[Original Post from Feb. 22, 2005] 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 an 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 little 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.
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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 my daughter 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.
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This is the second time I have stood at the location where one of my children is said to have been abandoned as a tiny infant. It does not get easier and the experience left me temporarily stunned with an intensely hollow feeling and profound sense that while I have searched widely to find a lot of historical, cultural, economic, and bureaucratic 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 paternal 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 immeasurable 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.
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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 our Hengdong daughter, 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.
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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 seem like little islands of clustered dwellings surrounded by the small plots of land assigned to each resident family unit. 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.
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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 a very traditional design but had been completely rebuilt only a few years ago, very likely with simple hand tools but also with impressively solid workmanship. It 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 relatively well.
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.
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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, albeit a very modest one located some distance from the side of the path, 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 my children, 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.
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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.