Love your Life

We are staying at the Tianlong Grand Hotel, a three star establishment on a busy avenue. I can't give you an address because all the pamphlets are in Mandarin, the clerks don't speak English and guests sitting in the lobby are openly staring at me while smoking their cigarettes.  Juana tells me that I am probably the first white person they have ever come across - other than those they have seen on TV.  Qianjiang has a population of a hundred and twenty-thousand people. The director of the school of Tourism thought the hotel's location would be more practical for me so that I could just walk about town. 

We are assigned room 5650.  We head up to the fifth floor and walk down the corridor. I notice that if I reach my hand and hop, that I can touch the ceiling. I'm 5'4.''  A quick swipe of the key card and, surprise, we stumble upon a pair of Chinese men. You guessed it, smoking. Thankfully, clothed. They gasp. We gasp and quickly retreat into the hall wondering what has just happened. I am just grateful that the situation was not reversed and that I am the one who shocked them.  So we return to the lobby and attempt to extract an explanation from the front desk lady. She looks at us as if we are stupid, I can tell this by her tone and I don't need to understand Mandarin because her condescension is so not subtle. 56507 = sixth floor, room 507. Ok, we aren't so bright. Our mistake. But how does this explain the fact that we were able to enter the wrong room, one floor below us?

Spacious, decorated in earth tones and olive colored lame, with the prerequisite kettle in the bathroom to boil the water, yes! Wherever you go in the country, this is the key to your health while traveling. Boil all water that crosses your lips, even when brushing your teeth. Thankfully, although the view is of the conference center parking lot, it is more quiet than had we been fronted on the main drag. And it's free!

Our guide, Pauline, will meet us and take us out to dinner. I am really beginning to feel watched over as plans materialize for us before we can think them through and the clock is ticking on the time I have left in the city.  Juana and I plot our last day in Qianjiang which will consists of tracking down the supposed "head of the foster mothers" from Mak's orphanage and finding out if she recognizes the woman pictured with my baby a few weeks before we adopted her.  I know that this is a no-no. I fully understand the risks the Center for Adoptions is trying to avoid by having adoptive parents come in contact with former nannies or foster moms. I get it. I am not planning on giving anyone any monetary gifts - other than some chocolates and my undying gratitude. I just want a name for the woman. I want the tiniest bit of information so that I can fill my mommy tank with answers for my curious daughter when the questions start coming.

Cherry is calling and texting me from Beijing with an address she has pulled from her files and she is dictating directions to this person's home based on memory. Cross the main bridge and take the first left along the river, or is it the second... go three kilometers down the road until you come to a fruit market... follow the market until you come to an alley... zigzag left, zigzag right... look for a courtyard... and so on.  I transcribe the instructions trying to visualize what she is saying. Juana keeps repeating the Chinese address in Mandarin and thinks the grammar is off. The clerks have never heard of the street... Meanwhile, we have to set up the appointment to take photographs of a young burn victim so that Cherry can send pictures to the surgeon in Australia but we can't get a hold of her she has no telephone. We find another number to call in case of emergency and it is that of the girl's father who is working in Guangzhou with her mother. He excitedly takes our call and promises to have his daughter in our lobby by 9am the next morning.  Which, if all works acording to plan, will leave me two hours plus to get to the Foster mother's place (assuming directions are correct.) We are not sure this is going to happen. What is certain though is that we don't want the babysitters around when we are documenting the burns and I don't want them with me when I go looking for the foster mother lady. We hatch a plan to have our guides pick us up at noon to take us to lunch and then the train station for a return back to Chongqing.

Pauline meets us on a street corner a few blocks from the hotel. The streets are filled with people and children. Groups of them, clearly belonging to one family. I am confused about this. Is there not a one child policy in effect?  Pauline explains that the Tujia minority (originally from Thailand or thereabout, I believe) are allowed as many as three children. She leads us down restaurant row - which mostly consists of outdoor kitchens with tarps spread overhead to shield diners from the elements. My olfactory sense is on overdrive. I swear that my nostrils are numb from trying to decipher and identify the perfume of smoke, sludge and Sichuan peppers, or is it Qianjiang bacon?  We snake our way past carnival type games spread out over the sidewalk and past rows of shoe shiners.

We look to Pauline for dining guidance but she is at a loss since she never goes out to eat, preferring her own cooking to anything else she might want. We settle on the most formal of settings, a restaurant with actual walls and a lot of steam billowing out of it. I like it because of the promise of beer. At this point I feel like a leaf carried by a stream headed for some rapids. I have no clue as to how much dining luck I have left . I know that I just need my stomach to hold out for another seventy-two hours and then I can explode when I get back to Los Angeles. At least, I'll be home.

I gently beg not to be served food that is too spicy. The Sichuan pepper has a taste all to its own and usually makes my tongue thick and numb. I am told that this pepper leaches the moisture out of the body. Translation: it has some arthritis combatting properties that these mountain folks appreciate. The dishes are all sealed in thick plastic wrap and they serve me water tea. Translation: hot water. Good for digestion. The meal is delicious. As much as I profess to be nervous about the dining conditions, the noodle dishes and breaded ribs and mystery soup are memorable. Everyone else loses weight when they travel here but not me, no sir. Those extra five pounds I won't be able to shake when I get home will be my lasting souvenir. That is, if my stomach holds out. What a dilemma.

.

Don't ask me what this is. It was spicy and delicious. 

At the end of the meal a shoe shiner approaches me for a shoe shine. Juana and Pauline quickly waive her off but I ask her to stay. My boots are disgusting. They are covered in mud, construction dust (the air is thick with it) and who knows what else. In any case my friends groan when she plants herself in front of me and starts to clean them.  I defend myself. I tell Juana that here is a woman who is trying to survive and the skill she has to put food on the table is to shine my shoes. This isn't about a superior-inferior complex, this is about me needing the service and her being able to provide it. She is not begging. She isn't asking for something for nothing.  Juana thanks me for my perspective. The shoe shiner looks up at me and smiles. I smile back at her and thank her in Mandarin, to which she responds, "Love your life." "Excuse, me?" She repeats it. "Love your life!" You speak English? She nods. "Love your life, love yourself." I am stunned. Juana is stunned. Pauline is stunned. We go on to find out that she loved studying English in high school until her parents could no longer afford to pay for her schooling and she was forced to go to work to help support her family.  She conjugates a few verbs for us, sharing what she remembers of the language, always smiling and laughing and proud while diners have gathered around us to listen to her. She points to my boots showing me that she is done. They look fantastic. I feel like a kid with a new pair of shoes who can't stop looking at them. She asks for four yuen. I give her six. She gives me two back. I tell her to keep it. The job was worth 3 yuen a boot, at least. She laughs and heads off in search of her next client. Juana looks at me and smiles. What a trip. This almost feels like and old "Touched by an Angel" episode.

How could my shoe shiner possibly know that "Love your life, love yourself," has been my mantra for the last two years and that I try to wake up every day with the goal of being conscious and grateful for the things that I have, for my kids, for my friends, for my life, for this amazing trip.

Is - loving it all

Serendipity

So, I'm squished into the window seat of a Sichuan Air flight from Beijing to Chongqing trying to crack the mystery of the contents of a lunch box that has been placed before me. My eyes are red and tired as I squeezed the last of my tears out after saying goodbye to the kids in the morning.  I don't know if this is why people stare at me.  I have taken the quick Caucasian head count and we are two aboard the plane, except that I am way cooler because I don't have an interpreter with me and I only speak six words of Mandarin.  I glance to my right and observe that most passengers are placing pickles inside the bread and eating the whole as a sandwich. So I stuff my pungent spread inside the bun, shovel it in my mouth and order my Lu Cha (green tea) to wash it down.

Juana is waiting for me when I come out of the baggage claim area and I am SOOOOO relieved because even though I thought I was hot shit for spending the better part of a day without linguistic assistance, I would have been really wigged out if she wasn't there grinning at me upon arrival.

How was I ever to imagine that a trip to Singapore a year and a half ago to visit Dominique would have me meet and get to know one of her closest friends there, Juana. And what would the likelihood be that Juana used to live in Chongqing and was originally from Fuling? (Which is a stop on the way to Qianjiang.) Or that subsequently she would end up divorcing her husband and moving back to China? Or that she had no clue that children were being abandoned and that SWI were filled to capacity?

I quickly brought Juana up to speed and gave her the 411 on my adoption journey and shared my dreams to someday to travel back to China to check out Qianjiang, the city from which Makena was purportedly from. She was fascinated and quickly offered to be my guide should this dream materialize. And fast forward to November 11, here we are.

(First class, soft sleeper, cabin: 139 yuen, one way. Book all for seats in case you don't want to share with a stranger and make sure it is non-smoking.)

(Chongqing rail station at 7AM)

FYI: Even though I had my friend with me, figuring out how to get to the right track in the correct departure hall and going through security was intense so I recommend extremely light packing for the train ride.

One of the rivers that feeds the Three Gorges Dam and the expressway that now links Qianjiang to the big times.

I always tell myself when I meet people for the first time and find a strong connection to them that there is always a reason. That is the case for Juana who essentially gave up two days of her weekend to embark on an adventure with me to a town she had never visited even though it is a couple of hours away by train. Thanks to her college connections and for wanting me to get as much out of the trip as possible, she called on friends to help us find a guide and a driver so that we could trip around town.

(My guides, courtesy of the school of tourism.)

(Footage of the drive through town on a Saturday morning.)

(A young woman rehydrating seaweed which is used in all soups.)

I really felt like I had stepped off the reservation when my entourage took me to lunch in a nondescript hole in the wall. To date, all my dining experiences in China in trips past and present were in cavernous glittery five star culinary extravaganzas. Here, I was being led into a windowless cinderblock room with a big round table at the center of which stood a bowl of steaming hot soup. I was being hosted at a farmer's restaurant where all veggies served were straight off his farm and everything was fresh. 

As an aside, I had until that very moment been a vegetarian for the last three years. Juana, pretty much told me that those days were over and that I needed to try everything. You pretty much can't pass on the pork when the poor pig was slaughtered in honor of your arrival. Times like these are usually when  I start praying silently to my digestive gods hoping that Montezuma is seeking vengeance on some other continent. So I took the tiniest bite of it,  almost gagged over the tripe, tasted a sliver of something beefy looking and took a mouthful of something that looked like squid. When I inquired as to the provenance of said protein, no one would or could tell me. The best surprise though were the potatoes that made an appearance halfway through the meal. Qianjiang is a mountainous region and many varieties are grown here. They even fry them up and serve them mixed in with the rice. I do have to fess up that once I got over the visuals and the scent of spices I had never smelled before, that the food was really delicious. I even impressed my hosts by moving a chicken talon aside in the bowl and plucking some yam noodles out with my chopsticks. They were seriously stunned that I could eat with them.

 

My first and immediate goal was to get to Makena's finding place. I had combed Brian Stuy's  website for pictures of it but never found one and I was really concerned that, as time went by, the city would change due to the massive construction push all over the country. I wasn't wrong.

(We stopped in a store so that I could purchase some tape for a poster of Makena's life that I intended to leave at the finding site.)

(As expected, and after three different attempts made to locate the Bojiawan gas station, we finally found it. At least, what was left of it. A primary school now stood in its place.)

It took my breath away, I was really emotional and conscious that everyone was watching me. Strangers curious about this white woman who really needed to get a picture of a gas station. I had to try to make them understand that one day my daughter would ask me questions about her beginnings and that I wouldn't really have any answers for her other than what I was able to gather for her now. In the very least she would know that mom moved heaven and earth to go in search of some facts to weave into the fabric of her life before the trail grew cold.

(This wall was part of the original gas station complex. I leaned there for a long time. I felt like this was my great wall and that it stood between me and Makena's past. Prettier shot than a gas pump.)

I put together a poster letting whoever know that in November of 2005 a little girl was found here and that she was later adopted by an American family, that she was bright and beautiful and very much loved by all who knew her. My guide translated everything into Mandarin while my driver shot a lot of pictures. I'm fairly certain that although he never said two words to me, that he spoke fluent English and reported everything back to higher up.  So much for keeping a low profile in Qianjiang.

(We left the poster at the entrance to the school along with an email address to contact us with any info about Makena.)

Just before we were to leave, a woman showed up at the school. She was the new director of the Qianjiang SWI that was being constructed. The director of the school of tourism had called her and told her where I was and basically ordered her to hightail over to me and give me a tour of the old orphanage. So our group left in a convoy of automobiles and drove up into the hills to a pink building overlooking the city. It had been closed since September and all the remaining children were now relocated to Chongqing. As hard as she tried, the director could not unlock the door so we went up the back stairwell and poked around with limited access. 

(View from the rooftop.)

(The empty kitchen.)

(A peek through the bars and I caught a glimpse of the profiles of the last of the children who were there before moving to Chongqing.)

According to the director, the new SWI will house retirees as wells as children but she was not clear on when the new facility would open. We bid farewell with the promise of staying in touch and then headed back to the hotel where I soon found out that the bill had been taken care of by the school of tourism. I was officially their guest. And although I insisted and waived my credit card around, Juana just told me let things be. That this was the Chinese way and that protesting too much would be insulting. So I backed off, thanked all present for their hospitality and headed up to my room for a well-needed rest until dinner. I still had a lot of to-do's I needed to check off my list before leaving the next day; namely get a name for the woman who was pictured holding Makena in her arms in early photos of her and take photographs of a young burn victim who my friend Cherry from Beijing had lined up surgery for in Australia. And so far, so good, my stomach was still holding up.

I came, I saw, I'm back.

Men at work?

In front of one of the Long men caves in Luoyang (UNESCO world heritage site.)

I just realized that if you don't want to age then you should always try to cross the date line the day before your birthday and land the day after. I plan on doing so again next year, and the year after, and the year after that and remaining forty-something, forever!

-The Mending Crew-

So many emotions factored into getting ready for this trip. One, I would be leaving my six-year old for almost two weeks when the last time I was going to China was to bring her home. Two, I would be spending a week in a hospital-like care facility with over a hundred and forty orphans most of whom had physical disabilities and, three, the Mending Kids coordinator was asking me to document the mission - which was okay technically since I am a grad of the American Film Institute but as a director, not a cinematographer. I felt a lot of pressure building up on many fronts. Here we were, fifteen volunteers traveling to China: two surgeons, an anesthesiologist, two scrub nurses, three pre-op/post-op nurses, three MKI staff and four moms with varying degrees of volunteering skills and experiences. Seriously, I thought that I would be burping kids and singing songs and rolling around on the floor with them.

-Heroes-

I didn't realize that I would end up in  the operating theater filming the surgeries without passing out or throwing up for hours on end. On another more profound level, I was scared at what my reaction might be to these kids with special needs. Could I connect with them? Would they interact with me?  I, and most everyone of my friends have been blessed with healthy kids (knock on wood) who have no reallyapparent physical disabilities. I've seen kids with disabilities, we all have, but in the past I would be careful not to stare. I'd shoot a quick glance and avert my gaze. Aware but detached. And I know this reads horribly but the truth is I really hadn't spent any quantifiable time trying to get to know anyone and I had no clue about how to behave.

All of this changed over the course of a lightening emotion-in check packed week. I met three kids in particular who touched me profoundly, whose personalities bore a hole into my heart and whose faces and laughter remain there since I had to say goodbye.  This isn't to say that there weren't other babies and toddlers I had to get a daily hug or snuggle with - like Seth who we all fought over to hold and carry and who came off the train from Xian late in the week with a travel buddy who was in dire need of life-saving surgery, or Theo, a little boy who would never walk, who scooted around the room following me and insisting that I carry on with him.

-Seth-

Seth's travel buddy recovering from surgery.

-Theo-

Three little girls: Jaelynn, Jessica and Fallon are the ones whose faces still shine bright when I close my eyes. All any of these children wanted was to be seen and to be heard and to be understood for who they were and not what their bodies were misleading. I'm embarrassed to say that it really wasn't hard at all to get down on the floor and hold their hands and laugh and play. These little ambassadors made me realize that I could have the emotional strength to parent a special needs' child. And don't think that I didn't come home wanting to fast-track them into my life, permanently. The reality is that I just can't right now. I have to get back on my feet and help provide for the two kids that make up the rest of my heart and soul and unless the adoption laws change in China soon, I would have to be married for five years at least and, oh yeah, this future imaginary husband would have to also want to do the same and,oh yeah, I am not so sure that I want to ever walk down that road again. Certainly not after having a taste of what having taking control of the remote like. I'm selfish that way.

-Jaelynn-

-Jessica-

-Fallon-

The only alternative I have in the short run is to become an advocate for two of these girls (see blog links below.)  So if you read posts on the Chinese family groups advocating for a girl with spinabifida or another one with CP, you will know that it comes from yours truly.

Also, part of my other tasks as an MKI volunteer was to blog about our experiences. We did this by sending an email to the PR person in L.A. who then transcribed/edited and posted them into the blog. The links are posted below. I am trying not to repeat myself, which I find almost impossible but in any case, the links also give you access to some of the pictures that I took and sent off. Some of which may also be repeated in this post.

You lose a sense of time when you are present and involved, but time did in deed move forward and at the end of the week, thanks to Mending Kids and the surgeons, doctors and nurses of Cedars Sinai, Los Angeles,  eleven surgeries had been performed (10 boys, 1 girl) and all those children will now become eligible for adoption and hopefully be matched to families somewhere in the world, soon.

Impressions

unexpected visitors

How do you say goodbye?

Is onto the next mission...

My new Facebook ID

Gifts

Six years ago tomorrow, I was on a cruise in Italy with EM. It was like a second honeymoon. We new that we wouldn't have too many more opportunities to have one on one time like this because Makena would be arriving within the year, we hoped.  We had stopped off in Coullioure, France, for the day - which also happened to be my birthday. And as we were tripping around town, hopping in and out of galleries, I came across a small finger puppet. I bought it as a future present for her, wondering if my daughter, who had floated in and out of my dreams for so long, was even born.  Little did I know that likely around the same time I was buying this gift,  a good samaritan had come across her in the middle of the night and was taking her to a police station. She was a week old. It was November 4 in France and November 5 in China.  She was the best present of all and it would be ten months before I would be able to hold her in my arms.

(Add placed in the paper announcing that Makena had been found.)

Tonight (in celebration of hitting my mid-century mark)  I will be boarding a flight to China as part of a volunteer group (for Mending Kids International) traveling to an orphanage in Luoyang, China. A team of surgeons from Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles will be performing about a dozen surgeries on young orphans to make them adoptable. I will be the trip documentarian and I will be recording the mission for them. It probably means stepping into an operating theater (and praying that my Grey's Anatomy exposure has prepared me) and spending time with some young patients in palliative care, and living and playing with a whole slew of young children.

When the mission ends in a week or so, I will travel onto Chongqing and meet a Chinese friend of mine who will take me by train to Qianjiang. The sole purpose of this part of my birthday trip is to get to Makena's finding place and take a picture and leave a poster letting whoever know that she was found, that she is an amazing little girl, and that she is thriving with her new family in the US. I'll also leave an email to contact us with any information. A message in a bottle, so to speak. (And, yes, it will all be written in Mandarin.)

The chances of me meeting her Foster Mother are slim to none, but I will try in any case. Then, I will travel out to the country side to the Tujia hill tribe villages where she is most likely from, gather a spoonful of dirt, and make the trek home with some great photographs and some lasting memories that I will eventually share with her when the time is right.


Is - on a mission.