The Trip Continues

The officials tried to be businesslike, but when you're in the business of uniting families, you get the opportunity to show your human side. We got the usual questions, including the one that makes everyone pause, "Will you abandon this child?" It makes everyone pause because they have to swallow sarcastic responses such as "You caught us. We thought we'd fool you, but you were too smart for us. We have to admit, we spent thousands of dollars and months of our lives and came halfway around the world to get her, but we've decided to set her out by the side of the road when we get home. Perhaps if we let her out somewhere near a farm, she'll find a good home." Then one of the interviewers asked why we wanted this child. I said that she was so beautiful when she was sleeping that I couldn't help but just stare at her for minutes at a time. When that was translated, all of a sudden everyone smiled and things got a whole lot easier.

The next day we ventured out again and went to get Amy’s picture for her American visa. This meant we had to take taxis through the streets of Fuzhou, which got us up close and personal with the traffic there. As far as I can tell, cars, bikes and pedestrians have the same right to every bit of roadway in China. There are no traffic lights, no stop signs, and, when you come right down to it, no lanes. Pedestrians cross the street anywhere, the bikes pull out in front of cars, and the cars keep blowing their horns as they shove their way through the crush of humanity. The taxi drivers are certainly not shy about brushing a pedestrian or a biker that they feel has been given ample warning. These traffic patterns can be truly terrifying until you realize that as long as you don’t hesitate, you won’t be in any trouble. Drivers expect that the pedestrian will cross in front of them - what they don’t expect is that they will stop in front of them.

The photographer's was crowded. People were standing in the staircase waiting for their own pictures, but they allowed us to go ahead. Perhaps it was a combination of the babies and the wiles of Jan and Mr. Ping, another Holt representative who helped us immensely all along the way. The photographer tried for a while to get the girls to smile, but soon realized it was a lost cause. Amy's face carries the same stunned look she had most of the time we were in China.

Another problem we encountered on the streets was that all the people were interested in the babies. The constant attention from throngs of people could get very wearing. Women would come up and tug at Amy’s clothing because it didn’t cover her legs. People would come up and ask "Boy or girl?" and would smile only once we said "Girl". One woman even reached into a baby’s mouth to check its teeth! We quickly got to where we shielded Amy with our bodies as much as possible.

Between that day, Friday, and the next Thursday, we basically cooled our heels at the hotel as we waited for the babies’ passports to arrive. The Lakeside Hotel in Fuzhou is a very nice hotel. Nevertheless, for a "western" hotel, there were few people that understood English. In the hotel restaurant that was OK - if all else failed, we could point to items on the menu - but in other situations it was very frustrating. For example, we were told that we should not set empty room service trays outside the room. Yet whenever we called for them to remove the tray, they couldn’t understand that we weren’t trying to place another order. Of course, like an idiot, there I am trying to play charades through the phone - "Pick up! Gather! Jerry finished! All gone!"

In the meantime, Amy was only sleeping two or three hours at a time and would want to be walked around the rest of the time. We couldn’t get much sleep because we were without a crib and Amy kept rolling towards the edge of the bed we put her on. Soon Susan and I were sick with sore throats and coughs, aggravated by the smog. We were all prepared for stomach disorders, knowing that the water was undrinkable, but we took nothing for respiratory problems. Unlike other brave souls, we didn't take any medicines we didn't recognize. And since we couldn't find anything for coughs we recognized, we just lived with it. Bad decision - it took us a couple of months to get it completely cleared up when we went home.

Holt arranged for things for us to do while we waited. We went shopping on Saturday, and Susan and I picked up a Snugli-type carrier for Amy. The backpack was alright for trekking through airports, but when we were sightseeing we wanted our main sight to be visible, so a front carrier made more sense. We draped a receiving blanket over Amy's legs to keep people from her - gasp - bare legs. Another day, while Susan was trying to get some needed rest, Daddy and Amy went on a trip to a Buddhist temple on Drum Mountain. They allowed us to take pictures outside the temple like the one here, but the sights inside the temple were amazing. Some of the larger statues of Buddha must have stood between thirty and forty feet high. The temple was under extensive renovation, which kept us from getting a true picture of its beauty, but it was still a sight to see.

Much of the rest of the time was spent in our room, playing with Amy, or perhaps strolling around the beautiful park that was directly behind the hotel. It was there that we saw one of our favorite visions of China, although we didn't have our camera at the time to capture it. As we entered the park late one afternoon, we heard music from the other end. As we approached a large crowd, they burst into applause. They were watching approximately twenty children, all around 5-8 years old. Each of the children stood behind an electronic keyboard, and they were giving a concert for their families. They were all dressed up and made up with lots of rouge, but all the makeup in the world couldn't hide their beautiful smiles as they swayed back and forth to the music they were producing. It was magical, almost otherworldly to just encounter such beauty within a few hundred yards of traffic-filled streets and high-rise apartments.

Something else we did while waiting was eat. The restaurants in the hotel were quite good and we rarely ventured anywhere else to eat. Amy certainly seemed to enjoy it. When we first got Amy she weighed a little over ten pounds. At the orphanage she had been fed formula and a rice porridge called congee. When we tried to feed her the congee in the hotel she wouldn’t have anything to do with it anymore. Since jars of baby food were unavailable, we ended up feeding her food from the table - eggs, soft bread, etc. which she gobbled up like it was her last meal. She didn’t seem to digest the milk-based formula very well, so we switched her over to soy (readily available in the stores there) and she thrived. She couldn’t crawl, sit up, pull herself up with her hands, or even babble that much. What she could do was claw and kick while she screamed in those late-night walking sessions. (I’ll tell you what - you never see couples who have just had their first baby go and stay in a hotel for the first couple of weeks, and there are many reasons why not - we saw most of them.)

We traveled that next Thursday, November 2nd, to Guangzhou, which used to be known as Canton. Once again, we ended up traveling in the evening, which made it more difficult on our tired, cranky babies. The tired, cranky parents had trouble with the Chinese people at the airport, who didn't believe in standing in line. Even though it was obvious that we were traveling as a group, people were constantly shoving in front of us at the ticket counter, the customs checkpoints, everywhere. We quickly learned to shove right back to keep our place. We arrived in Guangzhou around 11 and went to our hotel, the White Swan.

The White Swan is a five-star hotel and it showed. I wish we could have stayed there the entire time. We didn’t get to see much of it though. First thing the next morning we were off to get physicals for the babies so they would be cleared to travel. Since all adopted children from southern China are processed through Guangzhou, we now started meeting other couples who had gone through different agencies. It was amazing the number of couples adopting at this one time. I’ve read that approximately 2000 baby girls were adopted from China in 1995 - but that left 50,000 behind that were born that year. Sure does make me wish I could bring back more.

The physicals were very rudimentary. The babies were weighed and measured, then the doctor looked in their mouth and prodded them just enough to get them screaming. Satisfied, he would then scribble something down on a page and we were on our way. We went from our physicals to the American consulate to get the visas for the babies. We had to shove our way into the consulate past crowds of Chinese, but once we got into the consulate we were on American ground. That felt pretty good to a sleep-deprived stranger in a strange land.

Once we got the visas we were finished. Finished? How could that be? Les, who had met us in Guangzhou and helped us get through the clinic and the consulate, told us we were free to go home. Unfortunately, our return flight was booked for the next Thursday. It took us several hours and a few gray hairs to rearrange the flights from Guangzhou to Hong Kong to LA to home. We finally got them all booked for the next day - Saturday the fourth.

We were up at 4 to check out and get to the airport for our first flight. There’s all sorts of paperwork and taxes you have to deal with in these airports, so we had to get an early start. Luckily, Les was traveling back to Hong Kong on the same flight we were, and we shared a taxi to the Guangzhou airport. It seemed like it took them forever to check our baggage, and then sharp-eyed Susan saw that they had put tags on the bags that would have checked them through to Las Vegas instead of Los Angeles. That meant we had to wait even longer. Les stayed with us through all of this and got us to the airplane. I can't thank him enough for the help he was on that morning.

When we got to Hong Kong we had to get our tickets from the ticket counter, and as usual they had to scare us with "We can’t seem to find those tickets." But they did, and so we settled into our seats on the plane for the long leg of the trip. And we sat, and sat, and sat. I knew that we only had two hours scheduled in LA to go through Customs and Immigration before the flight home left, but the flight didn’t leave Hong Kong until an hour and 40 minutes late. Needless to say, I was panicking. However, the captain assured us that we could make up some of that time.

The flight back was nerve-racking. We got a bulkhead seat, which meant they were able to hook a bassinet into the wall in front of us for Amy. Well, Amy liked to play in it but not to sleep in it. That meant that when she did sleep it had to be in our arms. This meant that we didn’t sleep at all.

As we approached LA, the captain told us that the flight home would be held for all of us making that connection. We breathed a sigh of relief, since we knew we’d have quite a few people waiting for us at the airport. So we got off the plane as quickly as we could and got in line for Customs. We got through that line and went to the Immigration counter and there was no one there. They were all over in Customs trying to get the people through for our connecting flight. When we finally got someone over there he told us that there was no way that we could make the flight - and that the next one wouldn’t leave for at least four hours. We were crushed. Fortunately, someone took pity on us and rushed the paperwork through. and Delta said they could still hold the plane for us.

We got to baggage claim to pick up our luggage since you have to carry your luggage through a security checkpoint yourself whenever you come from overseas these days. There was a long line to go through the checkpoint so I went up to the front and asked if we could go ahead since a plane was being held for us. A surly woman told us we would have to wait in line. Well, the line moved fairly quickly, and when we got to the other side a Delta baggage person was waiting for us. "WHY DIDN’T YOU CHECK THESE THROUGH?!!" "Because the people in Guangzhou told us to check it to LA." The lady grabbed the luggage away from us and said "Go! Gate 59!" Of course, Gate 59 is the farthest point in LAX from where we were, so we were out of breath by the time we got there. Then we found out that our seats were not together! So Susan tearfully asked if someone would please switch seats with her husband so that we could sit together with our new baby. Wonderfully, someone did give up their seat for me. So we got back home on time, greeted by friends and family, after about 28 sleepless hours, and I don’t know when anything has felt that good.

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