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.