MY JOURNEY TO NOW . . . TO BE CONTINUED

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs of other families who have or are in the process of adopting from China and it makes me so impatient! When I was eight years old (back in 1995-96), and I overheard my mother talking with a friend about China. Being the child that I was, I wanted to know what the conversation was about. Though the memory has gotten worn around the edges, I still remember her explaining the one-child policy in China to me and the cultural preference for boys. I was a fiesty little kid, though with a big heart (my mom got me to give up my pacifyer as a four year old when she told me that there were some little children that didn’t have any pacifyers—she then proceeded to take my carefully wrapped gift of my “suckers” and put them in my saving’s box), and I told my mother right then and there that someday I was going to adopt, “Ten little girls from China.” And my mind has never been changed.

Through most of my highschool years it was really put on the back burner, so much so that as as a junior, I didn’t remember ever saying it until a long time friend who hadn’t seen me in a few years asked, “Are you still going to adopt those ten little girls from China?” Between that question and another conversation with a close family friend that had adopted three children from Vietnam, I started to research adoption. At first it was just international adoption in a general sense, but I found I sat up straighter and paid more attention to the articles I read on Chinese adoption. After a few long days, maybe a week, I gave up all pretenses of researching adoption as a subject and started devouring everything I could get my hands on about Chinese adoption. Check out this site: http://www.tussah.com/lara/chinasto.htm, you’ll find the website that really started the ball rolling for me.

About half of the links were disconnected, but in the page after page of links to family blogs and adoption journals, I got a better picture of what it actually looked like to take the journey I had been so adamant about as an eight year old school child. They were touching, thrilling, exciting. Each story became a fast passed, page turner for me. Yet in many stories there was a reference to British journalists that had found something about Chinese orphanages that was appalling. I remember pausing in one story, halfway intent on finding out what these references was about—my finger poised over the google search button at the top of my screen. “No,” I decided. “If it’s really bad--really, really bad . . . it will only drive me out of my mind. I’m seventeen, and there is nothing I can do to get those kids out. I have another thirteen years before I’m even old enough to submit a dossier (formal request to adopt). It will only drive me out of my mind.” So for three months I made a very concious choice in favor of ignorance. I continued to read, to research, to pray, to swallow up everything in sight, but I would not go looking for the story behind the vague references. I didn’t want to know.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. The same little spark of curiosity that had first asked my mother what she was talking about nine years before, that had brought me to this place of obsession, got the best of me. I had to know. So I started with simple google searches, typing in the pieces of information I DID have to try and locate the pieces of the story I didn’t. What I found broke my heart. Whoever said that ignorance is bliss must have had the same journey to discovery I had that day. I read about Kate Blewett’s documentary, The Dying Rooms. I read about the conditions she had discovered in the mid ‘90’s in China’s orphanages. Most heartrending of all--I saw my first photograph of Mei Ming. I can’t explain it all. She does it far better than I could. If you want to hear her story, go to this link and watch Blewett’s documentary: http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/archive/the_dying_room_player.html. I warn you that it is upsetting, but important. Too much of what happened to those children happened because the rest of the world looked the other way. It is important to remember them. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and twenty six letters can conquer the world, than this video is more important than any amount of writing can convey.

This was my first experience with shocked, horrified grief. I didn’t speak of this discovery for months. I felt that hollow empty feeling you have when you wake up to the world and discover there is true evil in it. Evil so far above your own painful experiences that getting up in the morning almost seems futile. In the midst of all of these emotions came the realization of the year the documentary was made—1995. I had been eight years old. THIS publication, making China the talk of the Western world, had most likely been what had started my mother’s conversation (when I finally did mention my discovery, my mother already knew about it), which prompted my inquiry, and lead me—nine years later—to discover the story and the children that had started it all.

Kate Blewett later said she could never return to China—if she did she would never be able to return home. But because she went that one time, thousands upon thousands of other Westerners took up the next stage of her journey. The children who came after Mei Ming and the others who died of sheer neglect had the alliance of soccer mom’s and every day dad’s on their side. Many of them were adopted, and those left behind have receieved better care than their forebearers. That’s the only way I can live with what was done to Mei Ming—knowing that what happened to her made a difference to her abandoned sisters.

To this day I carry her memory with me everywhere. From time to time I’ll look up at a girl (usually white, like myself) that is about the age that she would be now if she had lived and wonder where she came from before she was abandoned, who she looked like, wonder who she would have been had she survived. And then the real hard question—could she have made a greater impact than she did if she had lived? I read the blogs of others that have Chinese daughters, and see their children’s faces and think of the girl that brought their plight to global attention.

I can’t ever have the ignorance back, and sometimes I miss it. Four years later I still can’t escape the knowledge, but I don’t think I would choose to. I don’t think of it every day the way I did when I first discovered it, but I still think of my intent desire to adopt every single day. I am encouraged by others (http://always-in-myheart.blogspot.com/ ) who have gone ahead and shared their stories. I laugh to myself sometimes that I have had the longest waiting period of any adoptive mom—I’ve been waiting for thirteen years and have at least another eight and a half before I can even submit a formal request, at which time the REAL waiting will begin.

Being just old enough to start to see a pattern to my life, start to discover what was REALLY going on that I didn’t see at the time, and how quickly the last four years have gone by since I first started researching everything on Chinese adoption I could find, INCLUDING blogged luggage lists,:-) I can only imagine how I will feel when I look back at myself ten years from now when I’m making my own luggage lists and freaking out about all of the things adoptive China mom’s seem to freak out about.

I was just thinking last night as I posted about my Jewish flavored upbringing and read another blog (http://journeytojaden.blogspot.com/) about celebrating the Chinese Moon festival in honor of their son’s heritage. My poor kids are going to have such a weird, culturally diverse identity! After my upbringing with the Jewish holidays, I’m definitely continuing that. After experiencing the Mexican quensenara (the daughter’s coming out), I want one of those for my girls. And if my kids are going to be from China, and I’m going to be incorporating a lot of ethnic holidays that aren’t even part of MY biological history, I really ought to include the Chinese New Year or something. Wow, I’m having a culture shock just thinking about it.:-) In the meantime I’ve got a few books on Chinese history I’m reading, and I’m trying to get my eight year old “Chi-Mexican” friend (his father is Mexican and mother is Chinese, so he speaks Spanish, Cantonese, and English) to teach me a bit of the language. I think I’ve got enough to keep me busy before I can start my paper chase.

Thanks to all the mothers of Chinese children, especially Karen (http://always-in-myheart.blogspot.com/), for sharing your stories. You have no idea what an encouragement they have been to me. There is nothing quite like reading things that are written without the benefit of hindsight—people who write books can easily gloss over things or make them more palatable, because as they write, they know that by the end of the story everything works out alright. Thanks for your daily glimpses of joy and panic. I’ll try to remember them when my turn comes.