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Roasting

This is a final guest post from Christine “Cissy” White; she shared with us last week about her experiences waiting to adopt, and finally adopting a daughter from China.

She squatted on the sidewalk. She was wearing a dress. It was brown. So were the warm peanuts roasting over the fire in front of her. We were in Changsha, China. It was August. It was the huge tin pan in front of her that caught my attention and then the young children, one on each side. But it is the color of the ground, an earthy brew of clay and some chemical concoction from new construction that stays with me, makes me think of dried blood or fruit stains left on clean clothes.

Everything else looked grey, a bluish grey, dull. Even the air. Hot. 100 degrees. When I walked out of the doors of the Dolton Hotel I was assaulted by humidity, encasing me, trapping me like a box with too few air holes. I had to move slowly for fear of fainting.

Across the street, young people in Starbucks were wearing green aprons. We couldn’t drink the iced coffee because unboiled water could be contaminated. We were already eating Pepto with breakfast, to prevent stomach upset, but were looking to avoid anything that could causes explosive problems leading to hospital visits or dehydration. The night before we sipped coffee, hot and steamy, and added sugar and cream and got napkins and plastic sticks.

It’s her though, her image, the woman in front of the roasting peanuts that I think of now. Why? What was she telling me then? She stared into the camera, not smiling or looking away, when I pointed it in her direction. Was she showing me what type of life my new daughter, Kai, who I was hours from meeting and mothering might have if she were raised in Changsha, China with her biological family? Was she showing me how those raised in an orphanage fend for themselves once on their own? Was she supposed to remind me of Kai’s biological mother?

What did those peanuts cost? I wish I had asked. We had been warned by our adoption agency not to eat food from the street. Still, I wish I had tasted them, ate more of China.

A baby, mine, was somewhere waiting. David, my spouse, was at the hotel getting a work out in to help relieve his tension. I was walking the streets in those last hours before becoming a mother not knowing it would be the last time I would walk without a child on my hip, holding my hand or on my mind. I was trying to soak in some of the scenery trying to get a sense of the place where she was from. I was listening to the sounds of cars and buses, of buildings being erected, of people talking. I wanted to swallow the air where my daughter took her first breath, to keep something of China for her, for later.

What I wanted was to know her country, her province, the place where my she is from. She being my daughter Kai, she being the birth mother, nameless. Me, what was I? A white woman, like a ghost, appearing as what to those on the steet? A thief? A baby stealer? A woman walking with a camera, going in and out shops buying baby clothes, water bottles and diapers, walking alone one day and then the next, without a big belly or leaky breasts, without a long or painful labor appearing a day later with a Chinese baby in my Snugli.

What did the Asian women who saw me think? Outside, they didn’t speak to me nor me to them. We were told not to talk politics or religion by our Chinese guide. We were told that those who knew about Americans adopting orphans supported the idea but that many did not know how many orphans there were or what became of them.

The China Center for Adoption Affairs has what is referred to as the Matching Room where piles of paper are stacked as high as file cabinets. But it is not a well-known process within the country. There is a pile of parents who have been approved to be parents. There is a pile of babies who are orphans and have been selected, by orphanages, as eligible for adoption. There are rules, regulations and chance which determine which children and adults do and do not end up in those piles. But of those that do, how are they matched?

Is it as simple as coming to the top of the parent pile and the orphan pile at the same time? What if someone knocked over a file walking by? What if paperwork slipped under a desk? What if someone accidentally grabbed two files instead of one? Would we have a different daughter? Would Kai, not be named Kai, and be with other parents? What if someone smoked and a piece of paper caught fire, would a file be reconstructed or would a child languish in an orphanage instead?

Kai, in a Snugli, was my daughter but she belonged to China too. She was China’s daughter, relinquished, abandoned yet rooted there. I wanted to memorize the looks on faces, the clothing styles, to take as many photos as possible, to capture the contradictions of a culture where high rises were being built in high architectural style by men carrying plywood on the backs of bikes, where store owners had no windows or doors on the front of their shops, where men sold fresh fruit from baskets while standing beside them smoking cigarettes. I saw women pulling hitches the size of small uhaul trailers behind them on what looked like oversized tricycles, wearing straw hats to minimize the heat.

I saw men and women on the elevators in the four-star hotel who clucked and smiled, talked on cell phones, wore stylish shoes and practiced English sentences. I want Kai to know that in Hunan, China there were many Chinas, just as there is no singular expression of an American life but many.

I passed an old man sitting on stairs. I didn’t know if I should offer to help him. The impulse was strong as he looked so strange. In China, I had not seen one elderly person looking sick or poor, who was not accompanied by someone holding an arm or offering the support of their presence. China is a country criticized for the treatment of infant girls, but the treatment of the eldest members of society was notable. In the mornings, old people were out on the sidewalks doing tai chi, sitting on benches, talking and reading papers. They were not hidden, lost or lonely-looking.

Which is not to say I didn’t see poverty. Behind the woman and the roasting peanuts what I thought was a vacant building. It looked abandoned but when I walked by I could see through a concrete sized hole where several adults slept on plywood boards raised above the dirt by bricks.
Why have these Chinese people taken residence in my consciousness? The woman with the peanuts isn’t alone. When I press down on the memory, she’s just skin on the surface, and fluid spills out.

There was the nanny in turquoise, who was a bottle feeder, diaper changer and hopefully a hand-holding hugger to our girl. She knew facts about schedules and formula, about sleeping habits and bath-times. She, and all of the women who worked in Kai’s orphanage, were the only ones who might have met at least some of those primal infant needs for touch and food and love. What she had attempted to do with whatever eye contact she made, with whatever games she stopped to play, those moments may have shaped my daughter in ways that I will never know. As will the endless amounts of alone time no baby should ever know.

These women who knew Kai before Kai was named Kai, before she was our Kai, they have fingerprints all over her skin, they used their hands to mix bottles of formula that fed her mouth, held her naked and cleaned her. They are like soft pencil lines on tracing paper, erasable to sight but there in the beginnings of whatever takes shape.

And then, the woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, the one Shubie spotted in the park days before we were to return home. Shubie, who can hear the dance of song tapping the air when the drumming of my own brain crowds out that sound. He stopped us to watch her. She was wearing dark cotton and holding a fan. Her posture was impeccable and she had the full attention of the two women sitting at the bench beside her. Her body moved in poetic Tai chi. Her arms swayed and we were mesmerized. She saw us watching her and acknowledged us with a smile. When she was done we clapped. To see a woman in her fifties dancing in a park in the middle of the day kept me from being smug about China being a culture I would only pity.

I had my own fanning movement, lifting my arms up from my side to place them behind Kai’s head, as I cradled it in the air. She liked to sleep as though falling backwards her thighs against my belly, her torso in the air and her head tipping backwards. I wanted her to feel supported while suspended, to know, that she’d be forever anchored in the air, book ended by parents, and I wanted the women in the park to see my doing the dance of motherhood with my sleeping baby and if not to applaud me to at least acknowledge me.

It was these women I thought of near the end of the trip when we went to the temple in Guanzhou. Everyone rushed passed the statue of Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy and Fertility, to get a blessing from the monks. But I stopped, buying incense and saying “thank you” as it was not my fertility that created Kai and it seemed like the miracle of mercy when China opened its doors back to Americans after SARS. She was an elegant display encased in glass and I wanted her to know how grateful I was for my daughter, for my motherhood, for the duo that had become a family. I also was saying thank you to the pregnant version of Kai’s first other, the one who carried her from conception to labor, and pushed her into this word and ultimately delivered her to a public space where she was ‘left to be found.”

On that day, Kai slept in her carriage, it was the first time I had not held her in my arms, the first day where the heat was too much, a day that made the 100 degree days seems cool, a day where heat rashes and strokes were being prevented as each sip of water was taken, as the guides paced us and made us return to our air conditioned bus.

We sat in the Buddhist temple and the babies were blessed by monks. We bought extra incense candles for each of David’s parents and invoked their memory and presence. Ancestors of all kinds were dancing through the psyches and souls of every family as White and Chinese people bowed silently and ceremoniously even though we weren’t all Buddhists. It was sacred, as though we were simultaneously baptizing our babies or grieving losses, person to person, travel mate to travel mate, country to country.

Here, at home, Kai wakes from sleep and says, “I dreamed of China. Fish were hopping into my crib.”

“Was it a scary dream?” I say.

“No. It was a magical crib so I didn’t get wet.”

Another time she asks, “How many times did I cry before you and Daddy came and got
me?”

“I don’t know,” I say, knowing she doesn’t yet realize we didn’t know her all of her life.

“Maybe five,” she says.

“Maybe,” I say, knowing the answer is too many times.

Finally, I think of him, Kai’s grand-father, my father, another person she will never
know. I imagine some Chinese woman, a tourist, a student perhaps. Will he beg for
money? Will she stare at him, take a photo, drop money in a cup and not even get peanuts?

What will she make of him and our country where a homeless veteran returns from a
different Asia, Vietnam, and is as groundless. Will she press down on his image and will
he live on with her? Will she take him back with her to China, hold him with compassion,
where he may be revered as a sad elder?

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