China Ghosts

by Jeff Gammage

  “Wo ai ni,” I say. “Wo ai ni.” I love you.

  Jin Yu glances first at me, then at Christine. Perhaps my pronunciation is poor. Perhaps she has never heard that phrase. Perhaps love is a word that has little use or meaning in a crowded orphanage.

  Since the day the first photographs of Jin Yu arrived at our house, we have been studying every detail of her appearance. In one picture she is posed astride a green plastic rocking horse, refusing to look at the camera. She is dressed in four layers of clothes, including a new-looking blue plaid jacket. In another shot she is standing in a slatted, wooden box, a sort of undersized pen, big enough for her to stand and turn, too small for her to sit and play. Her mouth is open in a half-cry, her hand reaching out toward the camera, reaching out toward us.

  Those photos were copied and printed and posted all over our house—on the refrigerator, on the dining room table, on the nightstand. For five weeks, while we waited to get government permission to travel, Jin Yu’s picture was the last thing we saw at night and the first thing we saw in the morning. Her personality—or rather, our speculation about the makeup of her personality—became our sole topic of conversation.

  Now, we’re shocked to meet her. Seeing her in person is like bumping into your favorite movie star on the street—you’re momentarily startled to find that they exist in three dimensions, that they are more than an image flickering across a theater screen or a photograph in a magazine. More than a picture taped to a refrigerator door.

  Jin Yu is short, smaller than she looked in her photos. Her legs are sticks. Her hair is thin. And coarse. She has a nick under her left eye, a scratch on her chin, and a mark on her forehead.

  She is beautiful.

  She’s wearing a fresh-from-the-package polyester shorts suit, white with green and yellow trim. On the front of the shirt a cartoon rabbit is fishing in an imaginary river, using a carrot for bait. Spotless white socks reach to Jin Yu’s knees. I wonder if she has ever worn new clothes before. And I wonder how much, if anything, she has been told about who we are or what will happen today.

  I offer Jin Yu a stuffed toy rabbit. She stares at it, unmoving. I press it into her hand.

  “Jin Yu,” Mary calls to her from behind. “Mama, Baba!” Mommy, Daddy!

  Mary leans down and tells her in Chinese, “These are your parents.” At that, Jin Yu slowly turns her head, looking over her shoulder to fix Mary with a stare. If this two-year-old could have spoken English, “You have got to be kidding me” would have been her first words.

  Instead, Jin Yu says nothing at all. She turns back toward us wordlessly, uncertain why these two peculiar-looking people are crowding so close, so intent on making her acquaintance, on becoming her friends.

  If I could only explain to her. If she could only understand. I’m so excited I practically want to shout: You are real! You are here! You are ours, our baby, our child, our girl. We have wanted you so much, waited for you so long, wished for you so hard.

  Later, when I see a videotape of this moment, footage shot by another parent, I will be stunned to realize that other people were all around, behind Jin Yu in the hotel room and behind Christine and me in the hall. Until then, had I been called to court and seated on the witness stand, I would have sworn the three of us were alone.

  On that tape I will see that all the children were wearing nearly identical new outfits, each bearing the same image of the same smiling rabbit, gone fishing with the same orange carrot. And I will see that in her final minutes as a ward of the orphanage, in those last moments before her life changed forever, Jin Yu chose to stand off by herself, apart from the other girls.

  “TURN AROUND,” someone calls.

  What?

  “Turn around!”

  I have a dim awareness of sounds and people, a sense of returning to consciousness, as if the volume was being turned up on a television in the next room.

  Behind us, in the hallway, a party has broken out.

  “Turn around for everyone!” Mary says.

  Christine and I are still crouched on our knees. We shift awkwardly to either side, centering Jin Yu between us. Cameras flash. We blink in the lights. Mary raises her arms to quarter-angles, enveloping the three of us as she addresses the group: “This is She Jin Yu.”

  Her words are a benediction, spoken with the same assurance and satisfied formality a preacher might use to declare, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

  And like newlyweds at the altar, we’re not quite sure of the script.

  “Okay?” Christine asks of no one in particular. “We can go?”

  Not only can we go, but hands on our backs and shoulders are gently steering us out the door, making way for the next set of about-to-be parents. I lift Jin Yu up and into Christine’s arms.

  The whole thing is over in less than a minute.

  We move away from the crowd, finding an open space near a stairwell to pose for photos. We are now parents, the titular heads of a new and different entity, no longer just a couple but a family. Others in the group approach us as they wait for their names to be called, touching Jin Yu on her arms, her hands, her face.

  It’s as if she is holy.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” one woman says, unable to take her eyes from our child.

  Jin Yu doesn’t acknowledge the attention.

  Through months of waiting, as the machinery of Chinese adoption shifted down, decelerating from swift to slow to stalled, it seemed impossible that this moment would come, that the government of a country we’d never seen would trust us to be the parents of a child we’d never met. Even as we boarded a plane for Beijing, it seemed impossible to believe that somewhere in southern China, a little girl, our little girl, was waiting for us.

  Christine and I are ecstatic, beyond words, beyond description. Christine is at last a mother. And I am a father. But we try to imagine ourselves in Jin Yu’s place. And it feels miserable.

  A couple of hours ago, this child was put aboard a bus for the trip from the orphanage to the hotel. It may well have been her first ride in a motor vehicle. It was surely one of the very few times she was outside the orphanage grounds. But at least during that hour-long drive, and then in the confines of the hotel room, she was surrounded by familiar faces, by the other girls from Xiangtan and by nannies and administrators she knew and recognized.

  Now, in the stifling hallway of a strange building, she has only us.

  But Jin Yu doesn’t cry. She doesn’t flail or try to push us away. Though we’ve been told she can talk, she says not a word. Though we’ve been told she can walk, she wobbles when we place her on her feet.

  A second child emerges from Mary’s room, and unlike Jin Yu this girl is fighting her new mom with all the fury a two-year-old can muster.

  It’s only a prelude.

  The next child is sobbing, the next screaming as she flings her head backward, trying to wrest herself away. One child wets herself, soaking her pants and the carpet. The hallway is becoming chaotic, the children’s shrieks echoing off the walls.

  And that’s good.

  The child development experts say that this sort of resistance, while distressing to the adoptive parents, is actually a positive sign. The children’s tears and anger show that they successfully formed emotional attachments to the people who cared for them at the orphanage, that they possess the ability to bond and so can form new attachments to their parents.

  As new moms and dads clamber past us toward the elevator, straining to keep hold of howling, thrashing little girls, Jin Yu’s silence seems very loud.

  WE SIT our new daughter at the foot of our hotel room bed, kneeling on the carpet so we can see her eye to eye.

  Her most prominent feature is her frown. She looks like someone who’s been kidnapped. Or rather, she looks like someone who was kidnapped a long, long time ago, and who has given up any hope of freedom.

  All we want to do is to grab this child and pull her close, to hold her thin body against ours, to bury our fa
ces in her hair and weep upon her, to spill out the story, the legend, of how we have longed for her arrival. We want to cry out our declarations of love, our vows of unending devotion, our promises of loyalty and commitment.

  And, of course, we don’t dare.

  Jin Yu has had enough turmoil for one day. She doesn’t need us to add to it.

  “Bunny, bunny, bunny,” I say, dancing the stuffed toy across Jin Yu’s hand and knees.

  I expect her to grab for the rabbit. Instead, Jin Yu mechanically retracts her hand to her chest. She keeps it there, the pose of a silent-film actress attempting to convey that she feels a little faint.

  Christine puts her palm against Jin Yu’s forehead. Our new daughter neither recoils nor welcomes the touch. Her nose is running, but she doesn’t seem to have a fever.

  A child begins to wail in another room. Jin Yu turns her head toward the sound. Perhaps it’s someone she knows.

  Christine strokes Jin Yu’s arm. I rub her shoulder. She looks positively forlorn. We offer her a sippy cup.

  “Shui? Shui?” I ask. Water?

  No response.

  The new parents have been told to examine their daughters from head to toe, to check for any rash or bruise, any sign of injury or illness. Christine and I pull off Jin Yu’s socks, then her shirt, laying her on her back on the bed. We slip off her pants. Surely now she will rebel, fight back against this indignity. Jin Yu stares at the ceiling. We roll her over onto her stomach. A large Mongolian spot, a type of Asian birthmark, covers her lower torso, a pale purple shadow reaching from hip to hip. Jin Yu doesn’t try to sit up or change position, doesn’t fuss as we put her clothes back on, pushing her arms through the sleeves.

  It’s like she’s made of clay. She stays as we pose her.

  We have had our daughter for thirty minutes, and already it is plain that this will not be the blissful, tearstained joining of our imagination. Neither Christine nor I says it out loud, but both of us are worried that something is wrong with our child.

  We have read plenty about Chinese adoptions. We know that while many children react to the trauma of separation by acting out, some may respond by shutting down. Instead of screaming or crying or fighting, they turn inward, withdrawing from the world.

  But the descriptions we’ve read in books and magazines don’t match what we’re seeing now.

  It’s not that Jin Yu is submissive. It’s that she has no reaction at all. To anything. Her only movement is an occasional, vague shrug of her shoulders, a slight shifting motion made in response to some invisible, personal stimulus.

  “I’m going to get on the floor, so she can sort of move on her own,” Christine says, sliding carefully off the bed with our daughter on her lap.

  Jin Yu sits there, motionless. A minute later, her head droops, her chin coming to rest on her chest.

  “Are you not feeling well?” Christine asks softly.

  We are trying to be light, to will this situation well, or at least better, to force some glint of cheer into the dread we are feeling.

  Jin Yu tries to stand and nearly falls down.

  We don’t know what to do.

  Christine holds our child, stroking her hair and quietly telling her that everything is all right. That we love her. That we are here for her. That she will be fine.

  “Oh my goodness,” Christine says, her voice sharp, her eyes on Jin Yu’s head. “She’s got a scar. Oh my God.”

  I brush Jin Yu’s hair aside. What I see there is not a scar. A scar is a thin line across the surface of the skin, a faded remnant of some careful medical intervention. The left side of Jin Yu’s head is not scarred, it’s wrecked. A sunburst of ruined skin blooms behind her ear, the starting point of a ragged, four-inch gouge that snakes toward her temple, ending in a flap of thick, discolored flesh.

  I get down on all fours and stare into her eyes.

  “Are you okay, Jin Yu?” I ask, trying not to let the panic that’s rising in my chest seep into my voice, forgetting that she can’t understand a word I’m saying. “Did something happen to your head?”

  She stares blankly.

  Several realities begin to sink in, none of them good: Our child could be seriously injured. Maybe even brain-damaged. Our family doctor is on the other side of the earth. Here, in a nation of 1.3 billion people, we don’t know a soul.

  I am suddenly aware of the silence that has crept into the room. And how the cold breeze from the air-conditioner is flowing across my shoulder blades. I notice the early evening sun streaming unevenly through the windows, illuminating flecks of dust that float in the light. And how the room’s blue carpeting hasn’t been vacuumed in weeks, crumbs and dirt ground into its ridges.

  Poised there, on my hands and knees on the twenty-third floor of a skyscraper hotel in downtown Changsha, I feel like I am falling.

  WE HAVE to stay calm. Think clearly. Follow the steps that knowledgeable, experienced parents would take in this situation.

  Except we don’t know what those might be. Because that is not who we are. And because, for all we have read on adoption and child-rearing, we’ve never come across a chapter that outlines what to do if your child should arrive nearly inert, bearing evidence of a head injury.

  Christine and I carefully run our hands through Jin Yu’s hair and across her scalp. We can detect no obvious damage to her skull beneath the scar, no mass of rutted or malformed bone. Christine, who holds a doctorate in school psychology, her thesis written on facial deformities in children, puts Jin Yu through a number of basic-skills tests, checking her hearing, her reflexes, the track of her eyes. Despite our daughter’s stupor, her motor functions seem sound.

  All the new families are due at a meeting in Mary’s room, to fill out paperwork for the Chinese authorities. Christine and I get there early and sit quietly, completing the forms. Jin Yu sits on the lap of her new mother, oblivious. We linger as the meeting breaks up, waiting until the last smiling parent bops out the door, so we can be alone with our guide. Mary must have wondered what we were doing there, hanging around her room after so long and emotional a day.

  “Mary,” I say, keeping my voice level, nodding toward the girl in Christine’s arms, “our baby has a scar on her head and we’re concerned.”

  Mary doesn’t answer, but leads us to a lamp near her dresser, where she parts Jin Yu’s hair with her fingers. She lets out a breath.

  “In here,” Mary says, pointing. The four of us crowd into the tiny bathroom, which happens to have the brightest and most direct light in the room. Mary positions Jin Yu under a ceiling lamp, and in the glare we can see that the scar on our child’s head is longer and deeper than we’d realized. The wound is dirty. It’s oozing, wet and blistery. It looks infected. I can smell it from a foot away. It smells like feces, harsh and malodorous.

  Still, standing there with my wife and new daughter, squeezed into somebody else’s hotel bathroom, I hold to a strand of hope that, somehow, this will all turn out to be nothing. That in a minute Mary will pat us on the back, don the indulgent smile she reserves for inexperienced, first-time parents, and send us on our way with a patronizing, “There, there, not a thing to worry about.” I hope she may even scold us, for creating undue melodrama, for troubling her with something so small. I hope she will say she has seen lots of children with this condition, and every one of those kids turned out to be fine.

  Mary does not say any of these things. She says, “We need a doctor.”

  She pulls out her cell phone and dials the Xiangtan orphanage—itself disconcerting, another sign for alarm. Despite the lateness of the hour, despite the fact that it’s a Sunday, despite the weariness that engulfs us all, our guide, who has seen dozens if not hundreds of children in varying degrees of health, believes this is something that cannot wait.

  I can hear the phone ringing on the other end of the line. An orphanage administrator comes on. The ensuing conversation is loud. That’s okay. I know that when people speak in Mandarin, the rising and falling tones can
make the discourse sound clipped and cold. It’s easy to think people are arguing when they’re not. Besides, I don’t speak Chinese. I have no idea what Mary is saying or what she is being told.

  I know that when the call ends and Mary hangs up, she’s not looking at us.

  I wait for her to provide a rundown of the information she’s obtained from the orphanage, to summarize the explanation of Jin Yu’s injury, to describe the medical care our child has undergone to date, the plan for new treatment, the efforts that will be made to assure us, her parents, that our baby will be okay.

  I wait for her to say that, despite the evidence to the contrary, this is not a crisis.

  But Mary says nothing. Instead, she returns to examining the side of Jin Yu’s head. Nearly a minute passes before I realize she is not going to speak.

  “What did he say?” I ask.

  Mary pauses.

  “He says it’s a scratch.”

  The room feels newly tight, without oxygen. I realize I have sat down on the edge of the bathtub. And that I need to think very carefully about my next words, because a lot could hinge on them.

  “It’s not a scratch,” I say.

  “No,” Mary answers. “It’s not a scratch.”

  She says she will begin making calls tonight, to try to find a physician who can help.

  Christine cradles our baby, rocking her gently, whispering to her. Jin Yu, detached from the concern that swirls around her, seems to be staring at a patch of wall somewhere above the bathroom mirror.

  Sitting there, on the side of the bathtub, the four of us crammed into this small, too brightly lit bathroom, I am seized by a vision. It is not an illusion. Or a hallucination. It is a fact, as certain as my own existence. It is what is going to happen, the future foretold.

  I see this girl living out the years of her life between the fixed metal rails of a hospital bed. I see her body limp and mostly useless, her eyes open but unseeing. I see Christine and me aged beyond our years, gray in looks and spirit, worn out by the around-the-clock demands of caring for a profoundly disabled child. I see all the eagerly awaited milestones of our daughter’s childhood—birthday cakes and bicycles, puppies and proms—fading to black. I see Jin Yu’s contemporaries grown to high school age, swinging hockey sticks on a grass field, belting out torch songs in the senior play, gossiping about boys, clothes, and colleges, all of them unaware that in a quiet bedroom of my home lies a girl just their age, a girl largely unaware of the world around her, a girl who also deserved to enjoy the rites and passages of a typical suburban adolescence.