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.