Growing Girls Read online

  And so he finds that he is the kind of man who charges after a loose balloon, charges after it with courage and fight. He isn’t aware of his heroism, or his foolishness, he is too busy chasing a balloon. He hops, runs, reaches, trots over the grass and trips into the boxwoods. That balloon is either dancing or flirting or maybe a little of both. It doesn’t have enough loft to go into the clouds—no, it hovers, dragging its purple ribbon just beyond his pleading fingertips.

  “Get it, Daddy!” she is saying, cheering him on. “Oh, good job, Daddy!”

  It is all he needs to hear. It is fuel. He leaps a few more times until he gets an idea. He’s going to outsmart that balloon. He calculates its direction, like a receiver estimating the trajectory of a touchdown pass, and he runs past it, up a little hill, to the top of a wall, off of which he can hurl himself and go for the grab.

  One, two, three—the timing here is critical—and he leaps! And don’t you know that darn balloon darts left. Left? The balloon is now over the wall, high in the air.

  To another father, that balloon would be a goner for sure. But not him. Not yet. He watches it. He shakes his head. He wonders how he might break the news to her. He thinks, Life isn’t fair.

  Just then the first real breeze of the day kicks in, and the balloon makes a U-turn, an absolute about-face. It drifts toward him, closer now, and closer. He hops at just the right moment. He feels the ribbon like a tickle between his fingers and so he grabs, he grabs happiness out of the sky.

  “Aaaah!” she says, her mouth dropping open. “You did it! Daddy did it!” She can’t quite believe it’s true. Her father has performed a miracle. Her balloon is back. And life, to her, but also to him, has plenty more fairness left.

  meeting the ghost-mother

  When we were waiting to travel to China to adopt Sasha, I signed up for a Yahoo! group for people who had adopted or were adopting from the Huazhou Social Welfare Institute in Guangdong province, the orphanage in southern China where Sasha was living. The people at the orphanage knew her by the name they’d assigned to her—Ji Hong Bin—if they knew her at all, but Alex and I had already decided to name her Sasha Marie as soon as we got her home. We picked Sasha because it means “little Alex” in Russian and we loved the sound of it. At first I worried that a Russian name for a girl of Chinese ancestry would be somehow … crooked. But the truth of the matter was this girl from China was going to be the daughter of a Russian-Lithuanian Jew and a French-Irish-Lithuanian Catholic, so I figured we may as well just go ahead and enjoy the benefits of being a family of mutts, one of which surely must be you aren’t beholden to any particular rules of pedigree.

  At that point all we had of Sasha was a little picture, her date of birth, some scant medical information, a brief report about both the day she was found and her subsequent life at the orphanage. She is gentle. She likes listening to music. If another child snatches her toy, she will look at the child but not cry, and pick another toy up. If you cuddle her, she will touch your face by her little hands. The report also said that she weighed about six pounds when she was first found on the streets of Huazhou, on the steps of a pharmacy, lying in a paper box. She was wearing a suit of gray dress, and covered with a hand-me-down cotton padded coat.

  In her picture she was now twelve months old and she had a beautiful, dainty, heart-shaped face with fine features and an air of serenity. She looked to me like a little, exotic flower. The exotic part was due to her hair, which was dancing all over the place, confident and springy. My pediatrician got upset when I told her about Sasha’s head circumference, which the report said was only sixteen inches, and her body weight, which was only sixteen pounds, and her height, which was only twenty-six inches. The doctor, an international adoption specialist, was so upset she had me call our adoption agency and ask them to contact the orphanage and verify. When the stats were confirmed, the doctor had me ask for more photos. She said one way you could tell if a baby had fetal alcohol syndrome was by the vertical lines connecting the nose to the mouth. No lines was a bad sign; defined lines was a good sign. When I got the new pictures I blew them up gigantic on my computer and I studied and studied them for shadows that might reveal lines, but the photo resolution was so bad it was hard to tell what was what. Then something happened, sort of like when you can’t find your car and you suddenly realize you’re in the whole wrong parking lot, and I made the picture small again and she turned back into a beautiful flower.

  The Yahoo! group was wonderful because I got to look at pictures of other babies adopted from Huazhou that people had posted and also I got to hear how everyone loved Miss Peng, the orphanage director, whom many had met and thought to be an angel.

  We got the picture in March, right after Anna turned three, and then we had to wait until June to travel to China to go get Sasha. It was hard to know how to fill that big black hole of time. If you didn’t fill it with something in particular, it would so easily get plugged with fear and all the tricks of the imagination.

  Right away I tried to figure out what her Chinese name meant. Ji Hong Bin. At first I got: Lucky Red Kneecap. Then I got: Lucky Roasted Hair on Temples. Hmm. Translating Chinese into English is something of a fine art. Ji Hong Bin was the “pinyin” version of her name. Pinyin is a system devised to represent Chinese characters phonetically using our alphabet. You have to first get the pinyin translation and then match that to the actual Chinese character. These are not subtle differences. In pinyin “Ji” can mean anything from “lucky” to “horseback” to “accumulate” to “bamboo box used to carry books.” And “Hong” will lead you to “red” just as easily as it will to “cistern,” “blast,” and “species of wild swan.”

  I was able to get a good match on Ji and Hong. Lucky and Red. Bin was giving me a lot of trouble. Lucky Red Riverbank? Lucky Red High-Quality Iron? Eventually, I found it. A character with every last squiggle accounted for.

  So here was my daughter: Lucky Red Equally-Fine-in-External-Accomplishments-and-Internal-Qualities.

  It seemed a big name for such a little girl. But I liked the meaning. The notion of balance. The notion of luck. What a wonderful wish to place upon a six-pound baby lying in a paper box.

  One of the things we did while filling up time before going to China was we got goats. I wanted goats because I had heard that they would eat our multiflora rose, the thorny bush that is almost impossible to control, and also because goats are funny. Gretta recommended Nubians, the kind with the long, floppy ears, because they’re big and eat a lot and we had so much we needed eaten. I rode with her in her truck to the farm in Ohio and met the girl who raised them and her proud parents and then a month later I learned that the girl’s father died suddenly of a heart attack. I sent a card and identified myself as “the lady who bought your goats.” It’s hard to know the right thing to do in a situation like that.

  We named the goats Nellie, Tut, and Cleopatra. Nellie was the oldest and her big ears flew up like Sister Bertrille’s hat on The Flying Nun whenever she heard any sounds that concerned her. Tut was Nellie’s son, and Cleopatra was her pregnant daughter.

  Gretta gave us instructions on goat prenatal care. She said the most important thing was exercise and she suggested we walk Cleopatra twice daily. I never knew you could walk a goat. It was like walking a very obedient dog. Cleopatra never pulled at the leash, or whimpered, or complained about the snow. She and I wandered around the farm, and I talked to her about motherhood because she was just getting started and I was by now getting sure of myself.

  We bought an intercom system from Radio Shack so that we could eavesdrop on the actions of our goats in the barn. One night I was giving Anna a bath and we heard horrible goat hollering coming out of the monitor. Alex ran down to the barn. “It’s time!” he yelled. Cleopatra, he reported, was in labor. I asked him how he could be so certain. He said there was a foot sticking out.

  I pulled Anna out of the tub and quickly dried her hair and bundled her and by the time I ran through the night and
into the barn, baby Greg was born; Cleopatra had done all the work. Instinctively, she took on the business of cleaning and nursing—within minutes this goat was a pro. “Congratulations!” I said to her, and closed the barn door to give mother and child a chance to sleep. I thought that was the end of it, and went to bed wondering if there was any sort of message in all of this.

  Three days later, George came barreling up our driveway. This was way before we went into our neighbor-feud. This was back when George was just an everyday part of our lives. “I’ve got something here,” he said, climbing out of his pickup. He was carrying a baby lamb. The tiniest creature, about the size of a kitten. Her nose was pink and her body was covered in tight fuzz. George said she was just born a few hours previously. She was one of triplets. Her mother had rejected her, had refused to let her suckle, had kicked her away. He said sheep just do this sometimes. “Maybe you can help?” he said, holding out the orphaned lamb.

  I took her in my arms. She was all skin and bones, a wrinkled angel. I asked George how a person went about rescuing a creature so delicate.

  “I was more thinking your goat could do it,” he said, looking over at Cleopatra. Goats and sheep are genetically similar, he said, and a willing goat can raise a lamb. This was news to me. George said our goat would have more than enough milk for this baby, too. Maybe she would accept her as one of her own. Maybe she wouldn’t. It was worth the try. It was either that or let the lamb die.

  I felt awkward. How do you go about asking a goat to mother a lamb? I placed the lamb next to where baby Greg was nursing. Cleopatra looked, sniffed, looked some more. In an instant she had made up her mind. The lamb took a good long drink and the bond was formed.

  In a way, it was the most natural thing in the world. Here was a creature that needed a mom, and here was a mom with plenty of mothering to give.

  I stood there a long time watching this, filled with pride for my goat and her good deed. At one point Cleopatra looked over at me. It wasn’t an expression of thanks or even a knowing. It was a plain old goat look of “What are you looking at?” A bond is a bond is a bond.

  I remember thinking that if Anna and Sasha ever complain about having gotten me as a mom, I could send them out to talk to that lamb. “Yeah, you think you’ve got it rough,” that lamb could say. “My mom is a goat.”

  We named her Sweet Pea. Within weeks, well before the daffodils came up, she was strong enough to play in the barnyard, tumbling with Greg and accepting Anna’s invitation to wear a hat.

  A lot of Americans adopting from China incorporate some portion of their child’s Chinese name into the new American name, but with Sasha we couldn’t figure out a way to do this, just as we couldn’t with Anna. Anna’s Chinese name is Gu Yu Qian. We tried Anna Gu Levy or Anna Gu Yu Levy and everything sounded ridiculous and apologetic. “Levy” is so Jewish: you throw Chinese into it and the whole thing sounds too eager to please. So with both girls we decided they’d head into life with two names; they’d have their American names and they’d grow up knowing their Chinese names, too. Gu Yu Qian translates to “Pretty Like Jade.” When we went to China to get Anna, I bought a jade bead and a small gold chain and I made a necklace that I never take off. I tried to think of something I could wear around my neck that would say: Lucky Red Equally-Fine-in-External-Accomplishments-and-Internal-Qualities.

  Every day I checked the Yahoo! group for help with this and other matters, including tips on how to make rice congee and which stores in Guangzhou had the best deals on baby clothes. Sometimes people would post newspaper articles of interest, and one day this one landed in my in-box:

  The Guardian—Final Edition

  SECTION: Guardian Features Pages, pg. 7

  LENGTH: 772 words

  HEADLINE: Women: Do the foreigners who adopt our girls know how to feed and love them in their arms and hearts?

  BYLINE: Xinran

  BODY:

  Recently I received an e-mail. Had I ever Interviewed any women who were forced to give up children because of the “one child” law, which China started in 1981? Yes, many.

  One particularly painful memory stands out. On a cold winter morning in 1990, I passed a public toilet in Zhangzhou. A noisy crowd had formed around a little bag of clothes lying in the windy entrance. People were pointing and shouting: “Look, look, she is still alive!”

  “Alive? Was this another abandoned baby girl?” I pushed through the crowd and picked up that little bundle: It was a baby girl, barely a few days old. She was frozen blue, but her tiny nose was twitching. I begged for help: “We should save her, she is alive!”

  “Stupid woman, do you know what you are doing? How could you manage this poor thing?”

  I couldn’t wait for help. I took the baby to the nearest hospital. I paid for first aid for her, but no one in the hospital seemed to be in a hurry to save this dying baby. I took a tape recorder from my backpack and started reporting what I saw. It worked: a doctor stopped and took the baby to the emergency room.

  As I waited outside, a nurse said: “Please forgive our cold minds. There are too many abandoned baby girls for us to handle. We have helped more than ten, but afterwards, no one has wanted to take responsibility for their future.”

  I broadcast this girl’s story on my radio show that night. The phone lines were filled with both angry and sympathetic callers.

  Ten days later, I got a letter from a childless couple; they wanted to adopt the baby girl. That same day on my answer machine, I heard a crying voice: “Xinran, I am the mother of the baby girl. She was born just four days before you saved her. Thank you so much for taking my daughter to hospital. I watched in the crowd with my heart broken. I followed you and sat outside your radio station all day. Many, many times I almost shouted out to you: ‘That is my baby!’

  “I know many people hate me; I hate myself even more. But you don’t know how hard life is for a girl in the countryside as the first child of a poor family. When I saw their little bodies bullied by hard work and cruel men, I promised I wouldn’t let my girl have such a hopeless life. Her father is a good man, but we can’t go against our family and the village. We have to have a boy for the family tree.

  “Oh, my money is running out, only two minutes left, it is so expensive.

  “We can’t read or write. But, if you can, please tell my girl in the future to remember that, no matter how her life turns out, my love will live in her blood and my voice in her heart. (I could hear her crying at this point.) Please beg her new family to love her as if she were their own. I will pray for them every day and…”

  The message stopped. Three months later, I sent the baby girl to her new family—a schoolteacher and a lawyer—with her new name, “Better.” Better’s mother never called again.

  Afterwards, I started to search for other mothers who had abandoned their girls. This spring, I talked to some near the banks of the Yangtze River. Did they not want to find out where their babies were? “I would rather suffer this dark hole inside me if it means she can have a better life. I don’t want to disturb my girl’s life,” said one. “I am very pleased for a rich person to take my daughter; she has a right to live a good life,” said another.

  One of them asked me: “Do you believe those foreigners who adopt our girls know how to feed and love them in their arms and hearts?”

  I read this article over and over again. The first few times I felt like a spy finally finding the corner of the edge of the most critical piece of evidence that would mean the difference between war and peace. Actual words from the actual ghost-mothers. It is so hard for me to believe these women exist, so hard to hold on to the small fictions I invent to remember the truth that happened before my arrival in my girls’ lives. It is as meaningful as imagining the landscape of heaven; I may as well be a kid picturing God up there mixing the potions He’ll pour into the molds to now populate Cleveland.

  I can’t hold on to the fact that my daughters were once cradled by the women who gave them their biology
, were once jostled about by aunts or grandmothers who took hold of their umbilical cords and made the cut, were once wiped clean of the goo with which they arrived into the world by some trusted villager. I can’t hold on to the fact of her goodbye. I can’t hold on to that one at all.

  In my mind I begin both of my daughters’ lives with the pictures that arrived in the mail. The beautiful babies waiting. To think about the rest of it is only to realize how little I think about the rest of it, is only to spiral down again and down again.

  What do I want? What does she want? We want to meet one day, as old women, alone in a coffee shop. We want to embrace and fall into sobs. We want to verify in each other the fulfillment of every mother’s pledge: we did the best with what we had. We want to discover an instant kind of love that exceeds all expectations.

  Anna came with us to China to get Sasha. To keep her entertained on the plane, I supplied her with many books of stickers. When we arrived in Beijing she had little Poohs and Piglets covering her arms and legs and many people remarked that she looked like one of those tattooed ladies in the circus. Anna remained largely oblivious to the attention and soon enough added Eeyore to the tip of her nose.

  Twelve other families were picking up Huazhou babies and so we formed a large group. I could see some of the other parents-to-be studying Anna, and I got the sense that despite the stickers she became for them a symbol of hope. Here was the healthiest child in the world, a happy kid with a rich imagination who just two years previously had been bundled up in an orphanage, waiting.

  It was June and unbearably hot in Beijing but nonetheless we all traveled to the Forbidden City, where we took pictures for our girls to one day hold. Then we went to the Great Wall and bought pearls. Alex and I had both learned when we got Anna that these trips aren’t about sightseeing. Your whole self is used up trying to learn how to be a parent and there is nothing left. Even so, there is the rumble of who you used to be, the person who traveled the world in search of stories and who fell in love with wandering way back as a kid on Lorraine Drive, taking off for a day in the woods. The adventure! Standing on the Great Wall stretching east and west into the horizon, it was hard to be just a person with a camera and a seat waiting on a bus. I wanted to run on that wall. I wanted to climb. But Anna was hot and she needed more juice.