Wish You Happy Forever (23 page)

We found Jingli and the
ayi
slumped against a wall in a waiting room full of screaming babies and exhausted parents. Jingli was wan and bone-thin. Her eyes took up half her face. This place was more terrifying than the Root Cellar.

“
Ayi
says Jingli got very excited about going to Shanghai and did not sleep the whole night on the train,” ZZ explained. “In the car, she just looked out of the window all the time and got carsick due to all these excitements. Now they been standing here all morning.”

“How do we get her out of here?”

“We must show your foreign face,” ZZ said.

In less than twenty minutes, Jingli was in a hospital bed in a semiprivate room. I loved and hated having that kind of power. I'd never seen reverse racism before. China,
Zhongguo
, literally means Middle Country—the center of the world. But the pecking order—at least at that time and in my experience—told another story. Pale-faced Americans, for whatever reason, seemed to outrank everyone, especially the Chinese. It seemed to me China had the world's biggest inferiority/superiority complex.

Anyway, right then I was thinking of Jingli. I took full advantage of my unearned status when the chief of neurosurgery entered the room wearing scrubs.

“Thank you for agreeing to see us, Doctor,” I said. “We are so sorry to interrupt your busy schedule, but we were told that it might be difficult for this little girl to receive the detethering surgery she's supposed to have today. We scheduled it for her some weeks ago, but now there's some problem about too many on the waiting list. So I wondered if it's because the hospital believes that the child is an orphan and doesn't have family to pay?”

I'd learned that even the best surgeons in China make their paltry living through fees for surgeries. They can't afford to take charity cases. The doctor was flustered.

I jumped in again. “I just wanted to assure you, Doctor, that Jingli is my child, and my husband and I will pay for her surgery. Today!”

“She is your daughter?”

I smiled at Jingli, limp on the clean white hospital bed. I ruffled her greasy hair. She looked like she'd just dropped in from another planet.

“Yes. Well, she's one of my many daughters.”

I took her pale hand and gave it a squeeze. “
Keyi
—it's okay,” I whispered.

ZZ explained to the doctor about Half the Sky and about how we consider ourselves all one big family.

“Jenny has many thousands of children,” she said. “She really means it.”

She told the whole story. Her eyes teared up. (They always did.) The good doctor looked a little weepy too.

“Of course, we will take the very best care of your daughter, Mrs. Jenny,” said the chief of neurosurgery. That was all we needed to hear. I held Jingli's hand until the doctor left the room.

Then we headed for the airport. Now I steeled myself to shake things up in a whole new province, Henan. By a sad twist of fate, it had more troubles than most.

Somewhere in Henan Province

Mr. Hu, director of the Henan Province welfare department, cracked the car window. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

I'd almost recovered from another lunch banquet cigarette headache. But I really wanted Mr. Hu to like me. I said it was okay.

The driver sped south along the expressway from the capital, Zhengzhou, in the north to Xinyang in the south. The landscape of Henan was flat, featureless, any signs of life concealed behind a dull-green ribbon of highway flora. There were no other cars. No other people. Except . . . every kilometer or so, a not-quite-life-size concrete police sentinel standing at rigid attention, keeping an eye on things. These little fellows looked oddly foreign—too much nose.

“This doesn't feel like China,” I said. “Aren't there any people in Henan?”

“Ninety-eight million,” said Mr. Hu. “More than any other province. They just can't afford the tolls.”

Mr. Hu told us that Henan is where Chinese civilization began. “In south of Henan, in Zhoukou, there is the tomb of Fuxi, who they say is the forefather of us all. It was the capital of the Three Emperors: Sky, Earth, Man. And Laozi, the founding father of Taoism, was born there too.”

“What a proud heritage!”

“Yes. Now it is famous only for disasters: floods, famine, poverty, and AIDS.”

There was my opening. My heart sped. I bit my tongue. I'd been trying to figure out a way to work in this province since 2002, when I'd first read Elisabeth Rosenthal's stories in the
New York Times:

ZHENGZHOU
(
NEW YORK TIMES
)—AIDS is creating an explosion of destitute orphans here in China's rural heartland and is driving large numbers of families into such dire poverty that they can no longer afford to feed or clothe, much less educate, their children. . . .

Wang Beibei, 10, a star pupil from Suixian, a county in northern Henan, was expelled from third grade last year after school officials discovered that her father had died of AIDS.

“They were afraid to let me in, and my friends stopped playing with me,” she said. . . . In June, Beibei's mother died of AIDS. School is out of the question. There is no one to work the family's land, and she and her brother struggle just to look out for each other. “My brother cooks for me, and we eat noodles. We have no money for eggs or meat.”

I knew we had to find a way to try to help. Sure, these weren't abandoned baby girls, but orphans were orphans. The hurt was the same. When I asked ZZ to make some calls to our few friends in high places, we quickly learned that the subject was closed. Off-limits. There were no AIDS orphans in Henan. In fact, according to the authorities, there was no AIDS in China.

So we asked permission to set up Half the Sky centers in “ordinary” orphanages in Henan Province—for just normal, everyday, abandoned kids. Old Yang told us that was impossible. He said the province was closed to foreigners.

Guanyin, my favorite goddess, must have been listening. A few months later, and with no explanation, Old Yang was again replaced by dear Mr. Shi, our first and best friend at the Social Workers Association. Mr. Shi somehow wangled permission for us to visit a small group of Henan orphanages and possibly open centers. He said he must particularly recommend Luoyang.

“But why Luoyang?” I asked ZZ. I knew they were getting plenty of foreign aid. Even the Gates Foundation was helping Luoyang.

“It's China,” she said.

Despite the fact that Luoyang was the only place in the entire province that wasn't struggling to keep its doors open and tummies full, there was no avoiding it—the Luoyang director had both
guanxi
and
chutzpah
. So we would choose Luoyang, to make the officials happy, and then one other place—one deep in the heart of AIDS country. Then, somehow without succumbing to mission drift, we would find a way to reach the children who didn't exist.

I knew by now that the next step must be to make friends—local friends, preferably in high places. Mr. Shi introduced us to the director of the provincial welfare department, Mr. Hu. Our first Henan friend turned out to be our best. He was a gem. “Many Chinese even think all Henan people are thieves, criminals,” Mr. Hu was saying.

ZZ whispered, “Yes, they do.”

“Instead, we are victims of misfortune. Constant misfortune.”

He lit a new cigarette from the butt of one still burning. I rolled my eyes at ZZ. Grabbed my throat.

“Mr. Hu, you shouldn't smoke so much,” ZZ said.

“It's not good for me, I know. But it's part of my wife's free benefits. She works at a cigarette factory. I try to stop. Not successful.”

He turned to look at me. “Does the smoke bother you?”

“Oh no.” My eyes stung and my head throbbed, but I really wanted to keep my only friend in Henan happy.

Now, as we neared Xinyang, the landscape turned greener, the heat more intense. I could see mountains rising in the west. “Xinyang is a tea-growing area,” said Mr. Hu. “Xinyang
Maojian
green tea—one of the top ten China
famous
teas.”

“It is the place I was sent during Cultural Revolution,” ZZ said quietly, looking out the window.

“Xinyang is where you came?” I took her hand. I knew that was the time she'd had to leave behind her baby boy when he was only six months old and, like other young intellectuals of her generation, go “down to the countryside” to learn about the roots of communism from the farmers. She'd slept on a dirt
kang
(communal bed) and moved from house to house, working in rice paddies with leeches clinging to her legs. The farmers thought she was useless. The only food was a watery porridge sprinkled with a few grains of millet. She didn't complain; her hosts ate the same.

Her breasts ached until the milk dried, and even after, she dreamed each night about her tiny son, her first and only child. She was away from him for almost a year. She was still haunted by that . . . abandoning her baby to come to this place.

TO ME, XINYANG
looked like yet another smallish Chinese city struggling to come into the twenty-first century. To my foreign eyes, these cities all looked the same: a patchwork of single-story, tired-looking shops selling cell phones and dresses, a couple of McDonald's and KFC look-alikes, assorted tiny cafés with grimy windows, a block where merchants sold only giant coils of wire, another block of only used electrical parts, another of funeral wreaths, the occasional shiny new department store (still under construction), and a China Unicom tower. The government buildings, each on its own block, were always the most impressive.

“It was completely different then,” ZZ said.

A woman bicycled past, wearing a visor and a filmy “butterfly” scarf floating over her shoulders to shelter her pale skin from the sun. A small boy, perched on the crossbar, peered from between her arms. A young family cruised by on a motor scooter, baba and mama sharing the single seat, baby in the basket.

We turned off the main drag onto a rough road leading to the orphanage on the sleepy outskirts of town. These were more like village streets, the few houses and shops more ramshackle. I tried to imagine a young ZZ arriving here thirty-five years before.

“Not even like this,” ZZ said, reading my mind. “It was much more rural. Primitive. They had nothing.”

AT THE ORPHANAGE
gate, we were greeted by Director Feng, a cheerful, open-faced farm boy who clearly relished his job. As we walked through the sad little rooms of his orphanage, he was kind to the children and truly eager to help them. With no one to train his team in how to do anything like running a children's home, Director Feng had put his ample good energy and rural know-how into designing gadgets to make the children's lives more bearable. He'd cooked up hoists for kids with cerebral palsy and gizmos to correctly angle bottles into baby mouths.

Still, and as usual, the children were pretty much on their own. Nobody was holding or playing or talking with them. Every child I saw that bright summer day languished in bed. Except one.

She lived in a beat-up old baby stroller that wasn't going anywhere. She was about three years old. She had lost both her feet. Both of them cut off. Her name was Baobao.

I lifted her from the stroller and sat her on my lap. She allowed me to hold her close. Not tense or fearful—just unaccustomed to any sort of intimacy. She gazed at me with a sort of foggy curiosity.

Baobao

She'd been abandoned at the gate of Xinyang Central Hospital. The police report says that she was severely burned; both lower legs had turned black. She was dying. The doctors kept her alive, but her burns were so bad that one-third of each lower leg had to be amputated. Baobao spent eight months in the hospital, including the Spring Festival (the Chinese New Year holiday), when everybody who
could
went home. The nurses took turns looking after her. When I met her, she had just arrived at the Xinyang orphanage. Like so many of the children, the rest of Baobao's story was a blank.

“You are a very brave girl, Baobao,” I told her. “We're coming back to help you.”

I peered up at Mr. Hu. “I think Director Feng is wonderful, don't you, Mr. Hu? There is a great warm feeling about this place. They only need some training. If you are agreeable, we'd like to work here in Xinyang.”

“I can see that is true,” he said. He ruffled Baobao's stubbly hair.

IT WAS MY
first (and only) Chinese “camping experience.” We wouldn't actually sleep in the place, my hosts explained, but the Xinyang officials wanted to give us China's “
famous
camping in nature” treat. (I don't think there was much camping going on in China in those days.) First we drove through a mountain resort area, one of the country's four
most famous
resorts. Before every gorgeous view spot, there was a billboard with a cheesy inflated rendition of what we were about to see, along with a sales pitch for something irrelevant—cigarettes or skin lightener or a villa by a lake that didn't actually exist in China but looked suspiciously like Switzerland.

And then we bumped along an endless dirt road in black night. As far as I could tell in the darkness, there was no sign that anything like camping had ever occurred anywhere in the vicinity. Somehow we arrived just in time for dinner.

It was an outdoor kitchen on the shores of a reservoir—also
famous
. Bare electric lightbulbs were strung from assorted tree branches. We sat at a big round table covered with sticky oilcloth. It was a hot and humid night. Countless flying things batted themselves against the lightbulbs and the dinner guests. Cicadas screeched in the trees—deafening. But the food was great and the ice-cold bottles of local beer, a gift from the gods.

“Do they have cicadas in America?” shouted Mr. Hu.

“Not where I come from—not in San Francisco,” I shouted back.