China Ghosts

by Jeff Gammage

  Jin Yu is awake and for the most part alert, content to study the glimmer of the early morning stars from a post in my arms. Like her parents, she was up with the 4:00 A.M. bleat of the alarm. I had expected a battle to rouse her from her bed. Instead she rose easily, moving on instinct and adrenaline, as if she too was eager to embark on this expedition.

  Far along the track, a single headlight blinks into being, its beam turning the trees on the east side of the rails a ghostly shade of green. The light strengthens as it rounds the bend and heads toward us, illuminating the way for the 5:00 A.M. SEPTA train to Philadelphia. Seconds later the train wheezes to a stop at our side. It takes the four of us only a minute to board. The passenger car is practically empty, the few occupied seats taken by chefs in white smocks and waiters in black bow ties, headed to jobs cooking eggs and scrapple at the downtown hotels.

  The train glides forward, then picks up speed.

  It’s quiet. We join in the silence.

  The four of us won’t be getting off with the others in Center City, or even at a point beyond. We’re going to the end of the line, to the airport, to a plane that will carry us north and then west, trying to outrace the sun. Hours from now, at our first stop, in Chicago, the pilot will advise us to settle back, because it’s going to be a long flight.

  Again we are headed to China.

  This time Christine and I are traveling as a full-fledged family, with our daughter and with our friend and helper, Ellen. We’re traveling lighter, leaving behind the weight of doubt we carried the last time.

  We’ll land in Hong Kong, then catch a flight to Beijing. Of course, flying to Hong Kong to get to Beijing is like flying to Miami to get to New York. It adds time and distance and fatigue. But it was this flight or no flight. And given all that awaits, thirty hours of travel is a small inconvenience.

  We’ll stay in Beijing for a few days, letting our heads and stomachs settle, exploring the city, girding our nerve. Then we’ll board another plane that will take us deep into the country, to a particular place at an appointed hour. She will be meeting us there. This person I don’t know but long to see. This soul who I’m certain will play a pivotal role in my daughter’s life, forever connecting Jin Yu to her homeland, her family, and her future.

  No, not her birth mother. Or an aunt, or a cousin, or a biological relative of any sort.

  Her new sister.

  A tiny beauty, born in the year of the sheep, not yet one.

  I don’t know what I will say to her first. Not that she’ll be able to understand. I wonder what she will make of me, of my wife, of her new big sister, now nearly four. In two years Jin Yu has grown tall and strong, her intelligence shifting from the consistently impressive to the occasionally frightening. At lunch a few days before, Jin Yu was trying to solve some puzzle. And I was trying to help by leading her through a logical system of resolution, step one, step two—at which point Jin Yu jumped to step five. It scared me. If she already has more raw brainpower than me, how ever will I keep pace when she’s a teenager?

  But intelligence is different from maturity. Jin Yu is too young to comprehend the momentousness of this voyage, too small to understand how it will turn the direction of her life like a twig bent from a tree. She is too young to be excited about its possibility and promise, but old enough to perceive its anxiety and angst.

  When her mom and I explained to Jin Yu where we were going and what we would do, she responded with a wounding question: would she be coming back with us, or would we be leaving her in China?

  Every day, you tell your child you love her. Every day you tell her that she is yours and you hers, a family forever. Every day you tell her that you will always love and care for her. Yet when faced with the first challenge to your promise, she asks: do you mean it? Christine and I tried to reassure Jin Yu, again, that we would love and provide for her for as long as we drew breath.

  In a way, what Jin Yu thinks or feels, what any of us thinks or feels, is beside the point now. We are on our way, and this journey will be what it will be.

  The vinyl upholstery of the train seat is cold against my back. The air-conditioning is running despite the coolness of the dawn. Jin Yu stares out the window, watching bedroom lights pop on inside the houses, the passing rumble of our train providing a gravelly wake-up call. I lean back and close my eyes. I need to stockpile as much rest and energy as possible during the next twenty-four hours because the time after that will be long and testing. And of course, I can’t sleep, my mind racing.

  People say the second child is the parents’ gift to the first. That the second is confirmation that the first child made them happy. Otherwise they wouldn’t have another baby. But I think a second offers the first more than encouragement. The second is an ally in disputes with Mom and Dad, a co-conspirator in childhood schemes, company on a stormy night.

  Christine and I are not returning to China solely so that Jin Yu can have a sister. Adoption is the ultimate selfish act—all about the parents getting what they want—and Christine and I have our own reasons for going. We like the idea of having two children. It seems to offer a certain balance, a precise sort of stability. Of course we worry: That a second child will prove more than we can handle, beyond our parenting skills. That the happy triad we have established with Jin Yu will be ruined. That the girls may not merely bear no love for each other but be openly resentful. We worry that in asking for another daughter, in asking for even greater love and happiness, we have asked for too much.

  I believe this trip to China is the right thing to do. But in a way, that doesn’t matter either. Once you set these things in motion, you go where fate leads you and you take what it delivers.

  She is waiting for us now. I wonder what she will do when she sees us, how she will react, whether she will smile or cry, in joy or sadness, or perhaps offer a face masked by stoicism. I have seen her only in photographs, taken when she was younger. She is older now. But I am certain I will know her at first glance, and that, somehow, she will know me.

  I CAN’T see her. She is here, in the same room of the same building in the same smoggy Chinese city, but it’s so crowded I can’t see her.

  I’m standing on tiptoes, bobbing left and right as Jin Yu, her arms tight around my neck, bobs right and left, each of us trying to peer over the heads and shoulders of people in front of us. Ellen is behind us, aiming a video camera.

  “There she is!” Christine calls. “Do you see her?”

  No, I don’t.

  More people step in front of me. I can’t see anything. Christine says she can see her sitting against the wall on the far side of the room, perhaps fifty feet away, and that she’s beautiful, with fine, delicate features. That she seems relaxed, peaceful amid the commotion.

  Today she has traveled more than three hours to meet us, leaving her home in an orphanage in the city of Wuwei to come to the J. J. Sun hotel in Lanzhou, on the banks of the silty Yellow River. Lanzhou is the capital of Gansu Province, a snaking spit of land in western China pinched between the Tibetan Plateau and the Gobi Desert.

  I edge my way to the right, trying to see. A man at my shoulder steps back—and there she is.

  I can’t keep from waving, trying to draw her attention. She doesn’t notice. She seems unaffected, by so many people, by all the noise and movement. Her lips are drawn together in a tight little smile, as if she alone knows the answer to an odd riddle.

  I step to the left, creating an aisle so Christine and I can move ahead together.

  Now she is up and coming toward us, carried forward in the arms of a nanny. I can see her full on.

  She’s dressed in a cotton two-piece, colored pale blue with yellow sleeves. It looks new, undoubtedly purchased for this occasion. She looks different from her photographs. Thinner perhaps. Her hair is short. Not black, but a shade of sun-bleached brown.

  We’re five feet apart, separated now by only a few bodies, each able to appraise the other. She’s small. Her skin is pale, her eyelashes cu
rled. She has the longest fingers of anyone I’ve ever seen.

  We are two feet from each other. I notice she is no longer smiling.

  Jin Yu is trying to jump up and down in my arms.

  “It’s me! It’s me!” she shouts.

  As if she would be recognized. Then again, why not? These two are family.

  Jin Yu, determined to be first to greet her, is leaning so far forward that she almost falls out of my arms. I push one step ahead—and they are together, their faces inches apart, close enough to breathe the same air.

  Jin Yu’s face is illuminated in the brightest smile I have ever seen. “It’s me!” she insists once more, peeved at the baby’s lack of response. She acts as if they are old friends, separated long ago and now miraculously brought together, time having made one unrecognizable to the other.

  Christine has her arms out to receive the child. The baby, snug in the grasp of her nanny, stares quizzically, as if to ask, “Whatever do you think you’re doing?” not realizing how little she will care for the answer.

  The nanny bends slightly to hand over the child. In that moment, the girl not quite ours, no longer fully theirs, a freeze frame: the baby is the portrait of serenity, calm and at ease. I think, This one will be our quiet child. Our easy baby. Not the daughter who insists her way is the only way, but the one willing to go with the flow, to submerge her own opinion in the interest of compromise. Her name is Wu Zhao Gu. She was found outside the door of a health clinic in Wuwei, a Silk Road encampment best known as the discovery site of a prized bronze relic, the Flying Horse, its image seen everywhere in China.

  A woman steps in front of me, and I lose sight of Zhao Gu. I can only see Christine’s back, and over her shoulder, the face of the nanny.

  Then Christine turns around, our new daughter in her arms. Zhao Gu—my quiet child, my peacemaker, my diplomat—begins to scream at the top of her lungs. She is not crying, not even frowning. She’s screaming, registering her dissent at a level that pushes the noise in the room, where a dozen families are receiving Chinese children, to a new and impressive volume.

  It would actually be funny if she wasn’t so upset. And if she wasn’t so loud.

  A man I recognize as the director of the Wuwei orphanage tries to calm her, patting our girl’s hand and whispering soft assurances. Zhao Gu will have none of it. After a minute he turns toward me and shrugs his shoulders.

  I want to hug him. But that seems presumptuous. I tell him in Chinese, “Thank you, thank you.” In English I tell him all I cannot say in Mandarin: That I am so grateful, that Christine and I appreciate all he has done, all that China has done, in allowing us to have this baby, in permitting us to build a family. That we will always love and nurture this child, now our daughter.

  The words spill out, one after the other. He doesn’t answer.

  Instead, he pats me on the shoulder, a gesture I take to mean, “I understand. And you’re welcome.”

  I’VE HAD no word from Jin Yu’s Chinese parents, nor from anyone who knows them. I’ve not heard from a soul in response to my meticulously crafted classified ad alerting the birth parents to their child’s whereabouts and asking them to contact me. That was to be expected. I never published the ad. Not in Xiangtan or Changsha. Not in China or anywhere else. In the end, I left my message, my script for trans-world reunion, lying on top of my bedroom dresser, stuck between an old copy of Newsweek and a Phillies ticket stub.

  My plans for a trip to Guangxin Alley, to conduct an on-scene inquiry and search, I likewise put off.

  It’s not that I’ve shed my desire to learn about Jin Yu’s past, to know more about the people who gave life to her, more about the events of the days that preceded her abandonment and the hours that immediately followed. Nor have I lost the hope of somehow alerting Jin Yu’s Chinese mother and father to the fact that she is alive and well and very much loved. But the more I thought, the more I came to the realization that it was not my place to undertake such a search, to try to make that contact or pass on that information. That odyssey belongs to Jin Yu, and Jin Yu alone, should she someday wish to pursue it. If she wants me to help, I will. If she doesn’t, I won’t.

  The paper trail was a different matter. Trying to locate documents and records, papers that could help provide a basis for Jin Yu’s own search later on, that was within my parental purview. To me, it made sense to try to find any surviving written accounts now, before paperwork and people disappeared, to at least establish a record of having made the request. Not that it did any good. My effort to unearth some tangible tie to Jin Yu’s past proved nothing more than a waste of stamps.

  OUR GUIDES don’t believe in long first meetings.

  Forty-five minutes after Zhao Gu is placed in our arms, the five of us—Christine and I, our two daughters, and Ellen—head out of the hotel, due to meet the other families outside.

  Zhao Gu has not stopped screaming. It doesn’t bother us, except of course for her distress. It’s perfectly natural that she should be upset. Zhao Gu’s loud protest triggers none of the dread provoked two years ago by Jin Yu’s deep, still silence. To Christine and me, Zhao Gu’s loud, continuous shriek is music. This baby is healthy and secure enough to let us know what she thinks, to voice her displeasure, to take full advantage of her first opportunity to give us her opinion.

  We step outside the hotel and onto the sidewalk, the summer heat instantly dabbing our skin with sweat. Zhao Gu decides it’s time to save her voice. Her screaming ebbs, replaced by grunts of disagreement and, finally, by the occasional murmur of interest.

  We join the other American families, happy with their new Chinese babies, lining up outside a photography studio that’s set up in what looks like an open garage. A couple of passersby stop and stare, intrigued by the sight of so many foreigners holding native girls. Five or eight people surround us, then a dozen, then two dozen. The sidewalk quickly becomes impassable. People press close, touching us on the arms, shaking our hands, stroking the faces of the babies, eager to make sense of these curious pairings.

  We’re being mobbed, for the moment the most popular people in Lanzhou. It’s like being the Beatles, but without the torn clothes. The people closest to me seem to be offering plenty of advice about raising a child—and I can’t understand a word. Some of them want to hold the babies, not quite sure what we’re doing with them. Others understand perfectly, raising their hands to give us smiling thumbs-up signs. I crane my neck to try to judge the size of the crowd. At the back of the throng I see people standing on their tiptoes, trying to see what’s going on up front.

  A cop shows up, waving his arms and ordering people to move on.

  Strapped across her mom’s chest in a Baby Bjorn, Zhao Gu is unperturbed by all the attention and to-do, glancing around to see what she can see. She reaches out and grabs Jin Yu’s hair. Jin Yu protests as if she’s been stung by a bee. Zhao Gu responds with a grin. Already she is interested in this other, older child. In our room, the only time Zhao Gu paused in her wailing was when Jin Yu approached, wanting to rub her nose against that of her new little sister.

  We don’t know it yet, but Zhao Gu’s grieving is over. An hour of shouting, screaming protest—then acceptance. Her transition to us will be remarkable only for its lack of complication. Feedings will be easy, her sleep sound. She will cry when she needs something—a fresh diaper, a snack, a hug. But she has no interest in recreational crying. She will take to Christine and me as two big, personal servants and playmates, and to her sister as her guide and role model.

  As of now, Jin Yu is no longer an only child. And Zhao Gu is no longer alone.

  They will be rivals in some ways, to be sure. Jin Yu will have to share the spotlight, and she so loves its shine. But now each will have a friend, and most of all, each will have a sibling with whom to grow old. Years from now, all their lives, after Christine and I are gone, each of my daughters will be able to look at the other and say, “Do you remember the time when…” As an only child, I recognize th
e value of such a connection, because I don’t have one.

  Of course Zhao Gu comes to us with her own life and history, a baby with her own story, mostly unknown, attended by her own collection of ghosts. Her time in the Wuwei orphanage was relatively short at eleven months. Later this week, Chinese officials will surprise us by offering a wealth of information about Zhao Gu’s background, including an almost blow-by-blow account of her discovery outside the Wei’an health center in Wuwei.

  In fact, the level of detail provided about Zhao Gu’s discovery is so substantial that, a little over a year from now, with the help of a Chinese journalist, I will be able to locate and interview the man who found her on the street.

  “Oh, you don’t want me, you want my husband,” his wife will say when we call from Philadelphia. “He always talks about the day he found the baby.”

  On the sidewalk near our hotel, most of the locals have moved on with their business, leaving a happily tired pack of Americans to tend to their children. Our guide, Cindy, calls out our last name. It is our turn to be photographed. We step inside the makeshift studio. Only Zhao Gu, Christine, and I are permitted to be in the picture. Jin Yu, a bit put out at being excluded, waits on the sidewalk with Ellen.

  “Smile!” somebody shouts.

  The photographer is waving some sort of stuffed toy bird at Zhao Gu, trying to get her to look at the lens. Zhao Gu casts her glance everywhere but straight ahead. Finally—of her own accord, surely not because she’s been told to do so—she raises her chin.

  The flash pops. The resulting photo shows Christine and me leaning toward each other, as if to form an A-frame roof over our new daughter. My eyes are lidded, my mouth half open. I look worn out. By contrast, Christine is beautiful, her hair combed and in place, her glee evident in her smile. Zhao Gu is facing the camera—but her eyes look off to the side, I know not at whom or at what. She holds a rattle up near her ear, as if to show it off. On her lips is the beginning of what may be a smirk. She looks like someone who has just received some bit of good news, and is thinking about how sweet it will be to share it with friends.