Wish You Happy Forever

For Maya, who opened the door,

For Anya, who turned on the light,

And for all the little girls who showed me the way

This is the truth as I remember it—which doesn't mean it's precisely as it happened. I have consolidated a few events to better tell the story. For various reasons, I have changed some names of people and places.

I spend a lot of time in airport bookstores. They are full of books about how to do business wherever you're going. Bookstores at the Hong Kong airport are especially packed with tips for success in China. Most of them are written by Westerners who have succeeded in some small or large way or who have interviewed others who have. Most include cautionary tales and warnings that China will not be easy.

Although I am a Westerner writing about China, and although I have achieved a certain amount of success there (beyond my wildest dreams, actually), this is not one of those books. As you will quickly surmise, I am not an expert on much of anything.

But I still believe my story should be told, for it is not really
my
story.

Map

Dedication

Author's Note

Prologue

Part One:
Laowai
(Foreigner)

  
1 Clumsy Birds Have Need of Early Flight

  
2 Do Not Hope to Reach the Destination Without Leaving the Shore

  
3 Do Not Upset Heaven and Earth

  
4 To Move a Mountain, Begin with Small Stones

  
5 Pick the Roses, Live with the Thorns

  
6 A Good Beginning Is Half the Journey

  
7 Enough Shovels of Earth, a Mountain; Enough Pails of Water, a River

  
8 Unless There Is Opposing Wind, a Kite Cannot Rise

  
9 A Burnt Tongue Becomes Shy of Soup

10 Push One Pumpkin Under Water, Another Pops Up

11 One Who Is Drowning Will Not Be Troubled by a Little Rain

12 Wait for Roast Duck to Fly into Mouth, Wait a Long Time

Part Two:
Guoji Youren
(Foreign Friend)

13 Why Scratch an Itch from Outside the Boot?

14 A Sparrow Sings, Not Because It Has an Answer, but Because It Has a Song

15 Eat the Wind, Swallow Bitterness

16 One Who Rides a Tiger Cannot Dismount

17 Our Lucky Star Is Shining

18 Every Day Cannot Be a Feast of Lanterns

Part Three:
Zijiren
(One of Us)

19 If the Sky Falls on Me, Let It Be My Quilt

20 Count Not What Is Lost, but What Is Left

Epilogue

Picture Section

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Ad

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

One joy may scatter a thousand sorrows

Guangzhou, China

July 7, 1997

The others had come and gone. The little girls had been carried or marched into the room by smiling caretakers. One by one, they'd met nervous clutches of new mommies and daddies, aunties and grannies. Bright, tinkly toys had been passed into little hands, sometimes inspected, sometimes ignored. And then, gingerly, their eyes full of trepidation and knowing, the new mommies reached for their little girls. A few babies screamed bloody murder. Most went easily—another day, another pair of arms.

We still waited. I could hear the fading cries of the screamers. An official returned.
Please wait a moment. Please have a seat. Please have some water.
Then she left. We waited.

My heart had been in my mouth for so long I was afraid to swallow. Somebody, maybe Dick, my husband, told me to relax . . . take a deep breath. I didn't know where to start.

I blinked, tried to focus. I glanced out the window, at the building across the way. I thought I could see the desperate eyes of children peering through barred and blinded windows. Was it forbidden to see that? I shut it out, turned back to the reception room, and for the thousandth time scanned my surroundings.

The hot water they'd given us to drink had turned lukewarm. The fan blew warm, sticky air. Even the plastic flowers were limp. There was a yellowed calligraphy scroll on the wall.

“What does it say?” Dick asked, though both of us were beyond caring.

“It says, ‘When the horse is on the brink of a precipice, it is too late to pull in the reins,'” our guide volunteered cheerfully. “Ha. Just kidding.”

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS EARLIER
I'd been on a film set, squeezing the last few moments of daylight on the last of the grand old California ranchos in the Carmel Valley. It was the finale of what would turn out to be the last independent feature film Dick and I would make together, the last I would direct: an earnest little potboiler called
In Quiet Night
.

So it was us and the crew, out there in rolling-hill oak-studded glory, trying to capture the climactic moment when a mountain lion springs from out of nowhere and does away with the villain. The lion, in real life, seemed friendly enough; he had been declawed and defanged and probably neutered. Still, he commanded your basic lion respect, and the crew was on its toes. Except me. I was already thinking
China
and
Let's get this killing in the can so Dick and I can board that plane and bring home our little girl
.

Poor baby (although she likely hadn't a clue) had been waiting for us for the twenty or so months she'd been alive. Enough, already! The endless pregnancy had done something to me, for sure. I was starting to believe in destiny—that we were meant for each other. I was ready and impatient to meet my fate. And we hadn't even seen her picture yet.

It was a different little face that led us to China.

 

EARLY ONE SATURDAY
morning, eighteen months before we shot the lion pouncing on the bad guy and left for China, we were at home in Pacific Palisades, California. Dick, a cinematographer, was shooting a Chevy truck commercial and had a late call. A rare moment to kick back with coffee and the
New York Times
.

I was sitting at the kitchen table in my bathrobe, sorting seeds we'd ordered from catalogs at the start of the new year. Vegetables for Dick; herbs and flowers for me. This was sanity in our ever-precarious Hollywood existence. Today I was going to plant the first of my seeds in the potting shed. It was probably too early. Just as well, because I never did make it outside.

“Jenny, you've got to see this.”

In the newspaper, a photo of a tiny girl—really just the shadow of a child—eyes crusted over, cheeks sunken and dark. Her body, all bones.

“U.S. rights group asserts China lets thousands of orphans die.
” The story was about the just-released 1996 Human Rights Watch report,
Death by Default: The Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State-Run Orphanages.

Based on records smuggled out of a Shanghai orphanage along with a limited set of statistics relating to nationwide orphan mortality, the group claimed that thousands of healthy abandoned infants were dying of severe malnutrition only weeks or months after being admitted to orphanages across China.

And it said that the two thousand or so adoptions by foreigners couldn't begin to solve the problem. And it said that virtually all of the abandoned babies were girls.

Unwanted little girls.

I guess that somewhere I may have heard that children were given up in places like China and India because they were girls. I may have
heard
it, but somehow, reading it now, seeing the photo of a child nobody wanted, a dying baby girl . . .

Now we both knew what we had to do. Sort of.

“What can we do?” Dick said.

“I don't know. Send money?”

Isn't that what we usually did? But who would we send it to? How could our money make the slightest difference? We sat looking at each other, eyes red and throats lumpy.

“We could bring one home.”

He said it. It wasn't even my idea. But I guess, to my credit, I knew he was right. That's what we would do.

So we set out on our adoption journey not to build a family—we had raised two lovely children, the nest was empty—but to save one life. That was how we saw it then.

Nanoseconds later, I was at the computer, logging on to the Internet, trying to figure out how the thing worked. It was 1996, and I'd only begun really exploring the web a few days before. I'd been having a rotten writing day—my screenplay wouldn't shape up—so I'd lost a few hours poking around cyberspace as a distraction. Or that's what I thought at the time.

Now I spent the entire day learning to “surf.” There was no Google back then, but somehow I found the State Department guidelines for international adoption, the INS guidelines for orphan immigration, lists of adoption agencies, and information about an organization called Families with Children from China. I read personal stories. I called a friend who always seemed to know everybody and, sure enough, she had a friend who'd met somebody at a dinner party who had just returned with a baby from China. I got the name of a Chinese adoption facilitator to check out first thing Monday morning. I called San Francisco to give my grown daughter, Cristin, the news.

“I'm sorry I have to do this by phone,” I said. “I'd so love to see your face right now.”

“It'd make no difference, Mom. My face has no expression. I don't know what to feel.”

Fair enough. Who knew?

I didn't get dressed until 5:00
P.M
. When Dick called to say he was heading home from his shoot, I asked him to meet me at JR Seafood, our favorite Chinese place. I arrived with a giant red binder, crammed full and organized into categories—adoption agencies and immigration info and first-person adoption stories and lists of what to pack and what sorts of shots you need for China. Dick wasn't surprised to see the red binder. His wife was, if nothing else, a consummate researcher.