snapshots, notes on napkins

It's been more than a few days since I posted anything here, and it's not because nothing's happened. On the contrary. I've just been a bit busy with other things. We went to the consulate, got Ji's visa, took oaths, finished paperwork, moved hotels, walked through packed streets and markets, tried to say goodbye to the place of our daughter's birth, a strangely moving few days for us. What I have instead of stories are notes. Here's what the 32 hours of yesterday looks like on the back of a napkin: Awake before first light. A taxi away from the hotel and into the dawn. Through the city, waking up. Out to the airport on the outskirts. Check-in. Wait. Board. Carry-on luggage. So much stuff. Flight. Bassinet. Tokyo. Wait. New gate. Lift off again. JAL. Dinner, japanese style, fresh fish, reasonable portions, even on a plane. Shades pulled down, artificial night. A mobile from the flight attendant, hung above the seat - origami. A dozen hours against the sun. International date line. A novel, a movie, a novel, a newspaper.Ji Xia holding a finger offerred between the seats from behind us. A walk down the aisle and back, collecting waves from passengers awake in the middle of artificial night. SFO approach. Land. Borders. Immigration - standing with Ji's Chinese passport in in the line for non-US citizens A sealed package handed over the counter to an immigration official. Stamps. Forms. A new U.S. citizen. Customs. Luggage. Automatic doors opening, San Francisco beyond.

When I get a minute I'll get all these napkins from these past few days collected into something readable. I'll put a bunch of photos up here too. Meanwhile, there's this: Thank you all for such solid support. This journey isn't merely about Crescent and I going to get Ji Xia. It's about friends and family. All of us. We are home.

An easy silence

The social spaces between strangers to which I am accustomed in the U.S. do not exist here. Strangers approach us every time we leave the hotel. We walk out near the edge of the lake in the evening and find rows of chairs and sit for a while to watch the sunset. A woman sits beside me and begins examining Ji Xia like a pediatrician. She turns the bottoms of her feet to the sky, looks in her ears, pinches her thighs, repeatedly pulls her thumb out of her mouth, all the while scolding me in Mandarin. I know she’s scolding me because scolding sounds exactly the same in all languages. That, and a man behind us translates in broken English that the baby is not covered well enough for the evening air (despite the fact that the temperature of the humid air is still in the mid-eighties from the afternoon high of mid-nineties), and that if we let her continue to suck her thumb, she will destroy her thumbnail. She takes the bottle of formula from the bag at my feet and shakes some liquid into her palm, tastes it, frowns, scolds some more. She’s too old for a bottle, the man behind us translates, smiling. She tells us that new parents must learn a great deal to be good parents. As she scolds I realize that she has taken on the traditional role of the aunt whose job it is to tell the unvarnished truth, to balance the spoiling effects of overindulging parents and grandparents. So a while later, as Crescent and I stand to leave, I thank her and pull Ji’s thumb from her mouth and the lady frowns sternly and nods her approval, shooting me a hard look. Caring takes many forms. Sometimes its form must be hard because it is a hard world, made of hard things. These last few days, even as one beautiful moment after another has washed through my mind, that awareness has grown crisp. It is the contrast. Bright lights cast deep shadows.

Ji Xia has invented a game: the fall, tickle, and fly. We are learning to laugh with each other. Ji Xia palms the ground, props herself, turns a knee outward and stands roughly, wobbling like a drunkard, then falls backward into my waiting hand, arching her back and giggling upward, her little laugh rising into the air like a flock of starlings. Crescent, laughing, reaches out to tickle her and sweep her up through the air and I laugh as she flies along the cobblestones in the airplane of Crescent’s arms. We play this game and games like it throughout the day. In moments like these I sometimes think of a poem that I stumbled across in my teenage years by an author I can no longer remember that describes a feeling I first had then that is very much like a feeling I have now, a realization that moments like these, as perfect as they come, are at the basement level built on much more than they seem. There was a lake on the edge of my home town and I would sometimes go there and sit on the end of an old wooden pier that sagged on old pilings barely a foot proud of the mirror surface and there I would watch the summer sun lowering behind the pines, watch lightning bugs flash on and off above the fields and in the trees on the other side of the lake, wait in silence as evening darkened around me. I would sit without moving for an hour, two, more. I would lean back on the pier and watch Venus rise, and the moon. Here is the poem, or what I remember of it. (I’m sure my memory has butchered it.)

This silence would be perfect
If it weren’t for the urge I have
To tell you how perfect this silence is

As I listen to my new daughter laugh I know that in this world it is a stone fact that people leave babies at bus stops and in doorways, and in rivers and empty fields too, and only the lucky ones find their way to orphanages, where they sleep on thin mattresses or bare plywood and bathe in a trickle of cold water running from a pipe. Their legs are not strong so they walk late and they wear bald spots on the backs of their heads because they are crib-bound but they are the lucky ones because they live, lucky because they eat every day and they stay dry and generally warm enough and when they get sick they get medicine. I know that only a slight few of them have their files selected by clerks in the matching room in Beijing for referral to a waiting family or are chosen by a family from a list of waiting children with special needs, but most do not. They graduate from the crib rooms to the toddler rooms, to the school rooms, learn to read and write, learn trades when they’re old enough, leave state care at age 18, and move into adulthood never having known what most of us identify as the fundamental force behind who we are – our connections to family.

What I’m saying is that sometimes when I listen to Ji Xia laugh it reminds me that it is a hard world, made of hard things, and that thought makes her laugh sweeter still. I hope that when I think back to these first days with Ji Xia from a great distance, long after these days have been carved into the sculpture of my memory and stored neatly into my past, on the softest of days when I’m watching her swim in the ocean or listening to her complain about eating vegetables, I will remember that we are, all three of us, stupendously lucky to have each other and I hope that the remembering will help me mark each of these soft days as a treasure.

She digs dim sum, and she's ambitious.

Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province

Guangzhou is a loud, crowded, busy, thrilling place. At a glance, it looks like any other big city, but it's not. I count 14 super-cranes out the hotel window, swinging concrete and steel through great arcs 30, 40, 50 stories up. Skyscrapers rising out of fields in every direction as far as I can see. The air rings and echos with the pounding of pile drivers and steam hammers drifting down into the streets below like rain. Day after day, floor after floor, steel, marble, and glass replace hewn stones as giant towers encroach on ancient neighborhoods in a violent, relentless collsion of the very old and the very new. Anachronisms are everywhere. This morning, I watched workers install lighting five stories above the sidewalk while standing on bamboo scaffolding lashed together with rope. Here's another one: I can't access my own blog - anyone's blog for that matter. I can post to it, but I can't read it, can't read the comments. And so I I have to wonder if blogs are being filtered. Innappropriate content, perhaps? Strange, to a man who works in the Silicon Valley and lives a few lightrail stops from Mountain View, to think that the Google search engine isn't allowed to locate certain websites. But this isn't Mountain View, it's the PRC.

This, the most beautiful city

Ji Xia wakes up quietly and I watch from my pillow as a tiny porcelain arm reaches up to touch the colored beads strung on a rod at the top of the crib beside the bed. She doesn’t complain, just sits playing with the beads, and I wonder if she learned from her time in the orphanage that it is futile to cry out in the morning. I say her name and she turns, squints her eyes, smiles through the slats as if we’ve been doing this every morning far longer than we’ve actually been at it. I lift her out of her crib while Crescent prepares a bottle. It is 6:30. This is my third day as a father.

We’re finished with the legal proceedings in this town, the seat of the Provincial Government where Ji Xia was abandoned and presumably born. We have been waiting for the papers we thumbed in red ink to be processed by the plodding machinery of the state, and after two days the office of civil affairs gives us the stamp of approval and generates the papers that document the adoption, papers we will need to show the U.S. Consular officer in a few days, when we apply for her travel visa to the U.S. There are three documents:

First, the Notarial Certificate of Birth: This is to certify that Hu JiXia, female, was born on February 17, 2006. Her parents and place of birth are unknown.

Second, the Certificate of Abandonment: This is to certify that Hu JiXia, female, born on Februrary 17, 2006, was found abandoned at the doorway of No. 64 Yinbong Road, Wenzhou City on Februrary 17, 2006. On the same day, she was sent to Wenzhou Children’s Welfare Institute for nursing by the policemen of Wenzhou Tining Police Station. Up to now, no evidence can prove who are her parents or other relatives though great efforts have been made to search for them.

Third, the Adoption Registration Certificate of the People’s Republic of China: After examination, this is to certify that the adoption is in conformity with the provisions as regulated in “Adoptive Law of the People’s Republic of China”, thus adoption registration is permitted. The adoption comes into effect on the day of adoption registration, May 22, 2007.

Tomorrow, we fly to Guangzhou, but today, with no more official business scheduled here, we explore Hangzhou. We rent bikes. Our plan: ride the 30 kilometers around the west lake, Ji Xia strapped to my chest in a baby-sling because I don’t like the idea of putting her in the infant carrier on the rear rack. We ride over ancient stone footbridges, stop to photograph sculptures, watch old men drinking green tea and playing Chinese Chess under a pagoda that has been standing in the same place on a hill overlooking the lake since the year 900. Hangzhou, the most beautiful city in the world, according to Marco Polo who saw more than a few.

Everywhere we go in this most beautiful city in the world people stare at us, curiously, intently, obviously. Most smile. Some do not. People approach us, sometimes in groups, as if they know us, rubbing Ji Xia’s cheek and snapping fingers to draw her attention, talking to each other and looking up at us only after a few moments. At first I listen for the words “cleft lip” that I have taught my ears to hear and when I hear it I repeat it back in the best Mandarin I can manage to let them know that I understand the topic of discussion, looking over the tops of my glasses as a reproach, but after a time or two I realize it doesn’t matter and so I release myself from the duty, because people are people the world round and you can’t bring them all along. And truthfully, most just smile and say “lukee babee” or “beautiful gul”, and I feel like the proud father, as I might if I actually had anything at all to do with how beautiful she is.

I think about the morning nearly two years ago in Pat Lee’s office when we selected her to be our adoption agent and signed the first of a million forms, wrote the first of a raft of checks. I slid our initial application across the table to her, a $300 check paper-clipped to the corner. She put it in a tab folder with our names on it, looked up at us with a beatific smile and said, “Congratulations. You’re pregnant.”

I’m certain she’s used this same line a thousand times with a thousand clients but somehow it didn’t seem tired in the least. She said it with such certainty that it shortened my breath. And so here I am, a guy in an adoption agency two years ago, a guy on a plane a week ago, now a father with three days behind me. And here is Ji Xia, an orphan three days ago, now, smiling her scarred little smile through the crib slats, a daughter. You can’t imagine how bizarre it seems, and at once how completely natural.

Portraits and landscapes.

We live in a sea of images. When we’re doing nothing more stimulating than, say, sitting in a diner somewhere with our eyes open, we’re processing something on the order of one gigabyte of visual data every second, all of it stored, theoretically, in the matrix of neural pathways that defines who we are. Hard to believe, but it’s true. A hundred billion neurons connected via quadrillions of synapses in a kind of combinatorial matrix results in a brain with a theoretical storage capacity that is, for all practical purposes, infinite. So we sit in a diner while visual data streams in, automatically grouped, somehow, into images, each one pushing cocktails of neurotransmitters across synapses, opening ion channels, firing nerve cells, activating sodium and potassium pumps, sparking chain reactions of neural activity. Each firing of nerves reinforces some pathways, prunes others, changes the intricate microstructures of our minds – quite literally transforms us, second by second, gigabyte by gigabyte, synaptic connection by synaptic connection, into who we will become. The same is true for sounds, smells, tastes, touches. We relentlessly collect the present, and we store it all in the form of an unfathomably elaborate neural sculpture we refer to simply as memory.

But everything known at this stage about how a neural structure might represent a passing moment is the clunkiest of understandings. Modern neuroscience paints the broad brush strokes at best. When it comes to the details, we’re in the weeds. What makes a moment worth remembering? How does the mechanism of recall operate? How do we know the difference between the event and the memory of the event – a seemingly trivial feat, but astonishing when you think about it. How does the ever-shifting relative importance of memories get coded into the architecture? The last time I saw my grandfather, for example, the time passed uneventfully, installed in my memory like any other unremarkable Saturday, unpunctuated at the time. But images from that day loom large now. I stopped by his house in North Alabama on the way home from Tennessee and he met me at the screen door. I vividly remember shaking his ancient right hand, his ring finger and his pinkie permanently curled toward his palm by the tightening of tendons in his forearm. I remember sitting on the fender of the Pontiac he could no longer operate, him in a folding aluminum chair under the giant cedar in his crushed limestone drive, his garden of vegetables in the field beyond the fence. I remember both of us laughing at the stories we wove into the air, him walking me to my car, him standing by his mailbox waving me over the hill as I drove away. Some months later, when the family asked me to speak at his funeral, I expected to remember the funeral day like a video. But I don’t.

As I write this, the first hours I spent with Ji Xia are still fresh in time – barely a day old. The floor-to-ceiling doors open. Inside, the courtroom. Heavy red drapes at the front, large Chinese characters in gold on either side of a dinner plate of an official seal. A raised stage with a long table, three black leather chairs with tall backs: seating for officials. To the right, the crossed hammer and sickle flag of China hanging from a pole. In front of the stage, long rows of tables; more large black chairs; seating for about 50. I don’t see Ji Xia at first. I see the little girl Julie will adopt, Ji Kong, who will become Elisabeth. She is awake, bouncing on a lap. Then I hear the words “Ji Xia” pinned between meaningless Mandarin sounds and turn to see a young woman a few yards away standing on the other side of a long row of tables, pointing downward into two in-turned chairs, her eyebrows raised expectantly toward us. There are many people between me and the young woman: Julie, Pat, Doris, the director of the orphanage, a caregiver. Crescent and I are awkward, not wanting to rush past Julie in this, her profound moment, and by so doing, diminish it even slightly. So I watch Julie pick up Ji Kong who is becoming Elisabeth in this moment. Then we step toward the in-turned chairs, toward Ji Xia, as Julie weeps. We look down into the chairs. White shirt, blue pants, asleep. Suddenly, Crescent is holding Ji Xia and I am standing beside her watching the two of them.

For the next half hour, we hold our new babies, take pictures, pass them around, and generally act like new parents. A surprise to us: their cleft lips have been repaired. Ji Xia is teething and the front of her shirt is soaked. I measure every expression in my mind's eye, marvel at a small hand closed tightly on my shirt. There is business to be done, forms to sign. I sit at a table in the front row of the room next to Crescent, Ji Xia in her lap, Doris and the CCAA official on the other side of the table. As Doris translates, the official asks us whether we recognize the child in Crescent’s lap as the same child we were referred by the CCAA. I think of the three pictures on our refrigerator 9000 miles away, taken 6 months ago, look at ji Xia. Yes. Same girl. Twice as old as she was in the photos, but same girl. The official asks us if we are aware that this girl has a cleft lip and palate and that her palate has not been repaired. We are. The official asks us if we promise to love and care for this girl and afford her all the rights of a birth child and that we will not mistreat her nor abuse her in any way. We do. She shows us the public notice posted for six weeks in the community where she was found seeking to locate her birth parents. She shows us the certification of abandonment that defines her as a legal candidate for adoption. We acknowledge that we understand these documents, sign our names beside our promises, press our thumbs into a ceramic dish of red paste, add thumbprints over our signatures. According to protocol, with her head bowed, Crescent presents a gift to the official, wrapped in red paper, tied with gold ribbon, held out in open palms, the most respectful way. When all of this is done, Ji Xia is, according to the laws of the Peoples Republic of China, ours.

Our business at the Office of Civil Affairs concluded for the day, we walk back down the stairs, into the lobby, around the ping-pong table. The men look up lazily and just as lazily return to their conversations and their cigarettes, as if this happens every day. The driver is waiting outside in front of the barrier to take us back across town. We stop in a department store and buy two strollers as strangers stop to stare, craning to catch a glimpse of the girls.

To my surprise, it all seems completely unremarkable. I am like the men in the lobby. I have a child, and now a stroller, and I push the stroller with my child inside along the sidewalk with the hundred other people, and I am as the hundred people see me: a man pushing a stroller, nothing more. I step into traffic to cross the street, aligning the stroller beside a native, borrowing his judgement, matching my movements to his. And the morning passes, as does lunch, and the afternoon. Ji Xia naps.

An hour later she wakes up. We go out, through the marbled lobby, past the fish knifing through the water in their aquarium, past the bird cages, and out onto the sidewalk again. We find a restaurant and order some food and a bowl of Kangii for Ji Xia, to go with the banana and the yoghurt we have brought. And as we wait for our food, Ji Xia puts her tiny ring finger on top of her pointer finger, reaches toward Crescent and ever so delicately, lifting her eyes to me, presses down on the bone in Crescent’s wrist. And in that moment, I feel the architecture of my brain shift.

Crescent whispers my name, checking to see if I’m awake. It’s four thirty, two and a half hours before the wake-up call.
“So it’s like this then,” I say.
“Yeah…we should sleep. Big day coming.”
“Like a train from Wénzhou” I say.
So I sleep again and wake up an hour and a half later. Crescent’s standing at the window taking pictures of the sunrise over the city. I rise and we pack our list into a daypack– diapers, bottles, official papers, passports, camera, gifts for officials wrapped in red paper for luck, a toy, two tiny shirts, two tiny pants, two tiny shoes, water – and head downstairs.
Pat Lee, the woman who has shepherded us through the process, is waiting for us in the lobby. A score of orange fish as big as my hand glide and roll around a phone booth sized cylindrical tank on a pedestal nearby, businessmen sit in large leather chairs, smoking and doing business, or reading the morning newspapers. Doris, one of Pat’s dozen children, is also there, talking on a cell phone with our driver. Doris is Pat’s CCAA liaison and for this trip, our guide, translator, and arranger, switching between Mandarin, Cantonese, and English like I change radio stations. The other family in our group, Julie and her mother Mayme from Daphne, Alabama, is still upstairs. They arrive a few minutes before the driver and we all stand around talking about small things, as people do when large things are happening, as if we weren’t a half hour away from our daughters.
When the van arrives, we load in and our driver pulls into murderously tight traffic. Cars whose manufacturers are unknown to me grind along within inches on all sides of us. Bicyclists slip through momentary gaps that grow between the cars, pedestrians stream across crosswalks, spaces and speeds calibrated to the inch. No one waits for western-sized buffer zones, they step into traffic with a suicidal abandon, shoot gaps, defy death, as if it were an everyday thing. Cars, bikes, pedestrians, mopeds, electric scooters weave a random web, going from everywhere to everywhere at once. Beyond the road, beyond the sidewalks, shops give way to open spaces, parks, monuments. Hongzhou is a garden city, a monument city, impeccably manicured and well cared for. The streets are spotless. No litter anywhere.
We arrive at the building that houses the Office of Civil Affairs. An accordion gate on wheels is pushed open wide enough to admit us in pairs, or in threes, and we climb the granite steps that spill out onto the sidewalk from the glass-fronted lobby. An official sits smoking behind a metal office desk to one side, two others men in cushion chairs sit talking along the wall on the other side. They look up then return to their conversation. A ping-pong table fills the space between.
Our business is on the 6th floor, so Doris asks directions to the elevator. They speak Mandarin, then Doris laughs an exasperated laugh, rolls her eyes. The man laughs too and gestures to a doorway across the lobby.
“No elevator! Stairs,” he says in rounded English, and laughs again. So we climb the six flights of stairs, Crescent, Doris and I ahead of Julie, Mayme and Pat. On the sixth floor, we step into a long hallway. To the right are steps out onto a rooftop patio, and it looks beautiful at a glance, but that’s all I do is glance, because on the other end of the hallway are two floor-to-ceiling wooden doors, dark, with gold bars for handles.
“Is that the room? Is Ji Xia in there?” I ask Doris.
“Yes. The babies are there, and the people from the orphanage. We must wait for the official.”
The official, a beautiful woman in a green laced dress, steps out of an office as Julie, Mayme and Pat arrive in the hallway. We all walk toward the big doors. Crescent is holding my arm. The official opens the doors, and we walk in. Ji Xia is asleep on her stomach on a pair of leather courtroom chairs pushed together into a crib. We watch her sleep, unsure. What in the world is the protocol for this? Do we wake her up? Let her sleep? I feel tears rising. A moment later, her caregiver gently lifts her out of her sleep and hands her to Crescent, and we become a family.