by Jeff Gammage
She says: Here’s what you have to realize. Children can come out of the orphanages with all sorts of illnesses and injuries. This one is on the surface of the skin. There’s no evidence of abnormality or damage to the bone underneath. Jin Yu displays no symptoms of brain trauma, no sign of any cognitive impairment. Could this wound have been caused by an infection? Yeah, it could have been. But it also could have been caused by something else. By a lot of things.
She says: Here’s the reality, and it can be hard for parents. Sometimes, you’re just never going to know. Sometimes, in Chinese orphanages, things happen to children. And you never get an explanation. The information, the history, the background—it’s just gone. Vanished. Unknown and unknowable.
Dr. Sude looks at me, awaiting an answer. But I have none to offer. She turns to her file, scribbling a couple of notes on Jin Yu’s medical record.
Whatever it was, it’s healed.
Those five words may have to be enough for me. But will they be enough for Jin Yu? This scar is not some neat, fading line, soon to disappear. It’s a rough gouge of blistered skin. It will be there forever. A patch of flesh where her hair will never grow. The remnant of an injury that must have caused terrible pain.
The wound may have healed, but its impact lingers. For me. And, I worry, for my girl.
Someday Jin Yu will ask me about this scar, about how and when it got there, and what’s more, she will be asked about it—by classmates, teammates, boyfriends, lovers. Her hair will grow long enough to allow her to cover the scar. She will be able to hide it when she wants. But anyone she allows near, close enough to touch her face, to kiss her cheek, will see it and wonder.
Whatever it was, it’s healed.
I wonder if Jin Yu will as easily move beyond the ragged dimensions of this mark, if those few words of summation can suffice. I wonder if this scar will become a kind of mean, personal touchstone, forever poked and fingered, an indelible reminder of a missing past.
I PULL the front door closed, the lock setting with a loud click. Jin Yu and her mom are already waiting outside on the cement apron that passes for our front porch.
It’s hot and muggy, typical August weather in a standard Philadelphia summer. The bushes are lush, the cars in the driveways coated with pollen. My picket fence still needs painting. Nothing has changed on our block. Nothing and everything.
The neighborhood looks different. The people too. America looks different. It looks newly, unimaginably rich. My house, like the one next door and the one beside that, is strictly middle-class by American standards. In parts of Hunan it would be a mansion. Down the street is a cluster of clothing and jewelry boutiques, places where women buy silver and gemstone bracelets, along with skirts and blouses of comfortable summer-weight linen. Nearby is a grocery store stocked with practically anything that anybody might want to eat, and an art store that sells expensive carvings and paintings. This morning it all seems excessive. Disproportionate. In China, with no more than a backpack on our shoulders and our daughter in our arms, Christine and I had all we needed.
The three of us step through our front gate and turn left on the sidewalk, starting a long, languid walk toward what we have already come to call “the Yellow Park,” nicknamed for its giant yellow sliding board. Jin Yu holds tight to her mom’s hand, for support and comfort.
After a few steps, Jin Yu tugs Christine sideways. Our girl has spied a tiny purple flower poking up from the strip of grass beside the curb, and she crouches down to examine the bud. I wonder what the people in the passing cars might make of this scene. A little Chinese girl squatting by the road, staring hard at a patch of lawn, two older white people crouched behind, staring hard at her, as if she were about to do something magical.
Jin Yu completes her inspection of the flower, retakes her mom’s hand in hers, and grabs mine with the other. We start off again. It still feels odd to hold a little girl’s hand. To walk bent in a partial stoop, as if my back were hurting, so that her arm doesn’t stretch.
I find myself being preternaturally careful with Jin Yu, as if she were an egg, fragile and breakable.
I am still learning. We are still learning, Christine and I, trying to figure out how to function as a threesome after years of being two. Jin Yu seems to trust us. At meals she willingly opens her mouth, certain we would never feed her anything harsh or bitter. She lets us comb her hair, wash her face, dress her in bright new clothes. She doesn’t push or kick when we lift her up, or balk at being strapped into her car seat to go out on an errand.
Day by day we are teaching her how to be a daughter, indeed, how to be a child, how to be not the constant seeker of attention and affection, but its recipient. As much as we are teaching her, she is teaching us more—how to be parents. How to hold her, speak to her, how to comfort her when she cries and laugh with her when she smiles. We are a new family—but what is that? In our house it is two people intensely focused on a third, newly obedient to schedules of feeding, sleeping, and waking. Overnight the house has filled with dolls of every size and color, and stuffed beasts that represent every order and class in the animal kingdom. Parts of games and puzzles are strewn through the house like field seed. I’m sure we will still be finding pieces under couches and seat cushions after Jin Yu has left for college.
Right now that seems light-years away. Right now Jin Yu is a child who is interested in everything. And a little afraid.
She is content to play in the sunroom, but the living room is an expanse of hostile territory, never to be dared. She likes Doritos. But not chocolate. Ice cream strikes her as a little cold. She won’t eat it unless we heat it in the microwave. Television holds no attraction. But a walk up the stairs is a magical journey, each big step a triumph of exploration. She can go up, and then down—to a child two completely different journeys.
Here in a new land, Jin Yu struggles to make her wishes known to us. And we labor to make ours known to her. Mostly Christine and I have to point, or we lead her by the hand to whatever we want to show her. I hope Jin Yu doesn’t think we are transitory caretakers, that her stay with us is temporary. But there’s little we can do to tell her otherwise, our different languages a fence. We carry Jin Yu around the house, showing her each room, welcoming her to climb or sit wherever she likes. We tell her she is here forever, that we will always love her. She doesn’t understand. Her room—with its fresh sea-foam-colored walls and built-in bookcases, crafted by her mom—must seem like little more than where she happens to live now. Next week it could be somewhere else, like the hotel where we stayed in Guangzhou, and the different place where we stayed the week before that.
Twenty minutes after we start out for the Yellow Park, a stop-and-go stroll during which Jin Yu halts to check out anthills, cracks in the sidewalk, and stray vegetation, we reach the main gate. The park—its real name is Ogontz Park—is a giant green rectangle encompassing soccer fields and a baseball diamond.
Jin Yu doesn’t take off running for the jungle gym. She stops where the cement of the sidewalk meets the gravel of the jogging track, again where gravel changes to grass, and once more where grass switches to wood chips. Each time we come here, she waits to be reintroduced to the play equipment, wanting to be escorted up the steps of the faux castle and led across its fortlike drawbridge.
I lift Jin Yu and place her on the toddler’s swing, her legs secure in a hard rubber bucket. A small push gets her going, another whisks her higher. Jin Yu loves the swings. On the swings she relaxes, happy to move like a pendulum from point to point, confident that her back-and-forth journey will end at the same place where it started, in my arms.
After half an hour on the swings, Jin Yu shows no sign of wanting to stop, but it’s getting close to lunch time, and given her inclination to inspect each bud and bug, the walk back can be a crawl. I let the swing slow to a bob, then grab the chain. I pluck Jin Yu out of the bucket. She looks tired. She doesn’t want to walk, and I’m happy to carry her.
At home Jin Yu demoli
shes a bowl of noodles and a wedge of cheese. A tangerine serves as dessert. Drowsy in her high chair, she accepts a last spoonful of broth. Christine wipes our daughter’s hands and face and unsnaps her bib. I pick her up to carry her upstairs for her nap. In her room, we sit on the floor to read Curious George, who as usual is in big trouble. Then Christine and I set Jin Yu in her crib, kiss her goodnight, and quietly close the door behind us.
I love naptime. And bedtime. And not because they offer a respite from the demands of the day. But because when Jin Yu lies down to sleep, she reveals her secrets. Downstairs, I turn up the volume on the monitor as Jin Yu begins her sleeptime ritual, babbling to herself in baby-talk Chinese. Her voice rises and falls, changing tone and pitch. Sometimes she’ll talk for half an hour before falling asleep. It’s like she’s explaining her new world to herself in words she can understand, offering herself the only piece of what remains of the past—her language.
I love to hear her speak in Chinese. It’s beautiful. And it makes me realize how I must sound to her, a voice making sounds that have no meaning.
Jin Yu begins to sing, a song I can’t make out, a melody I’ve never heard. Her voice is sweet and strong. To Jin Yu, the verse is soothing, helping her drift toward sleep. To me her song offers reassurance. I imagine the Xiangtan orphanage, a place where too-busy nannies have too few hands to tend too many children. But at night one woman stands beside a crib, and there in the darkness, for reasons of her own, she sings softly to my child.
IN CHINA, Jin Yu was afraid of the bathtub. It may have been the cold tile or the warm water, or the sound produced when one sloshed against the other.
In Hunan we washed Jin Yu in the sink, the small oval form a better fit for her thin body. That first time, the dirt came off her like a second skin. In her new home Jin Yu has overcome her aversion to the tub, come to relish bathtime as a chance to splash and laugh and taste soapy mouthfuls of suds.
Tonight, as every night, Christine is kneeling beside our daughter, leaning into the tub to gently swish a wet washcloth across her back.
My job is twofold: One is to make funny faces and the occasional odd noise, to keep Jin Yu amused and patient while Christine washes her body and lathers her hair. My second task, once Jin Yu is clean and rinsed, is to wrap her in a big powder-blue towel and lift her up, sparing Christine’s back and giving me the chance to hold my fresh-scrubbed daughter close, to breathe in the scent of her skin.
I lift Jin Yu out of the tub, naked and shining. It’s as close as I will ever get to the moment of her birth. She smells so good. She smells like rain. She smells like the earth in the minutes after a storm has passed, the sky caught between cloud and sun.
I take a seat on the commode, steadying Jin Yu on my lap while her mom rubs her from foot to forehead with moisturizing lotion. Jin Yu is all motion and sound, wriggling this way and that, calling out unintelligible orders to mom and dad. Christine cleans Jin Yu’s ears with a Q-tip, tossing the used swab into a wicker trash basket. She trims Jin Yu’s toenails and fingernails with a pair of safety clippers, then rubs antibiotic cream onto the palms of our daughter’s hands, the site of a weird, bumpy infection.
Last, Christine turns to Jin Yu’s head. The cleaning of the scar has become part of our daily ritual.
Christine takes another cotton swab, dabs it with antiseptic and gently begins to scrape the surface of the wound, pushing away bits of dead skin. The scar seems to be changing, becoming more defined and solidified. As it contracts it offers up bits of dirt and filth, the way slivers of metal will continue to work their way out of a soldier for years after the initial wound.
After she completes the cleansing, Christine coats the scar with the medicines we were given in China, the white cream and the green jelly. We still don’t know what’s in them. Or if they’re helping. Whether we should stop applying them now or go and try to find more, for the day when we run out.
Christine assumed the job of bathing our child through unspoken mutual consent. And just as there was never any question she would be the one to bathe Jin Yu, there was no doubt she would be the one to clean Jin Yu’s wound. As Christine paints the scar with medicine, I turn my head away.
I can’t watch.
It’s not that the treatment is painful for my girl. Most nights she barely seems to notice. It’s that this scar is a visceral presence, an emblem of her suffering, a reminder of my absence.
To me, it’s inconceivable that a massive wound could blossom on the side of my child’s head, but neither the people at the orphanage nor doctors in two countries can say how it got there. Telling me it’s healed doesn’t tell me how it happened. Or how much pain my daughter endured.
I know that at one time, the nannies placed hot water bottles in the cribs to keep the babies warm at night. Sometimes the bottles leaked, burning the children. But Jin Yu’s injury looks too linear to have been caused by a burn. On the other hand, if it was caused by a cut, it surely would have required stitches to close. Yet her skin bears none of the pale, telltale dots typically left by sutures.
As Christine sets to her task, I turn my gaze out the window—and my mind to who is to blame. I know exactly who that is:
A careless orphanage staff. An indifferent welfare system. A government that consigns little girls to live in a place where a head injury can fester and boil without notice. From those people and those systems, I want more than an explanation. I want vengeance. I want someone to pay, in pain, in agony equal to that inflicted upon my child.
Jin Yu is wiggling on my lap, tired of being prodded.
As I look out across our front walkway, I imagine the three of us as guests at an official government function, visitors to the Chinese embassy, mingling with diplomats in tuxedos and foreign-service wives in long formal gowns. I see myself waiting patiently as the receiving line inches forward, toward the foreign minister, who is greeting guests a few feet ahead. Finally, when it is my turn, when I’ve drawn close enough to look into his eyes, to touch him, I ignore his outstretched hand—and grab hold of his necktie. I yank him forward, listening to the satisfying choke that emits from his throat as I shove his face next to the side of my child’s head, where he can take a long, close look.
That thought is quickly followed by another. By a vision of a different circumstance and outcome. One based at least partly on fact. One that forces me to reconsider my studious assignment of fault.
A friend at a foreign charity told me how she had visited the Xiangtan orphanage not long after Jin Yu would have arrived. During her tour of the housing area she noticed a baby lying in a crib, the side of the girl’s head covered with a thick bandage. My friend saw the child only for a moment. She never learned the baby’s name.
It’s impossible to know if that child was Jin Yu. Probably it wasn’t. It could have been any one among scores of children. But even if it wasn’t my girl, it shows the orphanage was providing treatment to a sick baby, that the people there were doing what they could for an injured child. They hadn’t abandoned her to the fates. They were trying to make her well.
There is something else too. Something specific to my daughter.
During the daily ritual of bathing Jin Yu, of cleaning and medicating her scar, Christine made a discovery: several additional scars on Jin Yu’s head, each one a short, thin line, barely perceptible. They are as different from the scar on the side of her head as the sun is from the moon. They look like the scars left by intravenous needles. And in China, the common practice is to insert IV lines in the head, not the arm.
It makes me think: maybe I have it exactly backward. Maybe, far from ignoring Jin Yu’s injury, the orphanage staff did everything possible to help her, including the provision of multiple IVs. Maybe it was only their intercession that saved my baby from serious, long-term injury. Maybe it was only their devoted intervention that kept my child alive.
I think back to that day when we visited the orphanage, those hours when the nannies gathered in the courtyard and surrou
nded us and our children. Friends who see the videotape sometimes ask: Was it an act? Had the nannies been told to smile and pose, to put on a show of warmth and love for the visiting Americans? Had the caretakers in street clothes been ordered in on their day off to make the pantomime complete?
I suppose it’s possible. But I don’t think so.
I’ve worked twenty-five years as a news reporter, an occupation that routinely puts me in contact with politicians, promoters, and public relations agents, people for whom the truth can be a malleable concept.
I have learned to trust my instincts. And I am sure the nannies’ affection for the children was real. The tears they shed that day were genuine. When Jin Yu was first injured, or took sick, could these same women have ignored her cries for help, her obvious distress?
No. They couldn’t have.
Here, at home, granted a measure of space and distance, I have to believe it’s as likely the staff did everything they could as it is they did nothing at all.
I will never know for sure.
My daughter’s life in China is a mosaic of a thousand tiny tiles. I can infer some of the colors and guess at the broad outline, but I will never see the complete picture. As we go forward, father and daughter, I will have to piece together the story of her beginnings by choosing the parts that seem most logical to me, selecting the likely versions of possible realities. And as she grows, Jin Yu will conjure her own account, selecting and ordering the parts that seem most probable and believable to her.
Now dry and lotioned, Jin Yu is ready to get off of my lap and into her pajamas.
Many, many months from now, on an evening much like this one, after Jin Yu has acquired the language to ask and the interest to inquire, she will look up from my lap at her mother and pull back her lengthening black hair.
“Mommy,” she asks, her finger upon the scar, “what is this?”
“It’s an ow-ee, sweetheart.”
