Hengdong SWI

Introduction

Hope, love, and help are chiefly among other things verbs.  To understand needs some effort too and in the end that is what the following story is about.

But to begin, this is a record of my journey to Hengdong, Hunan Province, China, and there I visited the Hengdong Social Welfare Institute (SWI).  My youngest daughter Clara-Li spent her first 17 months in this orphanage before we adopted her in Hunan's provincial capital, Changsha, on August 10, 2004.

We were unable to travel to Hengdong during her adoption trip, despite our lobbying at the time.  No other adoptive parents have been able to visit the Hengdong SWI although families from western countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands have been traveling to Changsha to adopt children from this orphanage since at least 2002. 

The information placed here is primarily for these families and others like them since in late 2005 and 2006 this orphanage, along with at least five others in southeastern Hunan, became linked to baby traffickers in an alleged bid to profit from adoption fees, a case in which the director of the Hengdong SWI eventually went to prison.  The case would become widely reported by Chinese and international media and led to a temporary shut down of foreign adoptions in Hunan Province.  It has many layers and orphanage officials involved have argued that in buying abandoned children from traffickers they were acting in the children's best interests.  For only a small portion of rural China’s abandoned children are taken in by its state controlled orphanages.  The rest are absorbed into families informally or otherwise left to find homes through a growing unregulated domestic black market, the murky realm of shadowy intermediaries and questionable safety.   Still, the case can be described but probably can't be rationalized in full.   There is a sort of untidiness throughout. 

These are our children.  Each has a deeper, more personal story and is no less deserving of answers about her past.

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In early 2005, before "the scandal" broke and five months after we returned home with Clara-Li, the group Our Chinese Daughters Foundation (OCDF) told us in response to a chance email inquiry that it might be able to arrange a private visit to the Hengdong SWI.  OCDF had experience arranging "culture-focused travel programs" for adoptive families wishing to return to China with their children.  Although this trip would be outside of the norm, an OCDF representative in Beijing obligingly made some local contacts, set up an itinerary in Hunan, and recommended a visa service and travel agent for the long series of flights there and back.  This was promised to suffice.

We quickly decided to go for it.  We also decided this would be a journey best made by me alone, for obvious financial reasons so soon after our last one but also because this project seemed to have a high probability for disappointment, given the non-history of previous visits. 

Why, we wondered, had Chinese officials suddenly changed their minds?  In response to our nagging pleas to be allowed to visit Hengdong during Clara-Li's adoption trip we'd been supplied with all manner of official discouragement: the area was off limits to foreign travelers, some Chinese travelers had been robbed there, another intrepid foreigner had been detained in an area nearby and his camera confiscated, the area couldn't be traveled to in one day, etc.. 

But something told me to ignore similar warnings two years before in Jiangxi Province, where I had summoned the optimism to jump in a taxi for a long but important trip to the town where my first daughter is from.  The road then, it became clear, wasn't really washed out. 

At the end of a nicely paved highway in Gao'an, Jiangxi, in 2002, I had eventually stood in front of a busy downtown market on the same spot where my first daughter as a newborn was left and found in a small cardboard box and in the flood of triggered images, smells, sounds, and understanding I made a very important connection, then wiped my tears and left.  When we returned to China for our second daughter, I knew I owed it to her to try to make the same connection, before too much had changed. 

I wanted to be able to honestly tell her something about where she was from.

This time, it would just require a special trip.

About Hengdong

Hengdong, the small city, is the county town or local government center for Hengdong County, which is in the southeastern part of Hunan Province.  The county is filled with tiny farms and farm cooperatives.  It's also home to a fair number of small factories including ones that produce plastic mats, metals, porcelain, and tea.   One variety of locally produced tea is a popular mixture of green tea and herbal medicine promised to "reduce fat and treat cancer."   In character the region as a whole seems a bit like a cup of optimism too, albeit a very ancient cup that's been through a lot.

This is an area that is mostly rural and agricultural in that populous way unique to central China.  The large city of Hengyang is only about 40 miles to the southwest and is the second largest city in Hunan with well over 6 million residents.  But in China places can be very distinct from one another even if separated by only short distances.  With Hengyang and Hengdong this is the case and they are separated by the hills, towns, and rural villages between them.

Notably, Hengdong County lies within sight of the mountain peaks of Hengshan, home to a group of temples that are well known throughout Hunan and much of central China.   The temples are very old, specially honored, and the mountain area surrounding them is carefully preserved.

At its western border the county sits alongside the middle reaches of the Xiang River that flows through the center of the province and it is intersected by a large number of smaller rivers including the Mui Shui, which gently curls around the edges of the city of Hengdong.  The county is served by the Jingguang railroad and a relatively new main roadway large enough for steady truck traffic, both traversing east to west.  The entire region--with its rice, grain, pigs, oranges, vegetables, camellia oil, and tea--seems characteristic of Hunan's reputation for productive agriculture.  Historically, Hunan produced so much grain that it provided surpluses to many other parts of China.  Success, however, also led to overpopulation beginning more than a hundred years ago, which led to waves of peasant uprisings.   

Fittingly then, Hunan is Mao Zedong's home province and birthplace to much of China's early communist movement. It strictly adopted Mao's grand social experiments and was a bit slow in adopting the reforms put forward by Deng Xiaoping in the years that followed Mao's death.  Mao's hometown, the once-tiny village of Shaoshan, is only about 50 miles from Hengdong, to the north and about halfway between Hengdong and Changsha.

During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, Hunan was home to its own sovereign realm and often considered a frontier region between the imperial empire and disputed regions to the south.  Later, together with Hubei to the north, it was part of the imperial province of Huguang until the Qing dynasty in the 19th century.   

But as agricultural practices advanced, it turned out that Hunan was located at the heart of an extremely fertile region.  By the end of the Ming dynasty and certainly the early Qing dynasty, the province was firmly established as an economic center with a large exported agricultural output, especially grain, along well established trade routes.  Its population ballooned.  Soon most of its land upon which crops could be grown was cleared.  Dense human and animal populations in the area provided fertilizer for other saleable crops such as high-yielding rice.  Qing rulers in the region failed to restrain competition for land among both landlords and peasant farmers.  Revolution that led to the abdication of the last Chinese emperor in 1912 left many local leaders in power and land in the region was still highly taxed in more ways than one.

Mao was part of a short-lived revolutionary movement in Hunan before joining and leading the communists against the broader nationalist Kuomintang government.  In the late 1920s and early 1930s communist forces often fought with Kuomintang forces in the mountains just east of Hengdong County along the Hunan-Jiangxi border until 1934, when communist forces began their famous long march out of the region north to Shaanxi Province.  The later communist government under Mao hardly solved the region’s land shortage and ecological issues, however.  By 1957 only 20 percent of the Xiang River Basin, which includes Hengdong County, was forested and more than 20 percent was barren land.

Indeed in the following year as Mao prepared to launch his calamitous Great Leap Forward campaign of collective industrialization, he rejected as unpatriotic an early attempt at population control begun in 1955 in response to inadequate food supplies and a very low standard of living nationally.  Waves of famine ensued.

Buddhist and Taoist traditions are still strong in Hengdong County, perhaps influenced by the close proximity of the Nanyue Shan mountain temples to the west.  A different kind of shrine lies about 30 miles in the other direction, just on the other side of the Luoxian Shan range and technically in Jiangxi Province.  This would be Jinggangshan, which is historically considered the birthplace of the Red Army, but which during the Cultural Revolution became a place of pilgrimage for young Red Guards who often journeyed there on foot to relive the experiences of their revolutionary forebears.  At its peak, more than 30,000 Red Guards arrived daily without food, housing, and sanitation facilities there to supply them.

Today Jinggangshan hosts a more benign brand of Chinese tourist, but it’s worth considering that the Cultural Revolution (officially 1966-1976) left few families untouched and still strongly reverberates, usually painfully so, in the Chinese collective memory.  Traditional education was halted.  Countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books, and paintings were destroyed. Young "intellectuals" living in cities were ordered to the countryside; most were actually just recently graduated middle school students.  Alleged crimes against the government resulted in public punishment of the accused.  Untold numbers went to forced labor camps, one of which was located in Hengdong County (a place called the Xuantang Tree Farm).  It was disbanded in July 1986, according the human rights group Laogai Research Foundation, which monitors forced labor in China.  But this group claims that prisoners are today still toiling in large numbers of Chinese prison factories including the Hengyang Prison Provincial No. 2 that produces automobiles and Provincial No. 5, also in Hengyang, that produces auto parts.

Like much of China today, Hengdong County may be seen as struggling through sometimes drastic economic and social reforms to emerge in incremental steps from a long period during which bad things could often happen to good people.

The county in China's 2001 population census had 660,000 residents living in 187,094 households and 610,000 of the county's residents were considered to be living in a rural area.  It's divided into 24 districts over about 1,925 square miles.   The people of this area have traditionally spoken the older Xiang dialect but Mandarin (or Putonghua), being the language of commerce and commerce being the force currently transforming nearly all of China, is commonly understood.

The climate of the region is blistering hot and tropically humid during the long summers.  Temperatures during the winter months can still be chilly, with average highs in the 40s and morning frosts on occasion from mid November through February.  Winter snow often tops the mountain peaks of Hengshan.

Topographically the county today is a mixture of forested hills and flat agricultural spaces.  Occasional cut-away hillsides reveal a deep red color to the earth underneath.   Several of the county’s districts contain midsized towns, some of which stand out as clusters of block-like cement buildings visible in the distance from its main highway. 

Xintang Zhen (town) is one of these and near there on a small lake visitors can ride tour boats and fish from the shore line at the Wild Duck Vacation Village, whose proprietor, Luo Guohua, first cultivated fish in the lake, later tried raising farm animals on its banks, and in recent years, in the spirit of the times, transformed his property into a local tourist attraction. 

On the outskirts of Xintang is the large Ouyang Yu Experimental Middle School, which serves about 2500 students between the ages of 11 and 17.    In the 1940s a young local man named C.J. Huang left the area and eventually immigrated to Taiwan, then later to the U.S.  Along the way he built an impressive career as an engineer and businessman.   He pledged the money that built this school on a return visit in 1986 and later established a fellowship in Asian studies at Stanford University that occasionally sends young research fellows to live and work at the Ouyang Yu middle school, and to teach English to students and teachers there. 

Hunan Province has been reestablished as a modern agricultural model for China and farmers' average annual incomes there have increased from 558 yuan ($67 USD) in 1989 to 2,299 yuan ($277 USD) in 2001.  In the online archives of China's People's Daily Hengdong County is mentioned in an article about the resourceful farmer Liu Aiping from Daqiao, one of the county's rural villages.  After taking a correspondence course in animal husbandry, he formed the Aiping Group, which has helped some 3,600 other local farmers to raise their standard of living by establishing pig farms linked by his breeding and marketing services.  Hengdong County's Aiping Group has been singled out as a national success story.

But while farm wages have more than doubled in the past decade, an average $277 USD a year for most farm workers doesn't provide much disposable income.  Moreover, in China's new market economy there are more basic services to be paid for and many more consumer items to buy.

The small city of Hengdong lies in the center of Hengdong County and is its bustling hub, home to several large agricultural markets and hundreds of small shops and businesses.   Its residents live mostly in tall apartment-style buildings separated by grid-like alleys and dusty narrow streets off its main thoroughfares.  Near its main intersection is a brand new two-story shopping mall with glassed-in jewelry shops and fashionable clothing stores, and a modern escalator between floors.   Not far away are the official-looking offices of the Hengdong County Civil Affairs Bureau and, in the other direction, the People’s Hospital of Hengdong County.   Across from the county headquarters is a small park with a busy playground.

Hunan Province has a current projected birth rate of 12.2 per 1000 population.  The average life expectancy in the province is a healthy 69 years.  Its overall rate of population growth is about 5% annually.   In 2000, gender imbalance among official (legal) births in Hunan was represented by an annually widening ratio of 126.9 male births to every 100 female births.  Gender imbalance measured in recorded births is typically even greater in mostly rural areas like Hengdong County.  Actual observed gender imbalance is tempered somewhat by underreporting of female births: children abandoned but then absorbed into other families.

There has been interesting debate about the probable causes of observed imbalance.  A lot has been written about underreporting but also about the high prevalence of selective abortion made easier by medical technologies relatively affordable even in rural areas, a practice the Chinese have recently been trying to control.  One theory even suggests that disease may play a major role in gender imbalance not just in China but across southern and central Asia, more specifically highly prevalent diseases such as Hepatitis B that have been shown to markedly decrease the chances of female births among infected birth mothers.

But, generally, it can be said that families in rural villages want sons.

Historians have written that family preference for male births and female infanticide were part of eastern and south Asian cultures throughout the ancient period, but it is doubtful that anywhere in China could still be considered stuck in that era, given what China came through during the second half of the 20th century.   In modern times social researchers have linked family preference for male births in China to economic reasons and the lack of a social safety net for those reaching old age, especially in poor rural areas.   Some now suggest that in China's new economic climate this is less a determinate than pressure on young parents from paternal grandparents, whose beliefs on the subject may reflect an older Chinese reality.

Population controls have added fuel to the flame, although China's population problem is truly staggering.   If you are reading this in the U.S. you might envision six people for every one of those around you.  Then imagine the resulting effects.

The Hengdong SWI is in many ways on the outer edge of the city of Hengdong and is one of a large number of county level orphanages overseen by the Hunan Provincial Civil Affairs Bureau.  There are 74 counties in Hunan and some have more than one SWI.   There are also 12 municipal level orphanages in this province and these are said to generally house larger numbers of children.  Most adoptions in China are domestic adoptions, albeit within the limitations of the country's strict population controls.  Researchers suspect that most of China's abandoned baby girls, especially in rural villages, are adopted informally. 

Supply still appears to exceed demand. 

In 1999 the U.S. State Department requested that Chinese orphanages wishing to make orphaned children eligible for adoption place "child abandonment ads" in newspapers to assist birth parents in deciding to somehow claim them.  The Chinese government complied and these have become known as "finding ads."  Catch 22 is that abandoning a child is illegal, and birth parents can be penalized when the birth of a child exceeds the population control limits set in their region.  Each ad is run in a local newspaper for 60 days after which, if no one comes forward, the child is officially determined to be abandoned and eligible for adoption.   As a result, newspapers throughout China collectively announce the recent abandonment of thousands of baby girls daily.

Very little is known about child abandonment in China other than generalized assumptions.  However, in one instance researchers were able to interview 237 families in central China who abandoned children in the 1980s and 1990s.  Within this sample, 88% were from rural areas, most had average incomes and education levels for the areas in which they lived, and most had been in their middle to late child bearing years when they had abandoned a child.  Gender, birth order, and the lack of a male sibling were indeed the major determinants of abandonment in these cases.  But only 11 of these families had abandoned first daughters, and in these few cases there were extenuating circumstances including three in which difficult birth defects were cited.   The study found this contradiction: that population restrictions lead some families to abandon newborn daughters after they have exceeded birth quotas, and that most families want to have and keep at least one daughter.   (See Johnson, K.; Banghan, H.  and Liyao, W. (1998)   "Infant abandonment and adoption in China." Population & Development Review, Vol. 24 Issue 3, p469-510.)

Foreign adoption in China is centrally managed by the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), a branch of the Civil Affairs Ministry in Beijing.  This is where dossiers from foreign parents wishing to bring abandoned children into their families are matched with dossiers for children sent in by SWIs in provinces throughout the country.  In other words, children in foreign adoptions are not adopted directly from orphanages.  Nonetheless, adoption fees are an attractive revenue source for desperate orphanages, greedy officials, or a complex mix.  Money changing hands anywhere within China’s bureaucratic system is a ripe target for corruption and this is commonly said to be especially true in Hunan Province. 

But corruption scandal (more on this later) can divert attention from the far greater problem of child abandonment overall, which seems to receive less Chinese media coverage.  The astounding number of baby girls abandoned in China each year has typically resembled in size the population of a typical small Chinese city, although the CCAA now says that, finally, child abandonment is on the decrease.

Foreign adoptions in China take place most often these days in provincial capitals like Changsha rather than in the individual locations that host orphanages throughout each province.  This makes it easier to process both the adoption paperwork and the application for a Chinese passport each child needs to exit the country.  It also serves to limit the visibility of foreign adoptions.  Still, some orphanages accommodate visits from families during adoption trips and others don't.  This we saw first hand during both of our adoptions. 

In fairness, it seems reasonable that some SWI directors might as a routine wish to avoid such visits to ensure that adoptive families focus their attention on their new babies, to avoid disruption back at the orphanage (especially for any older children who might be living there), and to avoid political problems  locally.  Their well meaning goal, it seems likely, is to see that the children in their care find good homes.  They may simply want to avoid anything that could jeopardize that.

The CCAA may actually prohibit orphanage visits from adoptive families during adoption trips in its guidelines to orphanages involved in the foreign adoption program while allowing for return visits later, according to the director of one private charitable foundation working in China.   She believes the CCAA is worried that families visiting orphanages during adoption trips might be tempted to compare children or may unfairly compare orphanage conditions to those in wealthy countries.  The policy is a means of limiting visits overall.  Perhaps it would be better if adoption agencies or local officials were simply more clear about this rule.

In 2003, only 24 of more than 85 orphanages in Hunan's provincial welfare system placed children in foreign adoptions, according to author Kay Ann Johnson.  Foreigners seeking to adopt in China pay an orphanage fee of about $3000 USD, and in Hunan much of this fee is said to go directly to the orphanage.  In the past two years, a large number of foreign adoptions in Hunan have been from the Hengdong SWI, prompting speculation that provincial officials have singled it out as a high priority target for improvements. 

Undeniably, photos from disposable cameras sent to the Hengdong SWI and returned to adoptive families have shown a very humble facility.  In my daughter's photos, some scenes seemed grim, a few even unsettling, in comparison to orphanage scenes I had seen first hand in China previously.

January 24: Trip Confirmed

Over the weekend, I finalized my Hunan itinerary with an OCDF representative in Beijing and early this morning booked my flights.  The trip is on.  The itinerary will begin in Changsha and then allow me at least two days in Hengdong near the start, just in case something gets delayed.  I'll stay close by in Hengshan while exploring the area where my daughter is from and spend a day in Shaoshan on my way back to Changsha and its airport.   Beyond this, I'll know very little until the trip unfolds.  I'll leave on February 18.   My next posts will be either during the trip or immediately after.  Zai jian. 

February 18-19: Departure and Travel

I am writing this from China, in the business center at the good ol’ Grand Sun City Hotel in Changsha.  This was a difficult trip for which to prepare since there were no adoption agency travel info packets and I'd had very little prior communication with my contacts here due to the Chinese New Year.  If there was a loose plan for the first part of my trip, it didn't quite work out and my itinerary for the rest of the trip has been sort of reversed.  Today I'm still working on revisions. 

But I'm here.

Very early on departure day, my wife and I crept from our daughters’ room where because of some post-orphanage sleep issues our whole family has camped each night since we brought Clara-Li home in August.  We dressed, fidgeted with my bags, and went over our checklist of last minute items.  The day before had been Clara-Li’s second birthday and remnants from our little celebration were still strewn around the house along with the usual toys and children’s socks.  We woke the girls, packed them into their car seats, and headed off to the airport, running late.

For several weeks I'd been quietly dreading the moment when we would pull up to the curb at our municipal airport in New Orleans for this trip.  When the moment came, I kissed everyone with my heart pounding and then quickly hopped out of the car.  As I slung my small knapsack over my shoulder and dragged my one larger bag inside, I remember also carrying what seemed like a lot of weight in matters to think about.

Still, the weight would be balanced by the secret to happiness, which lies in giving something up--like your safe position, your predictable routine, often your money--for the courage of your convictions.  So I could smile at least a little bit at the ticket counter when I learned my first flight to Chicago was canceled and that I would be rerouted to China through San Francisco, which would eventually put me on a different and much later flight into Changsha. 

Whoever might be meeting me in Changsha wouldn't find me on the original flight and would have to wait an extra four and a half hours to see if I could be on the next flight arriving from Beijing.   Late for my new flight to San Francisco, I quickly boarded and borrowed a cell phone from a nice guy stuck in the seat next to me and, as we taxied toward the runway, called home to see if we could get a message to OCDF.  Then I hoped for the best.

In San Francisco the different United Air flight to Beijing was very crowded and the plane itself had seen better days.  I sat next to a Chinese man who had been living in the U.S. but now was planning to start a business in Beijing, a car buying guide for new Chinese motorists.   We compared optimistic anecdotes from our recent trips to China and he was a cheerful complement to a long flight. 

I arrived in Beijing at 6 pm on the 19th, where the airport was crowded with New Year's travelers and where I almost lost my luggage for good.  In New Orleans and San Francisco I'd been told at each flight counter that my bag would be checked all the way to Changsha.  When I finally got to the domestic terminal in Beijing I thought I'd ask again.  Nope, we determined through sign language, my bag was probably back at the international terminal baggage claim.  I had 10 minutes to board.  So I ran back through both terminals and customs in reverse, which caused some audible gasps, and found my lonely bag at the claim area.   Then I ran back in the other direction, through customs, and unbelievably they waved me through security.  At the gate for the Changsha flight, they almost wouldn't let me on, but I was persistent.

There were no other foreigners on the Changsha flight.  I sat among a rough looking group of men who were alternately laughing and arguing over something written in a newspaper that one man kept slapping against the back of the seat in front of him.   Another in the group lit a cigarette in defiance of the airline's no smoking rule and the whole scene was out of place on the brand new China South plane with its cheery and earnest young flight attendants, who weren't quite sure how to handle this group.  I tried to sleep.

It was already late at night and the air was very cold as we stepped off the plane in Changsha.  Inside the terminal I cleared customs, claimed my one checked bag with no small amount of relief, and headed toward the main lobby into the New Year traveling crowd.  Among the faces lining the railing after the entrance to the public area I spied someone waving a sign with my name.  This was Song Xuefeng, my guide assigned just in the past day or so, and now my good friend who goes by the English name Leon.  He is a tall young man in his mid 20s, who speaks English well and has a quick smile and an easy, confident demeanor. 

When no foreigners had gotten off my originally scheduled flight from Beijing, Leon had simply decided to wait it out for the next one.  No problem, he said, smiling like he meant it.   He'd brought a book.

Outside the airport we climbed into a small Korean-built van driven by an amiable man named Chen and this little vehicle will eventually take us south toward Hengdong in a day or so, if all goes according to plan.

It’s good to be back, I found myself thinking as we drove through dark streets to downtown Changsha, yet I was struck by how different the city felt without the comfort and diversion of a travel group. Even the Grand Sun City Hotel felt different, although we had lived with eight other adoptive families at this same location for more than week just six months ago.  The difference was that this time I was no longer part of a grand collective effort.  Instead I was just there on business, the nature of which was very important to me, but not particularly obvious to anyone else.

Leon told me more details of my permission to travel to the Hengdong SWI.  He confirmed that I would be the first to visit there and said he was very surprised that provincial civil affairs officials had okayed the trip.  It was a civil affairs [provincial government] decision and not the orphanage's, he said.  Anyway, he said he thought this was a kind of experiment, and advised that I not mention the trip at the hotel.  With this I should note for Hengdong adoptive families that I am fully aware of my ad hoc ambassador status and will do nothing that would jeopardize trips for future Hengdong travelers.  There will be no sneaking of photos at the orphanage if photos are not allowed, for instance.       

My body had no idea what time zone it was in and there was a dull throb in my head after I checked in at the Grand Sun.  I've had about 6 hours of sleep since Wednesday and it's Sunday morning now. 

I find myself hoping that I can hold up through the rest of the trip and somehow pull this off.

By the way, there are at least three adoption groups at the Grand Sun, one from the U.S. and the others from Europe, I believe.  At least one more arrives tonight.

February 20: Changsha

Here in Changsha they're still celebrating Chinese New Year, a term that is really sort of a western expression for what the Chinese call Spring Festival. 

The Spring Festival starts in the early days of each 12th lunar month, lasts until the middle of the first month of the new lunar year, and its end is marked by the full moon of the Lantern Festival when brightly colored lanterns are displayed and yuanxiao or glutinous rice dumplings are eaten.  Within this period the Chinese government asks businesses to give workers seven vacation days off around the lunar new year and Spring Festival is by far the biggest holiday in China.  It's like our Christmas, New Year, and Valentine's Day all rolled into one.

The streets, stores, and restaurants are filled with big red paper lanterns, China braids, and other festival decorations.  Firecrackers and fireworks are a constant and can be heard at just about at any hour of the day.

One side effect of the Spring Festival is its celebratory imbibing.  Last night in the room next to mine a group of men--no, not possibly the same group from the airplane--could be heard carrying on in this vein until 5 a.m., when instead of going to sleep they all just seemed to say goodbye and go home.  Actually, my wife and I had noticed a little of this sort of competitive Ralph Cramdenizing in China before during our earlier trips, putting us in mind of the drinking contests in Fulong that Peter Hessler described in his book River Town.

Of course not all Chinese men do this, but it's interesting.  Interesting too to hear a bunch of guys coarsely shouting to one another over their apparently preferred accompaniment of soft ballads and that beautiful, lilting, almost new age music that is popular here in Changsha, the kind with no drums, electronic backgrounds, and mellow wooden flutes--and ethereal voices singing about things that are lite. 

In the morning after breakfast I walked behind the hotel to the familiar Whacko Market (yes, this is the name on the sign out front) for a few supplies, almost reaching for disposable diapers from force of habit as I passed them on the shelves.

Later I walked up the main street, Furong Zhonglu, for a few miles to get some more air, which was still chilly in the upper 30s.  The wide street is lined with fascinating little shops and food vendors and occasional larger stores.  Walking in Chinese cities is very safe, with street crime and police usually invisible.  Generally accepted or generally imposed, there are strictly enforced rules here, legal and otherwise, but this is not at all obvious. 

The larger stores I explored were crammed with people, products and flashy advertising, the dominant theme being a highly stylized happiness.  In fact, this seems to be the dominant theme in Chinese urban popular culture overall.   I've been asked several times in China what is it, exactly, that Americans see entertaining in horror, murder, crime, and mayhem.  Good question.

It's worth noting for this trip and before heading off for the rural countryside that women and girls are hardly ignored in Chinese urban popular culture.  Quite to the contrary, smart women broadcasters seem to be the norm on TV and the very large number of cable channels in China feature a varied array of shows about teen girls and little girls who are very cute, in serials and in game shows.  One very interesting game show even features beauty contest winners who rate older women on the warmth of their smiles and other personal qualities, the things that should really matter.

In Changsha little girls on the street and in stores seem hugged and pampered by their parents, equally as much as parents' little princes.

Back at the hotel, I watched a growing number of adoption travel groups coming and going, and it was interesting to be an observer of this rather than a participant.  The Grand Sun is one of three hotels in the city used frequently by foreign travelers and adoption groups.   For years now, in the case of the Grand Sun, foreign adoption groups have been staying for a week or so with their adopted babies nearly nonstop,  yet the hotel is not a baby hotel.  While its staff are uniformly kind and more than helpful to adoptive families, the hotel continues to primarily serve its Chinese clientele, to host local banquets and parties, and to cater to locals through its several interior restaurants and smoky lounges, especially the lounges.   In this terrarium, Chinese foreign adoption and routine everyday life simply coexist.

Next it was time for some trip planning and running a few errands around the city.  During this I found that the broad walkways of Martyrs' Park in the city's center were draped overhead with literally thousands of bright red and yellow Spring Festival banners, an amazing sight.

As in other Chinese cities, in busy Changsha there are no traffic signals, stop signs, or crosswalks at even the largest or busiest intersections.  This along with a lack of seatbelts adds an element of high drama to road travel.  Common scenes that call for pedestrians or heavily laden carts or bicycles to cross multi-lane streets or highways can be especially gripping.

My primary road trip that is now set to begin very early tomorrow morning looks to be an epic nail biter, although its twisting route that I've traced on a local map of Hunan also looks fascinating.  With the temperatures hovering around freezing and rain mixed with sleet or snow in the forecast, it's hard not to envision some slippery roads in the days and long miles ahead.  I've decided not to think about this too much.

..........

I learned today that my guide Leon does not actually work for OCDF.  Instead, he works for a general guide service that is based in Changsha.  Although he is relatively new to the profession, his job has already taken him to Yunnan Province and to a six-month stint in Tibet.   Earlier, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering at a college in Hubei Province, but rather than resign himself to a career behind a desk, he took a quick English language training course and became a guide.  He is originally from Yueyang, which is north of Changsha and where he grew up with his grandfather. 

Driver Chen Xi Yun is my age (in his 40s) and lives in Changsha with his wife and their 18-year old son, when he isn't ferrying people around the province in his small van.   Despite our separate languages, Chen and I hit it off instantly.  The man clearly has a sense of humor.

..........

In the evening I met up with my Chinese friends Daphne and Ellen Feng, local representatives from our adoption agency and sisters who helped us so much during our last adoption trip, heroines really.  I had emailed them in advance of my arrival and they were such a sight for sore eyes as they came through the revolving lobby door.  They had two new adoption groups in tow, with 15 families representing a total of more than 60 people including the children and travel companions that often accompany adoptive parents on these trips.   

When they were free, they pressed me for news of my oldest daughter Dorothy-Rui, with whom they fell in love during our trip last summer.  They asked about Clara-Li too, and were curious about my pending trip to Hengdong.  I told them everything I knew.  They genuinely wished me luck, although in a way that reflected the subtle complexity of the project.  I gave them the gifts we had packed for them, mostly photos of our girls.   

Because of their genuine devotion to the baby girls who Daphne and Ellen work so continuously hard to rescue (this word selected carefully), it sometimes feels like they are sisters to my daughters.  It would be dangerously wrong to believe there is any general need to rescue children from China but I know that Daphne and Ellen, native to Hunan, feel stongly about their work in helping to take these children out of institutional care and into situations of remarkable opportunity.   Through their work they have seen many institutionalized children in many different orphanage settings in several provinces.  To deliver abandoned children into loving families clearly has become more than a job in this case. 

As I watched Daphne get the large new group settled, I felt so proud of her and of Ellen.  It's not just what they do, it's how they do it: with so much love and care for the families wise enough to be open to them.

Tomorrow before dawn we would have breakfast then I would be off to Shaoshan, Hengshan, and to Hengdong.  "You better take down my cell phone number," Daphne sternly told me several times, finally borrowing a pen and just writing it down herself. 

"I don't want you to get lost in China."

February 21: Shaoshan and Hengshan

What a remarkable day.  I write this nine miles from Hengdong County at night upstairs in a strange sort of Internet cafe in an ancient building in an alley in Hengshan, some 100 miles south of Changsha.   I suppose it's not really a cafe since they don't serve anything here except Internet access to young locals, male and female, ranging in age from about 15 to 25.  There are no lights in the place other than the glow of the old but functional computers that line each wall, and the walls are so old they look like the walls of a cave.  The rates are cheap at 4 yuan an hour, which is about 48 cents.

Leon, Chen (or Chenge for "Brother Chen"), and I have just finished a dinner of hotpot nearby, sitting around a battered wooden table in the center of which was a boiling pot of broth with a fire underneath.  Into this contraption we dipped sliced mutton, tofu, pork blood tofu, spinach, and potatoes, then dipped them into the spiciest sauces imaginable.  This washed down with Chinese beer.

We left Changsha this morning after picking up an official letter at the downtown office of the Hunan Provincial Social Welfare Department.  The letter will permit us to visit the Hengdong SWI.   

There as we started out, Leon and I were fumbling around in the van trying to find a good secure place to stash this important document when Chen whistled and drew our attention to what seemed like a huge group of people that slowly had begun to file out of the same government building and into a very large bus we had parked next to, and that loomed like a mountain over our tiny van.   This turned out to be a Scandinavian adoption group with perhaps 40 or more people who had just completed their adoption paperwork.

Deciding we had better get out of the way of this oncoming crowd, we stuffed our letter into Leon's knapsack and then we were off toward Shaoshan.  Outside Changsha the city is surrounded by an astounding number of new construction projects: industrial parks, residential areas, etc.  But not far past the outer edge is rural China, which is a far different place from new urban China.

The area is hilly with steep valleys, at the bottom of which are usually ponds, rice paddies, or ancient terraced plots of land for growing grain or vegetables.  Square two- and occasionally three-story, tile-fronted houses are perched in small villages on the hillsides or beside the road, and are almost universally the same except for the occasional mud brick variety that are generally in poorer condition.  Overall the homes in this region are solid structures and large in comparison to the tiny apartment-style units packed into the high-rise residential buildings that are the norm in cities and towns.

Here each rural house may serve as home to three or four generations of one family, and sometimes their animals on the ground floor although this seems to be a tradition that is becoming less common.  With roadside dwellings the ground floor is usually converted to a garage housing a shop or some other type of business.

Gazing out the window of our little van, most of the countryside flew by in timeless scenes that would have looked pretty much the same 100 or 500 years ago.  Then we would careen around a corner and suddenly come upon a modern-era factory, a small government complex of indeterminate use, or a roadside village filled with tiny shops bustling with commercial activity.  Every small roadside village seemed to have at least one outlet for the company China Mobile, whose ubiquitous white and blue signs announce cell phones for sale.

The winding road was filled with cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, carts, and pedestrians.  All of them seemed to compete for the center.

Once in Shaoshan our first stop was for lunch at an old mountain restaurant owned by relatives of Mao Zedong.  Actually, more than half the residents of Shaoshan are said to have the name Mao.  There was no heat in the restaurant and a kerosene burner was placed under our table to keep us warm, plus a thick tablecloth (blanket) draped across our laps.  There was snow on the mountains above us, and it was about 30 degrees inside and outside the building.  Chen knows the owners and he got to sit at their table, and toss spicy bits from his plate to two friendly restaurant dogs. 

Although the restaurant has several dining rooms today we appeared to be its only paying customers so we were seated in the entrance room and our table was near a small bar with a television set hanging above it.  From their table nearby the Mao family was watching the NBA All Star basketball game. 

After lunch a large procession of townspeople came marching up the road, women wearing red and black uniforms and waving bright yellow scarves.  They had come to perform a drum dance.  Today was apparently the first day the restaurant had opened after a winter break and the drum dance will ensure good fortune during the season ahead.   

Eventually we headed down the road a short distance to what is now the shrine.  Shaoshan is more accurately the name of the mountain on the side of which sits the small village of Shaoshanchong, where on December 26, 1893, a bouncing little Mao Zedong was born to a relatively well to do peasant couple.  But the birthplace has popularly become known throughout China as just Shaoshan.

Mao grew up in this picturesque Shaoshanchong village, attended school there, and helped his father in the fields until he moved to Changsha in 1911.  There he briefly served as a soldier in the Republican army that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and, once settled in the big city, started to read works of western philosophy as well as the progressive newspapers and revolutionary journals that were then becoming available in Changsha.  In 1918, after graduating from the Hunan Teachers College, Mao traveled to Beijing and worked in the Beijing University library under its head librarian Li Dazhao.  Mao joined Li’s Marxist study group and the rest is history.  Mao's "mistakes" cost China as many as 30 million lives in his ironically named Great Leap Forward campaign alone, but he bonded the people of China together to a degree that no other leader had or has since, and he made them proud to be Chinese.

During the Cult of Mao, at the height of Mao's reign, the government carved the aforementioned winding roadway and also built a special passenger railway both leading from Changsha to Shaoshan for party faithful to make the pilgrimage to his birthplace.  In 1966 more than 3 million Chinese put down their shovels or factory tools to make the trip, with permission from their supervisors of course.  Today the area is far less popular, and the small gravel parking lots there were mostly empty.  The highlight of this relatively modest historical communist theme park is the Mao family residence, which was dubbed for a while the Ancestral Temple of the Mao Family and is now just called Comrade Mao's Museum.  There are stone markers etched with Mao's poems along the walkways surrounding the residence and nearby at an adjacent site is a very tall and famous statue of Mao, with mountain peaks as a backdrop.

The former residence seemed surprisingly large and sturdy.  The house is tan colored, with mud brick walls, and nicely tiled and thatched roofs.  It's on a wooded hillside, above some ponds.  One can tour all of the dozen or so rooms inside, including a kitchen, a dining room, three family bedrooms, a guest room and a common room at the entrance.  Within the rooms are various personal effects of Mao and his family, as well as a few family photos—Maomerabilia if you will. 

Is there significance to my daughter's birthplace being so close to Mao's? 

Not very much, I easily decided.  The history of revolutionary China has too broad a base.  Still, in my travels I have noticed some truth to the saying that Hunan produces people as spicy as its famous cuisine, laced as it is with those fiery chili peppers.  Even at 24 months, my Hunan daughter has a way of letting us know what she wants and doesn't want that is surprisingly emphatic.

But she is a sweetie and we have a special bond.  On our Gotcha Day in Changsha, I was handed Clara-Li amidst the shuffle of families in the crowded reception room on the second floor of the Hunan Provincial Social Welfare Department.  She melted into my arms then quickly looked me straight in the eye as if to say, simply, where have you been and what took you so long.  Then she nestled back into my shoulder. Around us the other Hengdong babies were freaking out. Clara-Li had one brief episode later that day back at the hotel room where I think she got a little scared by her new surroundings.   Eventually, with a little help from her new big sister, we were able to distract her and later she was fine.  Sort of.  Children who spend their first 17 months in a beleaguered orphanage generally have some issues and Clara-Li is no exception, but she is a very special child, which I knew from the start.

This, I realized today, is why I now found myself standing alone 10,000 miles from home, in central China, unable to speak or understand Chinese, at one of the world's most presupposedly unappealing tourist sites, the birthplace of Mao Zedong.  It's because I love my daughters, both of them, that much.  The thought had never entered my mind that I wouldn't try to make this trip that somehow brought me here.  It was like comforting a night terror in the wee hours or smiling through endless videotapes of Barney or, more surprising, My Little Pony.  It's just what I do. 

Of course I'm really only alone for brief periods, as Leon and Chen have turned out to be excellent travel companions.   Chen has been having stomach issues, due to his penchant for eating the spiciest foods he can find, and so he sometimes discreetly disappears.

Neither is well versed in the general facts surrounding the object of our mission, but I am beginning to understand that Leon and Chen were each subtly intrigued to discover how I came to be father to two Chinese daughters, and why I am traveling to Hengdong of all places.  In fact, they no longer seem like guide and driver since both often appear to be preoccupied, very much like I am, with the unusual tasks in our plan.  It's all for one and one for all.

Next stop Hengshan.  To be a driver in Hunan is to be a race driver, I've discovered.  Chen is a madman at the wheel of our little van but very good.  There are very few road rules in China and a lane is a loose concept.  To be a driver is also to be engaged in a constant game of chicken with your oncoming opponents and once the roadway opens up one must drive one's vehicle as fast as it will possibly go. 

The countryside between Shaoshan and Hengshan is fascinating.  I know I cannot adequately describe it tonight.  It is very poor, but this is an ancient subsistence poverty under which the people in the area have been living for thousands of years.  Many homes are as well kept as the small plots of land in front of them that families rely on for most of their income and livelihood.  Success seems to be a tenuous matter and other homes barely seem to provide their inhabitants with decent shelter.

The small city of Hengshan is also very poor, at its outskirts.  But the old part of the downtown where we are at the foot of the mountain is in much better shape and makes its livelihood off the Buddhist and Taoist travelers to the area, Chinese travelers.  Foreigners are extremely rare.

Hengshan the mountain is also known as Southern Heights Mountain (Nanyue Shan) and is one of the five sacred Buddhist mountains in China.  It has more than a dozen temples.  Although only about 4,000 feet at its highest peak, Nanyue Shan extends more than 30 miles in width and its spine includes a total of 72 peaks, the highest of which is the Wishing for Harmony Peak.  At the foot of the mountain stands the biggest temple in southern China, the Grand Southern Heights Temple (Nanyue Damiao).

The original temple there is said to have been built as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), although it has been damaged by fire and rebuilt several times.  The present temple dates back to the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 AD) and its design is patterned after the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing.  It has nine courtyards and its main hall is 66 feet high, floor to ceiling, and supported by 72 giant stone pillars.  The main building, painted with red and yellow, is connected to a maze of other buildings in a very large temple complex. 

Along the streets surrounding the complex are hundreds of small open-front shops selling a huge variety of incense, prayer objects, and firecrackers.  In this region of China, temple incense is tossed, often by the armload, into ovens large enough to be free standing buildings and it is believed that the rising smoke from these ovens carries prayers, wishes, and messages to the heavens.  During Spring Festival, many worshippers also lob big strings of firecrackers into these ovens, perhaps as an exclamation point. 

Leon and I hiked around the Grand Southern Heights Temple today, explored its maze of temple buildings within, and in the main temple shook sticks in front of the large Buddha for our fortunes. 

Mine looks good.

Tomorrow morning we go to Hengdong where I've a full day planned.  On the next day we plan to go to the orphanage.  Leon just spoke with the director on his cell phone.  We're set.

Tonight I hope to finally get some sleep.

February 22: Hengdong at Last

At our base in Hengshan we are staying at the modest Nanyue Telecom Hotel, which is near the foot of the mountain and just a short walk along old streets made of stone from the Grand Southern Heights Temple.   The Telecom is much like the hotel I imagined we might be staying at while my wife and I were daydreaming a long time ago about making our first adoption trip.  I wasn't really expecting the strange cylindrical rocket ship that is the Lakeview Hotel in Nanchang or the big businesslike Grand Sun in Changsha, four stars each. 

I am comfortable at the Telecom, which makes no visible claim to be international.  The people who work there let their little kids run around in the halls and play in the elevator.

Early in the morning I watched as daylight slowly gathered over the top of the hotel to gradually fill in the outline of the mountain peaks to the west outside my window.  I'd made some black tea in the room and I sipped this to keep warm while leaning out the window for a better view.   At that hour the air was still and the town very quiet, except for what sounded like a low droning horn coming from the direction of the temple at regular intervals.  When it seemed suitably late enough I quietly slipped out into the hallway and headed downstairs on my own to the ground floor, to a dining area where I correctly assumed that breakfast was being served.

To be surprised by a foreigner at a very early breakfast in Hengshan apparently can be somewhat of a shock.  The dining area was decorated in red and its big round tables covered with white tablecloths were each already mostly occupied.  I sat down at one of these tables and the three occupants on its opposite end quickly grabbed their plates and fled, not in a really unfriendly way but just with very puzzled expressions on their faces.  This seemed to cause the entire room to stare in my direction, to which I responded with a small wave.  Hello.

My eyes scanned unsuccessfully for coffee, then equally so for cups for tea.  I didn't see any teapots either.  Leon would later explain to me that, except in places used to foreign visitors, here hot drinks like tea or coffee aren't generally served with breakfast.  I got up and headed for the two buffet tables and found nothing there that resembled breakfast as I understood it.  Instead there were noodles and steamed dishes, including a very large carp steamed with head and scales intact.  I did see some tiny black-shelled bird eggs, so I put a few on my plate with a steamed bun and a cookie that looked sort of close to being a pastry and returned to my seat, which seemed to signal the other diners to return to the buffet. 

Here in the middle of the Middle Kingdom I'm a complete outsider. 

Back at my otherwise empty table I picked at my plate and basked in weary wonderment that I had somehow made it this far and to this place, such a short hop from the destination that last summer was so off limits during what we'd hopelessly thought would be my last chance.

A tap on my shoulder turned out to be a smiling Chen, who placed a tall glass of warmed milk in front of me and motioned for me to drink.  He gave the room full of diners a similarly gracious smile showing that everything was okay, that I was with him. 

..........

Settled in the van and on the road it took only about 15 minutes for us to reach and cross the wide Xiang River, then follow the road into Hengdong County.   I am still unable to sleep more than a few hours at night and this morning found myself staring haggardly ahead, with Leon periodically asking if I was okay.  Although I climb into a change of mostly clean clothes each day, I know I have the general appearance of a small graying man who a crowd has only recently been standing on.

So we chew betel nuts, flavored with mint oil or sesame.  These little nutshells taste like flavored garden mulch but have a stimulant effect sort of like drinking concentrated espresso.  Chen says drivers chew them to stay alert.

Hengdong County looks much like the area surrounding Hengshan, maybe even a bit more prosperous owing to the new highway that runs through it.  The roadside is typically dusty and lined with standard roadside homes and businesses.  About three miles into the county we passed a large funeral procession, the mourners in traditional white.  Chen quickly backed up the van so I could try to get a photo.  Then we were back on the road and to the right (south) the land flattened out into a wide series of fields and rice paddies.  There are very few other roads that connect to the highway and most of the houses in the area appear to be within walking distance of this main artery.

Eventually, the roadside buildings began to get larger and closer together.  Then soon the road flowed into the center of the small city of Hengdong, whose streets were packed with people, owing to the much improved weather (sunny and in the upper 40s) and the tail end of Spring Festival. 

Our primary goal for the morning was to find the Hengdong County Farmer's Market, where Clara-Li was reported to have been been left and found just two years ago, eerily almost to the day.   At first this appeared to be relatively easy.  Chen simply stopped in the middle of traffic, flagged a passerby and asked.  We were directed to the center of town just past its largest intersection and on the right we saw a big crowd hovering around the entrance to a large covered alley, both sides of which were lined with tables for people selling fresh vegetables, meat, dried fish, rice, flour, and the like.  Leon and I jumped out of the van and headed over.

A scant summary of a February 2003 police report in my daughter's referral papers said she was found inside the market near its entrance. We took our time as we scanned the scene in front of this place from the street, looked around the surrounding area carefully and, as inconspicuously as we could, took some photos.  Then we proceeded into and through the alleys of the market to do the same, quickly enfolded by its crowds and its mysterious, frenetic activity.  I had brought along a wrinkled copy of a photo of the Hengdong County Farmer's Market that had been taken for our family last summer and this turned out to be invaluable because the entrance to the market in the photo didn't really look like any of the six entrances to this one that we eventually found. 

Having finally run out of options in this huge but enthralling maze, Leon and I stopped and explained our problem to a woman selling candied fruits from big sacks.  She told us there were two farmer's markets in Hengdong and the entrance in our photo looked like the entrance to the other market. 

We followed her directions all the way back out of the alleys that we had traveled, turned left on the main street, and after about four blocks we found the three large half circle entrance ways in our photo.

I felt that I knew this place, which was a little unnerving.

Each of these entrance ways carried through a brick building like tunnels for about 40 feet before intersecting with a series of alleys where market vendors were selling domestic products such as clothes, household gadgets, and small gifts.  There was a large area for selling farm produce, but it was further in.  Just past the largest of those three main entrance ways I knew I had found the site I'd been looking for and I will confirm this with the Hengdong SWI director tomorrow.

..........

This is the second time I've stood at the location where one of my children is said to have been abandoned as a tiny infant.  It doesn't get easier and the experience left me temporarily stunned with an intensely hollow feeling and profound sense that while I've searched widely for and have found many historical, cultural, economic, and political reasons why what happened actually happened, I will find no excuses.  That's because my two children are my daughters and in my heart could not be more so.   That's how I know them, in that basic human way. 

I know I could never have abandoned them.

Then it dawned on me that this is likely as was hoped or intended and how the red thread that connects me to my daughters' birth parents really works in painful, practical terms.  I took a long moment to gaze at the marketplace around me and to listen to its voices and sounds. 

On this spot in this shadowed stone pathway was a whirlpool of immeasureable sadness, invisible to everyone else, and to which I'd been drawn as if by its own gravity for the special chance to see it, to peer inside its dizzying depths.  But I couldn't really see far enough in.

She's safe and more than loved was the dire message that I tried through concentrated will to send across the void.

Then when I was finally ready I whispered a quiet thank you and I moved on.

..........

It took at least a few seconds to reorient myself to the tasks at hand and I noticed that Leon was standing behind me in the center of the alley and had apparently been quietly suggesting to a few curious onlookers that they give me some space for a few minutes.  I gave him a smile and he gave me a look of concern.  "You okay?" he asked as he came over, repeating his mantra for the morning.

Throughout the past few hours in Hengdong we had heard holiday firecrackers wherever we walked.  As we had hurried alongside the crowded main street on our way to this place we had even dodged a few.  Suddenly we noticed a new commotion outside the market and a dragon dance procession was parading down the main street in front of the main entrance way, where several vendors were cooking meat and boiling tofu in fat.  We watched the dragon dance through the crowds and the smoke. 

By then Chen had joined us.  We set about taking a few photos at this spot and explored the surrounding area.  Then I shrugged and Leon and Chen took my elbows when we crossed the main street to find the van.  I am hardly feeble, but they've taken to doing this.  I think it's just a way of showing they appreciate what I'm up to.

Back in the van we were immediately off to find the orphanage; I didn't have to ask.  It was at the end of a comparatively wide street, with a median down the center, and that intersected the main street just past that first big farmer's market.  After about a half mile, the street just simply ended amidst a jumble of piles of wood and bricks, and there were some relatively poor looking houses surrounding us.  Then we spied a gate, indicating an alleyway.  At the end of the alley was the Hengdong SWI.  My appointment wasn't until the next day, but Leon and Chen went down the alley and knocked at the front entrance just to double check that everything was set.

I am not sure that I can describe my first look at the orphanage down this narrow alley.  But time seemed to stop and I was transported home though a rush of memories from the weeks before we adopted Clara-Li, during a period in which we had been very worried about a treatable medical problem in her health reports and so much wanted to somehow just pull her out of the orphanage without any more waiting.   For a moment, gazing toward this structure, that awful feeling returned.

I went back near the van and watched a family try to build a cart from old pieces of wood they had probably pulled from the piles of surrounding debris.  Nearby a woman was washing some clothes in a bucket and her little boy waddled out of their home to play in the street in front of her.  He was cute.  I snapped a picture and the woman smiled.

When Leon and Chen returned, we decided to have some lunch and found a suitable restaurant on a side street back near the second market. 

We ordered our usual lunch, mainly of tofu fried in green chilies.  This we washed down with beer.  We have become, I am finding, a bit like those guys who had been in the room next to mine back in Changsha and we are quite a team, although we skip the drinking contests.  When we're not solemnly planning or carrying out our mission, we're basically yucking it up.  That I don't speak but a dozen phrases in Chinese is just something else that's kind of funny.  Chen speaks not a word of English except "hello."

I find too that I've mastered the common practice of spitting chopped bones onto the table next to my plate with decent accuracy.  Leon and Chen think that this and my proficiency with chopsticks is intriguing.  Chen has been feeding me spicy tests for the past several days and now seems happily satisfied with the results.

After lunch we took care of some more business, a search for eight small identical gifts that I could bring back for each of the Hengdong SWI children in our travel group from last summer.  These turned out to be pretty elusive, but eventually we found something suitable after combing most of Hengdong's central business district.

Then we headed outside of town in the van for our next assignment.  Because the rural countryside is commonly said to be where babies come from, we had agreed that we would find a rural side road, drive down it aways, select a village at random and then Leon would approach its inhabitants and ask if I could come up for a visit. 

This we did. 

..........

Villages in central China are a different type of arrangement than the small townships with the same label in western countries.  Chinese villages very often have only a handful of homes and can seem like little islands surrounded by the small plots of land assigned to each family unit in them.  Some small villages can represent single extended families. 

For millennia villagers reported to landowners and toiled in hardship--suffering cruel taxes, unpredictable growing seasons, and periodic famine.  Then 65 years ago the revolution flipped Chinese society on its end.  For a period the rural village became idealized as the purest form of collective effort and honest work.  Educated classes from the cities eventually were sent to rural areas to absorb lessons in hard simplicity.  This was a disaster of course, but the period can be viewed from the countryside as a brief heyday when schools and clinics were built. 

Today rural China seems to have suffered a backlash.   In cities and towns the term "country people" is at least mildly derogatory, and almost any line of work other than farming provides a better income.   Young people are often forced by necessity to either leave their villages and send money home to their families from a distance or stay to scrape an increasingly meager living from the land.  I saw this two years ago in neighboring Jiangxi Province.  It seems the case in Hengdong County also. 

Even the Chinese government now estimates that overall about 150 million people have given up their household registration (hukuo) qualifying them for state benefits in the countryside to become part of China's "floating" or transient population, most of which has migrated to China's larger cities or its coastal zones targeted for economic development.  One of every four residents of Beijing, for example, is among this group.

Still, a rural-urban interconnectedness can be seen in the countryside if you look closely.  There are many subtle examples, but the monk staffing the Hengshan mountain temple or the Hengdong farmer resting by the side of a field can, either one, also be talking on a cell phone.  Or the farmer, admittedly more often than not, can be dirt poor, but the rural peasant stereotype still seems imbalanced. 

..........

As we hunted for our village, once again the road we picked simply ended.  Chen was turning the van around when we spied a cluster of three houses nearby with a family sitting outside in front of the house in the center.  Leon went up the path, came back down with a smile, and Chen and I piled out of the van with my two small cameras, and a bag of gifts.  We spent a few hours with the family, all four generations, talking with them, and touring their home and property.  They were gracious hosts .  Their house had actually only been rebuilt a few years ago, very likely with simple hand tools but also with impressively solid workmanship.   The house was laid out in function and style much like Mao's old family home in Shaoshan.  It was spare, but clean and very well cared for.  The family's name was Chen.

The main family--father and mother--had three young daughters, and the oldest had a daughter of her own.  Most children in the area attend school until the sixth grade, but the oldest daughter was proud of having also completed middle school [a rigorous equivalent to high school in the U.S.].  The rest of the family was proud of this too, perhaps in part because in China school costs money and often tuition for one child can represent a significant portion of a rural family's annual earnings.  Each of the Chen family members old enough to do so works in the small rice and vegetable plots in the valley below their home.  Lately there has been only one growing season, so family members sometimes supplement their income by walking into town, about four miles, to find temporary work.

It's interesting that this rural family we had chosen at random had no sons and comfortably relied on its daughters.  They appeared to be doing well, at least for now.

The kitchen was separated from the main part of the home and used a wood fire for cooking, much in the way that has been used for centuries.  A few small cuts of fresh meat hung from twine nearby.  Vegetables lying near the stove had likely come direct from the ground, since like many families in the area the Chens kept a small garden during the winter months that could be covered with a plastic sheet.  A number of shelves in the kitchen and an adjoining room were empty.   Water was pumped by hand from a well out front.  A power line was connected to the house, but no outlets were installed, since the monthly cost of electricity would be too expensive.  Several small hens roamed the village between its buildings.

Yet in this rural Chinese setting, I found nothing about this family or village that could fairly be described as backward.   Instead I found wry humor, proficiency, and self-reliance.

Everyone seemed to accept this sudden alien encounter with just the right amount of friendly skepticism.  They were surprised but certainly not overwhelmed. 

The women were dressed in a mix of store-bought jackets, traditional hand-sewn tops, and modern jeans or pants.  The men and boys, who mostly watched us from a safer distance, looked not much different in their black jackets and dark shirts than those I had seen on the main streets in downtown Hengdong or Hengshan--just dustier.  One young man, a cousin, was visiting from his new job in the city of Hengyang, and had parked his shiny red motor scooter at the entrance to the common room on the ground floor of the Chen family's home.

The oldest members of the family, grandparents, had rooms adjacent to the common room and these were furnished very traditionally.  Upstairs the home had a more modern look, with a polished tile floor and freshly painted white walls.  In each room throughout the home the few objects owned by each occupant looked carefully maintained.  Beds were made.  Clothes were neatly folded.

Nothing was taken for granted here, everything hard-earned and the Chens clearly relied heavily on organization and teamwork.

While I had brought gifts, the family quickly produced a small table and chair which they positioned in a sunny location outside for warmth, and filled the table top with small plates of nuts, fruits, and homemade candy for me.  Then they brought me a fine glass of hot tea, green with strong herbs.  After I asked most of my questions, all which seemed to sound pretty dumb, we all just lounged in the sun and enjoyed the afternoon.

Eventually the men from the village had to leave, apparently for some type of income-producing project they had been discussing and the four of them headed down the road on foot.  It pays to be flexible for a little extra income.  For example, we had seen families moving rocks by hand on a hillside building site not far away near the main roadway to Hengdong.

We stayed a little while longer, watching the children play with a little tan puppy.  They were basically taking turns hugging him, and we all thought this was very endearing.  When the women remaining with us asked if I had children also, we replied simply that I had two little girls.

That's good, they smiled.

We were grateful for the family's hospitality and they had been very pleased to have met a foreigner.  I felt that it was good to have found a family that represented such a proud picture of rural Chinese life and, because of this, the digital video we recorded would be much better for my daughters to view when they get older.  But nearby and elsewhere were many, many homes with families who clearly were not doing so well.

Back in the van we kidded Chen that he was the master of coincidence, since yesterday he knew the owners of the restaurant in Shaoshan and this family we had chosen today just happened to have his same name. 

Chen laughed and flogged the van back to Hengshan, scaring us half to death several times.   He is obviously much practiced, however.  At one point we sped between two long rows of vehicles that were heading in opposite directions at the entrance to the Xiang River bridge.  Engine whining, Chen calmly hit the brakes and, seemingly within just a few feet of slamming into the bridge's center abutment, swung the van safely in between two old military-style trucks heading across. 

Chen even has a fake police siren that he uses when the horn he pounds constantly doesn't seem enough.  The siren, Leon and I must admit, is pretty funny.

..........

But outside the window of the van, edgy scenes of daily life in Hengdong County were rushing by and competing with thoughts and images stamped into my memory from the morning, of the marketplace with its alleys ... and the faint, muffled imagined sound of a newborn baby crying.

Abandonment in China is complicated, as any adoptive parent who has visited their child’s abandonment site can attest.   There is a tendency in this to project one's own values into the mix, to imagine birth parents as plagued by regret and heartbreak.  But here staring out at these dreary roadside images I am forced to consider the idea that these birth parents view the birth of children through a set of cultural, societal, and economic filters that are entirely different from my own.  On the other hand, abandonment here is usually a choice that aims for the chance at some perceived optimum: to try again for a son or a child with fewer perceived defects.  All cultural relativity aside, when either of my daughters asks what exactly about her wasn't good enough I know the answer is truly not a thing.  So I wondered whose crushing sadness it really was that I felt so deeply back in that marketplace alley this morning.   

With a few hours of daylight still left when we returned to Hengshan, Leon and I headed up the mountain to look at some of the upper temples.  On the way we saw two more drum dances.  Drum dancers in this town prowl the streets and perform in front of stores which apparently supplies good fortune.  However, the dancers want donations from the stores in return and can be seen as a mixed blessing by the store proprietors. 

A trail made of heavy stones wound up the mountain past temples, monuments, and valleys with terraced vegetable plots.  We saw tumbling alpine streams, and occasional clear water springs bubbling up out of the good earth beside us.  Surrounding pine and hardwood tree stands were free of blown down branches and meticulously maintained.  At one point we surprised an old woman coming down the trail who was sweeping the path of sticks and leaves with an old broom made of rice straw.  Several times we rounded a bend to find a small house of stone or brick perched on the side of the trail.  The inhabitants of these little hobbit dwellings sell incense or offerings for use at the temples to occasional passersby.  Most had placed a small table or two out front and Leon told me they would make us dinner if we asked.

We passed through an area with stone markers next to newly planted trees that families had donated to this hallowed forest, often as memorials to loved ones.   On one of several shortcut paths that followed as the trail got steeper we happened upon one large stone memorial that surprised me, for here in what is perhaps one of the few remaining regions in China where Mao Zedong is still so openly revered was a memorial to Chiang Chung Cheng, otherwise known as Chiang Kai Shek, head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949, and subsequently head of the Chinese Nationalist government in exile on Taiwan. 

This reminded me of a newspaper article I read once that attempted to illuminate differences in Asian cultures by focusing on differences in feelings toward national identity.  The article said that while the Japanese can regard expatriates as not quite as Japanese as those who have never left Japan, a Chinese is always regarded as Chinese--even emigrants generations removed.   Here was certainly quiet proof.

The last of the afternoon sun, the warmest in several days, was shimmering through the trees on this tranquil spot and there was a soft, mountain-scented breeze around us.  As we stared at this memorial, I began to understand that my daughters would likely always be welcomed in China as Chinese, despite the accompanying baggage that China handed them in the process that formed our family that lives elsewhere.   

For Clara-Li and her older sister, eventually choosing how to feel about this probably won't be easy, but I hope they choose to assert their Chinese identities somehow and embrace the ethnically varied names we gave them as representative of the remarkable differences each of us can make on this small planet.

Climbing higher, we talked about our families and Leon asked about pronunciations of English slang terms and greetings.  We joked about my total inability to correctly memorize Chinese language tones.  At one point we stood on a big rock ledge and faced east looking back toward Hengdong.  Leon asked seriously for a moment what I thought of China, remembering the earlier events of our day.  As I fished for a short answer he finished my thought.  I'm glad you came here, he said.

Halfway up the mountain we found a tramway that provides a shortcut to the top.  The mountain even has a dangerous looking toll road on which small buses and taxis negotiate tight turns and treacherous angles for pilgrims who choose not to walk.  It seemed odd to see a tram in this area, however, and especially one built in the communist era for a spiritual purpose, but the tram is a testament to the regional importance of the ancient temple at the top of the mountain's highest peak.  Although it was already getting late when we started our hike, we took the tram up, saw the snowy temple that had been used since the Tang Dynasty, then quickly headed back down the tram and finished our hike in the dark.

We met Chen very late for another spicy dinner when we returned.

..........

As we were finishing, Leon left the restaurant for a while to retrieve something from the hotel.  This left Chen and I at the table.   The place was otherwise empty of customers, I was so tired, and for the first time there was a gaping, awkward moment between us. 

The three of us together would visit the Hengdong SWI tomorrow and Chen looked like he very much wanted to tell me something he felt was really important and that he'd obviously been stuck thinking about while Leon and I were on the mountain.   I've guessed that part of the strange chemistry that connects us is that we are both fathers.  But as master of coincidence, Chen noted earlier tonight that this is the tenth lunar new year in a row that he has found himself in Hengshan near the Grand Southern Heights Temple.  Less obvious symbols have been read as prophetic and Leon has said that Chen is "very loyal to the Buddha."

We tried our usual gestures and sounds, but to no avail.  Geography and cultures and languages were finally defeating us.

Eventually Chen came over from the other side of the table, sat down next to me, and gripped me by both shoulders.  He nodded with urgency and filled our two small glasses from the large green bottle of beer on the table.  We toasted.  This he did again soberly and his eyes started to fill with tears, which he wiped and then fumbled for his driver's sunglasses to quickly put them on, although the restaurant lighting was pretty dim. 

He shook his head and we both grinned. 

Then I punched him in the arm and we repeated these toasts until Leon returned.

..........

Tomorrow we go back to the orphanage.

February 23: The Orphanage

I have a confession that some of you may find odd and some of you I'm sure will understand.  It's that I didn't come here to visit the orphanage and there is a part of me that didn't really want to see it, that would've preferred to just leave it be.  The main reason I am here is to see where my daughter was from and to try to reach some understanding of it, for when she asks.   You see, the orphanage is where Clara-Li just happened to wind up in a twist of circumstance but she is by birth more generally from Hengdong County, Hunan Province, People's Republic of China. 

That said, my daughter spent her first year and a half at the Hengdong SWI, which for her was probably pushing the envelope in such a setting.  I now know more about what that setting was like for her and for so many other children.  It's good that I was somehow propelled to go there and henceforth I will always look at Clara-Li with a certain unique sense of astonishment.

The day began with a light drizzle of rain and a return to more seasonable weather.  It was cold again.  In my room I'd spent much of the night packing the small red bags of gifts that my wife and I had planned that I would try to give to the nurses who had looked after Clara-Li.  Into them I carefully doled out chocolates and pictures of Clara-Li and of our family and of our home.  In doing so, I thought about the things that had led me to this point, mostly about fate and responsibility.  A lot of hours passed by rather quickly.

As we prepared to leave the Telecom, Chen and I stood watching our breath under the entrance awning out front next to the van, while Leon paced off to the side and fielded a series of calls on his cell phone, periodically glancing over at us with a look of desperation that said he didn't need the distraction.  Chen too seemed nervous, standing nearby and occasionally patting me on the shoulder but mostly staring ahead absently.  When we were ready, we huddled for a moment before piling into the van, eyes on me to say something. 

"Thanks," I managed.  "Really.  Thanks." 

Then with a grip on the shoulder of his big blue winter coat, "Chenge, xiexie.  Hao pengyou."

----------

When we arrived at the Hengdong SWI, we were greeted by Director Chen Ming, Assistant Director Ding Qi Hui, Secretary Xiang Zhen Xin, and several dignitaries from the Hengdong County Bureau of Civil Affairs.   The building is a three-story square structure of about 12,000 sq. ft..  The three of us were quickly waved inside, where it was very cold.   Heat was provided within only by some small portable heaters. 

We gathered inside the entrance way and cement stairwell on the ground floor for a moment, and then were directed upstairs to a 2nd floor meeting room not far from the stairwell.  On the stairs we passed a nurse holding a bundled infant, which I instinctively stopped to peek at.  I looked into that little sleeping face then glanced at the nurse.  We both smiled and nodded knowingly.

The meeting room was small and filled at the center with a huge black-finished wooden table surrounded by benches with the same finish that were placed against each wall.  Leon and I were seated at the far end of the table near a window that had one panel open, since the air was warmer outside.  Chen found a seat on the other side of the table with Xiang Zhen Xin and the county officials.  Chen Ming, the orphanage director, was seated next to me and he would be the spokesman.

As the talk began around the table, with Leon acting as my interpreter, it became apparent that this visit was far more than a granted request.  Among this group it had been planned and anticipated for some time with a mixture of hope and no small amount of apprehension.  The room crackled with tension that the frigid temperature didn't help and that our Chen, thankfully, attempted to ease by periodically inserting humorous asides into the conversation and laughing mostly on his own.

But having our words interpreted provided opportunity on both sides for careful scrutiny of speaker's intent and the listener's reaction.  I found that I was being presented not with a tour description, but a very serious explanation of a number of difficult problems that daily engulfed each of these people in a very personal way.  This was a meeting that was very important to them.

Chen Ming began by explaining that the building was first constructed in 1986 as the Glory Social Welfare Institute for war veterans but quickly began to take on abandoned children as the demand grew, especially in the early 1990s when population rules became more strictly enforced outside the major cities.

Although several adoption groups had adopted Hengdong children in just the past few months including 10 children earlier this same week, the Hengdong SWI was still taking care of about 70 children between the ages of one and two, two older children who are "disabled," and two 12-year-old girls who were living with the families of two orphanage staff.   Seven to eight babies between one and three were living outside the orphanage with families in a situation sounding like a temporary arrangement rather than formal foster care. 

In addition, the Hengdong SWI on its ground floor still cared for about a dozen seniors, several of who were veterans.  It had 18 full time staff including its administrators and about 30 part-time employees to function as nurses or nannies. 

There were so few older children at the facility because Chen Ming and his staff, very likely with assistance at the provincial level, had been so successful in arranging domestic and foreign adoptions for the children in their care.  Most were now being placed in families within a year. Families from the United States alone had adopted more than 100 Hengdong SWI children. 

[This is remarkable, given the more lottery-like nature of foreign adoptions in China generally and that many children living in SWIs are often said to be ineligible for adoption either because of communicable diseases, especially Hepatitus B, or other medical conditions.]

However, a half dozen or so newly abandoned babies arrive at the Hengdong SWI each month, making the work of the orphanage extremely difficult.  This appeared to show on Chen Ming's face.  Neither the SWI nor county officials said they saw an end to this on the horizon, given a continuing preference among families of little means for sons.  Instead, they said it is very important that a new orphanage be built.  The sooner the better.

The reason was obvious.  The building was in very bad shape, although the staff were doing the best they could in it.  Several adoption groups had made donations of equipment to the orphanage; ours last August bought a few air conditioner units and washing machines.  But too much was wrong with the basic structure of the building. 

Even its interior looked battered by the elements.  Many windows and some of their frames were not weathertight.  There were cracks in the walls and ceilings and the interior paint looked original.  Electrical wiring was very scarce and old and I found myself wondering where the gift of an air conditioner or washing machine could be safely plugged in.  Cribs and other furniture pieces also were old.   Even the walkers that looked okay in so many photos taken a year or so ago with disposable cameras now looked worn.

In contrast, the bedding was fairly clean and the staff I met seemed solidly competent, admirably so.  I met each of the nurses who had looked after my daughter.  They remembered her well and it was obvious they had cared for her with a great depth of feeling. 

The children I saw in the same room Clara-Li had lived in were being given the same compassionate treatment and most of the children I saw during my visit looked okay, in relative terms.  There were children who looked very thin or not well, but it has to be remembered that these children were physically abandoned as infants generally not much older than a few days or a few weeks, which is a significant trauma.  Most very likely had poor prenatal care.  One tiny child with beautiful eyes and skin nearly translucent, who could not grip in her hand the finger I offered through the opening in her blankets, stays in my memory.

Each day following that first trauma of being abandoned involves a certain degree of catching up, which I sensed that some infants handle well and others do not for many reasons.  The stress of an institutional setting is a large added hurdle for them.  Subtract any number of basic resources from the institution and the result is a pretty steep uphill climb.

I did not get information on mortality among these children.  But, again, the staff seemed to be doing the best they possibly could with the few resources they had at hand.

In the small room adjacent to the one that had been my daughter's there were eight small metal cribs with eight small bundles of blankets holding babies.  This room seemed typical, with its grimy bare walls and somberly functional appearance.  At the center of the room a small portable heater was glowing.   It threw some warmth if you stood in front of it but didn't really warm the air very much.

While the immediate challenge was the cold, I couldn't help wondering what conditions in this building might be like during Hengdong's much longer season of intense heat and humidity.

----------

Ding Qi Hui, the SWI's assistant director, is the middle-aged woman who generally accompanies Chen Ming when he brings babies to Changsha for foreign adoptions and we remembered our meeting there.  At the orphanage a head nurse was actually in general charge of the nursing staff, but Ding has the air of a fine nurse, along with a beautiful smile, and both she and Chen Ming were obviously familiar with the children.  They explained that the administrative staff have distributed their offices throughout the building and everyone expects that when a baby needs attention nearby the nearest person will respond.

It was Ding who guided us to the room that had been my daughter's and who proudly introduced the staff there, not especially worried what I might think of its battered walls or the old Chinese army coat that rested for good measure over the top of one bundled sleeping baby.  She guessed correctly that I'd see past this, at least for the moment, and understand how dedicated these nurses were.  As Leon translated, she helped them to answer my questions and held my arm all the while.  More than anyone there she seemed to understand why I'd made such a long and complicated trip to Hengdong.

-----------

While the children I saw were cared for, most if not all will have problems that could have been avoided in a better facility.  In the winter the children are bundled in many layers of clothes for warmth and spend most of the time in their cribs under warm blankets.  This keeps them snug but hinders their physical movement and will encourage developmental delays.   Chen Ming and Ding Qi Hui told me they know and are concerned that Hengdong SWI children have sometimes had trouble crawling and learning to walk after they are adopted and know that this is because the children spend so much time in walkers when not in their cribs. 

The floors in the orphanage were made of hard concrete and were either very cold or damp, depending on the season.  They were not good for putting babies down upon.  Chen Ming said they very much wanted to renovate a large empty room at one end of the second floor to a suitable baby room, with a soft floor and toys.  I made a monetary contribution toward this effort.

In the meantime the babies in their walkers at least looked happy in them. 

Many adoptive parents of Hengdong SWI children have reported that it seemed like their children came to them familiar with being loved.  Indeed I saw nurses on duty routinely pick up children to hold and soothe with loving attention, but there seemed to be a fair number of children in relation to the number of staff on duty and this was during the day.  In the absence of bright colors and the scarcity of all but the barest of furnishings, I realized that a periodic allotment of nurse interaction was probably the only satisfying cognitive stimulation my child received in her first year and a half of development and that she almost always had to wait her turn. 

This helped to explain a lot, about the lack of a sense of safety that I've seen in the eyes of orphanage children and about Clara-Li and what in her terrible nights she will slowly overcome.   There really is great strength in adversity; she has this built in.  Each month gets a little better.

Someone once wisely told us to look for those inner things in our children that enabled each of them to get by on their own during a difficult infancy.  Clara-Li has so many of these fine inner traits, not the least of which is a full-body smile that seems to begin in her feet and causes her little shoulders to hunch in delight as each grin blossoms.  She seems to have a natural tendency to look for happiness and find it in the simplest things.

It's quite remarkable.

Chen Ming and the other officials asked that I not take pictures inside the Hengdong SWI because they freely admit that its conditions are poor.  They worried that any photos I might take would be viewed out of context.   I agreed and didn't take any inside.

----------

Mostly, the building inside was dark.  It was laid out like a dormitory with small rooms of equal size accessible from central hallways that ran the length of the building on each floor.  The hallways were not lit and light filtered in only through the windows in each small room or from the wide main stairwell at the center of the building, which can be seen from the entrance.  The ceilings were very high and sounds, like the occasional baby crying, echoed down these long, dim and empty caverns.

Looking into the sparsely furnished rooms as we toured the halls, more of the rickety wooden window panels were open in the hope that the daytime air outside might warm the cold interior.  The windows to the outside were in fact the life that fed the place and seemed to offer the only real break from its dreariness.  In this dull light interior colors were reduced to monochrome shades of gray. Darker colored doors and door frames were weathered and chipped.

Except for the cribs and babies in its rooms, the building looked much like an aging version of its original intention, a simple roof and walls built by grateful citizens for former soldiers of the Chinese army.

----------

A few years ago a Wisconsin couple came to Changsha with one of the earliest foreign groups to adopt children from the Hengdong SWI, and went home deeply committed to a new 9-month-old baby daughter.  Just after her first birthday at home she became very ill and at the hospital was eventually diagnosed with tubercular meningitis.  She died not quite a month later in February 2003.

A few other Hengdong SWI children later tested positive for tuberculosis after they were adopted and brought home, enough to serve as a notice for new adoptive families with Hengdong SWI children to have them tested.  Tubercular meningitis is rare and tuberculosis infection can easily be treated to greatly decrease the chance that an infected person will ever become sick with tuberculosis.  But active tuberculosis in children can be very serious.

As we walked about the building, Chen Ming and at least one other official made a special point to tell me that the seniors who live on the first floor of the building are no longer allowed upstairs to play or help with the children, although many of the seniors are unhappy with this.  This rule is strictly enforced because some of these older residents "have sickness and the situation was not good."

----------

I passed an office bathed in soft yellow light from a desk lamp and where three typically white coated nurses on a break were huddled around a very small glowing heater.  They looked up and laughed shyly, a little embarrassed.  No problem and please carry on, I motioned. 

From the doorway across, a tiny bundle in a walker came wheeling out into the hall.  When the little vehicle came to a stop, a round-headed baby gazed up at me with a look of great surprise.

A nurse from inside the doorway quickly retrieved this escapee, to rejoin two other children in her room who were also in walkers.  They each looked to be about a year and a half old.  I knelt down among them for a while, as they bobbed about, looking like teddy bears in their many puffy layers.  All the while they stared at me transfixed through the dim, hazy light.  If you think I look interesting, I thought hopefully, just wait until you see the Grand Sun City Hotel.

----------

To summarize, one county official told me he believed that Chen Ming and his staff are the best in the province in their care for and dedication to the children in the Hengdong SWI, but that the orphanage itself, in its physical condition and lack of resources, may be the worst.  I saw nothing during my visit that would lead me to doubt this.

While conditions at Hengdong SWI were very difficult, there were fundamental differences between the situation I found there and, say, the popular reports about Chinese orphanages from the mid 1990s such as the widely circulated Human Rights Watch/Asia report Death by Default in 1996 and the BBC documentary The Dying Rooms in 1995 that are still way too often cited inaccurately as current indicators of orphanage conditions.  Most researchers and private agencies working directly with orphanages in China would likely agree that conditions have vastly improved during the past decade and especially among orphanages that have been involved in China's foreign adoption program. 

Throughout China, even today, there are many places where life can seem dreary or hopeless and an under funded, crowded, state-controlled orphanage in such a setting can be full of sights and sounds that are disturbing.  But it helps to weigh a variety of factors when thinking about the orphanage.  While the Hengdong SWI has no heating or cooling system, this is the standard nearby in homes, shops, restaurants, and other buildings.  Common too is a very sparing use of electricity and especially during the day, which makes sense in a developing country with a billion and a half population. 

So on one level conditions in the orphanage approximated ones that these children might have experienced living in a typical home in the area.  On another level, an orphanage should be a health care facility, especially if it must largely focus on infant care. 

Mostly, the Hengdong SWI seemed like rough temporary shelter.

----------

The officials explained that they agreed to my visit after much discussion and the decision was eventually made by Director Zhou Liqun of the Hengdong County Civil Affairs Bureau.  He is the head government official in the county.   Hearing of my efforts to make the trip, they decided they would seek approval for the foreign parent of one of the adopted Hengdong children to come to see the orphanage and to carry back a message about what was happening there, to somehow encourage support.  They hoped the situation would be accurately presented and figured this was worth a try as an experiment.   

As we later stood outside I looked up and caught a haunting glimpse of a nurse holding tightly to a baby and standing at an open window above me.  In the gray daylight they were half in shadow and the room behind them appeared much darker than it probably would have seemed inside.  Our eyes met and the grief in hers really startled me.  I do not know what this meant.  This might also be said of much of what I had seen there.

----------

As for my daughter's finding site, Chen Ming confirmed that she was found at the second market we had located.  She was discovered there within its alleyways, generally in the area that I had sensed.  The man who reported the incident to the local police had found her wrapped in an old black skirt and unwrapping the skirt discovered she had been dressed with a little pink hat and a tiny red vest.  Pinned to her was a typical note, painted in black ink on a swatch of red cloth that indicated only her birth date on the lunar calendar. 

Red for luck.  There was nothing else on the note. 

Beside her was half a packet of formula. 

She was nine days old.

Xiang Zhen Xin had brought this information into the meeting room for me, later after we all had walked about the building.   It was gathered in a folder full of documents, which Chen Ming and Leon patiently helped me to sift through. 

Then I sat in the room holding and looking at the red cloth note for a long time, before it was returned to its folder.

----------

After the tour of the Hengdong SWI we packed in several cars and drove to the site of what Chen Ming and the county officials hope will be a new orphanage.  There they planned to build a large facility for children only.  They hoped to complete this new building in three to five years.   They had raised 1.5 million yuan toward this effort so far, needed 3.5 million yuan to start construction, and 10 million yuan to complete the project.  Ten million yuan is about $1.2 million USD.   They had commitments for some additional assistance from China's Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Hunan Department of Social Welfare, but said they also need support from foreign adoptive families.

The amount raised for the new orphanage appeared to roughly match the total revenue that the Hengdong SWI would have seen from foreign adoption fees over the past few years.  It seemed legitimate to question why more of this money isn't being directed to more immediate improvements.  The brief debate that followed on this point wasn't very conclusive or especially illuminating.

Local officials were clearly committed to the project and this could be seen in their faces as they looked out over the projected building site.  It was obvious too, however, that no one was in any way satisfied with current conditions in the present building.

On the new building site was a series of large ponds bordered by some watery vegetable plots, and these were adjacent to and hemmed in by several rows of tall apartment-style residential buildings.  The edges of the ponds were lined with piles of dirt and litter.  On their far side was the edge of town.  In the other direction, the alleys between the buildings had the same gray disheveled look as those that surrounded the marketplaces that I had searched the day before.

Next we all went to a restaurant where we were met in a special meeting room by Director Zhou Liqun, who apparently is much esteemed.   There was more serious discussion of the orphanage.   

I sensed that the county government did not have a lot of revenue of its own to work with, but that it had a large list of basic priorities largely focused on infrastructure and creating conditions for economic development: roads, dams, power, sewerage, and water.   It was used to focusing its actions to benefit the broadest portion of well over a half million people. 

The Hengdong SWI, with its comparatively tiny number of inhabitants and hidden at the edge of the county town, for many years had likely been a back burner issue easy to ignore as a possible agenda item, if it had been anywhere on the stove at all.  Somehow, in just the past few years, county officials had obviously become very concerned about the SWI and personally involved in its future.  Several seemed to have donated a great deal of time there.  But inherent to the SWI is an array of dismaying issues and challenges and in its attempts to address them the county was clearly struggling.

The discussion finally drifted toward its inevitable conclusion that if nothing else this had been a remarkable day, an unlikely meeting in Hengdong between two vastly different cultures 10,000 miles apart, all sparked by love for a child.  In the end we agreed that at home, nestled within our own families, maybe we're really not that different.   

Eventually we were presented with a dinner around a large round table that seated more than a dozen of us.  During the dinner there was much toasting and many humble expressions of thanks. 

For my part, I especially thanked Leon and Chen.  When we clinked our glasses and embraced in friendship, and in dawning recognition of an extraordinary mission accomplished, everyone including the restaurant staff stood and cheered. 

Perhaps there is something that, collectively, Hengdong adoptive families or others reading this could do to help. 

I was able to learn a very important lesson on this trip, probably the one I came here seeking.  I was mistaken in the way I was attempting to explain why my daughters were abandoned.   I know now that it is useless to try to understand what happened within the context of my own life, even if I have understood something about life's challenges from working for several years with schools in rural Appalachian West Virginia or if the city of New Orleans where I live offers many examples of bad urban American blight and poverty. 

Poverty in China is actually a relative concept, one factor among many in a severely overcrowded country with 80 percent of its population living an ancient agrarian lifestyle out of balance with a growing modern urban population struggling to compete in a new market economy.  This is the land of contradiction, a graceful chaos that one out of every five people on the planet calls home, yet a mystery for almost everyone else.

The lesson is that for those struggling to get along in Chinese society, simple poverty aside, life can sometimes be hard in ways that can't be understood from a distance, if at all, by us. 

February 26: Notes on the Way Home

There is no modern equivalent to what has happened to perhaps more than a million* baby girls in China and to what is continuing at such an astonishing rate today.  However, while there have now been well over 30,000 abandoned Chinese children adopted into the United States alone since the mid-1990s, there has been, as Kay Johnson’s valuable work has pointed out, surprisingly little hard data published about child abandonment in China or about China’s social welfare system.

*   Researcher Kay Johnson estimated in the late 1990s that the number of children (generally baby girls) annually abandoned in China had climbed into the hundreds of thousands.  Government statistics showed about 50,000 brought into orphanages each year; Johnson cited officials who estimated that number was likely to be only about 20 percent of those abandoned.  Actual numbers are still unavailable.  These high rates of abandonment can be traced at least as far back as the early 1990s.  Today the number of children brought into orphanages has begun to decline.

It’s probably healthy then to question some of the basic assumptions we have about these things.  Is abandonment only a rural problem?  Take a walk off the main street in almost any small city in China and you’ll likely find living conditions as difficult as those in the surrounding countryside where there seems to be less pressure to strictly adhere to population controls.  While good work has been done in the past decade by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), and many private groups, how much has orphanage care really improved overall?  Given that child abandonment has practices that are so standard such as leaving those red birth date notes, might it be possible to identify a standard set of conditions that lead to abandonment so that these conditions could be more closely addressed?  Given the tragic scope of China's abandonment problem, why is domestic adoption in China so often decribed as too cumbersome or too expensive or too often less valued by orphanages than foreign adoption.

We simply don’t have much to go on.

That’s too bad because through my journey to the Hengdong SWI I have come to more fully understand that there is so much more to Chinese foreign adoption than children needing homes and families wanting children.  I know that am blessed to be an adoptive parent, but I also wish with all my heart for the day when there would no longer be foreign adoptions in China because children there would no longer be abandoned.  It is my greatest hope, even if that day seems such a long way off.

Meanwhile, please support Chinese foreign adoption and look for ways to support positive change in China's domestic adoption system.   Support established public and private efforts to help the Chinese improve orphanage and foster care, especially for infants.

I spent a couple more days in Hunan following my visit to the Hengdong SWI, mostly focused on returning safely.   But all in all, I have come to treasure every minute that I've ever spent in China and I carry with me many special moments from those last days as well.  On my final day in Changsha, I found it difficult to say goodbye to my friends.

While it will be good to be home, to be camped out once again in our daughters' room, I know that our family will somehow return to China again eventually, since despite its immense challenges it is equally such a wondrous and powerfully compelling place.  This and the fact that our kids are each irrefutably Chinese.

It's just that they're ours in a very special way that comes with all they've been through and two unforgettable promises, each made between sniffles in a far away land, that everything will be okay from now on.

Seeds of Change: Renovation and Building Plans

I am haunted by the circumstances that have overwhelmed the Hengdong SWI, months now after my visit there.  But as early as the long return flight home in February 2005 I began to try to think of ways that I could help.  I decided then that at least I could supply those interested with more information from my trip so I began adding to my earlier weblog posts important bits and pieces from my notes--having noticed for example that my original description of the orphanage was probably far too cautious, and therefore too vague.

Next I proposed to the yahoo news group for Hengdong SWI adoptive families the idea of raising money for the orphanage, suggesting a project that would paint and caulk its interior as a means of providing the greatest benefit for a relatively modest investment.

Halfway across the planet and through a third party contact in Hunan, I uneasily proposed the painting project to officials in Hengdong then waited for a reply, and worried that they might see the proposal as an attempt to meddle with their priorities and that this might cause them to second-guess their decision to allow my visit there.  In a few weeks news came back that officials had agreed to the project, but then the date on which they promised to provide a cost estimate came and went with no further contact.  I began to worry again.  Finally, three weeks overdue, I received an email message from my Hunan intermediary.   It relayed some stunning news.

In the attempt to determine the costs for the interior painting project, Hengdong county officials had determined the obvious: too much was wrong with the basic structure of the building that painting and patching wouldn't address.  Therefore, they had sought and obtained a permit from the Hunan Provincial Civil Affairs Bureau for a more complete renovation of the entire building, a much larger project that would begin almost immediately.  The longer term plan to eventually build a new orphanage was still on the table, but directing nearly all the SWI's revenue toward this far off goal, several years away, wasn't worth the adversity suffered by the children and staff at the present facility in the meantime.

Omigosh, I thought as I read this, and promptly knocked over a cup of cof