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.

Arriving in Hangzhou: every arriving begins as a leaving.

We will meet Ji Xia tomorrow morning at nine, but tonight we are still moving toward each other from an unimaginable distance.

Ji Xia is on a train tonight, traveling the ten hours from Wénzhou with another young orphan girl, a caretaker, and an orphanage official. They took the slow train instead of the express and booked second-class sleeper cars to save fare, because what they don’t spend on train tickets can be spent on the orphans that remain behind. They’ll have the windows open to the countryside because it’s hot here, southern hot, Alabama hot. Ji Xia will wake up every couple of hours in a different village to the sounds of voices over intercoms and people talking on train platforms in the middle of the night, then drift off again to the metronome of metal wheels over rails. I imagine she’ll be exhausted in the morning when she arrives here in Hangzhou at the office of civil affairs.

This morning Crescent and I boarded a jet for the two-hour flight from Guangzhou and checked into the five star Lake View Hotel just before lunch: traditional murals ten meters across frescoed on the walls above the concierge desk, enormous wooden cages filled with songbirds flitting and rising like moths in a giant lampshade, intricate jade relief-carvings in the lobby, high thread count linens and feather pillows, marble and wood in the rooms. Crescent orders toast from room service to calm her jet-lagged stomach and it arrives five minutes later on fine china with the crusts cut off and a side of delicate mushrooms and thin slivers of cucumber. A half-hour later, housekeeping brings a baby bed to the room, and two polite and efficient maids assemble it quickly, bow and smile at us, and tell us ‘congratulations! lucky baby’ while we sit on the edge of our bed, stupidly happy, trying to get our heads around the idea that we’re about to need a baby bed, that we're about to leave behind a lifestyle we've known all our adult lives.

We walk around the city for an hour or two, leaving a wake of stares wherever we go, generating smiles and polite waves, return greetings of “ha-loo-wel-come China!” with timid “nee-how-she-she,” in a clumsy tying-together of the only two Mandarin words we possess into an anemic but sincere response – hello! thank you! We’re the only Westerners around. We return to the Lake View where tonight we’ll sleep in air conditioned luxury, or more likely lie awake, stealing glances at the bedside clock and waiting for dawn.

Crescent and I are almost two years into what is euphemistically referred to by veterans of this process as the paper pregnancy. We’ve filled out forms, gathered birth certificates, marriage licenses, bank records, we’ve written autobiographies, submitted fingerprints to the state and the FBI, been examined by physicians and by the Department of Homeland Security. We’ve been interviewed by social workers, paid thousands of dollars in fees, corresponded with the U.S. State Department and the Chinese Consulate in Washington D.C. We’ve received photographs of Ji Xia (three in all) and pinned them under magnets on the fridge, taken the sparse medical records supplied by the PRC listing her weight and height and her head circumference and describing her deformity to a cleft lip/palate team in San Francisco, researched and ruminated, and after being cleared by DHS, INS, FBI, PRC, after accepting a referral by the CCAA, after submitting our legan intent to adopt and receiving our official invitation, after being issued travel visas, finally booked passage for the trip that has carried us nine thousand miles away from our little house in the Santa Cruz mountains and brought us here to this hotel down the street from the office of Civil affairs, where Ji Xia will be in the morning.

It’s the simplest thing in the world to think only of oneself: how much paperwork, how many months, how many dollars, how many miles. But I know that it is Ji Xia, born only a few hundred miles from here, who is making the longer journey. This afternoon, while Crescent and I were leisurely walking around this beautiful city, Ji Xia was leaving the orphanage, the only home she’s ever known. Tonight, while we’re asleep in our luxury hotel, Ji Xia will be slipping inexorably away from the culture of her birth, and tomorrow at the office of civil affairs, her caregiver will hold her out and we – complete strangers who sound different, look different, smell different from anything in her life thus far– will take her.

Yesterday we met a shopkeeper who spoke English and she asked us what we were doing here in China. When we told her we were here to adopt a little girl, she gave us the same response the housekeepers expressed. Lucky baby.
“I hope so,” I said, “but we feel like the lucky ones.”
“Maybe double happiness,” she said. That's what I'm hoping for. Double Happiness.

First days in Guangzhou

We arrived in Guangzhou yesterday and checked into the White Swan hotel, the five star on Shamalian Island known for its popularity with foreign nationals in China to adopt. At breakfast this morning, I saw no less than two dozen foreign couples with Chinese babies. That'll be us in a week.

After breakfast, we walked about a half hour into the city and found a food market where the entire animal kingdom was available - dried, pickled, shredded, boxed, tied, caged, giant bags of dessicated seahorses, shelf fungi two feet across, buckets of eels, tubs of scorpions, squirrels, turtles, and, as in the picture, cylinders of dried snakes tied together with ropes.

Tonight we found a restaurant that served - get this - Chinese food. On the menu, we had a bewildering choice that included prepared duck chest, roated duck chin and sauce, assorted food with chili spiced, and flied cashew with flavor, so we ate big.

3 AM Pacific Coast Time: On the Plane to Guangzhou

I have an absurd image in my mind that I know is completely inaccurate, but it’s persistent. I see a gymnasium-sized vault of a room, with a hard tile floor and garish lights hanging from metal pipes, institutional paint, and in the room are a thousand cribs in rows, uniform and regular, like tombstones at Arlington, and in each crib is an orphan. I imagine a handful of birdlike ladies bending over crib rails efficiently adjusting bottles, changing diapers, drawing thin rectangle blankets. The room sounds like seagulls over a bay, and somewhere in the sea of cribs is Ji Xia, who, if not at this very moment then in some other moment very much like this one, is crying up into the bare lights, acutely aware that something is missing because no one comes to pick her up.

Here’s what we know: She was born around February 24, 2006. She was found at a bus stop in Wénzhou, a big city, when she was just a few days old. She has a cleft lip and palate. She’s in an orphanage. That’s it. The rest of her history we have to imagine.

We’ll probably never learn the details of how she was found. Did her mother come from the country, spending most of her money on a long bus ride to the city to leave her where she knew someone would find her quickly? Did she linger in the dawn, watching from a distance? I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t linger. Did she pin a note to her clothes with a message, or an apology, or an attempt at an explanation, or a declaration of love? Did she leave a flower, or a button, or a ribbon? Was it even her mother who left her? Maybe it was her father. Or an Aunt.

What could possibly explain how someone came to such a desperate decision? The boilerplate answer is that she was born a girl in a culture with a one-child-per-family policy that values boys, but that’s a thin explanation. I believe that mothers are mothers, and this mother would have wanted what all mothers want for their babies: a good life. Perhaps she wasn’t wretched, or weak, or even shameful, but simply willing to do anything, even the unthinkable, to give her daughter a chance at the kind of life she felt she couldn’t provide. Otherwise, if she really was hard-hearted, why a bus stop? Why not an empty field, or a river?

No, I think this mother must’ve cared very much, which means that what she did - leave her baby at a bus stop for a stranger to find - was utterly stunning in its humanity. It was desperation, but also hope, that drove her to that bus stop. Maybe she’s too poor to feed her, or too ill to raise her. Maybe Ji’s cleft palate kept her from nursing and she feared Ji would starve. Whatever the reason, I know this: she had the strength to do what she did and I certainly won’t judge her a monster, because the fact is that in all likelihood she faced the horrible reality of watching from a distance while a stranger took her baby away in the hope that her baby would find a better life. That mother must be broken with grief. What haunts me is the thought that she will almost certainly never know what became of her daughter. She’ll never know that against incredibly long odds, her desperate gamble paid off, her daughter found a home.

Packing List

Our adoption agent has been travelling with families to China to get babies for the past decade and here's the packing list she recommends. Theoretically it's close to the bone but it seems like a lot to me, and to Stella, who wanted me to leave the wooden toy for her to chew on while we're gone, which I should do because all this stuff outweighs Ji Xia and it's all made in China anyway. So they make it and ship it on container ships to Cali where we buy it at Target and fly it back to China. Taking coals to Newcastle if you ask me, but what I know about taking care of a baby would fit in a baby's hat, so I ain't gonna argue.

80 diapers (Ultra trim)
1 box of disposable diaper sacks
5 bibs
5 sleepers
5 onesies
1 dress outfit (for notary interview)
1 dress outfit (for arrival in airport in USA)
1 sweater
1 jacket with hood
1 hat
3 recieving blankets
6 pairs of socks
2 pairs of tights
shoes
bath items (shampoo, soap, lotion, toothbrush, toothpaste)
2 baby washcloths
1 baby towel
Pedialyte
Infant suppositories for constipation
Infant Mylicon (gas pain)
Benadryl
Infant Tylenol
Children's Advil or Motrin
A&D ointment
Lotrimin cream
Medicine dropper
Nasal aspirator
Rectal thermometer
Wipes ( the noun, I assume, not the verb)
Baby fingernail clippers
Vaseline
1 large insulated thermos
6 bottles(8 oz)
1 box of rice cereal
2 baby food jars of prunes
variety of nipples (we both will be bringing our own so we have 4 already - two different varieties)
2 sippy cups
2 spoons
cheereos and other finger food
baby carrying sling
baby toys and books
changing pad
quart sized plastic container
baby bottle brush
small bottle of dishwashing liquid
plastic-backed tablecloth

If you have no kids, you can get in the car on the spur of the moment on Saturday with very little luggage - a tent and some sleeping bags - and drive to Big Sur and camp on the coast for the night. This is one of the beaches toward the south end of Big Sur. It's a stunning landscape. I put this photo here so that you can compare what we look like before kids with what we'll look like after our trip. I keep thinking about how Jimmy Carter looked the day he took office compared to how he looked when he left the job.