by Jeff Gammage
“Next, next,” somebody calls.
I lift Zhao Gu and ease her back into the child carrier, facing forward, safe and comfortable against her mom. We walk out of the studio and join Ellen and Jin Yu, turning back toward the hotel with plans for an early dinner and bedtime. Zhao Gu is content to bob along as we stroll, watching the faces of the people who pass.
I pull open the hotel door to let Christine step inside. My wife is playing with Zhao Gu’s dangling feet. Our daughter cackles in delight. At that moment, halfway through the door, my new daughter turns and looks up at me, her little face alight.
I do not know what has become of Zhao Gu’s Chinese mother and father. I hope they are well—and that someday our lives will be such that we may meet. I hope that, somehow, they will learn their baby is safe in the arms of people who love her.
But those are just wishes.
What I know for sure is that, once again, officials in the Chinese government have examined the nature of my character and the content of my heart, and compared what they found there to the needs and dispositions of the children in their care. They believe Zhao Gu and I will make a fine match. And I am willing to trust their judgment.
SINCE WE landed back in the United States, we have spent our time adjusting to life as a foursome, settling into new routines and adapting old ones to new schedules. On Saturdays, I’m the one who gets the mail from the box near our front door.
I find the letter at the back of the mailbox, dropped there without ceremony or announcement, hidden behind a couple of bills and a catalog offering half-price on summer footwear. I take it inside with the rest. At first, standing there in the foyer, I don’t realize who sent it.
I’d given up hope of help from the Chinese government in unearthing Jin Yu’s history, concluding that whatever records might exist would, for now, remain beyond my reach. To see them I might have to wait a very long time, for a day when the relationship between the United States and China shifts to something more open and comfortable, or perhaps even for a cataclysmic event like the fall of the ruling party. In the former Soviet Union, archives opened to reveal decades-old secrets only after the top cadres were expelled.
The envelope is thin. If this were a reply to a college application, I’d already know I’d been rejected. The letter bears the return address of the Chinese consulate in New York.
It’s been five months since I wrote.
I slide my finger under the flap and tear open the envelope, glad to have received some reply, interested to see the wording of the response, the explanation for why the information is unavailable, or why I must write to some other branch of the government.
There’s a cover letter. It says the government of the People’s Republic understands my desire to obtain more information concerning the birth and discovery of my daughter. That my request is being answered by Consul Shuangming Dai, who received my letter from Consul General Liu Biwei. Consul Dai heads the unit that authenticates American documents regarding adoptions.
In the letter, Dai says he contacted the relevant authorities at the Ministry of Civil Affairs in China, and received this information about my daughter: the child was female, found in Guangxin Alley, within the Yuhu District of the city of Xiangtan, on August 5, 2000. She was wearing cotton clothes. The name of the person who found her was not recorded. The police transferred the baby to the Xiangtan orphanage. Efforts to locate her Chinese parents were unsuccessful, and after two months she was legally declared to be eligible for adoption.
All of this I knew. All of this I’d been told before.
The letter continues.
It says a search of the record by the relevant authorities located a particular document, and a copy is included herein: a note that was found tucked inside Jin Yu’s clothing on the day she was discovered in Guangxin Alley.
My forearm thumps against the entryway radiator as I slump sideways.
I flip the page. I see it. But I can’t believe what I’m looking at.
The note. What adoptive parents call the birth note. Jin Yu’s birth note. The last testament of my child’s Chinese parents. Their final words on the subject of their daughter.
Of all the records I imagined might exist, of all I hoped might be found or surrendered, this I didn’t expect. I wished for a copy of some official record compiled by the authorities in the hours after Jin Yu was found, something that might provide a name or a location, a new place to look. From the consulate I anticipated a polite, formulaic note thanking me for my interest. I never imagined I would be given the note that was left with Jin Yu. When we were in China to adopt her, I’d been told that no such note existed.
“Christine!” I call.
She walks out of the kitchen, her hair pushed back, wiping her hands on a dish towel. My hands are shaking.
“You won’t believe this.”
We look at the paper together.
The note is short. Three lines. Written on a torn Hong Bao, in this country known as a “lucky money envelope.” The envelopes are invariably red, typically adorned with pictures of dragons or deities. During the Lunar New Year, grown-ups place a few coins inside the envelopes, to give to children as goodwill gifts.
This red envelope bears neither dragons nor gods. On its cover, beneath Chinese characters that say, “Good luck,” is a cartoon drawing of two children. One is a boy, the other a girl.
On the reverse side, the dark lines vivid against a white background, are twenty-three Chinese characters. The handwriting is neat but not elaborate. The characters look as if they were written by someone who was concentrating very hard, someone taking care with their writing and their words.
The consulate has included a translation. The words say: “Daughter, born at 5:13 P.M., August 2, 2000.”
I practically want to shout: Success! Success. From the depths of the Chinese bureaucracy I have managed to mine a previously unknown artifact, a new piece of information, a fresh portion of Jin Yu’s past.
The note is proof of Jin Yu’s birthday—and a silent explanation of why the officials we met in China seemed sure of her date of birth, while those of so many other children are estimated. It adds an important detail to her story: the time she was born. It provides my daughter with a sample of the handwriting of one of her Chinese parents, a physical, tangible tie between them. This note is something they created for her.
To me the value of this small bit of paper lies not only in what it says, but in its mere existence. My daughter didn’t drop to the earth from the moon. She came from real and living people, people who, however briefly, clothed and fed and cared for her. People who kept their child for three days before letting her go forever. People who thought to write out some semblance of a good-bye.
This is it then—her Chinese parents’ farewell. Their last comment on their child, the girl who would become my daughter. Their note had been sitting in the files the whole time we were in China. In fact, it had been there much longer, since before our adoption application arrived in Beijing.
I bet it was Jin Yu’s Chinese mother who wrote out these spare lines. The toughest jobs fall to women.
I wonder, did she want to say more? Did she long to pour her heart onto this piece of paper, to tell her child all she had done and tolerated just to be able to give birth? Did she want to write volumes of detail—the place of birth, the baby’s weight, the familial name—but dared not, fearing it would lead to her own identification and punishment? Did she want to tell her daughter she was sorry? That she was caught between want and reality? That despite this act of abandonment, despite their distance and anonymity, the two of them would be bound for as long as both should live?
Maybe she spoke words like those aloud, a conversation kept between herself, her daughter, and the gods.
Of course it’s possible that Jin Yu’s birth mother didn’t write the note. Maybe her husband or boyfriend wrote it. Maybe she wanted to write it—but couldn’t bear the pain. Maybe she was unable to read or write, force
d to ask a friend for help. And then, faced with having to dictate her words, to describe the scale of her loss and the depth of her grief, to express in a few lines all she had expected to be able to say to her child over long years, she could manage to speak only the bare details: “Daughter, born at 5:13 P.M., August 2, 2000.”
Who was she writing to? Certainly not to me. She could not have expected Jin Yu to maintain possession of the note, and indeed it was taken from her, along with the clothes on her back. Plainly this woman wanted her daughter’s birth date known—identifying the child as a dragon, the only magical animal of the Chinese zodiac, the luckiest and most powerful of symbols.
Yet it is also true that had Jin Yu been born a male, her Chinese parents probably would have kept her. Her parents were under pressure to give up their baby, compelled by situation and society, but they were not forced, not in the literal sense of the word. They could have made a different choice. They could have kept their child and suffered whatever penalty was to follow, however unfair and injurious. But they didn’t. My daughter will have to live with that knowledge, as her Chinese parents live with it now.
At this moment, as Christine and I pore over this note, Jin Yu is in the sunroom, determined to protect her toys from the clutches of her baby sister. Christine hugs me and says, “Ya done good.” The exploration of Jin Yu’s past has always been more my obsession than hers. Christine, like her eldest daughter, directs her energy toward discovering a brighter tomorrow, not recovering a darker yesterday.
Standing there, in the doorway of my house, I imagine the entrance to another home, far across the sea, a household too poor to feed an additional child, its elders too weak and beaten to face the wrath of their government. I can hear the baby, crying in her makeshift crib on the floor, hungry for her mother’s touch. I see the child’s father standing by, impassive, not daring to embarrass himself by revealing his sorrow, as the woman sits on a stool, writing a farewell.
I imagine that she slips a few precious coins into the red envelope, hoping that whoever discovers it will use the money to feed the baby. She doesn’t know that the first person to see the child will tuck the money into his own pocket and walk away, leaving the note and the baby for others to find.
Standing there, holding a copy of the birth parents’ last missive in my hand, I am sure that these people loved their child. I can’t explain it. It’s just my own certainty, a sureness that Christine and I are not the only parents in the world who love this child. I don’t think they would have gone to the trouble of noting Jin Yu’s date and time of birth if it wasn’t important to them. They wanted to communicate—with someone, with a police officer or a passerby, with whoever might be next in their daughter’s life.
I fold the note and letter and slide it back into the envelope.
I think, The woman who wrote this note doesn’t know I have a copy.
But someday, if my eldest daughter permits, she will. Someday I will bring it to her. I will track her down. I will take this note in my hand and place it in hers, a piece of paper with the power of a talisman, the coded evidence that reveals each of us to the other, marking us as kin. When she sees this note, she will know by the evidence of her own handwriting that I have her child. And she will know by the look in my eyes that I worship my daughter.
13 CELEBRATIONS
THE LAST thing I do, a few minutes before the guests are scheduled to arrive, is the same thing I’ve done on or about this date for the last four years: tie a shiny Mylar balloon to the fence beside our front gate, to help people find the house.
I tug the knot and let go. The late-afternoon, late July sun bounces off the curved surface of the balloon, which jerks to a stop on the tether of a gold-and-purple ribbon. The balloon revolves in the breeze, as if impatient to display its confetti-colored message, HAPPY 6TH BIRTHDAY.
Christine’s brother Yves and his partner James are already here, in from their home in Oklahoma. My mom arrived fifteen minutes ago. This will be Jin Yu’s first birthday without her other grandmother, Christine’s mom Hannelore, who died last winter.
Only family and close friends attended the first parties. But now Jin Yu is old enough to invite friends her own age—from her preschool program, from the neighborhood, from the lion dancing class she attends each week in Chinatown. Her circle of friends grows by the month—sometimes it feels like by the hour—pushing our guest list beyond forty, half of them children.
Jin Yu on her sixth birthday
“Daddy, what are you doing?” Jin Yu calls from the front door. I turn to explain, noticing how pretty she looks. As she chose many of the guests, she also chose her birthday outfit, a pale orange plaid dress. It’s practically brand-new, and already a little short.
Jin Yu will start kindergarten in a few weeks. She is not just growing but maturing. Her tastes are shifting. Elmo, her friend from her first days in this country and the theme of a previous party, is being left behind. Today the theme is unicorns, the cups, plates and tablecloth bright with the spectrums of color and bent light that accompany magical animals. And magical children.
There will come a time when Jin Yu will regard a birthday party, particularly one thrown by her parents, as decidedly uncool. But not today. Today she is thrilled.
Nathan arrives with his mom, Florence. Then Phoebe and her mom, Ellen. Helen and Bret and their three children. The house begins to fill with people. I lose sight of Jin Yu. That’s okay. She is no longer at an age where I must wander the house and yard behind her, keeping her constantly in view, worried she might meander out the gate or down the basement steps. Now the best way to check on her is to stay fixed in place and wait for her to pass.
I’m dumping a bag of ice into the cooler when Jin Yu flashes by, newly decked out in a sparkling pink-and-gold dress-up gown, leading a pack of kids wearing an array of tiaras and tutus. Their plastic high heels clomp against the wood floor as they rush past. Trailing behind the bigger kids, determined to be part of the group, or at least near it, is Zhao Gu. She is not much for dress-up, though today, perhaps in honor of her sister, she has donned a stylish set of oversize plastic pearls.
Jin Yu begins to organize the other kids, setting them in line as a makeshift wedding party, best men and ushers and bridesmaids. Of course Jin Yu is the bride. I can’t tell who is the groom. Maybe she sees that job as superfluous. She turns her back to the wedding attendants, swinging her arm in an underhand motion from hip to shoulder, perfecting the movement she’ll use to toss her bouquet. She’s much more interested in refining the arc of her throw than in learning who will catch the flowers.
A minute later, the wedding is over and the kids move on.
The grown-ups stand chatting in groups of three or four, relaxing on soft leather sofas or sitting on the hard concrete steps of our back patio. Children follow one another through the house in twos and threes, head out and around the yard and then come inside again, stopping only long enough to pick up a juice box or another slice of pizza.
It’s almost time to cut the cake. Christine and I know our roles by now. She is in charge of arranging the candles and carrying the cake from the kitchen to the dining room table. My job is to summon all of our guests and ready the video camera.
There’s no need to call Jin Yu. She materializes at her mom’s side at the head of the table. She is hot and sweaty. It’s hard work being a bride. And a hostess. Christine lights the candles, the cue for everyone to begin singing “Happy Birthday.” When the song ends, a smaller chorus of guests repeats the tune in Chinese.
Jin Yu leans forward to blow out the candles, six this year, plus the usual one extra, for her birth mother. Christine steadies Jin Yu. I can see the two of them, captured in the rectangle of my viewfinder: Christine, caught in half-smile, her arms around her eldest daughter. No longer a woman hoping to be a mother, or even a new mother, but the woman other moms approach when they have questions about raising their kids. Jin Yu, her cheeks puffed like the belly of a blowfish, so happy, and
so accepting of happiness as the normal state of her existence.
She doesn’t know how far she’s come. She doesn’t know how much she means. How much she matters. She doesn’t know how close a thing it was. We could have missed each other. What would have happened to her if she had stayed in Xiangtan? That part of my imagination is not a place I like to visit. What a waste it would have been, for Jin Yu most of all, but also for the people gathered around her now, who love her and who bask in her love for them. For others, not yet known, who will love her in the future, and for people who will enjoy and benefit from the things she will do and accomplish in her life.
That day in China, when we were allowed to visit the orphanage, the administrators told us that most of the older kids go to school in the city. They learn to read and write, and that is not an insignificant skill in Hunan Province. But to me the older children looked sad. They looked dulled, as if the nourishment that helps children grow—not merely food, but music, art, sports, intellectual challenge—had been denied to them. They looked as if they knew that, and could not understand why they had been relinquished to that fate.
Jin Yu blows a long gust of air that extinguishes most of the candles. A second blast puts out the rest. People applaud. Her pals push their way in from the sides of the table to stand close beside her, each announcing whether they want a slice of cake with an icing flower, or no flower, or a butterfly or part of the rainbow or the unicorn.
Later that night, an hour after the last slice of pepperoni pizza has been snatched from its box, after the hum of conversation has slipped from the house, it is just the four of us again, parents and daughters. Jin Yu is sitting at the kitchen counter, trying to decide which of her new bracelets to wear tomorrow. Her forehead is streaked with violet icing. Nearby is the stack of videos she received as gifts, Mickey Loves Minnie, Lassie, and Barbie as Rapunzel.
