When I asked Megan, who was turning seven in a few weeks, what she would like for her birthday, she piped up, “A sister!” Her words struck my heart like stones.
Kevin and I were from small families. We knew when we got married that we wanted a big family, but it didn’t turn out that way.
There had been a time when I began every day wishing evening would come quickly so I could lose myself in sleep. I spent the day in my housecoat and slippers. I didn’t bathe or comb my hair. Sometimes, when he came home from the office at noon to check on me, Kevin found me where he had left me, sitting on the couch, staring at nothing.
I didn’t feel sorry for myself; I didn’t feel anything. I changed my dressings with the disinterest of a cop writing a traffic ticket. Sometimes I wandered from room to room in the empty house, aimlessly picking up toys, knickknacks, books, magazines, turning them over in my hands and setting them down again. I yearned to be interested in things.
Kevin phoned from work every hour or so. I let the machine pick up. After the first sympathy call from the school where I taught, I wanted no more. I couldn’t bear the honeyed tone of voice, the soft concern, the kindness that grated like broken glass. The solicitations of Kevin’s and my parents set my teeth on edge. When they came over I screamed silently for them to go away, to ease my burning nerves. Megan, bewildered by the woman her mother had become, avoided me. Kevin understood. He left me alone, but seemed to know where I was every second.
When the anger came, seeping into me the way spilled blood soaks a paper towel, I welcomed it. For a time, rage was my friend. Unable to rail against god or fate, I cursed the doctors. The operation left me empty and barren as sand. The thought of the hospital churned my fury. On one floor people in white smocks struggled to bring another day’s life to a premature infant in an incubator, while on the floor below others casually performed abortion after abortion. The absurdity was cosmic. I was somewhere in the middle. My baby lost through miscarriage, what they clinically called my reproductive system damaged beyond hope. And removed, leaving me empty and bitter for a long time.
Megan must have overheard conversations between Kevin and me, and the phone calls with adoption agencies. A few wouldn’t even give us appointments after they learned that we already had a girl of our own. Those who had finally agreed to interview us marked us down on their long waiting lists with little hope.
We eventually stopped talking about adopting altogether. Until Megan brought it up again.
It was a typical fall day. The sky was a vast sea of blue, embellishing a forest of coloured leaves. I was in the staff room at lunchtime, waiting for my lunch to heat up in the microwave, when I noticed a newspaper clipping pinned to the bulletin board. It was a brief report on China’s family-planning law. As a grade four teacher, most of my reading was confined to student projects on insects and reptiles, or spelling tests and arithmetic quizzes. When I did get a chance to branch out, I settled down with something refreshingly literary, so I knew very little in detail about China. But I had a husband addicted to his three newspapers a day and a father who was a retired head librarian, so I had picked up a bit of information. China was changing, opening up more and more to trade and tourism. By the end of the week, after talking to both Kevin and Dad, I had a good grasp of China’s attempts at population control. And the more I learned, the deeper I was drawn into what I came to call China’s baby policy, which allowed only one child per family and strictly punished parents who broke the rule. They were subject to fines, demotions, and ejection from the Communist Party, and a cruel second-class citizenship awaited the forbidden second child. But one thing we discovered with delight: people outside China were allowed to adopt Chinese babies.
I called the Children’s Aid Society in Toronto. An agent advised me to get in touch with the federal government’s International Adoption Desk in Ottawa. They in turn told me to write to a certain private adoption agency in Vancouver, which had in the past couple of years brought back overseas children to homes in Canada; a few of them were from China. The woman who answered the phone informed me that the agency had no problem accepting applicants who already had kids. But I would have to take an older child, she told me, or one with a disability or questionable health. Or a girl, if the child is Chinese, I said to myself.
After months of phone calls and tons of paperwork, a letter arrived with a photo of a little girl named Dong-mei. The poor thing looked too small for a six-month-old. Along with the picture came instructions to apply for a Chinese visa, and more documents and forms to be filled in by our family doctor, employers, and banks. Megan was delighted by all the official forms, and we watched her go through them page by page as we looked at each other across the kitchen table. Suddenly it had all become real.
The colour photo showed me nothing about the child who, if all the bureaucrats could be satisfied, was going to be our daughter. How could a baby’s face be so grave and blank?
On Tuesday afternoon when I got home from school, there were three phone messages from a reporter at The Milford Daily, asking us to return his call as soon as possible.
“Mrs. Parker, this is a fascinating story,” he pressed me when I called back. “A Red Chinese baby is coming to Milford and—”
“Mr. Jenkins, I understand that you have a job to do. But at the moment I have nothing to say.”
A few days later, on the front page of the paper, was the headline “Milford’s First Chinese Citizen.” I read the article, trembling with anger. At least he hadn’t brought politics in; there was no mention of “red.”
But I had more on my mind than a newspaper story. In a letter we received a day earlier, via the adoption agency, we learned for the first time that Dong-mei had been born deaf. That surely explained her sad face in the photo. But why had we not been told until two weeks before we headed across the Pacific to get her? I went through every single letter sent to us and failed to find even a hint about the child’s disability. A phone call to Vancouver didn’t help much. All I got was an earful of apologies from Ms. Chow, who promised to look into the matter as soon as she could. I wasn’t interested in who was responsible or where to lay the blame. It was no one’s fault if Dong-mei was deaf. What would matter to me, and to Kevin and Megan, was whether or not her disability would change our decision.
Ms. Chow called me back three days later. She related that Chinese government policy dictated that if the adoptee was a second child as in our case, the adopting family must accept an “imperfect” baby. The rule also applied within China but in reverse. Only couples whose first child is deformed are allowed a second. Chow added that if I changed my mind about adopting Dong-mei I should let her know as soon as possible.
I’d like to say that Kevin and I weren’t bothered by this new development. But we both tossed and turned in the darkness. Say what you will, a disabled child brings added responsibility, strain on the family, expense, and demands on emotional energy. I knew that from being a teacher for years. And if Dong-mei’s hearing impairment had been kept from us, what other problems might the Chinese bureaucrats have overlooked—or hidden?
We got up in the morning, carried on our normal routine. My mind, though, was a stormy sea, and as the day wore on I became more agitated.
“Would we have given up Megan if she was born deaf or mute?” I asked Kevin as soon as he stepped into the house that evening.
Kevin looked at me with the same sense of determination that had attracted me on our first date. “Let’s do it, Jane.”
I picked up the phone. For the first time since our contact with the adoption agency I was thankful that Vancouver was three hours behind. “Nothing has changed,” I told Ms. Chow. “We are going to China as scheduled.”
The Nanjing Hotel was a rather forbidding Russian-style pile of stone set in a garden in the northeast part of the city of Nanjing. The trees and hedges surrounding the building drooped in the heat.
“Ten days?” the young woman at the front desk said incredulously.
There followed rapid dialogue, frowning, and head-shaking between the clerk and Ms. Cai, the woman from the Nanjing Foreign Affairs Office who had met us at the airport and would be our interpreter and liaison with the orphanage. Kevin and I exchanged glances.
“Ten?” the clerk asked again, this time in English, holding up both hands with her fingers splayed. “Here? Nanjing?”
While Kevin filled out the registration form, I asked Ms. Cai, “Is everything all right? The hotel isn’t full, is it?”
This brought a laugh from the interpreter. Cai was a small woman in her mid-forties, garbed in a white blouse and black trousers. “Oh, no, Mrs. Parker.” She pronounced it Pokka. “Everything just fine. No problem at all. The young comrade is curious about your long staying. In summer, Nanjing is known as one of China’s ‘three furnaces,’ so tourists usually try to avoid to come here. Or to have short visit at least.”
I looked at the clerk. “Please tell the young lady that where we come from it is winter six months of the year. We don’t mind a bit of hot weather.”
After Cai translated, the young woman smiled behind her hand. “Wer-come,” she said.
Although our room had an air conditioner that wheezed away at the window, I would be stretching things if I claimed it was cool. It was frustrating, sitting in our room, bathed in our own sweat, waiting to see Dong-mei. The closer we came to seeing her, the more anxious we became that something might go wrong.
Ms. Cai was all right, doing what she was supposed to do—acting as a go-between and tour guide—with grace and politeness. The pumpkin-faced woman tried her best to help us occupy our time. Upon meeting us, she had handed me a typed itinerary of sights to see. But after a tedious trip to the Sun Yat-sen tomb the next morning, I pitched the itinerary directly into the garbage.
While we were having lunch in the hotel restaurant, Ms. Cai came to inform us that our request to visit the orphanage in Yangzhou had been turned down. Yangzhou, about two and a half hours by bus from Nanjing, sits where the Grand Canal meets the Yangtze River.
Kevin and I were learning that asking “Why?” didn’t often produce acceptable answers. Or answers that made sense.
“There are no bus tickets,” Ms. Cai said to us.
Kevin looked at me, then asked Ms. Cai, “How can there be no tickets? It’s a public transit system, isn’t it? It operates daily, doesn’t it?”
“We’ll take a taxi tomorrow,” I cut in. “If we leave in the morning, we’ll be there before noon. Plenty of time to look around, then return.”
“Not possible,” Ms. Cai said firmly. “The orphanage is not kai-fang-dan-wei. It is not open to foreign visitors.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to tell us that earlier on in the conversation?” Kevin muttered.
“But we don’t care about the facilities,” I protested. “We just want to see the place where Dong-mei has lived, maybe take a few pictures to show her when she’s older. It’s important to us that Dong-mei keeps a link to her heritage, her roots.”
Cai sounded puzzled. “But why you want her to know such negative details? The dark part of her life? Her mother deserted her. When they found her, she was half frozen, didn’t have strength to eat or cry. The workers in the orphanage called her Tearless Girl. Then later they realized her hearing defect. It’s sad story. Better she not know. She a lucky girl, just tell her that.”
Days passed. The streets sweltered. A thunderstorm howled across the city. Kevin and I tried to while away the time reading, going for walks in the relative cool of evening, occasionally succumbing to Cai’s urgings to accompany her to a temple or other historic site. Gnawed by doubt, we reminded ourselves that everything had gone well—though slowly—so far, and we had nothing to fear. We were also aware that as Canadians we were favoured by China to adopt their children. We knew that the memory of Norman Bethune was still strong, and that he was still regarded as a hero and great friend of the Chinese people. Canada’s being one of the first Western nations to recognize Mao Ze-dong’s government also helped, we thought.
“If this is how they treat people they favour,” Kevin joked, “I hate to think how it would be if we were not favoured.”
The sixth morning began as the others had. The heat came with the light, and by breakfast time the cicadas were thrumming in the gardens. We had just finished our meal and returned to our room when there was a knock on the door. It was Ms. Cai, her chubby face split by a triumphant grin that made my heart soar. Standing on one side of her was an older man whose white shirt was buttoned to his chin; on the other, a middle-aged woman similarly dressed, with short straight hair as rigid as her posture. In her arms was a bundle of blankets.
“Kevin!” I called out, forgetting to invite the party in.
Kevin rushed to the door. “Come in, please,” he urged.
The woman said something.
“We may have overdressed Dong-mei,” Cai translated. “We heard that the hotel is air-conditioned and didn’t want her to catch a chill.”
I let out a nervous laugh at the word chill.
After we had persuaded our visitors to sit, Cai began to speak formally. “Allow me to introduce Mr. Liu, director of Social and Welfare Institute of Jiangsu Province. Mrs. Xia is with Yangzhou Orphanage, which is under the leadership of the institute. It was Mrs. Xia who found Dong-mei outside the orphanage over seven months ago.”
While Cai talked, I made tea and set the cups on the tables beside our guests, who ignored them. Mr. Liu cleared his throat and began to talk in a surprisingly powerful voice.
“Mr. and Mrs. Parker. Your patience is appreciated by our government, and your donation to the orphanage is very generous. Perhaps all the paperwork required for Dong-mei’s adoption is in order. So, if you would sign this document, you may take Dong-mei to Canada.” The document, we were informed, was actually a receipt, dated and stamped, acknowledging that we had received a female child from the institution.
While the translation pattered on, Kevin and I couldn’t tear our eyes from the motionless bundle in Xia’s arms. We signed where Cai indicated and returned the papers to Mr. Liu. Liu then stood, followed by Xia and Cai.
“Now I’m sure you are eager to see your daughter,” he said kindly. “If you have no more questions, we will go.”
He gestured to Xia to hand over the baby, whose face we had yet to see. I took her and immediately pulled the outer blankets away to reveal the same tiny, serious face that I had seen in the photo. “Thank you, thank you,” was all I could say.
Xia rattled off a few sentences and Cai translated.
“Mrs. Xia tells that you should feed the baby soy milk, maybe with a little sugar. Also once a day you may give a bit fruit or rice made into mush.”
“Yes,” I said, gazing down into the tiny face of my daughter, “I brought soy milk with me.”
“Please convey our thanks to the Chinese government and the officials at Yangzhou Orphanage,” Kevin intoned, as formally as he could manage. “There is one request I would like to make. My wife and I wonder if there is any information on Dong-mei’s background. We would like to know as much as we can in case Dong-mei asks us when she is older.”
There was a moment of silence. Cai looked a little displeased after she had finished the translation. Liu shook his head. “Mei-you—nothing,” was all he said.
Cai elaborated. “Whoever left Dong-mei did it secretly. If seen, the person would have been punished and the baby returned.”
Xia kept silent, looking at the floor. After more formal thank-yous and farewells, the three Chinese left us with our new daughter.
As soon as the door was closed I lay Dong-mei on the bed and began to loosen the tightly wrapped blankets.
“Three layers! It’s a wonder the poor little mite didn’t roast. Look, Kevin, she’s so small!”
But she was bright-eyed and she kicked and punched, blowing bubbles as I removed her soggy cotton diaper and put on one of the disposable ones we had brought with us. It was far too large, and, as if aware of how pathetic she looked in it, Dong-mei began to cry.
I picked her up, swaddled in a light cotton blanket, and began to pace the room to quiet her. No luck. I sat down and bounced her on my knees. Dong-mei wailed even louder, and I was grateful that the hotel was almost empty. Kevin took her from me and sang to her, with no effect.
It was a long night. We took turns walking and rocking our little girl, who after a few hours quieted down—provided she was in motion. As soon as she was placed on the bed, her eyes would snap open and the cries would come again. An hour or so before dawn, Dong-mei drifted off to sleep, and I lay her between us on the bed. In seconds, the three of us were asleep.
I was awakened by a quiet knock at the door. “What’s that?” I exclaimed.
I looked at my watch when the knock was repeated, low but insistent. Six am. Still dressed from the night before, I rolled carefully off the bed, picked Dong-mei up, and opened the door.
Mrs. Xia pushed past me into the room and closed the door behind her.
“Oh, no,” I moaned. “Kevin, there must be something wrong! Is there a problem?” I asked Xia. She gave me a bewildered look. I remembered she had no English. I asked, “Alone?” She frowned at me. I held up one finger. “Alone?” She seemed to catch on, because she nodded and, to my relief, smiled.
“Um, you-wen-ti-ma?” Kevin tried haltingly. “Is there trouble?”
Xia shook her head. “Bu, bu, bu,” she said. She made sure the door was locked, then took a small piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to me.
I said to Kevin, “There’s writing on it. In Chinese.”
The writing was in blue ink, just four handwritten characters. I wondered why Xia hadn’t given it to us the day before so that Ms. Cai could translate it for us. Then it struck me that she had brought it today, alone, at dawn, because it was secret.
Xia pointed to the first line on the paper. “Chun-mei. Mama,” she said. Then, pointing to the second, “Dong-mei.”
“Is she trying to say that Chun-mei is Dong-mei’s mother?” Kevin said to me.
“But they told us yesterday her mother was unknown.”
This time I pointed to the first line of writing. “Dong-mei Mama?” I asked Mrs. Xia.
Her face brightened. “Dui, dui, dui.” She smiled, touching my finger. “Chun-mei.” She then moved my finger to the last two characters. “Dong-mei.” She patted the baby’s head.
The similarity of names struck me, though I didn’t know what they meant. “I understand,” I said uselessly.
“I bet the note was left with the baby,” Kevin said. “The mother must have wanted the names to be known.”
Dong-mei chose that moment to wail as if I had pinched her. Xia took a close look underneath her blanket and noticed the disposable diaper with the big pink flower on the bottom. She tsked and shook her head and held out her arms. Reluctantly, I handed Dong-mei to her.
Xia put Dong-mei down on the bed and stripped off the diaper. She searched the room with her eyes and pounced on the green canvas bag she had left with us the day before. From it she removed a worn but clean cotton diaper and, mumbling to herself, pinned it on the baby. Dong-mei fell silent.
Xia pointed to the disposable diaper. “Bu, bu, bu,” she said, shaking her head.
She passed Dong-mei to me, then shook hands with Kevin and me.
“I wish I could talk to you—and thank you,” I told her.
Xia unlocked the door, opened it, and looked up and down the hall before stepping out. “Zai-jian,” she said, and walked briskly to the stairway.