Wish You Happy Forever (6 page)

Just two days before I traveled, Mrs. Zhang finally replied, “After back and forth negotiations, we got approval from the Ministry to visit three institutions.”

Well, I figured we'd have to visit at least six institutions if we were going to find the right place for the pilot. If we failed, we wouldn't get a second chance. And there was no word about approval to actually start programs. So it wasn't exactly a yes. But it certainly wasn't a no. That was good enough for me. I decided not to burden anybody else with the details.

 

THE LADIES OF
CPWF were an hour late for our breakfast meeting. “So sorry,” said Mrs. Zhang. “Terrible traffic jam. Construction everywhere nowadays. It is a great, great pleasure to meet you!”

If it weren't for the fact that Mrs. Zhang's boss carried herself like someone important, I might have hugged Madame Miao at first sight. Everything about her looked soft and cuddly. Chubby face, rosy cheeks, fuzzy halo of dyed hair. Yet there was no doubt who was in charge.

Mrs. Zhang, on the other hand, even though sixty-ish, was as playful and available as a puppy. She had a gigantic warm smile, dark eyes that shone behind big round glasses, almost perfect English. I felt like I'd always known her.

“Now please you will tell us how we can help you,” she said.

I explained a little about Maya, about how she'd come alive after finding the love of a family. But I sensed that I shouldn't linger on the dark side of Maya's story. No dredging up ghosts of dying rooms from Half the Sky.

“I represent a group of parents just like me,” I said. “We are so grateful to China for the gift of these beautiful little girls in our lives. Now we want to give something back to their sisters who still have no families.”

I told them about my idea for infant nurture programs where retired women could be trained to help the babies form healthy attachments and to give them the kind of individual attention and stimulation that would allow them to thrive. And about preschools, in which children would be gently guided to develop self-confidence and a love of learning while being prepared to enter primary schools in their communities. I told them about Reggio and threw in a few of my statistics about brain development.

“You are a teacher?” asked Mrs. Zhang.

“Well . . . no. Um, I'm mostly a screenwriter. And I've directed a few little films. But that's not—”

“But
why
?” she asked. There it was again.

“Because . . . well, because, most of all, we want to give orphans the love they have lost. Every child needs to know that she is loved and valued.”

“But you have come all the way to China. You want to do for Chinese children?
Why?
” said Mrs. Zhang, her eyes now glistening.

“Well, because we have Chinese daughters. The children we had to leave behind are our girls' little sisters. We can't just go on with our happy lives and forget about them. They're family, just like our daughters.”

Mrs. Zhang wiped her eyes and slapped the table.

“Understand. We must help you do this.”

“Madame Miao, Mrs. Zhang, I think we may have found the perfect partner,” I said.

Madame Miao nodded. “We think the same way.”

“Well, okay! So what I think we need, to get things off to a really good start—well, we need to visit more places, more orphanages. Three's fine, but do you think you could get us into six? And we don't want to go only to model institutions, okay? Can you show us the not-so-good ones too? Because if they're perfect, there is nothing to improve.”

Somehow I doubted that perfection was going to be an issue, but I wanted our new partners to have a mission, to feel driven. Heaven knows I needed them.

HERE'S WHAT IT'S
like to travel China by car:

There are eight of us plus luggage in what is optimistically called a nine-passenger minibus. Madame Miao, Mrs. Zhang, Wen, the driver, yours truly—plus assorted others. There are always assorted others.

And the driver always smokes. He is willing to hold his cigarette outside the cracked-open window, but he just can't survive the drive smoke-free. As a result, I always feel bleary-eyed and hungover on road trips. Nobody else seems to mind.

Just about everyone is talking on a cell phone. Different conversations, all at maximum decibels. Chinese cell reception far outclasses that of its Western predecessors. On one of my rare sightseeing excursions in China, I once received a perfectly clear call from Los Angeles while at the bottom of an impossibly narrow mountain gorge. I'd walked 6,566 stone steps down to the bottom, and the line was crystal-clear.

In addition to the competing phone calls and the smoke, there is snacking. Bags of watermelon seeds and salty-sweet crackers and peanuts in their shell, along with dragon's eye fruit and mandarin oranges and lychees and bottles of water or sweet green tea, are produced from thin air.

You would think all this would make time fly. Au contraire.

It was a five-hour minibus ride south of Beijing in interminable traffic to our first destination, a place with the unpronounceable name Shijiazhuang. It would have been three hours without the traffic, but then it wouldn't have been China. Whenever the traffic opened up a bit, the driver went into high gear, pushing the minibus until the windows rattled, passing everything he could. He accomplished this by driving on the wrong side of the road, playing chicken with oncoming truckloads of melons, rusty scrap metal, and pigs, ancient putt-putting tractors and sleek official vehicles with black-tinted windows.

The air was hot, thick, gray-brown. The landscape was flat, green-brown, and went on forever. There was not a single piece of modern farming equipment to be seen. I was dripping and my brain had gone to mush. China in July. Avoid in future.

At long last, we turned off the expressway.

After we'd passed through the tollbooth, the driver pulled the minibus over to the side of the road behind another car. A man and a woman got out of the parked car and squeezed into our already cozy minibus. (We were up to ten of our allotted nine passengers.) The man was Mr. Bai of the Shijiazhuang Family Planning Association. Nobody introduced the woman.

We zipped into town, mostly by driving on the wrong side of the road. Then we sat in another traffic jam. The downtime was not wasted, though. Mr. Bai took charge. He shared with us the entire history of Shijiazhuang going back to 206
BC
. He told us the current population—almost ten million, and I'd never heard of the place before! It seemed like no town in China had fewer than a million residents. After a while the mind is so boggled by people numbers that none of it registers.

Mr. Bai also managed to share Shijiazhuang's agricultural output, important historical sites, and what the place is
most famous
for. In this case, it was smokestacks. More smokestacks than any other city in China. There was plenty of visual evidence to back him up.

When we finally reached our destination, it was not the orphanage, but a restaurant. It did absolutely no good to protest that we weren't hungry; we'd been snacking on the drive. In China, I soon learned, hunger is not the point. No meals will be missed. Ever. I am to this day, whenever I visit government friends anywhere in China, reminded of meals I foolishly begged off from a dozen or more years ago.

“Remember when you drove all the way from Gaoyou to Lianyungang and then
only
visited the orphanage? You left without lunch!”

THE RESTAURANT LOBBY
was palatial. Crystal chandeliers, rococo gilded wing chairs, and massive potted plants. The pseudo-Aubusson carpet was grimy, as was every single carpet in China as far as I could tell. (In the new, improved China, the carpet grime situation is likewise improved. It seems to run about fifty-fifty.)

We were greeted by a beautiful, tall young woman in a pencil-thin red-satin
qipao
. She was wearing a white-fur shorty cape, even though it was close to one hundred degrees outside. I was the only one in our party who was soggy from the heat.

We followed our greeter into an elevator. The doors closed but the elevator failed to move. Our driver muscled the beautiful young woman aside and punched the buttons in a more manly fashion. Nothing happened. The beautiful young woman opened the elevator doors and we followed her up three flights of stairs.

She guided us down a hallway with dozens of open doorways. Cigarette smoke poured out of every one. Raucous laughter and shouts punctured the haze. Somebody was having way too much fun for twelve thirty on a Tuesday afternoon.

The woman who'd arrived with Mr. Bai pushed ahead and entered one of the smoky doorways. A lot of pushing and shoving goes on in China, but nobody minds.

By the time we arrived, our hosts were stubbing out their cigarettes and gulping the last of their tea. They stood to welcome us with wide smiles. I'm not sure who most of them were. There was a vice mayor and a party secretary, and apparently they were the only ones who merited an introduction. Everybody else came for lunch. Mr. Bai vanished and I never saw him again. I decided that maybe I didn't need to memorize everybody's name.

There was a great deal of bickering about who should sit where around the big round table. I got the message right off the bat that this table-arranging business is a highly complex matter that all foreigners should stay out of. Almost as complex as food-ordering (but here you are invited to participate if you dare).

Certainly the highest-ranking person must sit at the head of the table (which at a round table is the place with the pointy napkin) and/or facing the door. And the honored guests (that would be me in this situation) are invited to sit to the right and left of him according to somebody's idea of what each one's respective rank is. But then there are the seats remaining. Everybody vies for the
least
important. At a not hugely formal banquet like this one, there's always a fair bit of friendly shoving before everyone finally settles down to eat.

The meal featured local delicacies with a special focus on meat and seafood. The Chinese were poor for a very long time. Vegetables don't get much respect when people have guests. Cheap stuff like noodles or rice is an afterthought. Visitors are a great excuse for a proper carnivorous feast, even in the poorest places.

The vice mayor was hosting a couple of other banquets at the same time. After he told me about his town's historical highlights and the trip he made to Disneyland and Las Vegas and Miami and we toasted a few times, he excused himself to make the rounds. I never saw him again.

I picked at my meal and tried to make sense of the conversation. When the topic bored her, Mrs. Zhang translated only every fifth sentence or so.

The meal was punctuated with toasts of
baijiu
—seriously hard white liquor—required for men, optional for ladies. Then fruit. Then all the men lit up. Then it was time to leave. Everyone stood at once. Exited abruptly. Lunch over.

This would normally be naptime in China, but this particular foreigner was the restless type. Somebody would have to take her to the orphanage.

ESCORTED BY THE
still unidentified woman who'd joined us with Mr. Bai, our minibus made its way through a poor part of town. Kids playing in muddy sewer water. Hawkers hawking whatever—food, cigarettes, underwear, VCDs (ubiquitous first-run movies of suspect origin)—from plastic tarps spread on crumbling pavement. Horse-drawn carts, pedestrians, and tiny three-wheeled trucks transporting refrigerators and mattresses competed for space along the narrow road. Our driver leaned on the horn and bullied through. No one on the street even glanced at him as they edged aside just enough to not get killed.

At long last we arrived at the orphanage gate. A woman in a grungy nurse's uniform was swabbing the tile lobby with a dirty mop. She ducked out of the way when we entered.

THERE WERE NO
signs of children living there. No cries, no laughter. I wanted to ask where they were, could we see them? But I obediently followed the group into the reception room. The unidentified woman brought up the rear, keeping an eye on me.

The room had a big oval conference table with an open space in the middle. Sort of an elongated doughnut. Dusty plastic flowers only partially filled the hole. Chairs and leatherette sofas lined the walls. It looked familiar. Another version of the place we'd met Maya.
Every
orphanage has this reception room.

But now there were plates of fruit and bottles of water and unopened packs of cigarettes and paper cups for tea poured by a pretty girl. A new trio of women came in and sat with us at the big table, smiling and peeling oranges for me. Then we waited.

At last Director Kong, the orphanage boss, entered the room. All the ladies stood until he sat. He was in his midforties, wore his pants pulled high over a premature paunch, and sported a rather extraordinary black rug atop his head, apparently held in place by a thicket of eyebrows.

One of the orange-peeling women passed out brochures and a three-page report densely packed with Chinese characters. Everyone took out a notebook and started writing. So I did too.

Director Kong introduced himself and the others on his team. Each stood and bowed slightly. The unidentified woman turned out to be Mrs. Li, in charge of the children's department. Another woman, a deputy director in charge of logistics, then read the report aloud. She was nervous. Mrs. Zhang translated every word.

I learned how many
mu
of land the institution occupied and how many square meters the building was. I learned about the history of the institution and about the various divisions of work and, finally, about the children. I learned how many were “brain-damaged” or “deformed” and how many were “normal” (which, in the deputy director's opinion, was almost none).

Madame Miao then introduced Half the Sky. In a tribute to the Chinese educational system of rote learning, she recited to Director Kong and his staff exactly what I'd told her the day before. Everybody wrote in their notebooks. Another orange was shoved my way. More tea was poured.