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.