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.