Gao Rui De in Gao’an, was growth-delayed and at the time really just a small infant equivalent, very hungry and unexposed to much sensory stimulation. And while we were complete, fumbling novices, we were startled by how instantly and naturally the transition to parenthood took place. Today Dorothy is still diminutive (by far the smallest kid in her next year's fourth grade class) but the best big sister imaginable for Clara-Li and Henry, although we know it was hard for her to relinquish to them the attention we know she would have wanted otherwise. She has grown to be a brilliant child, more contemplative than her siblings but with a highly developed imagination and a keen sense of humor. Our Mary Poppins she is practically perfect in every way, while Clara-Li and Henry are practically perfect in their own ways. They change so much and so fast as the years go by. In many aspects, so do we, as part of them, and they of us. One wonders how on earth could children such as ours, anywhere or against whatever circumstance, ever be abandoned or sold. There is no satisfactory explanation; so you just love them as hard as you can. Still, looking back over the past decade just from our own experiences, one could reasonably ask when, for the Chinese, might enough be enough.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Practically Perfect in Every Way
This week marks the two-year anniversary of when Henry joined us in Lanzhou. We will have our usual family celebration, remembering that cherished event and so many milestones since, a lot of them noted in posts here. Henry, our little special man, is progressing well. But these private celebrations are really about all three of our children and all of us together, and tucked near to the heart of each are our first memories from when we somehow started all this for our oldest daughter Dorothy-Rui. The call came for Dorothy on October 3, 2002, after a couple of years of first-time paperwork and a lot of wondering. We knew in advance that a large batch of adoption referrals, including our own, was coming from the government ministry in Beijing where our file had been matched, lottery-like, to one of so many thousands of little girls waiting at the time in state controlled orphanages mostly in south central China. The call would be from our agency with translated news of who and where our daughter was, her estimated birth date, and her length, weight, and head circumference. A package would later follow with a couple of small grainy photos. Also coming was Hurricane Lili, a late-season storm that had caused us to batten down our shutters and hole ourselves up with the usual flashlights and supplies. We were holed up too with the nervous hope that our doomed phone connection would last at least until the call came through. It did and notably there is absolutely nothing we remember about Hurricane Lili after the call. By mid November that year we were in Jiangxi Province, staying in Nanchang at the old Lake View Hotel, a strange cylindrical tower that has since been demolished to make way for new construction. Nanchang that fall was cold and rainy, its air thick with hazy smoke from rice straw the city's residents then burned in small cooking stoves outside their grey block-shaped apartment buildings, many that have also since been razed. But the whole thing can be recalled in scenes still more vivid to us than those from any classic film: scenes from the hotel and the day trips to Lushan and the Yangtze River near Juijiang that we took while waiting for our documents to clear; scenes from that first revelatory visit to a nearby orphanage within the large Nanchang Municipal Social Welfare Institute; haunting scenes from a trip to Gao’an, 75 miles to the southwest, where Dorothy was said to be from and the location of both her orphanage and finding site; scenes from our treasured first moments with her, our precious first child, so fragile and small. How, before handing her to us, civil affairs officials collected the tattered outer layers of her tiny clothes to bring back for the other children and how the remaining layers, which we saved, were just rags. How we cried as we handled them. How Dorothy, called Gao Rui De in Gao’an, was growth-delayed and at the time really just a small infant equivalent, very hungry and unexposed to much sensory stimulation. And while we were complete, fumbling novices, we were startled by how instantly and naturally the transition to parenthood took place. Today Dorothy is still diminutive (by far the smallest kid in her next year's fourth grade class) but the best big sister imaginable for Clara-Li and Henry, although we know it was hard for her to relinquish to them the attention we know she would have wanted otherwise. She has grown to be a brilliant child, more contemplative than her siblings but with a highly developed imagination and a keen sense of humor. Our Mary Poppins she is practically perfect in every way, while Clara-Li and Henry are practically perfect in their own ways. They change so much and so fast as the years go by. In many aspects, so do we, as part of them, and they of us. One wonders how on earth could children such as ours, anywhere or against whatever circumstance, ever be abandoned or sold. There is no satisfactory explanation; so you just love them as hard as you can. Still, looking back over the past decade just from our own experiences, one could reasonably ask when, for the Chinese, might enough be enough.
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2 comments:
Indeed. Would that each child had a loving family. We cannot wait to welcome our beautiful Pingliang girl into ours.
You have a beautiful family :)
We should explain with this post that in China it has been illegal since 1979 to have more than 1 or sometimes 2 children but still no legal avenue exists for birth parents to place over-quota children in adoptions. The government so far will not mount an effective domestic adoption program that addresses unregistered births since legally they're not supposed to exist. Studies indicate state-controlled orphanages are irrelevant to most childless Chinese couples due to restrictions and cost. An informal domestic adoption system handling non-special needs children exists otherwise, especially in rural areas, and dominated by paid intermediaries (traffickers). Meanwhile, a lot of children sit in orphanages like Pingliang's. We're glad there are foreign families committed to international adoptions (as we continue to be) because orphanage children, especially those with special needs, need families right now. But in all this there just seems room for improvement.
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