All Tourists Must Be Satisfied With All

I just had the most bizaare little encounter. It was about 6:00 p.m. and I was passed out in the hotel bed in the dark, thanks to the generosity of my husband and Mary and Paul, who took the girls grocery shopping and allowed me to have a cup of a coffee, a whisper of solitude, and a bit of a lie-down before dinner. I felt a little guilty accepting something none of them have had, but then recalled that each of them has had a smile or hug from their daughter to compensate for their own exhaustion (suddenly a Jewish mother joke comes to mind: Jewish Son: "Ma, how are you doing?" Jewish Mother: "Terrible. I haven't eaten in 38 days." Jewish Son: "Ma! How come you haven't eaten in 38 days?" Jewish Mother: "Because I didn't want my mouth should be full if you had had called.") Anyway, I was suddenly awakened by a petite young woman in a uniform standing above the bed saying "Excuse me, we knocked but there was no answer." "Wha...?" I replied, not even sure who I was, let alone who she was. She scampered from the room and I heard her whispering to someone right outside. I stumbled out of bed, pulling on some clothes, and threw open the door. She was standing there, with another woman, next to a cart. "Yes?" I whispered. "We are here to clean your room." Clean my room? Was it tomorrow already? What had become of David, and of our squalling baby? It was strangely quiet, except in my skull, where Lollapalooza China was happening. "Our room is clean?" I asked more than stated. "We must do it again, for the evening." "Why?" I was almost crying. Why must they torment me? I kept craning back into the room, looking for clues to explain this mystery. Readers, I believe I stood outside the door for a full five minutes, with my bed head and eyes like puffy slits, repeating, "Now?" and "Why?" to the ladies' increasing consternation. I'm not sure I ever sorted out the situation, but eventually I thanked them and shut the door, and they went off saying "We can come back later."

Now David and the gang are back and I'm awake but not really here. Everything is far away and foggy; I can hear sounds but don't really comprehend them. David says that they had to beat a hasty retreat because Jarrah had a meltdown in the market. Well, that sounds in keeping with my version of reality, anyway. I attempted to pick her up just now as she sobbed in the stroller and she fought me quite impressively, with both fists. Ah, motherhood and its heartwarming moments. We're a regular Madonna and Child.

It's later now and we just had a long play session out in the hall with some of the other babies and a few parents and I actually got to see Jarrah's front teeth for the first time, she was laughing so hard about this partially deflated beach ball someone brought. She also fell in love with her squishy bath-time soft book (Thanks, Kandra!) and happily turned and/or chewed the pages for quite some time. I am pleased to be getting another avid reader in the family.

Today was even worse for what is known in adoption circles as "Velcro bonding" between Jarrah and David. We had a nice interlude this morning while David showered and I watched her alternately chew her biter biscuit on a plastic sheet on the bed (damn, those things make a mess!) and smash her stacking cups against each other. But that was the last time I was able to get near her today. She insisted on David feeding her at meals, sitting on his lap on the bus (and if so much as one of her toes landed on my leg she made her trademark "em, em, em" sound) and being carried by him at regular intervals. I got the grunt work like diaper assists, making bottles (this evening she wouldn't even let me give her one--that was a first), cleaning up messes and lugging her stuff. I want to say this is not very rewarding but even in my outcast status there are moments when she is so adorable it's worth it. Notice I said moments, though. ;) At one point this morning she picked up a Veggie puff with each hand and smashed them together like tiny cymbals. And once David was absent-mindedly holding some yuan to pay our bus driver and she leaned over to lick the bills. She has also begun shaking her head or nodding in response to questions about food--pretty sharp for a 1-year-old who until three days ago only heard Mandarin.

Today was another crazy-tiring day. Tomorrow we have a much lighter schedule--no 9:30 call time, so we can sleep in or at least not rush to breakfast. Tomorrow evening we have a group lobby picture, and then packing, and Saturday we have another 6:30 wake-up call for the airport. I am consistently amazed at the thoroughness of our CCAI staff. Not only will Marie et al. handle all our luggage, passports and tickets so we don't even have to check in, but she has some kind of insider connections to get the airline to look the other way about our overweight baggage. Today she and Anita presented us with framed Chinese brush paintings of all the baby's names in the Chongqing lettering style, and tonight she and Anita are translating all of our documents from the orphanage so we can have those records. Marie was so gentle with us today on our chartered van trip to the "founding sites;" we went to two places since another family's baby was found not far from Jarrah. Neither location had been recorded accurately so we only had a general idea of where the babies were found. The first stop was a sort of recreation park; we only saw the entrance and a street of shops where we loitered while the other family went to have some private time. But then our location was ridiculous; it seemed to be a busy traffic roundabout with buses hurtling by at breakneck speeds; the roadside had no sidewalk and was covered in ankle-deep mud and circled by stray dogs.
There were a couple shops and vegetable stands and some falling-down buildings and a general air of extreme poverty. Marie pointed out a few restaurants (Jarrah was supposedly found near a restaurant) but we had no idea which one so it wasn't very profound. I thought the visit would feel meaningful or maybe even very sad but instead it felt absurd. There was David carrying our cute baby while people stared open-mouthed and me snapping photos of rotting vegetables and traffic signs while Marie followed us and showed where we could buy a souvenir in a grocery kiosk. "You could get a torch, or an umbrella..." she pointed out, and I added, "...or a pack of sanitary napkins." I felt a little like an idiot. We ended up getting a little umbrella and a pink ballpoint pen, but the items have very little meaning for Jarrah except that they were purchased somewhere within a few blocks of where she was discovered.

Tonight, though, in my naked tiredness, I burst into gulping sobs when Marie gave us our official paperwork for Guangzhou and included a copy of the "finding ad," organized by the orphanage to advertise the discovery of abandoned babies. The page she gave us showed a series of mug shots, looking a little bit like my sixth grade year book, but of Martian-headed babies (bad photocopying) all in rows. It reminded me of nothing so much as the full-page ads for the Humane Society featuring the dogs and cats of the week, with their photo, name and a little blurb like "Max would love to throw a ball with you." Marie had translated the blurb under Ruo-Ruo's picture as follows: "She was found with a red coat, a peck (sic) of formula, and a bottle." I couldn't get over this little sentence. It felt so personal. I cried to David and Mary and Paul, "And what did they think she was going to do with the formula?" But David gently explained that the formula was to help whoever found her. Oh.



So the founding trip took all afternoon and this morning the whole group took the bus to Chongqing Old Town, which was kind of like a village of shops, some of which sold silk items similar to what we'd seen in Hong Kong, and some that sold wacky foods like bricks of tofu as big as those fake cheese wheels in Italian restaurants and very long sticks of meat. The entire area was suffused in a collage of smells that made me want to hurl. And the cobblestones, slick with mud, made pushing the stroller almost impossible. Again, if I hesitated even for a second, Jarrah was surrounded by people who reached out to touch and squeeze her. I enjoyed our stroll for part of the time but was more than ready to get back on the bus when the time came. I fell asleep on the way back and jumped out of my skin when David put a hand on my shoulder when we reached the hotel.

All of your comments have been so thoughtful and really have helped me put this experience into perspective. In fact, they are my main source of sanity right now (David, Mary and Paul are right up there, too) because this trip is exhausting because of the parenting stuff, surreal because of the China stuff, and devastating because of the rejection stuff, and I think I'm actually not able to process all of those issues at once and am sort of in an emotional shut-down mode. I feel kind of numb. I know that other people's China blogs are very cheery and sweet and believe me, we've had some moments of a lifetime. But I really do think that being persona non grata is even weirder than it is sad. I just feel kind of superfluous. I understand intellectually that I'm very important (after all, I'm the U.S. citizen and hence the only one who can sign the American paperwork for her!) but right now she has very immediate and very primal needs and she is getting them met by someone who is doing an excellent job and she knows it. Mary and Paul have encouraged me to really persist; for instance, force David to go on a walk and just keep playing with, feeding and smiling at Jarrah until she gives in. But I keep having this feeling like I don't want to bother her; it's just easier to help David so he can do it. I'm not sure if it's worrisome that I'm just too tired to see the situation as a struggle or a battle of wills. It's like I've waved my little white flag. Or, if this were "Survivor," I've climbed down from my post and taken a seat on the bench, along with the others who couldn't outwit, outlast or outplay.

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