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Originally published on January 10, 1999
Shortly before my wife, Brenda, and I first met our daughter, Chloe, in a tiny government office in southern China, I stuck a tape recorder in my shirt pocket. It seemed an easy way to document what would be, for all of us, a life-changing event. A month later, I sat in our Emsworth home and listened to the tape for the first time since our return to the United States. It is an imperfect recording - the voices muffled and mixed with an annoying electronic hiss - yet clear enough to shatter my memory of what happened that day. In the office were nine families and nine new daughters, along with several Chinese women who had escorted the babies. Added to the mix were an assortment of office workers, several wooden desks and chairs, and a long bench. Many of the children were crying. Parents wept, too. Cameras flashed, phones rang. People spoke loudly, excitedly, in English and Chinese. It was a crowded, chaotic and emotional scene, but I was calm and self-assured. I fell comfortably into my new role as father, methodically meeting the baby's immediate needs. At least that's what I remembered. Then there's that tape. It's a bit embarrassing, really. My wife comes across as the calm one. She's asking me for diapers, for a bottle, for baby powder. I, on the other hand, stumble into parenthood, nervous and overly excited. You can hear me fumble around in the bag of supplies we'd brought. At one point, I holler over the crowd noise, "WE NEED EIGHT OUNCES!" I was asking for water to mix formula, but my voice has all the urgency of a doctor performing an emergency amputation on "ER." Then I say, "She has all her fingers and toes." The words are spoken slowly, with heavy drama, the way astronaut Neil Armstrong delivered his historic "One small step for man."
I was a bit wound up. I'd never been a daddy, and Brenda had never been a mommy. It was something we'd only dreamed about. Now, after 16 years of childless marriage, it was happening - halfway around the world, in unfamiliar surroundings, thousands of miles from our family and friends. We were holding a baby girl who was more beautiful than we could have imagined. She was crying, and we needed to reassure her that we could take care of her, that we would love her. It was both exhilarating and frightening. I'm glad Brenda was there. She's used to taking care of children - for years she's worked as a pediatric occupational therapist. If not for her, my nerves would have gone over the edge, and it would have been me, and not just our new daughter, in need of a diaper. Calm would come that day, in its own time. During the two-hour bus ride from the city of Maoming, where we met Chloe, to our hotel in Zhanjiang, I held our 15-pound daughter in my arms. It was a bumpy trip, but Chloe was peaceful, gripping my thumb with her left hand. Brenda sat beside me, and the three of us watched as a huge, orange sun settled over distant rice paddies that seemed to go on forever. At that moment, parenthood was idyllic. Reality was on its way. Brenda and I would soon learn the difficulties of caring for a young child, and for each other, in an unfamiliar country, where you can't pick up the phone and ask your pediatrician or your mother what to do when your child is feverish, and where the penalty for eating the wrong food is several hours of horrific cramping and toilet-hugging. Through it all, however, Brenda and I were both comforted by one simple fact: Adopting the little girl we had named Chloe was the best thing we'd ever done.
Chloe's first year of life is a mystery to us. We know she was born Nov. 28, 1997 - at least that's what the adoption papers say. Two days later she was abandoned in Huanzhou City, where she was sent to the Babies Welfare Court and given the name Ji Lijun. Police tried to locate her parents but were unsuccessful, the papers say. We're not certain where she spent the first 10 or 11 months of her life, or who cared for her. We do know that, somewhere along the line, this baby girl whose life had gotten off to such a rough start was matched with us. Brenda and I had entered the adoption process after trying for nearly three years to have biological children. Once, in autumn of 1995, we were told that our efforts had been successful. I remember sitting in a stark-white medical office and watching a video monitor display ultrasound images of our child, who was about the size of a grain of rice. We watched it move, and were thrilled. We began talk of nurseries and names. Would we have a son or a daughter? Would we use cloth diapers or disposables? Several weeks later we were in the same room, watching the same screen, the same image - this time without the movement. The technician's face went pale. Then she called for a physician, who did her best to explain things. I remember little after the doctor said "miscarriage." In that small room, the word was like a flash flood in a narrow valley. It was upon us before we could prepare. Suddenly, our long-running debate over the color of the baby's room was over. No more counting weeks and months on the calendar. On the way home I wanted to say something to Brenda, but what? She had seemed so vulnerable in that white office, nodding her head while the doctor explained what had happened, why we'd lost our child. But I could not protect her from this thing, this flash flood of a word and the damage it could do. I searched for a thought, a phrase, a comment that would let her know she was not alone, that we would try again and, one way or another, have a family. But every word fell short, every sentence seemed trite. Brenda finally rescued me from the awkwardness by reaching over and holding my hand, and we drove home in silence. Perhaps there would have been some relief that day had we known this: The miscarriage was the first in a series of events that would culminate in an extraordinary relationship between an abandoned baby girl born in a communist country, where people still plow fields with water buffalo, and an American couple raised on middle-class dreams and Cold War values.
If you'd have told Brenda and me on the rainy April day in 1983 when we married that we'd one day travel to China to get a daughter, we'd have questioned your sanity. To us, it would have seemed unthinkable. Brenda is from a small, rural town in Indiana, where people still worship the music of Hank Williams (senior, not junior). She could sit on her porch and watch cows munch grass in a field across the street. I was raised in a more suburban setting a few miles away. As a kid, I roamed the nearby woods until they were paved and planted with split-level homes. I played with Rock-em, Sock-em Robots and carried a "Lost in Space" lunch box that always smelled of bananas. China then was Red China, according to our local paper. It was an ogre state, with a population so great its army could forever march two abreast off a cliff and yet never run out of soldiers. At least that's what we were told in third grade. Richard Nixon had yet to come along and make his historic visit. The Chinese government was still considered harsh, even evil, as recently as 1989. Remember the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square? One of the most stunning news images in recent memory is that of a lone Chinese man standing defiantly before a row of tanks. Much has changed. Today, China is accepting some Western ideas, like capitalism (it now has hundreds of American fast-food restaurants), and America has softened its attitude. Hong Kong is now governed by China, not Great Britain. But the change that most affected Brenda, Chloe and me occurred in 1992, when China enacted a new adoption law. Since then, Americans have adopted more than 10,000 abandoned or orphaned babies. Most of those babies are girls. In the '50s, '60s and '70s, China's population grew so rapidly that officials feared the country would be unable to feed its people. So in 1979, a one-child-per-family rule went into effect. The policy seems to be working - population growth has slowed dramatically - but there is a side effect: Thousands of baby girls are abandoned shortly after birth because couples often prefer that their one child be a boy. Chinese culture traditionally favors male children - they carry on the family name, can inherit land and, in rural areas, it is believed, can carry a heavier workload. Brenda and I sometimes wonder, how could a parent abandon a child as beautiful as Chloe? We have talked about this and have agreed not to pass judgment on our daughter's birth mother. Perhaps she was under tremendous pressure from her family and gave up Chloe unwillingly. We'll never know. What we do know is that because of these varied and seemingly unrelated events - the miscarriage, Chloe's abandonment, social policies in China and changes in that country's laws - Brenda and I have a healthy and happy baby sleeping in our home tonight.
After the miscarriage, Brenda and I continued to try for another pregnancy. Our efforts were unsuccessful. One night in the fall of 1996, we talked about our options. We were both nearing age 40 and had spent most of our adult lives chasing careers. Perhaps we had simply waited too long to have children. Can you accept that? Brenda asked. What choice do we have? I replied. Adoption, she said. Brenda had always wanted to adopt a child, even if we were successful in having kids. In her job as an occupational therapist at D.T. Watson Rehabilitation Hospital in Sewickley, she had met and treated several adopted children, had gotten to know their families. Brenda discovered there was as much love in those families as in any she'd seen. For months we attended meetings, read everything we could find on adoption and talked to parents and children who had been through the process. During one meeting in Monroeville, Brenda met members of an agency that handled Chinese adoptions. I came home from work that night, and Brenda filled me in: She felt comfortable with the agency, the social worker she'd met and the owners, and she felt she could trust them. She wanted me to meet them. That night, we stopped looking. After all the research, our decision on exactly where to adopt was made on gut instinct. In July 1997, we began working with the agency, Adoptions from the Heart, to fill out the reams of paperwork needed to begin the process. Within three months we had completed all the forms, submitted all the records, answered all the questions. We made certain we had enough money set aside for the adoption - roughly $17,000. Then began the wait. Brenda and I painted a nursery, acquired a crib, talked about the eventual possibility of day care, but as the months passed, the adoption became an abstraction - something that would happen in the future, but we didn't know when. I certainly didn't think of us as parents. Brenda wasn't pregnant. So we went about our lives as we always had - eating out on a whim, staying up late, going to movies. Then the phone rang. On Sept. 1 of last year, Brenda called me at work. She was breathless. "We've gotten a message from the agency," she said. "We're going to China." At the time, we didn't know who our daughter was, didn't know her name, didn't know when we would be leaving. All we knew is that we had been matched with a baby girl halfway around the world. Details would come two weeks later when a package arrived at our house. It contained health records and a picture - a small color image of a bald baby with chubby cheeks and a furrowed brow. She looked alert and curious. Brenda smiled as she held the picture up for me and mimicked a child's voice: "Mommy, daddy, hurry up. Come and get me." (continued on the next page)
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