Dropped Threads 3 (26 page)

JANUARY 1999
,
GUANGDONG PROVINCE, PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

On this first journey to Maoming, by plane, train, bus, taxi and van, my mind was overwhelmed with anticipation of a child as I talked excitedly to my travelling companion, my mother, who calmly prepared to meet her new granddaughter. Occasionally, I turned on the rented camera, but the video looped and bumped with every turn in the road making the recorded image as nauseating as any arcade’s Drop of Doom. I remember the paved highway, fast-moving cars beside our bus, tense individual murmurs of eleven families anticipating their new child’s arrival, a blur of square whitewashed farmhouses, walled courtyards, a water buffalo’s lumbering gait, chemical belch of smokestack, cluttered metal of factory yard, the still pools of roadside water, green-spiked rice paddies neatly squared, ingenious farm plots snaking through ditch or road allowance, the scented shape of longan fresh from the tree.

Details of my daughter’s orphanage lodge in my memory like night lights in a home. We visit the courtyard only. No foreigners allowed inside. Vines and pink-trimmed balconies edge every floor of the main wing where my infant daughter grew, one of many sleeping two by two in blue metal cribs. The courtyard is deserted except for a few older children dressed against the winter chill. On seeing us, the nanny hurriedly rushes them inside. A line of dark laundry for tiny invisible children hangs from the balconies of an adjacent grey cement structure. Ribs of bamboo scaffolding hide a new wing under construction, funded by foreigners’ donations.

Mrs. Zhang, the orphanage director, asks whether I want to visit the place where my daughter was abandoned and without hesitation I say no.

How much does an adoptive mother’s life begin with dissimulation, a first refusal that makes the story begin again? Did I not want this memory for my daughter to keep? Much as I told myself to remember every second, to document, for my daughter’s sake, every location, every encounter, I wondered, did I want to erase this part of her history? What part of me liked to imagine my first meeting with my daughter as a new birth for the two of us, an erasure of long months of care by others?

ADOPTION, LIKE TRAVEL, EXPANDS THE WORLD YOU INHABIT

What is strange becomes familiar as the small being in your arms becomes as much of you as a child can be. And you become hers. At the end of five years you notice your behaviour has changed—sometimes for the better. While you never imagined your adoption to be a matter of altruism, you have become more generous with strangers. You seek nourishing communities and caring neighbours where you cultivate aunties and uncles for your daughter. Still an atheist, you join a compatible Unitarian congregation to surround yourself with others who care about what it means to live in a just world. Less mobile now that you clothe and feed and house a child, you contribute more to the well-being of those with less, especially motherless children. You are not able or willing to rush through life. You know more about your daughter’s birth world, a smattering of language. You acquire new music and a library of books.

JUNE 2004
,
MAOMING, GUANGDONG PROVINCE

Your daughter’s world opens you to the unexpected. Her questions become your own. When she is six, you return to
her birthplace to seek a backdrop for the absent centre that is her first family. You want to people a landscape, find a substitute for the sudden erasure of genealogical connection.

In a small provincial Chinese city, you discover a rootless traveller’s ease. At home in a strange land, you reinvent your desire. You once loved McIntosh apples; here dragon fruit turns you on. You thought the big sky of prairie or taiga lipped by Rocky Mountains thrilled your heart, but here you love the spare horizon, the beat-up lineage of a seaside resort, the South China Sea. In settled Western Canada you followed the clean order of gridded urban routes, but here your mind bends through looped rings of narrow streets. You liked the comfort of barely peopled spaces, but now catch your breath, sigh in the crush of bodies, the swirl of crowded squares. You found comfort in shades of grey monochrome, but now your eye is nuzzled by gold-threaded cobalt and red silk. You preferred the plain speech of a secular life, but weep in the incense fog under this blackened Buddhist temple roof.

Your centre of gravity shifts.

MY DAUGHTER STANDS AT THE ENTRANCE TO HER ORPHANAGE

She asks where she lived as a baby and I point to the building on the left, each floor lidded with balconies and hanging vines. The director, well dressed and cautious, ushers us into the reception room, acres of table ringed by chairs. My daughter wants to explore in the playground sheltered on the first floor. She likes monkey bars and shinnying up poles at home. Here she wraps her suntanned hands around the chipped paint of the swing’s upper bar and looks into my camera’s lens; her slim body hangs suspended, pink skirt, pink T-shirt, pink cheeks flushed by the heat of
the tropical sun. Imagine the photograph: a glance, sadness deep in her eyes, the tentative upturn of her lips.

Afterwards I sit alone in the orphanage courtyard dwarfed by a giant white stone statue of “the one who loved China,” Madame Ching-ling Soong, who had established the first Chinese Welfare Institute, a safe haven for surviving orphans after World War II. Just above us in my daughter’s immaculate, illustrious orphanage, sixteen infants bounce in one room’s shining new stainless steel cribs. Stuffed animals hang suspended just beyond their reach. My child’s dark brown eyes are rimmed with a watery look. Madame Soong is obscured behind the pillar.

As we are about to leave, my daughter refuses to pose with me for a family portrait. Instead she stands on the other side of the lens and snaps my picture.

ALL ALONG THE RIVER, WE FOLLOW YANGJIANG ROAD

We photograph places where babies have been left. Here is one site, a stone’s throw from the Hedong or Guandou police stations several blocks from the orphanage; or here in the bustling marketplace by Guandou Bridge; or here in front of the Yangjiang Restaurant renowned for its culinary treasures,
dim sum
, translated literally as “little hearts.” Right here beside the spot where another child was found not long ago, I begin to imagine a crowd of shadows, invisible women and men crowding the streets, hiding behind the trees, waiting in doorways, casually dilly-dallying at a market stall to mull over fish or greens or a pile of shining key chains, all watching, all waiting for someone to look down, then look again; startled this time, they listen for the cry. Maybe they retrace their steps, stoop down and hurry away again. Maybe they say out loud, “Look, here’s a baby.” Or maybe they say nothing, pick the infant up, and show her to
someone. Or they carry her into the restaurant and call the police. Or maybe they themselves take her to the station. One police station meets and conveys to the orphanage about ten children each year; nearby, another encounters even more.

When we arrive at the station where my daughter was first taken at three days old, her umbilical cord still attached, the chief of police can’t stop patting her slender shoulder. Smiling, he bends down on one knee beside her to pose for the photograph. What must it be like to be the intermediary of so many children, bearing them from their mysterious past into an institutional future?

Standing at the market, hiding in the grove of palms or squinting into the sun on the Guandou bridge, my daughter frowns but doesn’t say a word. Later she proudly tells a stranger, “I live in Canada, but I’m Chinese,” explaining that Maoming is her favourite place in all of China, because “that’s where my orphanage is.”

On our visit to a Maoming elementary boarding school, where rural children are sent for a better education, the youngest dress as sunflowers to sing and perform for us. Only forty of the three hundred students in the school are girls. “Girls have more patience for farm work and stay in the countryside,” a teacher explains. They might attend a rural school, but boarding school funds are reserved mainly for boys who will care for their elders and maintain the family name.

ADOPTION INEVITABLY SPEAKS THE “LANGUAGE OF CELEBRATION AND LAMENT”

You imagine her as Mother Moon, always present even when we can’t see her. Over time, a particular woman’s face comes into view. At first she looks like every other Chinese
woman—the way some Caucasians say “all Chinese look alike” when they don’t look carefully enough to appreciate the differences. You notice how this particular woman’s eyes—beautiful, deep brown-black, almond-shaped—are tired around the edges. You imagine her up early to look after her children, only one of them official unless she lives on a farm and can justify more for the field labour they perform.

Today you watch as she takes her bicycle to the market before dawn to find her way almost by touch in the dark to the small shop where she sells soup pots and small wicker kitchen implements. Or you pick out her silhouette among dozens and dozens of women as she sits on the factory floor and in a flash sews the Disney T-shirt front to back, front to back, for eleven to sixteen hours, six or seven days a week. She maintains her quota in spite of her back, her fingers and the deterioration of her sight. Or follow her to where her walk ends in a rice paddy and see her hat dip to the rhythm of arms and torso as she curves into and over the green spiked water. Or watch her stretch a weary arm for the branch of lychee fruit, another migrant worker in the civil servants’ ancestral farm. The surrounding hills are rounded with groves of trees or squared off in concrete-block solutions to overcrowded cities.

This woman birthed a most beautiful baby daughter in the early morning of an August day in 1997, somewhere near Maoming in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. She knew that this child would disappear, never to be spoken of again. She knows this now and weeps.

FÚ

To become mother and daughter, we’ve both crossed great distances. Any woman who adopts at forty-eight knows that a midseason turning point can be a revolution.
Tattered pages of the
I Ching
, the ancient Chinese book of divination that I consulted as a hippie in 1971 become my transcultural adoptive mothering manual thirty years later. “The time of darkness is past,” says the
I Ching’s
six-lined hexagram
fú
. This image of earth over thunder means “return” or “turning point” when the December winter solstice marks the seasonal shift that stimulates good fortune. Here at latitude 53 where winter’s night endures almost forever, signs of changing seasons are delayed. Chinese New Year fell in February this year. That’s when millions of red paper squares, embossed with golden brushstrokes of the Chinese good luck symbol, clung to doorways from Beijing to central Alberta.

The ancients advise, “Position the golden strokes of
fú
upside down to ward off evil and bring great good fortune.” This tradition began in the Qing dynasty (1661–1911) when one of the servants accidentally displayed the symbol for
fú
, or luck, upside down on the palace and storeroom doors. Justifying the error, the housemaster noted the word
dào
or “upside down” is the same character as “arrived.”

Soon after I adopted Bao, our friend Rose from Shandong taped the red Chinese New Year sign to the oval glass in our purple Edmonton front door. For Rose, who knows the difficult trails of Chinese migration, my daughter and I have truly arrived—only luck, the one-child policy and uneven economic development could have brought us together to share this small house.

Luck is also often the topic of conversation when we visit the Garden Bakery for our tasty Chinese coconut buns: the friendly woman proprietor tells me my daughter is “lucky.” In Noodle Noodle, our favourite restaurant across the street, uniformed waitresses echo these words. These brilliant Chinese women travel to Canada in search of a better
life only to trade in their PhD in engineering or forestry for a
dim sum
cart, shift work in a water bottle factory, or an extra job cleaning houses for penny candy tips.

LOVE’S FORTUNATE PIVOT

“I’m so lucky, Mommy,” says Bao as we nibble on the
har gau
shrimp dumplings,
dim sum
culinary treasures.

“Why, Bao?” I ask, knowing that when others describe our luck, the comment erases my own good fortune and the tragedy of her early life.

“I’m lucky because everyone loves me,” she says.

At night my daughter looks up to make her wish. That faraway Chinese god of luck,
fú xing
, twinkles her starry eye at us.

The phrase “language of celebration and lament” is from Jacqueline Rose’s discussion of feminism in
On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World
. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003.

STEP 1: RISE

Up until now your life has been a wrestling match, with obligation and guilt in one corner, free choice and self-preservation in the other. You have always known which corner wins the small battles—after all, you have been conditioned to revere your parents, respect your elders and “Honour thy mother.” But now your bulging belly has added a potent element to the fight: a protective maternal instinct. Lean in close to the mirror. Closer. Examine those dark hollows above your cheeks. Raise your gaze a little and stare into those frightened eyes. See how they belong in a smaller frame, that of a young girl no older than eight? Now inhale deeply, right down into your extended belly. Breathe for both of you. Think of him and feel that tingle of clean tranquility. At the dawning of your son’s life, it is time to reclaim your own.