by Jeff Gammage
Jin Yu asleep in her crib at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou
6 IN CHINA-LAND
IF CHANGSHA is the China of a history book, caught between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, a place where foreigners shop in Friendship Stores and recreation is a trip to a woodland park, then Shamian Island is its modern opposite—a small, Disney-esque China-land, where English is spoken, the dollar is king, and Pizza Hut delivery is as close as the phone.
The slender streets are lined with well-stocked, well-lit stores, many of which cater to adoptive parents. Jennifer’s Place sells children’s shoes, hats, dresses, games, fans, necklaces, kites, quilts, charms, bracelets, and shirts. It’s followed by Sherry’s Place, which is followed by Michael’s Place, followed by Benjamin’s Place, all of which sell more of the same. Several stores offer Internet access and same-day laundry service. They’ll lend you a baby stroller for free.
Shamian Island is actually not an island but a sandbank, risen from the waters of the Pearl River and penned into permanence by thick stone walls. A series of bridges links it to the rest of the city of Guangzhou. The main boulevards are bisected by an island-long park, a pleasant stroll of flower gardens, shade trees, and wooden benches. Traffic is restricted, and in the mornings the streets steam in the tropical sun, the rays visible in the mist. It’s easy to imagine that in this place, as in Camelot, it only rains at night.
The island’s fine-trimmed landscape reaches back to another century, nearly 150 years ago, when Shamian was taken at gunpoint. In 1860, as Americans embarked upon the bloodshed of the Civil War, the British claimed Shamian from the Qing, as spoils of the Second Opium War. Shamian became a foreign concession, and over time it grew to host spacious consulates and trading offices. Access to the island was guarded by gates and, supposedly, by signs that warned, “No Chinese or dogs allowed.”
For Western oilmen, insurers, and diplomats, this spit of land—half a mile long—became France, England, Australia, a place to be remade in the image of home. On block after block, impenetrable granite walls went up around roomy European courtyards.
The buildings still stand, strong and imperious. The people who built them were planning to stay.
But today the consulates and banks have been reclaimed by the Chinese, turned into apartments, offices, and military barracks. Children play in the halls, and wet laundry hangs from clotheslines strung across once-grand courts.
The only signs of the buildings’ previous use are the small brass plaques affixed to their fronts, naming the particular foreign power that laid claim to this particular piece of China. The United States does not go unmentioned. At least two buildings still serve their original functions, though now in the service of the Chinese and their guests. One is the Catholic church, built in 1890, closed during the Cultural Revolution, and since reopened. The other is the elegant Victory Hotel. It was once the Victoria, built by the British in the 1920s.
The most famous structure on the island is not a colonial compound but a hotel, and not the Victory. The White Swan is a soaring, thirty-four-floor white rectangle that overlooks the Pearl River on one side and the Banyan Gardens on the other. For tired Western travelers, the five-star White Swan is an oasis, in China but not truly of China.
Its main floor is a maze of fine shops, the wide halls the gallery for an unending array of sculptures and carvings of stone and jade and teak, all of them for sale. Above these offerings rise 744 rooms and 99 suites that open onto hallway floors washed in seas of thick green-and-rose-colored carpet, complemented by art-deco lighting and brass elevators. The lobby is an indoor microcosm of the South China farmland, all flowers and vegetation, its centerpiece a two-story waterfall that splashes into a pond brimming with dozens of foot-long goldfish.
At the White Swan, you can rent a Rolls Royce limousine to take you wherever you want to go. Or you can stay in, choosing from among half a dozen restaurants and bars. The hotel has its own beauty salon, karaoke lounge, driving range, and flower shop. It has a staff of at-the-ready babysitters.
It also has a nickname: the White Stork.
American families like to stay here for a couple of reasons. One is that despite its luxury, the White Swan is kid-friendly. The ground floor features the Swan Room, a big indoor play area strewn with dolls, push-cars, and games of every description, a toy kingdom presided over by its queen, Barbie, who reigns from behind a glass enclosure. The Swan Room is sponsored and supplied by Mattel, the toymaker, in an act of great kindness and marketing genius.
The second reason Americans stay at the White Swan has nothing to do with amenities and everything to do with location: the hotel is close to the American consulate, the only place in China authorized to process adoption paperwork and send families speeding out of the country and on their way home.
At the White Swan, on Shamian Island, in the city of Guangzhou, my wife and I found all we hadn’t found elsewhere: hamburgers, cold beer, potato chips—and a child newly able and determined to reveal herself.
CHRISTINE AND I are up early to prepare for the day, gathering documents to present to government officials and PowerBars to sustain us while we wait in line.
Jin Yu is still sleeping. Christine selects an outfit for her, clothes of light cotton, so she doesn’t swelter in the heat. She packs a sweater for our girl, in case we go inside a building that’s air-conditioned, a snack in case Jin Yu gets hungry and a sippy cup of juice for if she should thirst.
All her life Christine has wanted to be a mother. Already she is weaving a protective cocoon around her daughter.
Jin Yu awakes with a yawn, then pulls herself to standing, peeking at us from between the rails of her crib. She wants to get out and get moving. We dress her, feed her a quick snack of raisins, then take the elevator down to the main floor, strolling across the hall to a small bridge that traverses the lobby pond. Five minutes later we’re being seated at the center of the hotel’s River Garden restaurant, with its spectacular view of the Pearl River. I lift Jin Yu into a high chair and strap her in. Christine and I take our seats, staring out at the sparkles of sunlight on the water, watching the boats bob in the current.
Last week in Changsha, we filled our breakfast plates from trays of hard-boiled eggs, rice, and chicken feet. But here the morning buffet is fit to serve a head of state. Westerners come here by the thousands, and the White Swan knows what they like. Chefs prepare mounds of French toast, waffles, bacon, eggs, and potatoes. There are cereals by the boxful, fresh fruit by the bowl, juices by the pitcher.
Jin Yu wants to try it all. She devours everything we place in front of her: Scrambled eggs. Bread. Egg rolls. She drains a bottle of milk. Tries some yogurt. Burps. She has trouble grasping a spoon, so we take over feeding her—mouthful after mouthful. When her plate is empty, she utters the English word that has quickly become her favorite, its pronunciation intense and exaggerated: “Mhhhoorrrr….”
We fill her plate again. And she again eats it all, this time washing it down with juice.
In her first days with us, in a time when she met the world with a dull stare, Jin Yu seemed not to know what to do when confronted by a full plate of food. She ate what we spooned into her mouth, mostly rice and steamed eggs. Now she will not stop eating. She is developing preferences, establishing likes and dislikes. She enjoys fresh melon, especially watermelon, loves bacon and the sweeter American brands of cereal, dyed the colors of the rainbow. At first, small brown rounds of Cheerios were all she would accept from us. Now they’ve dropped toward the bottom of her personal menu, her food of choice only if nothing better is available.
Other families sit down, eat their breakfasts, and leave. Jin Yu continues to fill her belly.
She eats as if food were something new and exotic, as if the chance to eat might never come again. Eventually we have to cut her off, concerned that she’ll make herself nauseous. Jin Yu doesn’t like that a bit. She quickly stuffs a last handful of cereal into her mouth, her cheeks puffing with a
reserve to be stored and savored.
It will be months before Jin Yu comes to understand that she doesn’t have to gorge herself at every seating, that food is as near as the refrigerator, and she can have more when she wants it.
For now, she sees food as a treasure for the taking.
Of course, her body needs the nutrition. And it needs fuel to create the energy to meet the demands that are being placed upon her. Every day, Jin Yu is made to experience new sights, new activities, new sounds, new people. As far as we know, until the day she was placed in our arms, Jin Yu left the grounds of the orphanage only rarely, like the other children allowed to spend an occasional night at the home of one of the nannies. Except for that, the boundaries of her world were set by the institution’s brick and stucco walls. Now the walls have disappeared, and Jin Yu is being led across lawns and sidewalks, into offices and stores, over bridges and walk ways.
Every place holds new wonders—and new fears. Jin Yu loves the hotel waterfall. Hates the bathtub. Loves the balcony. Hates being up on my shoulders.
At night, she is worn out but too wound up to sleep. Or to let us sleep. Freshly bathed and dressed in new pajamas, she rolls and turns in her crib. Sometimes, when she’s supposed to be lying down, falling asleep, she stands up and stares at us. If we dare look back, she breaks into a big grin—and renews her efforts to stay awake.
I know a small bit of what she’s facing. My wife’s relatives are French-speaking Swiss. I speak a little of the language, but when the family is together, at day’s end I’m tired from trying to follow the conversation. At age two, still learning her native language, Jin Yu is being asked to do more—to follow along in English even as she tries to speak and understand it.
An hour after we sit down to breakfast, the morning rush is beginning to thin. Dishes clatter as busboys clear cups and plates from empty tables and place them in big brown tubs. I lift Jin Yu from the high chair and set her down. Her legs quiver when they hit the floor. She steadies herself against the side of the high chair.
It’s clear that Jin Yu didn’t get much of a chance to practice walking in the orphanage. She moves more like a one-year-old than a two-year-old. Even after a week of practice on the streets of Changsha, her steps remain uncertain. Whenever Jin Yu encounters a place where the surface is about to change—where carpet meets tile, or grass meets dirt—she has to stop. Then she stretches one leg forward, lowering her foot, toe first, like a swimmer testing the water. Only after she has assessed the quality and consistency of the next surface does she hazard to move ahead.
Still, she’s slowly building strength and confidence. Her legs mostly take her in the direction she wants to go. She likes to push her own empty baby stroller, holding its lower supports for balance, the way an older person might rely on a walker. She’s learning that her legs can be made to move faster, enabling her to attain, not a run, but a quick sort of clomp.
Everywhere, at breakfast and dinner and places in between, Jin Yu carries her favorite toy, the small stuffed bunny handed to her at our first meeting. The bunny has acquired a patina of grime and a name, Tu Zi, pronounced “Too-dsuh,” which in Chinese means, of course, “rabbit.”
Jin Yu has also developed a favorite game. When the three of us are lingering in the hotel lobby, waiting for a cab or for other families to meet us for dinner, Jin Yu will pause until she thinks we’re not watching. Then she’ll rush at the lobby door—which flies open, triggered by motion sensors. Sometimes she keeps going, out onto the paved entryway, dissolving in laughter as two adults—three if the doorman is on duty—chase after her. After a few attempts she figured out the precise spot at which the sensors will intersect with her body. That’s fun too. She steps forward. The doors open. She steps back. The doors close. Open. Close. Open. Close.
For a two-year-old, it’s great entertainment. And vast power. For perhaps the first time in her life, Jin Yu is able to exert some control over her world.
CHINA IS many things to many people. Or, more specifically, it’s something different to everyone.
It’s a land where stained-glass images of John Lennon and Frank Zappa gaze down from the walls of a not-so-rockin’ Hard Rock Café, and bronze images of Mao and Sun Yat-sen rise above the lawns of manicured parks. A land where the public markets stock basins full of angry brown scorpions, all crawling and squirming as they await a dip in boiling oil and a trip to the dinner plate, their fate to be shared by stoic turtles trapped in mesh bags and writhing black snakes held in glass tanks.
It’s a land where monks in flowing gold robes and tourists in souvenir T-shirts line up next to one another to tour the Forbidden City. Where multimillion-dollar steel-and-glass hotels shimmer beside one-story hovels that lack electricity and running water, and the people inside of each stare out at the other.
It’s a land defined by smells: The damp, wind-carried musk of plowed fields. The acrid smell of old cooking oil, cheap varnish, and burnt coal that drifts from doorways. The neon-colored scents of fruits and flowers that waft from gardens. The bland odor of dust and dirt on city streets.
For Christine and me, China is most of all a land defined by love.
In southern China, in a pitiless corner of the world, we have found more than we could have ever dreamed of. Our daughter. She is ours, to hold, to kiss, to bathe, to feed. As we wander through the galleries and trinket stores in Guangzhou, Christine can’t stop smiling. Jin Yu’s every discovery—the sweet taste of sugar, the fluttery wings of a paper kite, the glass tinkle of a wind chime—is reason for celebration.
Jin Yu doesn’t seem to mind when we hold her close, when we kiss her cheek. But she hasn’t kissed or hugged us. I wonder if she knows how. I wonder if she understands the affection that is conveyed by drawing someone near. I think those feelings are within her. Her interaction with us has come to include a regular smile and even an occasional laugh.
In the evenings, when we meet up with the other families, Jin Yu chases after her Xiangtan sisters like the old friends they are. She seems to take comfort in the presence of the other girls, and to offer the comfort of her presence to them. Sometimes, when another child becomes upset and begins to cry, Jin Yu will move to the girl’s side. She doesn’t say anything, nor does she wrap an arm around her friend. She simply stands there, watching, presenting herself as a sign of the known and familiar. Often, that’s enough.
These girls have spent the first two years of their lives together, the older ones, closer to three years. But time is drawing short. Soon they will be scattered, taken across the sea, to Connecticut and Texas, Minnesota and New York and Washington.
Before that happens, there is something Christine and I need to do.
THE TEMPLE of the Six Banyan Trees is as holy a place as exists in Guangdong Province, and a regular stop for American parents adopting Chinese children.
The temple was built about 1,500 years ago as a place to store Buddhist bones brought here from Cambodia. During the Northern Song Dynasty, the great writer Su Shi visited this spot. Enchanted by the trees, he wrote out the inscription that would give the temple its name: Liu Rong, meaning Six Banyans.
Just inside the temple’s front gate is a wooden stall, attended this morning by an older woman in a brown shirt. Here the faithful can buy small jade carvings of Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy and protector of women, or choose from rows of malas, long necklaces of Bodhi-seed prayer beads. A few steps on is a dormitory, home to the monks who tend this temple. Their shaved heads and plum robes identify them as the spiritual descendents of those who watched over these same grounds ages ago.
Beyond the dormitory is the courtyard, dominated by a towering pagoda, the Flower Pagoda, painted in muted tones of rainbow. Its peak, adorned with the sculptures of one thousand Buddhas, seems to touch the sky.
It is impossible to walk these grounds and not be moved by the power of belief—or at least by the collective power of those who so fervently believe, whose certainty in a benevolent, caring spirit is but
the modern incarnation of a faith that reaches back centuries.
At home, in the United States, I have friends who mark the passages of their lives by the ceremonies of their church. The regular Sunday services. The christenings, weddings, and funerals. They find strength and comfort in the routine of the rites and customs, their priests and ministers a part of their extended family.
Me, I rarely go to church. And I’ve never been in a Buddhist temple. I can’t say that I have seen the presence of God, or a god, in the day-to-day workings of my life, not beyond anything that couldn’t be ascribed to coincidence. Nor have I ever felt the need to seek Him out, to resolve in my own mind that He is real, that He or anyone is out there, listening. But until now, I’ve never had a child. You do things for your child that you wouldn’t do for others or even for yourself. For Jin Yu, I’m willing even to believe. It’s been a long time since I prayed, for anyone or anything. Now, in our last days in China, here at this temple, I am ready to pray for everything.
We follow the scent of incense to our destination, the Great Hall. It is big and square, perhaps half the size of a basketball court. The scale of its contents makes it seem smaller, the hall dominated by three giant bronze images of the Buddha. Each one weighs about ten tons. They are the temple’s centerpieces, imposing and impassive.
In the center sits Sakyamuni, the sage of the Sakyans. On the left is Amitabha, the Buddha of boundless light. And on the right is Maitreya, the future Buddha, often called the laughing Buddha. Before them is a long altar topped with trays of fresh fruit.
The hall is dusky even at mid-morning, smoky with the haze of burning incense. I take a spot in the front row, on my knees. Other parents from our group kneel down beside and behind me, holding their new daughters close. Two monks in purple-red robes silently move to either side of the altar.
Jin Yu climbs into my arms, but once there she doesn’t want to stay. She squirms, insistent on getting free, wriggling until we’re stomach to stomach. I take her by the shoulders and hips, and turn her to face forward. The images of the Buddha glow in the soft light.
