China Ghosts

by Jeff Gammage

  It looked like we were that couple.

  Our travelmates, barely acquaintances, offered suggestions. Did we want to try to phone a physician in the United States? Maybe we could take a digital picture, showing the damage on the side of Jin Yu’s head, and e-mail it to a doctor back home? Perhaps we could send a written summary by fax? We thought about it. But besides the discouraging logistics of international time zones and local doctors’ hours, what could we say to a physician? We only knew what we saw. And what could an American doctor do to help, from the other side of the world, on the basis of a photo or a few paragraphs of type?

  Moreover, we had become apprehensive about our interactions with the local Chinese officials.

  No one in authority said, “We will get you a different baby.” Or, “This child is injured, you don’t have to take her.” Or, “You should make an exchange.”

  Not in those words.

  What they said was, “Remember, this is forever.” And, “You must be sure.” And, “This is for all time.”

  It made us uneasy. Made us concerned that somehow, despite years of effort to get here, to hold our child close, the Chinese government perceived us as somehow unready or unwilling. To us the family equation was simple: Jin Yu was now our daughter. We were now her parents. We would tend to one another as best we could.

  Christine and I were torn between need and apprehension, wanting our daughter to be seen by a physician, fearful that if she was, people in Chinese officialdom could infer that we wanted to trade children. We worried we would inadvertently send some signal that we wanted a different, provably healthy child, that we could set in motion events that held terrible, unforeseen consequences.

  Mary was waiting for us in the lobby when we returned to the hotel. She told us to come to her room immediately—a doctor would be meeting us there to examine Jin Yu.

  We asked Mary to please make our apologies. We had decided against seeing a physician.

  She insisted we come to her room.

  The doctor will be arriving any minute, she said. It was too late to cancel. And, Mary said, she had consulted by phone with a second doctor, one who frequently treats children at local orphanages and knows about the illnesses that breed there. She needed to tell us about that conversation, about what it might mean for our baby. We had to come and see the doctor. Now.

  “Mary,” I said, “you understand that Jin Yu is our daughter, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand she’s going home with us, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Mary resumed her argument. A doctor might be able to explain what was wrong. A Chinese doctor might recognize a condition that an American doctor might not. If Jin Yu needed medical treatment, it could start here. It could start today.

  Mary’s reasoning made sense. And she had worn us down with her persistence. We told her we would meet her upstairs.

  Ten minutes later, we walked into her room, the mundane duplicate of our own. The doctor was already there, a woman, perhaps in her fifties, her black hair beginning to gray and pulled back in a bun. She wore a white lab coat over a dark shirt and tan slacks, and sat perched on the edge of a chair on the far side of the room, near the window, in the light.

  She greeted us with a wordless smile and opened her arms to our daughter. Jin Yu stood between Christine and me, holding on to our hands, wary at the sight of another stranger. She didn’t fuss. She just stepped a little further back into her own darkness, turning slightly more blank to the world. I could imagine what she was thinking: Am I about to be handed off to someone new—again?

  We led Jin Yu forward.

  I knew nothing of the doctor’s expertise or credentials, where or if she went to medical school, or what kind of medicine she practiced. And it didn’t matter. This was China. This was the doctor. Take it or leave it.

  The woman gripped Jin Yu’s head with both hands, using her thumbs to part our girl’s hair. The scar rose up like a snake from the sea. The doctor frowned but did not recoil. She glanced up, said something to Mary in Chinese, then returned to her examination. She pulled at the edges of the scar, following its length from beginning to end. She put her nose close to our daughter’s head, taking a deep sniff. Then she took Jin Yu’s little hands in hers, edging our daughter forward until their noses were six inches apart. The doctor stared hard into Jin Yu’s face, watching our daughter’s eye movements. After a minute, the doctor let go, combing Jin Yu’s hair back into place with her hand.

  That was it. The examination was over.

  The doctor—she was never introduced by name—leaned forward in her chair and began talking to Mary, who nodded at every other sentence. The conversation went on for five minutes, a long time for parents to sit by, unable to understand, as the state of their child’s health is evaluated. Finally the doctor reached into her black bag and pulled out two tiny jars. One contained a green goo, the other a white paste. She handed the jars to Mary.

  With that, the doctor stood up, cradled Jin Yu’s cheek in her hand, and gathered her bag to leave. The fee was twenty yuan—about $2.50. I paid her from the loose change in my pocket.

  The hotel room door clicked shut behind her.

  Plainly, at that moment, whatever this doctor had determined or diagnosed, whatever our daughter’s prognosis for the future, we were about to be told that we would have to live with it. That it was unchangeable. The doctor could have called for an ambulance, summoned a specialist, directed us to a hospital, referred us to an international clinic.

  She didn’t. She looked at our daughter for ten minutes and walked out.

  “Well?” I snapped at Mary, my patience past thin.

  “Okay,” Mary said. She exhaled, then began:

  The doctor does not think the scar on Jin Yu’s head came from a cut, a fall, a blow, or any sort of sudden, external event or collision. She does not think the scar represents the outward evidence of internal damage. She does not think the scar is the result of any sort of medical operation or procedure. In fact, she does not think the scar is a scar at all. Not in the truest sense of the word.

  She said: Imagine summer in a Hunan orphanage. The temperature soars into the nineties. And stays there. Monsoon rains add to the stifling humidity. Puddles and ponds form across the countryside, the breeding grounds for millions of flies and mosquitoes. The orphanage has little air-conditioning. Doors and windows are propped open to catch whatever breeze might pass by.

  Now, imagine that a girl in the orphanage gets bitten by an insect. Her skin puffs up in an itchy welt. The child, perhaps a few months old, maybe a year, scratches at the welt, tearing it open. The welt becomes a raw, weepy wound—and even more uncomfortable.

  The child sweats in the heat. Her hands are dirty. The more the wound itches and burns, the more she digs at it. The gash on her head becomes polluted with grime and germs. If the child has been scratching her bottom, as children tend to do, then her hand becomes a carrier of fecal matter, which is introduced to the open sore. At that point, the chance of infection moves from probability to certainty.

  If the wound is left untreated, the skin begins to blister. The sacs fill with pus and blood. They stretch, burst, heal partially, then erupt again. The cycle repeats and repeats. If the child is lucky, she gets medical attention and the infection eventually subsides. When the wound on her head finally heals, the result is a landscape of ruined skin—that looks like a scar.

  Mary said: The doctor believes this is what happened to Jin Yu. The other doctor, who I spoke to on the phone, thinks the same thing. Both doctors say that in the orphanages, this kind of injury is unusual, but not unheard of. Both have come across it before.

  Mary looked at me, awaiting an answer, but for once I had nothing to say. It was not as if I’d raised this child from birth, as if I knew something or anything about her past. I couldn’t contradict or confirm any part of the doctors’ opinions, or even suggest alternative possibilities.

  Two doctors think Jin Y
u managed to turn a mosquito bite into a raging infection? And that the infection turned the side of my daughter’s head into a moonscape?

  If that was what happened, the explanation didn’t make me feel better. In fact it was horrifying.

  Could an infection on the outside of a child’s head injure her brain? Could it hurt the child’s coordination and speech? Her hearing? Could it leave a little girl, my little girl, alive and conscious but largely cut off from the world?

  Jin Yu’s wound would have been noticeable to anyone who so much as glanced at her. But no one called a doctor? Or took her to a clinic? Her head must have been oozing blood and pus for weeks. She must have been in terrible pain. She must have cried out. And the people responsible for her care were either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

  Standing there, I was so angry I didn’t even know how to respond.

  It was Mary who finally broke the silence. Coat Jin Yu’s wound with these, she said, holding out the little tubs of medicine. Alternate green and white. It will help heal the lesion and prevent reinfection.

  I took the jars from her hand and slipped them into my pocket.

  JIN YU has stopped screaming. She no longer has the strength. Her sobs croak in her throat as she goes hoarse.

  Christine carries Jin Yu across the room, turns at the wall, walks our girl back, then turns at the window and covers the same eight steps again. She pauses in this back-and-forth journey only to try to distract Jin Yu with toys and stuffed animals. It doesn’t work. Our girl does not want toys. Or food or water or blankets or rest.

  I take a turn holding Jin Yu. We trade back. And back again.

  I wish Jin Yu would stop crying. My legs ache. I’m tired. But more than that, I can’t bear her sadness. I can’t bear that Jin Yu is in pain and I can do nothing to stop it. I can’t stand that I, the person newly entrusted with her care and placed in charge of her well-being, am failing at the job—and failing so soon, and so spectacularly.

  Jin Yu raises her head and gazes at me, not seeing. She looks at me the way you stare through a stranger on the street. Her eyes are red, her long black lashes stuck together with drops of tears.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her, as she chokes out another sob. “Daddy’s here. Daddy’s here.”

  As if she understands English. As if she knows what a daddy is.

  I’m not sure what time it is. I know it’s late.

  This is not how I envisioned this night, our time together, our trip to China. I thought our joining as parents and daughter would be, not easy, but not wounding either. I thought the children would be a little underweight, but basically fit. I thought our girl would shed a tear but not an ocean. I thought I would feel happy—that this union was a good thing, for her, for us, for China and America, for anyone in either land willing to take a chance on leading a different life.

  Tonight, holding Jin Yu, I am learning that real children are not the freckled imps of television sitcoms who cease their tears the moment their mommies pick them up, just in time for the commercial break. Real children come to you with ravaged bodies and broken hearts. And when they weep out their sadness, their faces streak with snot and wetness, and drool soaks their shirts. They pee in their pants and on you.

  I imagine myself walking until dawn, back and forth across the dirty rug of this hotel room. This morning’s visit to the orphanage feels like it was weeks ago. It seems Jin Yu’s tears will never end—and then they do.

  Jin Yu pulls in a deep breath. I brace for her to croak it out. Instead, her breath comes out in a long, slow exhale, like air escaping from a punctured tire. Her head flops against my chest. Her breathing steadies.

  It takes me a minute to realize she’s asleep.

  I stand there, unmoving, for another five minutes, not daring to risk waking her. Then I silently take three steps toward her crib, one hand supporting her back, the other her head. I bend over and lay Jin Yu down.

  It’s easy. She doesn’t weigh much.

  THE MUSIC is jarring, a loud, early-morning soundtrack that forces itself through the windows of our hotel room.

  Outside, the sky is close and dark, promising rain. Twenty-three floors below, on the stained, wrapper-strewn parking lot of an old theater, ballroom music blares from a speaker system, setting to movement a hundred spinning ballroom dancers. In the corners of the lot, people practice Tai Chi and fan dancing, their morning exercise conducted in the gloomy dawn, a necessity in a land where time and space are at a premium.

  It takes me a moment to remember where I am. I turn my head on my pillow to glance at the clock radio. It says 6:00 A.M. My back aches. My right arm is frozen. I can’t recall where I put my glasses. I slowly roll over toward Christine. She’s awake, staring at the ceiling. Her hair is a tangle, the color gone from her face. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days.

  Jin Yu begins to stir, and Christine and I find each other’s eyes, dreading that our baby will start this day in the same state where she ended the last.

  I push myself up on my elbow. I can see Jin Yu through the mesh webbing of her crib, lying on her back. She yawns, stretching her arms out and above her head. She rolls onto her stomach, works her knees up to her chest, then reaches out with her hands and grabs hold of the top rail. She hoists herself upward, first one shaky leg, then the other.

  She peers over the top of the crib at us.

  Her eyes are bright.

  “Hi, darling,” her mom says.

  “Hi, Jin Yu,” I echo.

  Jin Yu’s response is a cracked half-smile. Her look suggests she remembers us from somewhere, she just can’t say where.

  Christine gets up, plucks Jin Yu out of her crib, and sets her down on the bed between us. Jin Yu reaches out to touch her mother’s nose—so pointed, so different from her own. She pokes and plays with her mom’s nose and cheeks for a while, then wriggles free and tries to climb down. Her feet reach uncertainly for the floor, like Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon.

  On the carpet she puts one foot forward, then follows with the other, her legs trembling. She holds her arms away from her body for balance, as if making her way across a heaving deck. Six steps later she reaches the dresser, using it like a handrail to navigate her way to the luggage rack. She finds something that interests her: an open suitcase. She investigates, pulling out a shirt. She moves on around the room in a rough semicircle, giving the TV screen a pat, tugging on the strap of our backpack, stopping to slip her feet into her mom’s shoes. She makes her way to the phone, where she takes the receiver from its cradle and puts it to her ear, listening to the hum of the dial tone.

  Jin Yu has stirred herself as if from a coma. It’s like she’s broken surface after days spent underwater. Like she has decided to come and try out life in this world, to leave behind the world of her own, internal isolation.

  She finds her way along the wall, to the full-length mirror. She stands there, studying her reflection for so long and with such intensity that I wonder if she has ever seen herself before. Christine fetches her a baggie full of Cheerios. Jin Yu willingly accepts. She manages to hold the bag, but when she reaches inside she’s unable to grasp the bits of oats, lacking in fine motor coordination.

  She lets Christine feed them to her.

  In these minutes, watching my daughter munch oat after oat, I allow myself to imagine a future restored. To imagine a life with a happy, healthy child at its center. To envision a home made messily alive by her presence, a girl aware and embracing of the love that swathes her. I let myself imagine that she and I may yet rejoice, each in discovery of the other.

  Our time here in Changsha is growing short. Today will be busy. Soon we’ll fly south to the city of Guangzhou, the site of the sole American consulate that processes paperwork for Chinese adoptions. After a week of securing clearances and approvals, we’ll fly from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, then to San Francisco, then home to Philadelphia.

  Lying there in bed, watching Jin Yu watch herself in the mirror, I th
ink about all we’ve learned and all we’ve been told, wondering how much of either is true. We were lucky to have been able to meet the orphanage director, his staff, the nannies who cared for our child. But between the language difference and the size of our travel group, we found out little that was new about our girl. The most important questions about her life and health, about the circumstances in which she was raised, remain unanswered.

  We were told that all the children at the orphanage got two baths a day—which, if accurate, given the number of children living there and the minimum time needed to wash an individual child, would mean the staff spent most of every day bathing children. We were told who among our kids was talkative and who was not. Who liked to play in a group and who preferred to be by herself. That none of the girls had ever seen battery-operated toys and might be frightened of them at first.

  We were told that our girls were born in hospitals, assisted by doctors armed with all their modern technology. Which seemed unlikely. If the Chinese parents did not have the money to pay the fines and penalties for the crime of having an “extra” child, they probably didn’t have the resources to give birth in a hospital.

  We were told that, sadly, none of the girls’ Chinese parents left farewell notes. In each case, we were told, the mother or father had put down their child and walked away without leaving so much as a last scrawled good-bye.

  That troubled me when I heard it, and it nags at me now as we prepare to depart Hunan. It seems so unlikely. Fourteen Chinese families abandon fourteen children at fourteen different places—but none leaves a note? None leaves so much as a record of their child’s date of birth? Or wants to explain the reasons that drove them to surrender their own flesh and blood? None—God help them—wants to say they’re sorry?

  Later, I will find out that this statement, that none of the children had a note on them, was at best a mistake and at worst a casual lie.

  One did.