Sometimes Life Gives Us What We Need

Penny and I went back and forth a lot on whether or not to visit Jing Jing's orphanage and finding spot. I don't completely understand why I was resistant to the idea, but I was. Penny stood firm and ultimately I went along (that's being married). I guess that we have to believe that knowledge is power. There is enough mystery surrounding all of us, no matter how hard we try to plumb it, and maybe more than average surrounding Jing Jing and it only seems right to do everything possible to look deeper into her origins.

On our first day in Tongling, in addition to visiting the mall and doing up Jing Jing's hair (I'm pretty sure that if she doesn't remember anything else from the trip she'll remember those girls flitting over her) we went to the place where Jing Jing was found. Penny and I both had ideas about what this place would be, to the extent that when we went back and double checked her paperwork we both had "mis-remembered" the exact spot, constructing something more specific (more "romantic"?) than what the actual documentation provided: "found in Tongshan Village a suburb of Tongling and taken to the local police station."

We took a cab there with Jing Jing. We didn't exactly say what we were doing. We just thought that we should see what sort of place it was and take some pictures. The cab climbed up and up the hills outside of town and at the summit, the driver stopped and said, "Tongshan Cun." We looked out on a place that could only be described as utterly average for the area we were in--yet now special to us.

We walked the neighborhood which seemed middle-class and relatively tidy. People had enough fund to have planted flower gardens and there were rosebushes in many yards, beautifully in bloom already. There were flowering trees and children running around behind us. "Those could have been Jing Jing's playmates," Penny said. True enough.

We walked all through those streets to their end where the sidewalk ended and a cliff tumbled down to a valley where old men and grannies tended a flourishing vegetable plot through which a small creek flowed. It looked like Tong Shan Village had been under cultivation for a thousand years... in exactly the same way as it currently is. I could almost imagine the decaying apartment blocks disappearing and a more traditional Chinese village taking it's place as I watched the straw-hatted gardeners looking after their farm.

But at the end of it all, looking for something profound in this place, some sort of slap in the face, some symbol to take away I came up empty. "This could be anyplace," I thought. And what happened to Jing Jing happens everyday in anyplaces all over the world. And as impossible as it seems to me to leave a child to be found, there was a reason and the place demanded that it happen in the way it did and we were lucky enough to catch her in our arms. And life is as profound and mundane as that.

Out of the Icebox and Into the Fire

Non-Minnesotans are probably blissfully unaware that it was F---ING SNOWING on the day that we left for China. That was April 28th. I like that Prince song about snow in April, but when it comes to actual snow in April it's not the melancholy feeling that song evokes, but something more akin to a deep and abiding sadness tinged with rage.

Our northern blood hasn't had the chance to stop running thickly, and warmly through our veins. And now we're in what is referred to as "the furnace of China" and afternoons it feels an awful lot like someone lit that baby up and my jeans feel like big terry cloth towels after a too long in the steam room on my legs. Dank? That's close, but hotter than dank. Who made me bring jeans? Perhaps it's time for one of my pan-cultural wraps--freedom-pants! Propriety says "no."

We're in Tongling now. It's great and weird. This is definitely Jing Jing's birth city. In Shanghai I didn't have this sense that we were among her people. Shanghai is filled with people from all over China. Tongling is filled with people from Tongling. And by golly, many of the people here share a lot in common, looks-wise, with Jing Jing. The bellman at the hotel (sweet kid who strutted his English like a peacock, but a demure peacock without all the peacocks cockiest attributes) noticed this immediately.
"She is Chinese?"
Sorry, but, "Duh?"
"Where is she from?"
"She's from here."
"I knew it."
And why not? Jing Jing is clear and fair complected; she is very broad-faced, full-lipped, heavy lidded like so many of the people in Tongling--and Anhui generally. The girls on the street all fall in love with here and want to hold her. She looks like many of their kid sisters, I reckon. Jing Jing mostly retreats into herself during all their exclamations, but I think that she is pleased about it actually.



why are these men holding hands? actually there is a lot of hand-holding here between men and men and women and women. makes us uptight westerners alternately insecure and excited!




Today, for example, we went on an excursion through a shopping mall (though there are big glittering examples of these in China this one was more old school and very dirty and hot) and Penny spotted a store called Beauty Fashion where you can buy fancy hair things. A group of female employees fixed up Jing Jings hair very elaborately, up-selling every inch of the way of course, and cooing at the results. After affixing about fifty dollars worth of doo-dads to her hair the assistant looked at us and said, "This hair is very exciting!" Yeah, sure, but please remove three pounds worth of sparkly butterflies and hearts and it will still be completely over the top. The overall experience was simply fantastic and loving. People are staring and curious, but mostly not threatened by what they see.



On the other hand many people here are not aware of international adoption and there have been some uncomfortable moments. The mildest form being the staring, no let's be honest, the gaping, but also running to someone saying "Shenme Shi?" roughly equivalent to "What the hell?" to a friend while looking pointedly at us, to a woman nearly chasing Penny and Jing Jing across the street looking at Jing Jing and saying "Ni de mama zai na li?" or "Where's you mama?" over and over, to a lady coming up to us and saying, "Ta bushi ni de" or "She isn't yours" to which I responded, "She is. We are her mom and dad. She was born here, but she is our daughter." She replied with, "I don't believe you." How can one respond to such ignorance? But at the same time, how can we blame her? My Chinese is unfortunately too limited to give the answer that I really wanted to, but not limited enough to smile nod and ignore it. And even if it wasn't, that is a long conversation and not worth it with the likes of her.

Oh my God, The Industry!

You know how the Hmongs moved to town and all of a sudden made average hard-working Minnesotans feel like layabouts? Freeway interchanges came under the plow. Tomato plants filled the ditches. Cucumbers vines crept out onto the byways.

China is like that... on steroids. As we cruise along from Nanjing to Tongling every bit of land is under cultivation. Vegetable gardens abound. There are little bits of ponds... and I mean little bits and there are guys standing around fishing them. That's not to mention the freeways, train tracks and buildings buildings buildings going up, out and on.

There are solar power units on many of the buildings in the countryside here too. I don't think that anyone would venture to call China green; too many coal-fired power plants for that. And the pollution from automobiles in Shanghai is EPIC. But it's reassuring to see those rooftop units everywhere we go.

We can tell that we're getting deeper into Anhui now as guys with crazy chicken coops and bamboo cages are starting to get on the train. It's country time! [Cue banjo music...]

On The Train to Tongling

Are we over-doing it? There's new stuff every day though! It's impossible to not talk about it. Is this blog just one more way for me to blah blah blah my life away? Perhaps self-consciousness is the anti-blog. But we're in a place that is making me more than a little self-concious, so that's out.

You take a blonde blue-eyed momma (and I do mean momma!), add a white-haired, strapping yang guizi (that would be the foreign devil in me) and throw in one Chinese-born five-year-old and basically everyone here has an opinion. Or at least that's what I find myself thinking as we walk through Shanghai and people double take left and right. That always used to happen to me when traveling over here and I didn't think too much about it. Now with Jing Jing along I wonder what people's opinions are. That sort of thinking can get you spinning. I try to leave it be.

All this surfaces as we're making our way by train to Tongling. That's Jing Jing's place of origin. I'm a mess of feelings about going there. And maybe about being here with her in general. But somehow the orphanage visit brings it all home. Here in China there's been, for me, a sense of having to share OUR little girl with a whole country of questionmarks. It doesn't seem fair. And of course it's irrational. That's beside the point. How does it happen that "Just My Imagination" starts playing as I'm having these thoughts. I just have to listen and sink into it for a minute...



...that's better. If you know me much you know that I don't often headphone. The train music has pushed me to this. The train speakers are inescapable and play a pretty random selection, uniformly too easy on the ears and profoundly lacking in the sort of profundity that Eddie Kendricks can lay on you. So you see, my departure to my private soundtrack is situational and temporary. It's a necessary antidote. I'm not joining the hordes of the disengaged. I still like being where I am.

And that brings us back to the train and Tongling out over the horizon. I won't be worrying about prying eyes anymore on this trip. Hold me to that. Because in many ways I've never seen Jing Jing so happy. As uncomfortable as she gets under the eyes of strangers, she likes the attention. And most of all she loves the constant attention and time that's she's getting from us. Hours and hours of card games, origami, Chinese checkers... she's all good like that.

So, for the next 18 hours or so, I won't worry about the trip to the orphanage and figure that Jing Jing's stability will sort out whatever presents itself. And the rest we'll take care of as a family.

"Are we stuck in the sky?"

This is a reasonable question for a five-year-old to ask after the umpteenth hour of flying in a 747. So I said, "seems like it," just as Shanghai loomed into view out the window.

These pics are from earlier in that day, sometime before we got stuck up there. In Asia people make the peace sign a lot when they have their photo taken. We weren't in Asia yet, but we are peace loving. We're going to teach Zhi about that... Jing Jing too.

But now we are here. That's "there" to you. Feels less faraway than ever before, though. Shanghai is becoming closer to the rest of the world than it once was. That's good for China, I reckon. Sort of sad for the adventurer in all of us. Time to think about going to Rangoon if you want to get your adventure on. I wonder if there's a Starbucks in Rangoon... there's a bunch here that's for sure. And every other kind of coffee, too. But I don't know if I could stand too much more adventure. Not with an occasionally toxic five year old in tow. Very occasionally, btw. Jing Jing has mostly been a travel champ. But who loves jet lag? Especially when your whole time space frame work is pretty undeveloped... it's like a cruel joke. Speaking of cruel jokes it's always a good idea to include some crazy mixed up translations in any travel writing about China. I don't want to be accused of not being de rigeur so put that in your "bottom sink type spuare" which is actually very nice if you've not been there.

Alright. Let us catch up on our sleep and then we'll tell you more. Until then we are... zzzzzz

Two Days Out

Enough people have asked me, "Are you going to blog about your China trip?" that I decided to see exactly how easy it would be to do... and damn if it ain't like falling off a log. So thems as encouraged me in this way, thank you.

We're counting down now. It feels like we're leaving at any moment. But really we're not gone until Monday. Wait a minute, that's practically tomorrow by now. We ARE leaving at any moment. We got a message from our agency months ago it seems that read, "Time to pack your bags!" and of course we ignored it. And now here we are, looking at a pretty unmanageable pile and a too big bag and wondering how we're going to get it all in and once we do, how we're going to lug the thing on and off planes, trains and buses in China. Hmmm.

Anyway, this is our blog. Time to get more serious about the pack.