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.