We’re Outta Here!

Thursday, August 6:

I haven’t slept in 32 hours and I’m on a 14-hour flight from Beijing to Newark and I’m six-foot-two-inches tall trying to sleep in a space where I couldn’t hang a sock without it wrinkling and I’ve got some jackass in front of me who first thing he did when he got on the plane was recline his seat as far back as possible and of course I’ve got some kid behind me who’s kicking my seat but I’m thinking to myself that this is the first flight where I might actually get even with these passengers because I’ve got a two-year-old girl next to me with a healthy set of lungs and I’m betting at some point she screams on this flight and I hope it annoys the freaking beejezus out of these people and makes up for all the years I’ve had to sit by obnoxious adults on an airplane so I watch a Japanese movie called “Departures” then “Annie Hall” because I forgot Christopher Walken was in it, then the “French Connection” and finally some crappy movie that just came out called “17 Again” because I’m thinking I’ll sleep if I watch something I’m not interested in but watching a bad movie reminds me of an episode of a TV show “Ghost Whisperer” that Bernadette watches and in this one episode there’s a plane crash and the people on the plane wind up wandering the earth together and I’m thinking if this plane crashes and I have to spend eternity with these pinheads I will definitely kill myself but wait, I’m already dead so now I’m totally screwed…

Did I mention I’ve been up for the past 32 hours?

LATER, MUCH LATER: I think the feeling of exhaustion is circular rather than linear because you just reach a point when you are so tired that you’re awake. I hit that point at Newark Airport as we waited for the customs official to stamp Penelope’s passport making her a U.S. citizen. We gather our luggage. Our friends Nick and Amy and their two children meet us at the airport. Nick suggests we stop for Chinese food on the way home. Bern and I look at each other nervously. I consider opening the sliding door of the minivan and splattering myself across the interstate. Bern, more rational than I, simply begs off.

We arrive home and the place is festooned with balloons, banners, flowers, crepe paper streamers and food for the next few days, courtesy of Amy and another neighbor, Karen. We’re home five minutes when Karen, her husband James and their son show up on our doorstep. I wonder if Amy has a bat signal rigged to the top of their car but I learn later that Amy employs the much more conventional cellphone when I’m not looking. I open a nice bottle of red wine I’ve been saving for a special occasion, and we toast.

We all walk to Karen’s barn so Penelope can pet the horses and get scared out of her wits by their German Shepherd. I imagine Penelope snatching my cellphone, contacting the Chinese embassy and demanding she be immediately returned to the Mother country.

Darkness clings to the tree branches and the older children are dancing around the backyard with sparklers. I’m holding my daughter as the night begins in our first day in America.

The day is ending, yet a new day has begun.

Shamian Island (Or Let’s F–k with Jordan)

The streets of Shamian Island have a bride and groom on every corner. At first glance you think it must be the most romantic place in the world — all these gorgeous brides running about with perfectly coiffed hair, glamorous make-up and dressed in the most fashionable gowns imaginable. On their arm is a handsome young man wearing an immaculate tuxedo. They look as though they just stepped out of a catalog.

Then you notice something amiss.

It’s the shoes. The brides run about in cheap yellow flip-flops; the bridegrooms in scuffed up shoes or sneakers. Then it hits me: They aren’t stepping out of a catalog; they are stepping into one.

Shamian Island is all about the commerce. While there are several fashionable bridal shops and boutiques, the bulk of the retail business is geared toward schlubs like Bernadette and I: foreigners with adopted toddlers, wandering the streets killing time before their appointment with the U.S. Consulate. Retailers try to persuade you to kill that time by shopping for chotchkies. And of all the chotchkie peddlers on Shamian Island no one is quite like Jordan.

Jordan has a built-in radar detector enabling him to find foreign families with toddlers. He patrols the neighborhood streets — seemingly everywhere at once — encouraging parents to visit his store. On our first day on Shamian Island, a genial Jordan is waiting for us, an armful of advertising brochures and a mouthful of questions: How long are you here? What’s her name? You like Guangzhou? You want to come to my store? We politely answer his questions as we pass by. But an hour later, we bump into Jordan on another street and he asks all the same questions. Early in the afternoon, we replay this scene a third time.

The next day, we take a different route along the island and, sure enough, there’s Jordan yet again. He chases us a block, asks his questions and urges us to visit his store again. As he walks away, an idea pops in my head. Hours later we’re returning to our hotel when I see Jordan hurrying down the street. I urge my wife in the opposite direction. When Jordan returns to his post on the street corner, I turn back around. Jordan spots us and hurries in our direction. I pretend to be distracted by something behind us and persuade Bern to turn back. Jordan stands, arms akimbo in the middle of the street then rushes back to the corner.

I spin around again. Bern looks disgusted. “Knock it off. For that alone, we should go to his store. He’s a nice man.”

“Yea, but this is fun.”

Eventually, we duck our heads into Jordan’s shop and wander about. He has some beautiful placemats and chopstick sets. He does Penelope’s name in calligraphy and is exceedingly gracious when our daughter accidentally spills Cheerios on the floor. He picks up a toy cellphone, squints at some fine print on the back. “Hmm, made in China,” he says. “You know, I can’t get this here. Seriously.”

Besides shopping, Shamian Island offers Bern and I the time to learn about Penelope. I love how opening the hotel room curtains prompts her to raise her arms above her head and cheer, “YAY!” After winning freedom from the captivity of her crib, Penelope first heads to the radio, turns it on and starts dancing. OK, sometimes she’s dancing to a talk show, but I think of how I crawl out of bed grousing at the world and realize there’s a lesson for me to learn here.

Unfortunately, the second thing Penelope does in the morning is reach for the notepad and endless supply of sharpened pencils the maid service continuously brings to our room. Each morning we snatch a pencil from Penelope’s hand and hide it atop the television. Hours later, the maid service cleans the room and replaces the hidden pencil, forcing us to add the new pencil to our stash atop the TV. This process repeats several times during the day and night until we have a small pile of pencils in the room. Since the maid seemingly doesn’t understand that we’re not collecting sharp pencils, Bern sticks a crayon on top of the notepad with a note (written in crayon) that reads: “No pencils please.” We return to our room hours later to find a brand-spanking new razor sharp pencil resting on the notepad.
“Thank God, the scissors factory is closed or we’d have a real problem on our hands,” I mutter.

This is the most unfriendly-to-kids kids hotel I’ve ever seen. There are dozens upon dozens of steps in the lobby, a number of expensive breakable items at kneecap level, and a kiddie pool that’s impossible to find without a map and a guide. Or maybe I’m just cranky because I want to retrieve our paperwork at the consulate’s office and go home. There’s talk of a typhoon hitting China soon (it eventually hits two days after we leave).

Bern and I are eager to start our new lives together with our daughter back home.

Oh Rats!!

Thursday, July 30:

I’m glum today because I can no longer eat at the hotel buffet. Not that I’ve been banned due to overindulging or sneezing into a steaming cauldron of fish-head soup, but simply because I’ve lost my appetite for it.

Earlier today, Bernadette, Penelope and I were splashing about the kiddie pool at the hotel. Penelope has been bonding quickly with us helped in part by our willingness to flop about in a large puddle of water. Penelope giggles uncontrollably when she dumps small plastic cups filled with water on my head. She loves wearing my sunglasses and has a penchant for washing her flip flops with pool water. As we played, a rat ran along the sun-baked concrete between the kiddie and adult pools. The lifeguard grabbed a metal pole and swatted the rat, which tried to escape a brain-bashing by diving into the adult pool. That’s when I discovered that Japanese men can fly too because seven of them spring out of the pool faster than you can say “Smog Monster.” A second lifeguard grabs a skimmer, scoops up the rat and the lifeguard with the metal pole starts swinging away like he’s Ryan Howard. (I would have said David Wright but that would imply that the lifeguard couldn’t hit the rat.) Bern and I turn toward each other and she’s reading my mind: We’re not eating at the buffet tonight.

I tell this story because frankly there’s not much else to do in Fuzhou besides watch lifeguards treat rats like pinatas. The city isn’t known as a tourist destination so we visit the gorgeous Buddhist temple and wander the neighboring park early in the morning or late at night because it’s too hot to be outside during daytime. Walking out of the hotel is like walking into a blast furnace. So, I wheel Penelope around the lobby in her stroller, let her test her wobbly legs by walking up and down a flight of stairs holding her hand all the while. In the afternoons, Bern and I take turns sitting with Penelope while she naps. On my “off” days, I sit in the lobby and read a book of letters written by Theodore Roosevelt because I’m nosy and like reading other people’s mail. We swim, of course. And, we eat.

And eat. And eat.

And eating isn’t good because between eating breaks I sit bloated in the lobby with chicken’s feet running around in my stomach and I start to think. And thinking isn’t good for me now. I think about whether I can handle this responsibility. I think about what I will do if the market crashes and I lose my job. I think about how I’ll be 65 when Penelope is getting out of college. I think about what Bern would do if I drop dead and she has to raise Penelope on her own. (OK, with this one I just figure she’ll marry some rich guy and laugh about the days when she had to slum it with her first husband.) And it all scares the shit out of me.

But now it’s time to strap Penelope into the stroller and head to the restaurant where I’ll surely be eating some kind of fish that will be staring back at me. And I’ll feel as though the fish is staring into my heart, sizing me up as a father and a man. And I worry that I will fail.

I can’t wait to leave Fuzhou.

Alienation

Sunday, July, 19, 2009:

I’m staring at an alien. Granted she’s a very cute alien, but an alien nonetheless. She’s 34 inches high, weighs 25 pounds and has a head circumference of 18 inches. She’s surprisingly swift on her feet despite her wobbly legs. Oh, and can she scream! Blood-curdling, heart-wrenching cries that spring from the depths of her soul and pierce your heart and eardrums.

Earlier that evening, our arrival in Fuzhou turned out vastly different than anticipated. Bernadette and I expected to deplane, meet our adoption coordinator and be driven to our hotel, where we’d drop our luggage and have a final goodbye-to-DINKdom drink or two, or eight, before meeting our daughter the next day. We land as the night sky encroaches, collect our luggage, and find no one waiting for us with a neatly printed ‘Harding Family’ placard. This sets Bern off in search of someone – anyone – who speaks English while I play bellhop with a precariously balanced load of luggage.

Bern wanders outside into the taxi and limo area, where she sees a woman guiding people onto a bus. Somehow the woman persuades us to board. Seven of us share five seats in the back row of the bus as it meanders forever through southern China. I expect to see the skyline of Beijing where I’ll be dropped off, only to get flattened by Tina when I step off the curb.

Eventually, we arrive at a hotel — not ours, but at this point who cares what hotel — and everyone exits the bus. Not wanting to be the only ones remaining aboard (although the Samurai soap opera playing on the television behind the bus driver’s head was mesmerizing), we climbed out and were thrilled when this wisp of a woman squeaked in relief. Isabell introduced herself as our adoption coordinator and explained that a terrible traffic accident on the highway prevented her from getting to the airport in time to greet us. She ushered us into a van, we buckled up and exchanged niceties, and then she drops the bombshell: “So, are you ready to go meet your daughter?”

‘As in, this minute,’ I’m thinking. I turn to my wife. Her face registers panic, joy, terror, excitement, terror. Then she starts to cry. Bern can run through a gamut of emotions in the blink of an eye; the only thing that resonates with me is shock. I feel as though my body is draining through the floorboards and melting into the steamy Fuzhou streets. I’m having a massive disconnect with the idea that I am about to become somebody’s dad.

“But I thought we weren’t going to see her until tomorrow?” Bern asks. Well, we are told, plans change. It’s the Chinese way, our adoption agency warned us ahead of time. Expect things to change at the last minute, and just roll with it.

Uh-huh.

Flash forward to a reception desk on the 18th floor of our hotel. The adoption officials greet us and remark that our girl has been calling all the ladies she’s with “II-EE,” which means Auntie in Chinese, and that she is waiting in a conference room. Bern and I do our best impersonation of calm, rational about-to-be parents for the first time in our almost 18-year marriage as we walk down the hall. This is the next big chapter in our book. Despite knowing she may cry, and despite knowing that’s actually a good thing because it means she’s sad to leave the only people she’s known and more likely to bond with us, you cannot help but have that Norman Rockwell vision in your head of a happy family uniting with hugs and tears of joy.

The wooden conference room door swings open. Our girl is sitting on the conference room table, her skinny legs tucked beneath her, twirling the orphanage doctor’s stethoscope in her hands. She takes one look at Bern, then one at me. Then lets out the wildest shriek of terror I’ve ever heard in my life. She sounds like an animal being attacked in the woods behind our house. And I feel helpless, knowing there’s not a thing I can do to make the crying stop, except wait it out as patiently as I can.

In the morning, at precisely 5:17 am, I tiptoe around a darkened hotel room in Fuzhou frightened out of my wits that I will wake this creature and unleash her wrath. Of course, when I’m being quiet in a darkened room is when I accidently drop a glass, trip over a coffee table or stick my foot in the garbage can when trying to get my pants on. But miracle of miracles, I avoid these pitfalls.

Eventually, the alien awakes and rises to a sitting position. She takes a tentative look at each of us, while we look at each other like we’re standing in front of an explosive device like Batman running around the docks holding a ticking time bomb over his head in that cheesy made-for-TV movie in the 1960s (Oh come on, you remember: “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!” Oh, never mind!) Bern grabs the container of Cheerios and shakes it vigorously. She hands one to the alien who ponders it sitting between her thumb and forefinger before popping it in her mouth. She accepts one from me and another from Bern and another from me. Soon Bern lightly tosses a Cheerio into our little girl’s mouth and she giggles. There’s a dimple in her left cheek. It’s beautiful.

The bonding begins over a handful of toasted oats. And the world’s a wonderous place.

 

Shakes on a Plane

A domestic Chinese flight can deaden the synapses rather quickly if your only two entertainment options are a Chinese-language newspaper and an in-flight video on the Beijing bus system (also in Chinese with helpful Korean subtitles). I watch, munching warily on a pork bun, as a woman reveals the secrets to opening a bus window. My mind wanders to thoughts of meeting Penelope tomorrow.

The name Penelope stretches back to ancient Greece and means “weaver.” In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Penelope’s soldier-husband Odysseus fails to return home from the Trojan War. Penelope weaves a tapestry which she says she must complete before she even thinks about marrying another man. So, each day she weaves the tapestry and each night she promptly unravels it. (Those sneaky ancient Greeks.) The name signifies a loyal, capable and clever woman.

One evening months before the trip, Bernadette and I meet around the dining room table to discuss naming our future daughter. We agree to compile separate lists of names we like and compare notes.

Minutes before we meet I jot down a few names I like on a sheet of paper. I bounce downstairs, into the dining room, and suddenly feel like the sixth-grader who finished his book report in home room before first-period English. Bern, on the other hand, is the class geek who’s footnoted every other sentence of her book report: There she is, seated at one end of our rectangular dining-room table, surrounded by baby-naming books, print-outs of articles she found online and an array of manila folders. She points to the opposite side of the table. I feel like we’re about to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles. “Is a rectangular table OK or should we be seated at a round one?” I ask. No answer, so I sit. After a few minutes of paper rattling, she asks: “So, what’s on your list?”

“Siobhan?” I whisper. I say it cautiously, as though I’m suggesting we set the dog on fire or vote Republican.

“I don’t know if picking an ethnic name like that is a good idea. That’s going to confuse a lot of people,” she says. It’s a good point. It’s not like we’re heading to Dublin. Of course that means my pen starts scratching out half the names on the list. What do I know about naming a child? I wanted to parent four boys so I could name them Matthew, Mark, Luke and Mookie.

We verbally dance in circles like pigeons in the park over a hunk of bread crust until we narrow our choices down to two names: Penelope and Olivia. We print out two photos of our daughter with the prospective names underneath and tape them to the kitchen wall. We introduce ourselves to each other (and to imaginary others in the bathroom mirror) as “Penelope’s Mom” or “Olivia’s Dad.” Within days, we mutually gravitate toward one name. “I like Penelope,” Bern says one morning at breakfast. “It fits. I can’t explain it, but it fits.” She’s right. And I’m not writing this just because I know one day she’ll read this post.

The response to our name selection proved interesting. Most of our family and friends under the age of 50 loved it; those older than 50 tended not to. (One friend, considerably past 50, said, ‘Penelope?! Is that a family name?”

When I cell-phoned my mother that Bern and I had decided on Penelope, I employ a cheesy morsel of pop psychology. “So, we gave it a lot of hard thought, we decided to name the baby Hazel,” I told her.

“HAZEL!?!? Where in the world did you get that from?”

“We just like the name, that’s all.”

“Do you want that girl to grow up to be somebody’s maid?!” she blasted. “You can’t be serious.”

“OK, I’m not. We’re going to name her Penelope.”

“PENELOPE!?!? Where in the world did you get that from?”

Not exactly the response I was anticipating. “We really like the name. It’s a classic name but not too common. And she looks like a strong kid so we want a strong name that will fit her.”

“You’re kidding, RIGHT?”

“No, Mom, we aren’t” Sigh.

And now, more than 18 months of conversations, adoption paperwork and waiting (and waiting and waiting) are nearing an end. Tomorrow — Monday, July 20 — will be one of the biggest days of our lives. I have no idea what to expect. We’ve been told that if our daughter cries, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it might be a good signal as it indicates she bonded with the orphanage directors and her foster parents, and will likely form new attachments with us. I’m — eager? anxious? — to see how this plays out.

Beijing Before The Fall

Saturday, July 18, 2009:

A brown-streaked sun sinks slowly beyond the Beijing skyline as we rocket along the Badaling Expressway. Tina, our driver, darts in front of a bus, weaves into the bicycle lane almost clipping an elderly man in a sweat-stained T-shirt, then whips behind a dented minivan the color of a pool table in a smoky bar. Part New York City cabbie, part Hollywood stunt driver, she’s talking furiously in Mandarin to our tour guide as she jerks our van around a pedestrian who’s foolhardy enough to step off the curb. My eyes dart over my right shoulder, expecting to see a cascade of arms, legs and twisted metal in her wake.

John, our tour guide, offers some reassurance: “Don’t worry. Tina is second best driver in all of Beijing. Best is ambulance driver.” My wife Bernadette is white knuckled and green in the cheeks and when I glance at her I suspect she’s either doubting my sanity (OK, that’s nothing new!) for suggesting a few days in Beijing or worried she won’t survive this trip.

Beijing is a last-hurrah honeymoon of sorts. In two days, we’ll fly south to Fuzhou to unite with our adopted two-year-old daughter who we are naming Penelope. We wonder constantly how our meeting will turn out, what Penelope will be like and whether she’s potty trained. OK, I’m more curious about that last one because I’m a little weak-stomached for soiled diapers. I gag when I get downwind of one our gassy beagles.

We’re apparently in a hurry to get to a buffet dinner of mystery fruits and ox tongue before catching “a mystical and amazing acrobatic show.” Well, that’s what it says in the brochure. Actually, I am anticipating something “mystical and amazing” because my friend Mark assures me that Chinese people can fly. This knowledge is based on numerous viewings of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” I wonder why I bothered purchasing a plane ticket for Penelope when she could simply fly alongside us on the trip home.

We arrive safely at a hotel buffet and are promptly escorted to an empty dining room. I load my plate with a plethora of animal parts in brown sauce, leafy green vegetable-type things and flaky pastry. Bern stares at my plate for a moment and promptly turns green again.

“Really? You’ll eat that but turn your nose up at pork roll?” Bern asks.

“Well, that’s because pork roll is disgusting,” I reply, tossing a chunk of fried ostrich tongue down my neck.

Her fork hovers over a scallop. “Say, why do you think Tina and John never want to eat with us?”

I pause, wondering if the tickling sensation at the back of my throat is the ostrich tongue. “They probably want to talk shop. Bitch about gas prices, incompetent drivers and so forth. Or, maybe they just want yap about the capitalist swine that they are stuck driving around on a Saturday night.”

Before long, we’re back in the van. We narrowly miss flattening a man in a straw hat who’s driving a wagon loaded with corn. We plop down in our seats in the theatre seconds before the show starts. Turns out that Mark was right: Some Chinese people can fly. The acrobats leap through the air, bounding, bouncing and balancing across the stage for the next 90 minutes.

Later, back at the hotel, Bern flops into bed, and I decide to walk the Beijing streets one last night. The air tastes like warm tapioca. The sidewalks are writhing with city dwellers and tourists struggling to escape the heat. I walk half a block when a girl dressed in a business suit sidles up besides me. “You look for lady friend?” I chase her away but it’s not long before I’m approached again. “Are you lonely?” This scene will play out a half dozen times before I spin through the revolving doors of the hotel lobby. I stare through the windows and watch two teenage girls smoking under a street light.

I learn later that many of the prostitutes are former orphan girls doing what they can to survive. And, I’m grateful knowing one orphan will never wander the Beijing streets.