For These Lessons

Recently I woke in the middle of the night and, unable to fall back to sleep, did something I hadn’t done in a very long time.  I sat down at the computer and returned to this blog.  Rather than posting as in the old days I started to read, beginning at the top introduction and slowly scrolling downward.  I found myself absorbed by post after post in succession, especially the narratives from the trip. (Somehow I had lately forgotten about having watched an NBA All Star game with Mao's relatives on a mountainside in Shaoshan.)  The story pulled me along with each piece falling into place behind the next, despite turns that must have been surprises.  Finishing the last entry, I found myself relieved in the end that I had posted each time with care.  I had laid out a lot of detail but also tried to be clear about the story’s inherent mystery.  In other words, this was a story about a difficult search, less so about any conclusive discovery.  

I had thought about the blog only occasionally during the past year or so and even wondered whether I should delete it.  It was originally intended only as a travel journal for friends and family, but word spread through cyberspace to many thousands of eventual visitors.  Perhaps it should disappear like an intricate Tibetan kyil khor, the circle mandala composed from colored grains of sand and delicately crafted by monks sometimes over the course of several weeks or months only to be brushed away when completed, to illustrate how ideas like reality are by nature impermanent.  

The benefit of time has allowed me to see this blog more for what it is: mostly just a story about me and my second daughter Clara-Li, who came from the Hengdong SWI.   This makes me appreciate even more so today the story’s not so subtle complexity. 

I worry about families still stepping blindly into Chinese foreign adoption without a full understanding of its ongoing transition and I am today firmly among those who believe there is ample reason for the U.S. and other governments to begin to pressure China to limit foreign adoptions now to special needs adoptions. 

On the other hand, I worry about the sweeping generalizations that can crop up in discussions of this.  Not all orphanage officials are corrupt as can be implied.  These social welfare homes operate within a society that has no equivalent to legally giving a child up for adoption.  Revenue from foreign adoptions may be seen locally as helping to address the social challenges of caring for growing numbers of children with special needs as well as indigent seniors in a rapidly aging population.  In the absence of a free press or broad public discussion, it may be harder for these officials to connect the dots between actions such as offering incentives for those (including birth parents) who bring them abandoned children and problems such as organized baby trafficking--especially since "informal" adoption through intermediaries has been the standard practice in surrounding rural areas for many years.  

And one could see no evidence of ill advised practices at the orphanage I visited last June in Gansu Province. 

It housed about 80 children with an even ratio of boys to girls.  Nearly all had special needs and the orphanage took in relatively little in foreign adoption revenue.  It was housed in a modest facility that had just been damaged by an earthquake but it had a doctor and trained nurses on the staff.   The children had toys donated locally.   Children with developmental special needs were given daily physical therapy.  The orphanage director had arranged for art students at a nearby college to paint colorful posters for the walls of each room.  Older children were sent to school including a school for the blind.  Local farmers regularly donated fresh milk to the orphanage.  It was a part of the community.

We discovered our son Henry, who was cared for at the orphanage described above, through China's waiting child program for children with special medical needs.  He had been born with a big hole in the center of his face (an unusually severe cleft anomaly) and then left by a roadside dumpster.  A charity-sponsored team of American surgeons had tried to fashion an outer repair, but the result had torn open on one side and inside was still a gaping hole instead of separate oral and nasal cavities.  Once home he required a quick succession of extensive surgeries and will need more in the years ahead. 

But Clara-Li also has had special needs that, while less visible, have been in many ways no less challenging: severe night terrors probably associated neurologically with the anterior fontanel portion of her skull remaining unclosed until she was about five years old; early acute problems with physical balance and motor development; frustrating visual and auditory processing disorders that today make it difficult for her to make the same kind of learning connections as her classmates at school.   

At this point in my lengthy search for understanding, I know now that I’m not going to find a blog post, article, treatise, transcript, or other document that is going to show that Clara-Li didn’t need us—her dad and mom.  The Hengdong orphanage in 2005, it is obvious now, was a bad place to be for a child.  We gave her love and hope of course, but once home she needed our help to find the right help and undoubtedly will need this again on occasion in the years ahead.

She has come a very long way; from the Hengdong SWI but also from the noodle-limbed child of 18 months whose synapses were firing so erratically that doctors in China were sure she had concomitant esotropia (crossed eyes).  Today her eyes are fine, which is a recovery that her doctors say is highly unusual.  We had encouraged her to follow her muse; whatever it took to really develop her interests in anything.   This helped her to become a very hard worker who, against considerable odds, learned to excel at things like swimming, biking, scooter riding, and jumping rope.  Now, with help, she is working very hard to rewire her own circuits again so that she can more easily link sounds, syllables, and images for use in her speech and for beginning to learn to read.  This is a painstaking process—but it’s starting to click, which we’ve seen happen in her before. 

She is our tender free spirit, still gifted with that full body grin that begins in her feet and causes her shoulders to hunch in delight as each smile blossoms.  It's funny the things that parents sometimes pick up from their children. 

So for these lessons learned, I'll leave this blog here a little while longer.

Comments

[Georgia Nitescu]

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR WONDERFUL, INSIGHTFUL, AND VERY INFORMATIVE BLOG and great pictures!
After 4 years (?!!) of waiting we have a daughter and she is waiting for us at Hengdong! Born on 28 Sept 2008, her name is Fu, Li Xxing. We are so ecstatic to be matched with Hunan baby (love the "spiciness" legend). We are also very scared, naive, worried etc.
We will be travelling to Hunan's capital at the end of Oct, to receive our child
and for China part of the paperwork, then to Beijing for Canadian government
clearance.
There is one more Hengdong referral in our travel group.
What is our chance of actually seeing the orphanage?
I am so grateful to anyone posting the pictures on the web. Your photos of renovations made me cry. I hope our child is safe and has someone to give her a hug and talk to her.
Thank you again,
Georgia, Toronto