In Beijing at this hour, it is the morning of Emily’s adoption day. 17 years ago today, we met this little peanut of a girl, bundled up in a pink snowsuit, arms at a 90 degree angle to her body, cheeks flushed with wind and the bitter December cold of Nanchang, China.
That first night Emily just mewed, no crying. She ate an entire loaf of sweet brown Chinese bread, ravenous and underfed. She was one year plus a week old. We always joke that she was “lost in the mail” but it was no joke at the time. We had been waiting the better part of a year for the arrival of our second daughter, not understanding the wait time given that expatriates living in China at that time were treated to “express” service in the adoption department.
We had our dear friend Lei Jing call the CCAA (the official government adoption agency in Beijing) to inquire why our ‘placement’ was taking so long. She was told that the envelope containing the dossier of who-was-to-become our daughter along with a few tiny photos and a brief overview of her ‘finding’ place and her first year in the social welfare institute (not actually an orphanage as most abandoned children in China have living birth parents) had been sent two weeks prior.
They told Lei Jing that they were about to re-place our daughter with another family because we had not responded to the express delivery notification. We, in fact, had not received it. Between the adoption of our first daughter and our second, we had moved apartments in Guangzhou, and though the most current address had been given in our adoption submission, the envelope had nonetheless been sent to our previous address.
Everything went at warp speed after that call: finding the present residents of our old apartment; confirming they had received and returned the envelope (after sitting untouched for several days) back to the DHL office; contacting DHL headquarters in Guangzhou to be told the envelope was still there; arriving at the headquarters to be told it had just been sent back to Beijing; contacting and re-contacting Beijing to vehemently insist, “WE WANT THAT BABY! DON’T GIVE HER TO ANOTHER FAMILY!” And then calling again.
Within a few days we were on a plane to Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, to complete our family in the well-worn Gloria Plaza Hotel, in a room with a view of the Gan River, and Cheerios under the bed and ground into the carpet from all the other international adoptions that took place here. The hotel hallways were the meeting places for countless parents and their newly-acquired children. Not a sterile operating room, but a grungy green carpeted hallway hallowed with memories. The same hallway where we met our Charlotte, our other Jiangxi baby, two years previous.
There is more to tell of this story, so much more, but today this is what I have energy to write. This was the day our family became complete.
Tonight we went out for wonton soup and gailan (Chinese broccoli) in oyster sauce at Hon’s, one of my longtime favourite hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Vancouver. We remembered our dear daughter/sister over the steaming broth, the plump shrimp and pork-filled wontons, the slurping of the nest of egg noodles and the crunching of the greenest of slippery oyster-sauce-coated stems, nearly impossible for even us, with 25 years of living in Asia, to pick up with our chopsticks.
We went home and knit, and then the three of us laid in the not-very-big bed and nuzzled and ‘worried’ the edges, as she had always done, of the soft white-with-pink-stars blanket we had gifted Emily on the magical day of our meeting. That blanket stayed on her bed these last seventeen years. Now it will stay on ours.