China Memoir

I remember giving birth to my daughter on the night of April 6, 2000. Just the night before I had written the following letter to her:

Dear Anna Rose-

Your mother and I are waiting to take you home. Right now you’re more a dream than a reality, but still you’re there— we’ve named you- we’ve imagined you— we’ve already put you into our lives and you’re here except— no one knows this more than we do—you’re not here.

The fact that you are Anna Rose and you are already in our hearts if not in your home- and there is no way to remove you from them in either thought or deed- so in a sense then we are no longer waiting.

If we never saw you- if God forbid we were never to see you at all- though I know that’s impossible because you exist— you are there in China, somewhere, no matter if you have been or will be chosen for us because you are already part of us; we are already a family.

You are the child who will be given to us not because they have decided to give you to us or because they have picked one child over another child but because you are the child who is meant to be given to us and has always been meant to be given to us long before we had ever thought of having you. I wish I could tell you right now not to worry because even though we are not there yet to take you home still we are coming and since you are in our hearts nothing can happen to you— you are as good as here.

The next day we received a call from Gongzhon— our Chinese connection from the Gladney Adoption Agency- that “they” had begun “mixing and matching” adoptive parents and babies in Nanchang, China, and that any day now we would be receiving “official confirmation,” so I wrote to her again:

Dear Anna Rose—

Now I know you’re listening! No one has ever responded to one of my letters so quickly, not even by e-mail. So they’re mixing and matching. Like I said you were always here but it’s nice to get some unofficial official confirmation.

Anyway, sleep well and dream of big American toy stores.

Love,
Your Dad

It was not an easy birth, not an easy journey, but I enjoyed every agonizing, ecstatic moment of it. It began with frustration and disappointment and the end of something that left us dead inside, that would shed old beliefs like skin, from which- like a miracle- new life would emerge.

There is no real way to know when this journey began. There is, of course, the failure of biology.

I suppose it begins there. But not really.

“Why don’t you adopt?” friends would ask and we would say it’s not the same thing.

It wouldn’t be ours. It wouldn’t look like us, act like us, eat like us, cough in the winter or sneeze in the summer like us, be bad in math like us.

I’m not exactly sure when the exact moment came or moments or days when we began to see things differently— maybe it was the day I saw a little girl run into her father’s arms on his way home from work or a father showing his young son Shea Stadium for the first time from the window of the #7 Train- shining like a great ancient jewel under the Flushing sun— something let us feel what it would be like to be parents no matter what the child looked like or talked like.

Reaching the decision to adopt was the end of the first journey— others followed from applications and medical reports and fingerprinting and referral letters to the moment we heard those babies’ screams in the hallway of a hotel in China until we brought our daughter home holding a plain brown envelope that under no circumstances was allowed to be opened— or else what?

We’d have to send her back?

Or else?

What if?

These journeys within a journey were fraught with uncertainty, fate, speculation, fear, anticipation, the haunting spectre of the unknown. They were also filled with unimaginable joy, a heightened sensation of heart and mind that was like none other I had ever experienced.

The final journey was the memoir itself. Memory is a funny thing. Certain events, moments, sounds, sights are indelibly etched into my brain. Other events, moments, sounds and shapes were overwhelming, vertiginous; I can only recall them as if I were recalling the moments of a dream, in fragments and images, sometimes surreal, sometimes too real— I think of Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tamborine Man (though through the entire trip I was never on anything stronger than a Tsing Tao)

“Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship/
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip/
my toes too numb to step. . .”

and those were just my feelings before I even got on the plane to China.

My memoir on adopting my daughter from China was perhaps the hardest thing I ever wrote mainly because at the same time that I was trying to understand what was going on, what this sudden unexpected journey in the middle of my life actually meant, to capture in words what it actually felt like– I was trying to get others to understand, to feel all of this at the same time.

I hope you’ll join me on my journey. Stay tuned.