China Ghosts

by Jeff Gammage

  She responded with silence.

  But I think she remembers. She is just not ready to talk about it. Or doesn’t yet have the language to communicate the enormity of the experience.

  I’ve asked other parents if they had heard of a child suffering a similar breakdown. Some had. Though no one, not even our doctor, could offer a definitive explanation. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made my own diagnosis: That night in Changsha, Jin Yu was indeed sick. Not physically. Emotionally.

  She was sick with despair and grief and loss. She was sick with the realization that she had been abandoned a second time, that those who had saved her from the streets had delivered her into the arms of strangers. That the very direction of her life had been altered, again, without anyone so much as asking her opinion. On the day she came to us, her world, along with the places and people who made it a living existence, disappeared without a trace. That night in Changsha, her world shrank to sound and solid—her cries, her tears, her little body, undersized and under-exercised, flat against mine.

  From a distance of a year, I can see how terrible that time must have been for her. To have the people she knew and trusted suddenly vanish. To be unable to communicate her fears to these new, strange-looking beings who now held sway. To be torn from everything, and all at once. Other people living other lives are granted the grace of slowly surrendering the things they love: a neighborhood changes as people move on, a family business withers over generations, a parent ages into infirmity. All these things, in their leisurely cruelty, afford a chance to settle debts, to reconcile wrongs, to make peace. They offer a chance to say good-bye.

  Jin Yu was not allowed that privilege.

  That night in Changsha, it was as if she had been holding back her rage and sorrow, wanting to see how this interlude would end, waiting to find out if this latest, greatest change would prove passing or permanent. After our visit to the orphanage, when she returned to the hotel with us, she had her answer. Only then did she allow her anguish to burst from within.

  Before she could begin to accept her new life, she needed to mourn the old. She needed to say good-bye, to those she loved and to friends she knew, even if they were not there to hear her farewell. I don’t think she was unwilling to receive Christine and me, to give us a fair chance to show we could be good parents. She had that strength, the ability to close one door and open another, however painful the parting. But before she could accept what was being offered, she had to honor what was being lost.

  Today, a year later, I think about the things that happened in China, about gain and loss, present and past. I think about how faraway events in a distant land will ricochet through my life and that of my daughter, perhaps forever.

  You think the impact of her years in the orphanage will quickly fade, become less of her life. But grief is deep and abiding, whatever its cause. Grief is not a sudden plunge into darkness, followed by a slow upward incline to the light. Grief moves forward and back, up and sideways. At times it jerks to a stop, and any progress toward healing seems fully and permanently stalled.

  Jin Yu has not forgotten her life in China.

  Sometimes, at night, as Christine and I are putting her to bed, she’ll tell us stories, tales that begin nowhere and end in the same place, fragments of memories about another child, a missing toy, or a woman who tucked her beneath the covers. The names and faces are lost to her. Only the ghosts remain.

  Almost every night, Jin Yu will awake three or four times, disconsolate. She doesn’t seem to know why she’s upset. Sometimes she will go to sleep only if Christine or I lie on the floor of her room. Some nights, it is Jin Yu who insists on sleeping on the floor, the rug as her mattress.

  One night, at bedtime, she and I are turning the pages of a favorite book. Once again Curious George has lost track of his pet baby bunny.

  Jin Yu points to George’s face.

  “Sad,” she says.

  “Wait,” I say. “George has an idea for how to find the bunny.”

  “Crying,” she says.

  I try to turn the page. I want to show Jin Yu that in the end things will be fine, that she doesn’t have to worry, George will find his bunny as he always does. She slaps her palm onto the center of the book, blocking my hand.

  “Tears,” she says.

  She seems to be on the verge of tears herself.

  I move her hand and force the page, showing her that George has enlisted the mother rabbit to help search. Now George is sure to find his little bunny and bring her safely home. Sure enough, a few pages later, George has tracked down his pet and put the world right.

  That happy resolution doesn’t do much for my girl. Jin Yu goes to bed glum.

  Later on, I awake to hear her crying. She doesn’t call out for Christine or me. She just cries. I haven’t completely opened the door to her room when she springs out of bed, clawing her way into my arms, climbing my legs and torso as if I were a tree. She won’t let go. Sobbing, she pulls me so close it’s as if she’s trying to push herself through me. She refuses to let me set her down. So we stand there in the dark. I don’t know what to do, how to comfort her. I begin to recite the list of all the people who love her.

  Mommy loves Jin Yu. Daddy loves Jin Yu. Grandma-ma loves Jin Yu. Jack loves Jin Yu. Tanya loves Jin Yu.

  She stops crying. I go on.

  Zumu loves Jin Yu. Noa loves Jin Yu. Arielle loves Jin Yu. Rena loves Jin Yu.

  Her grip loosens. I can feel her body unclench. A few more minutes, another six or eight names of the roll call, and she pulls back and looks at me.

  “Hi,” she says softly. As if she’d just noticed I was there.

  I ask her if she’s ready to get back into bed.

  She nods.

  I lay her down and pull the sheet up and over her, turning off the light as I leave.

  THE GUILT does not settle on you immediately. Nor does it come all at once.

  It builds slowly, like a small black dot on your skin, unnoticeable at first, an odd blemish that slowly grows wide and deep and cancerous.

  At first you’re not even sure it’s guilt. You think it’s fatigue. Or stress. Not until it begins to wake you in the night, to leave you staring into space during the day, do you fully realize its presence. I am always surprised that people do not seem to notice. Sometimes I feel they must be blind, not to see my blame, not to recognize my chains, as long and ponderous as those that bound Marley’s ghost.

  It never keeps me from getting out of bed in the morning, doesn’t stop me from going to work during the week or doing what needs to be done around the house on weekends. On good days it is merely present, silent and stabbing. On good days it’s a shrunken thing, and I feel I can almost hold it in my hand, examine its weight and texture. I resolve to toss it away, like a stone into a lake, to hear the satisfying ker-plop as it hits the surface, to imagine it drifting down, deep under water, passing through cool shades of green and blue until it strikes bottom, where no light can reach.

  On bad days it’s neither small nor separate. On bad days I can almost see it, a living piece of me, like a gruesome photo in a medical-school textbook, a portrait of a man with a partial, malformed twin growing out of his side.

  The experts say guilt can be a good thing. That it can function as a warning, a reminder not to repeat your mistakes, to do better next time. But for my daughter there is no next time. There is only then and now. And for me there is only this reality: my baby needed me, and I was not there to help her.

  She was alone, waiting, hurting, wanting. And I was fiddling in doctors’ offices and fertility clinics. Wasting my time. Wasting her life. She needed warmth and food and medicine. She needed laughter and love. She needed just a little of what I had in abundance, and I did not offer it. More appalling, it never occurred to me to do so. Not until I needed something from her, not until I wanted something from China, did I even think to ask.

  I wonder if she will ever be able to forgive me.

  Sometimes I think we will
talk when she is older, that we will sit down and discuss the reasons why she spent the first two years of her life in an orphanage, and I will try to explain what I did and didn’t do, and why I was thinking what I thought. I will not have much to offer in my defense.

  No matter how many times I zip her coat closed on cold winter days, no matter how often I rise in the night when she cries, nothing can overcome the fact that when she needed me most, I was absent. At night, I lie down beside that simple truth. And I know that, seven thousand miles away, the people who gave birth to her lie down beside theirs. They and I are alike in that way.

  Of course, right now that conversation between Jin Yu and me is years off. And I am glad to keep it there. Right now Jin Yu loves her daddy. To her I am a source of warmth and light, a sun in her universe. It’s wonderful. But even as I bask in that affection, I wonder how she can love me so. How she can so casually blink away the pain of her first two years, a sentence served for no crime committed.

  The other night she was restless in bed, talking to herself at 1:30 A.M. Most nights Jin Yu is up so often and for so long that Christine and I answer her cries in shifts. On this night I listened to Jin Yu on the monitor for a minute, then went to check on her.

  When I stepped into her room, Jin Yu was wide awake, her thumb in her mouth.

  “Are you okay, sweetheart?” I whispered.

  She didn’t answer. She simply looked at me, her expression one of intense bemusement, as if she couldn’t imagine why I felt the need to get up and come visit at this hour of the night. She looked at me with such focused curiosity that I started to smile, and then to chuckle. The more I tried to keep from laughing, the more she stared, until finally I could no longer contain myself and I laughed out loud. At that moment, there in the darkness in the middle of the night, Jin Yu took her hand from her mouth, holding her thumb aloft as if it were a favorite cigar, and said, “Daddy funny.”

  I told her she was the one who was funny, then bent and kissed her on the cheek.

  Back in my own bed, I could hear her steady breathing on the monitor. Already she had fallen back to sleep. Mine would be longer in coming.

  Jin Yu’s fate makes me wonder about the nature of luck and chance, the reality of good and evil. It makes me wonder how a loving God could deliberately put a small girl through two years of privation, and leave me to live with the blame. It makes me wonder if this God who people worship is a weakling. Or a coward, unwilling to intervene in the life of a helpless child. Sometimes, I wonder if Jin Yu’s fate is the ultimate proof that God is a figment of our imagination, a false celestial comfort born from the minds of primitive, frightened men.

  I AM searching.

  In my dream I am searching.

  Someone has told me the exact address where my daughter was left as a baby. Not merely Guangxin Alley, vague and elusive, but 7 Guangxin Alley, a precise address. Now I can find the exact spot where Jin Yu was abandoned. And by finding it, I will achieve a sense of acceptance, of peace. I locate Guangxin Alley quickly, then move down its center at a half-trot, checking the numbers affixed to the buildings on either side. The digits on the stores and offices keep changing, spinning like the drums of slot machines. But that can’t stop me.

  Then I see it—set back from the road, a plain brick building with small twin doors. I am so happy I almost weep. I rush across a dirt courtyard and push through the doors. Inside, the space is a single room, huge, as big as a concert hall. The walls are covered with Eastern religious symbols and statues, smiling Buddhas and tranquil Kuan Yins, and drawings of the sacred Hindu symbol that means “Om.”

  A dozen people mill about, carefully examining the drawings and carvings. They are searching too, absorbed by their own need. They pay me no mind. Somehow they don’t see what I see, in the middle of the floor. The head of a giant flower is set out like a floral rug, its tuliplike petals laid flat. Two paths of stepping-stones lie across its center, meeting at right angles to form a giant plus sign. I rush to the nearest stone and start forward, across the outstretched arms of petals toward the heart of the flower.

  That’s where the dream ends.

  I don’t know whether I ever reach the center. Or if I learn anything new once I get there. It’s just a dream. But it feels like a message.

  In the months after we returned from China, my child’s lost family and missing history preyed on me. I didn’t fret. I brooded. I felt my daughter’s loss of ancestry as if it were my own. I feared she would grow up plagued by an inner sense of rootlessness. I worried that by the time she was old enough to search for answers on her own, whatever records might exist would be gone. That whatever people might be living would be useless, their memories faded, and others would be dead, their lips forever sealed. On Father’s Day and Christmas, on my birthday and hers, her absent home and lineage seemed to hover not as a neutral piece of her story, part of the series of events that led her to us and us to her, but as a lasting sadness.

  No note from her parents? No record of her discovery in Guangxin Alley? What cop would take custody of a baby found on the street, transport her to the station house, and not write up a report? There had to be more information.

  I needed to try to find it. I needed to be able to show something to Jin Yu—in five years, or ten, or twenty—and say, Here’s what I found. Here’s how I applied myself to this problem, my time not wasted in the callow pursuits that once formed the construct of my life, but spent dutifully seeking to excavate whatever information could be located.

  I needed to look, for her sake and for mine. And I wanted the government in China to know I was looking.

  I WRITE out the text for a classified ad. Nine lines. Fifty-three words. Simple phrases, basic instructions. Meaning can be lost in translation, and I can’t risk that blunder. The Chinese authorities place ads for children who have been lost. I will place one for a child who has been found. At the top of the ad I write, “Seeking Mother and Father.”

  And underneath, “To the parents of the baby girl found in Guangxin Alley, Xiangtan City, Hunan Province, on August 5, 2000. Your baby is safe and well. She is living in the United States with us, her parents. We offer our most humble and eternal thanks for giving us this perfect daughter. Please contact us.”

  I list our names and address.

  I’ll have to find someone to translate the ad into Chinese, and figure out how and where to publish it in China. Probably I’ll need to place it in newspapers in several cities, in Xiangtan and Changsha and other places. Then I’ll wait. I think: One of Jin Yu’s birth parents might actually contact me. Might write to me. If not one of them, then maybe one of their friends. Someone who knows them, or of them. Someone who could at least let me know that the birth parents saw my ad, who could assure me that although Jin Yu’s Chinese parents may choose to remain in shadow, they do so in the knowledge that their daughter is healthy and loved.

  Next, I call a friend at the Inquirer, a reporter named Jennifer Lin, a former Beijing bureau chief who maintains impressive connections in China. I ask her: do you know anyone there who might be willing to tackle a difficult freelance project? It probably would have to be a reporter, or maybe a detective, someone deft and nimble, comfortable dealing with the authorities. Someone who could probe and ask questions without inadvertently stepping into target range.

  Jennifer can’t think of anyone offhand. But she knows someone who might know someone—Guo Hui, her former assistant in Beijing. Guo Hui, she says, is smart and experienced, bilingual, a solid reporter, and a person of sound judgment. Jennifer gives me Guo Hui’s e-mail address.

  In the meantime, I start to write letters, a task that quickly proves complicated and time-consuming. I need the phrasing in every letter to be just right, inquiring but not demanding, hopeful but not pleading. Then I have to find a person who can translate the letters into Chinese. Make sure I have the right address on the envelope, in English and Chinese. And be certain to enclose a self-addressed envelope, and a prepaid internationa
l mailer, so that anyone who wants to respond can easily do so.

  I write to the orphanage in Xiangtan and the Hunan Civil Affairs Office in Changsha, and send e-mails to friends in the United States and to friends of friends in China, asking for the names of others who have pursued similar searches, that I might seek their advice.

  Then I wait. For weeks. And here’s what comes back from officials in China: nothing. It doesn’t bother me, not at first. As a newspaper reporter, I’m used to dealing with government bureaucracies. An answer of no, or no answer at all, is no reason to stop pressing.

  But as time goes by, I begin to run out of people to ask and places to look. The secrecy that once made Chinese adoption seem attractive now works against me.

  Having run out of good options, I decide to write to the Chinese consulate in New York. I turn on my computer and type the name of Consul General Liu Biwei at the top of a letter. Then I tell him more than one should tell a stranger: Of my daughter’s intellect and beauty. Of her delightful sense of humor. Of her grace. I tell him I am the luckiest father on the face of the earth—and that I cannot sleep at night. That I need to be able to tell my child about the circumstances under which she was found, that even the smallest details would be of tremendous value. I tell him I need his help. And I ask, can he please search the government files and send me a copy of whatever he finds?

  I know the consuls in New York attend to diplomatic matters more important than digging out the history of a single child, particularly one who, by Chinese standards, has found her way to a richer life. I don’t expect much of an answer. In fact, I expect no more than the polite form letter that is sure to come back in reply.

  At least that will be something. Someday Jin Yu will see that letter, with its bright red consulate seal, and she will know I tried.

  Not long after I mail that letter, I send an e-mail to Jennifer Lin’s former assistant, Guo Hui, in Beijing. Guo Hui responds quickly, recalling the time we met during her visit to the United States. She says she will try to find someone in South China to take on the quest to uncover Jin Yu’s past.