Wish You Happy Forever (13 page)

ON THE LAST
day of our build, the new teachers and nannies proudly escorted the children into beautiful spaces that promised happy days ahead. The volunteers gave out sweet treats and dress-up clothes. We served a bunch of watermelons that we'd bought from a local farmer. We turned on the music. We all signed our names on the new preschool wall. Above the names, across the top, ZZ and I wrote in English and Chinese:
BUILT WITH LOVE AND HOPE
.

And then we had a party. A massive, everybody's-invited extravaganza of a party.

“THAT PARTY!” ZZ
said to me years later. “You bring everyone—blind children, children who'd been lying on their back for years, the disabled children,
everyone
. That so touch the heart of the people like Small Cloud Zhang. At the beginning she say, ‘Difficult. No, it's difficult. They never been out. We don't have the equipment to take those children out.'

“But when the volunteers pick those children up and carry them to the party, then they understand. And for me,” ZZ said, “
I
understand. It's really moving, how much you wanted those children at the party. And we all think, ‘Thanks for Half the Sky to bring those people to help the orphans.' The fear begins to fall away.

“You know, I am not a typical Chinese,” ZZ said. “I've been working with foreigners a long time. I understand them. I have no fear of them. But what is difficult for Small Cloud Zhang is that it is one thing to allow you, a foreigner, to come inside her institution. But then you, as the leader of Half the Sky, can bring a whole group of volunteers inside and she has no control. Who knows if they are 100 percent friendly? So she feels fear. The dark influence from
The Dying Rooms
is still there.

“The fear from my side is that Half the Sky doesn't make any mistake. But what taught me very early that I don't need to worry is what you did to one of the volunteers in our second build right after Changzhou. Hefei! Remember the volunteer in Hefei?”

“The one that I asked Dick to put in a taxicab?”

“You treat her even worse than the Chinese!” ZZ said, laughing.

“She broke all our rules,” I said. “She smuggled in a camera. She roamed around the orphanage by herself. She took photos of the kids.”

“If I were you, I would give her another chance. I give her some criticism—a warning.”

“I was terrified they'd make us all leave and that would be the end of Half the Sky,” I said.

“But you say, ‘Go back to the hotel, pack, go away!'—so that really tell me I don't have to worry about you,” ZZ said. “After that, every time I go to the institutions, when the directors or the officials—they worry that this is a whole group of foreigners come. We have rules, regulations, this and that. I always use this example and tell them, ‘You don't have to worry about Jenny Bowen. She is one of us.'”

ANYA STOOD ON
the white carpet of the Businessman's Suite at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, the city where all Americans must go to finalize adoptions. Except for the Pull-Up she wore on her head, she was stark naked.

“You and Maya go ahead down to dinner,” I said to Dick. “Anya and I will just stay here and glare at each other.”

“You sure?” he said. “Not much of an adoption celebration.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“We'll bring you something.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

They left. I ran cold water over my fresh-bitten finger.

If this child had come to us first, before Maya, it's hard to imagine anything like Half the Sky emerging. But who said it should be easy? Anyway, I reminded myself, we weren't alone. Thirty-two new teachers and nannies and one hundred sixty-five children were starting this journey alongside my family. We'd all have to find our way.

Pull-Up jauntily perched over one eye, Anya was struggling into her adoption-celebration going-out-to-dinner dress—
all my byself
.

“So now you think you'll deign to join the party?” I asked.

She ignored me. Put her shoes on the wrong feet.

“We're in it now, kiddo,” I said. “You and me. We're going to learn to love each other. Like it or not.”

Chapter 7

Enough Shovels of Earth, a Mountain; Enough Pails of Water, a River

Just a few months after the builds in Changzhou and Hefei, the first Half the Sky success stories began to arrive. Our pilot programs would eventually spark 165 little miracles. Just as Maya did, and I prayed that Anya would, the children of Changzhou and Hefei began to heal and even to blossom.

Feifei

The police had taken Feifei to an orphanage when she was about a year old. She'd passed through a few sets of hands by the time she was turned over to their custody, so no one was clear about where she'd been abandoned or how she'd been found. In those days, record-keeping wasn't a priority at the orphanage. If and when her file was submitted for foreign adoption, someone would fill in the blanks, make it up.

She didn't seem in crisis on arrival, so after a brief quarantine she was bathed, diapered with clean rags, clothed in several layers, and deposited in a small blue wooden crib, in a room full of small blue wooden cribs full of girl babies of similarly uncertain origin. There she remained for the next ten months.

She was fed on schedule, a bottle propped on a folded towel. Her diaper was changed on schedule, three times a day. She was bathed in a plastic tub every morning. That was her only human contact. She was never cuddled or rocked or kissed. Not once.

When Half the Sky programs began, our caregivers also began keeping “memory books”—individual albums for each child—full of reflections, artwork, photos, conversations, and milestones. The books serve as a sort of history for children who have lost theirs. From Feifei's memory book:

Today is Feifei's first day in the Little Sisters Program. She is two years old and very pale and weak and shy. She doesn't interact with other children. She can't walk or even sit by herself. The teacher is propping her against the wall to help. But Feifei doesn't want to sit and she cries to lie down, for that is how she normally spends her days. For a whole day she struggles with the teacher, refusing or unable to use her legs and hips. She seems to have no language at all. The teacher is having difficulties communicating with her. No one knows what is wrong with Feifei. The orphanage says it is brain disease.

Two weeks later:

After much patient help from the teacher, Feifei now is sitting up straight all by herself. She is beginning to play independently and shows a growing curiosity.

After another month:

Feifei walks by herself for the first time! She opens her arms to reach her teacher.

And just four months from that first day, Feifei began to care for her baby doll:

TEACHER
: What are you doing, Feifei?

FEIFEI
: It's cold.

TEACHER
: Oh, Baby is cold, so you help her by covering her with a blanket?

Feifei nods. She is very serious, but we can see a little smile.

Two years later, Feifei was adopted by a family in the Netherlands. Feifei's mother wrote to us once Feifei had settled in:

The idea that anyone thought that our daughter had serious brain disease made us feel very sad. There is nothing wrong with her! She rides her bicycle, plays computer games, needs an agenda to keep track of her play dates, and practices all day long for her career as a singer. She is fond of (pink) clothes and can't wait for the time when shoes with high heels and makeup are allowed. She fights over toys with her brother and argues over who has to feed the rabbits and cats. If you could see her, you wouldn't believe our girl was once little Feifei!

Feifei got a second chance. She learned to walk and eventually to talk and sing (and argue) because she came to know that somebody cared whether she did or not. She
mattered
.

Loris Malaguzzi got it right. The children, including Feifei, would become Half the Sky's teachers. As we observed them and responded to their needs, they proved to anyone who cared to look that what had happened for our Maya could happen for every child. Half the Sky's programs were developed from observations made within China's welfare institutions about what children need, along with a dose of early childhood theory. Yet they continue to prove over and over again the same simple, universal truths. Every child needs to know that she matters to someone. And every child has potential. One little girl's miracle would become an everyday story.

Within six months, the new preschool teachers and nannies were reporting back to ZZ and Wen steadily, giddy with small triumphs. We shared the coming-out stories with our supporters in newsletters and e-mails. The children's victories might seem slight against the soap opera of our own behind-the-scenes adult machinations, but there was no doubt in our minds who the true victors were.

As word got out, government study groups were sent from Beijing to examine the situation. Small Cloud Zhang was invited to give a few lectures at local teachers' colleges. She told ZZ that we'd changed her life. Suddenly she was
the
authority on child development, and in steady demand. “But I'm not a teacher!” she protested happily.

ONCE HOME IN
California, Anya and I had begun an uneasy and cautious rapprochement. After a couple of weeks, she let me dress her now and then. I was sometimes allowed to give her food. Occasionally she even joined us on the big bed for a family snuggle, though she carefully kept her distance from me. She eased up on the spitting and biting business (that slap, thankfully, was a one-time thing), and she began doggedly tailing five-year-old Maya, who must have ascended a pedestal while the rest of us were sleeping. Suddenly, Anya was handmaiden to her big sister, responding to her every whim and parroting her every move.

Our new daughter seemed to have decided that this family stuff wasn't a complete disaster after all, and neither, possibly (time would tell), was her mother.

 

MOST CHINESE WOMEN
were required to retire when they reached the doddering age of fifty or fifty-five (and just try to get a new job if you're a woman laid off post-forty), but because she had useful language skills, ZZ managed to hang on at CPWF until she turned sixty. The moment she retired, Half the Sky hired its first employee, and ZZ began what she now calls her “real career.”

While still in graduate school, Wen became our second, part-time employee. Half the Sky now had two staff plus me. I then hired Ivy Yu, a recent Berkeley grad and our most loyal volunteer, to help me run the Berkeley office (our dining room table). Still not imagining the day would come when we'd need seventeen hundred staff to keep our operations going, our team of four marched boldly into the next phase of Half the Sky's development.

I'd been gathering names of potential program sites from the beginning—orphanages whose kids came home to their new adoptive families with attachment difficulties, hints of abuse, or signs of neglect. Whenever I read a sad story on the adoption lists, I took notes. With increasing frequency, parents were writing directly to me, sharing their stories of troubled adoptions and traumatized children.

Letters of thanks from adoptive parents came to us too. After a period of adjustment (and some healthy grieving for their nannies), children from our Half the Sky programs seemed to be thriving in their post-adoption lives. Infants and toddlers who attached early were able to transfer those attachments to their new parents easily. With plenty of evidence of success in hand, it was time to expand our efforts.

Using my trusty World-Cart map of China and assorted plane, train, and bus schedules, I figured out how we could visit twenty trouble spots in six provinces in just nineteen days. ZZ and Wen didn't even wince at the itinerary. As far as I know, nobody in China ever winced when I announced an all-new plan, a whole new deal. This is one of the many things about the Chinese that I love.

Then bad news. Kindly Mr. Shi, our handler at the Social Workers Association, had been transferred from orphan issues to veteran affairs. I was crushed. The new guy was Mr. Yang. ZZ called him Lao Yang (Old Yang), so I did too. Thin, drawn, and humorless, Old Yang was a cipher. Even when we eventually met in person, I couldn't glean anything about him except that he was embarrassed by his bad teeth. (I knew this only because he covered his mouth when he spoke, and so nobody ever understood what he was saying.)

ZZ submitted my orphanage request list. Old Yang came back to us with approval to visit ten cities—none of them on my list of trouble spots. That news reached me two days before my departure for the big trip.

Hi ZZ,

Can you help me figure out how we might convince Old Yang and the ministry that it is not sufficient to send us to ten of the nicest institutions in China? If we accept only institutions on the approved list, we won't be going to a single place where the children are most in need.