Dear Friends & Fellow Travellers
This letter is long in coming. But the first months of single motherhood have been FULL of love, work and more love and work and work, love, etc. Studies show the amount of work required to care for multiple-birth babies is 197 hours per week. Only 24 x 7 or 168 hours exist each week, a fact that provokes one to rethink potential time/space continuum after child. While being a single mother doesn’t rival two-parenting triplets, the experience is closer than one might ever have anticipated. So here's the first installment of a long story - a letter that began as a note that grew and grew -- like the baby's belly -- like my sense of what it means to become "Mah." Everything has changed. Tent in the dining room. Tiny vivid furniture shifting underfoot. Stuffed menagerie observes all without comment. Large live poodle Phoebe licks her wounded pride. Cheerios mark the extent of our transformation -- little round o's packed into the crevices of the kitchen, bedroom, bed, highchair, car, sofa, corners: everywhere. Oh! Oh! Oh!
March 1998
On our arrival
home Baobao falls into the lowest 5% of the North American infant height
and weight category -- partially due to the limited nutrition available
to her having lived most of her life on congee, a rice cereal, and milk
powder. More significantly perhaps, she is as small in stature as her
south China ethnic heritage allows. Since January she has been expanding
in size from 12-month to almost 24-month clothes. Her weight is now about
24 pounds and she is in the 25th percentile. She remains vertically
petite, no doubt like her birth mother and just like her adoptive mother.
According to the nurse at the health clinic she is about to sprout. [Mah's
note, October 1999: I may have overestimated her weight in March. Perhaps
I couldn't read? She now weighs 24 pounds -- still? Is Bao shrinking?
Doctor claims she is very healthy.]
Active and lively -- she runs here, there and everywhere, leaping
tall buildings, throwing herself out of shopping carts -- the usual. Favourite
activities include: playing with plastic dishes and containers; standing
in colanders, dishpans, laundry baskets, telephone booths and the bathtub;
following me around mimicking my every move from putting on lipstick (eek!
a pipsqueak tart!); sweeping the floor; putting away her socks, shoes,
toys (yippee!); playing with her doll stroller, tent, sandbox -- and reading
books. Not just any old book but tomes like Mapping the Subject or The
Life of Culture. And she talks to herself while leafing with great seriousness
through the pages. I don't know where she developed these habits. Certainly
not from this mother!
After two months, Bb acquired as much language as an anglophone her
age according to Elena Nicholada, a specialist in child’s second language
acquisition who co-directed a study of the baby's language development.
Over the course of two months, Bb's Cantonese dwindles to mere scraps
of understanding in spite of our attendance at the twice-monthly Cantonese
Mother Goose infant and toddler sing-along hour at a Chinese church in
the north of the city. Were I to adopt another child …[Perish the thought!
cries the sensible single mother.]… I would ensure that the baby have
Cantonese caregivers from the first moment of her arrival in Canada. As
it stands now, hoping her tongue will follow the traces of her linguistic
memories, I hope to enroll her in Mandarin or Cantonese bilingual school
when she is old enough to concentrate on her lessons. Edmonton has three
public Mandarin/English schools and one Cantonese/English program. One
day I will have to decide which language to pursue -- the politics of
both are significant.
Bb's fingers are long, graceful and strong --very good pinching tools.
Will she play the piano or the cello or whatever musical instrument? On
Chinese New Years in February, Auntie Allyson from Vancouver, Bb and I
spent the evening feasting at the Miramar, a local Chinese restaurant
with Dragon dances and an extensive Tai Kwon Do exhibition. The young
dark-haired girls moved with practiced intensity and precision in dazzling
routines. Would Baobao take up Tae Kwon Do or tap?
Last minute preparations
for my trip to China lose impetus -- interrupted by a sudden desire to
smash out walls, repaint the kitchen, perform any banal physical task
that will replace my feverish brain with numbing fumes. Two weeks ago,
my lover tells me he is unable to continue our relationship since he can't
project "us" into the future and doesn't want to be another disappearing
act in this child's life. Am I distraught or relieved? Spend Christmas
alone coverekd in paint and plaster dust. No pathos here. Just Martha
Stewart, and me, and this silent night. Cry and sing carols off-key while
dangling from treacherous ledges and ladders. During my last Christmas
without a child for years to come, I relish this crazed solitude lost
in distraction of delirious anticipation. Already utterly bonded to the
pudgy spike-haired child I have only seen manifested as passport-sized
photograph, my feelings shift like ice floes. The adoption is what I want
but these waiting days bring confused reflections on what has brought
me to this place: I was: "childless" for too long; filled with trepidation
at the thought of establishing a single-parented "family"; happily "child-free"
for the early part of a life filled with activities that made parenting
seem an impossible world; lamenting my long infertility and the psychic
paralysis it induced.
One night, an irrational desire to adopt two children emerges. Why
not a playmate for the first?
What I Didn't Know About Babies
Shopping for baby things
a comedy of errors. What IS a onesie? How small is my baby? Pack clothes
for China that will fit three variations on a theme. What's with these
diapers and accessories -- a repertoire of variations more complicated
than auto parts. I pack enough bottom wipes for 6 months of extreme use.
And a giant box of Cheerios in case the baby becomes an elephant in search
of a snack. What kind of stories will my baby like? What about this peek-a-boo
lift-the-flap book with Asian characters? Will she recognize identity
politics? Why didn't I spend more time on those elusive Cantonese tones?
Will my kisses and hugs provide a gestural bridge between us? How long
will it take the baby to understand my English? Are board books for chess
players?
I purchase enough domestic anchoring safety mechanisms to assure me
the baby will not die immediately. A hurricane will not blow away the
cupboards, the staircase, bookshelves or refrigerator.
Since we plan to stay as a group in a fancy Chinese hotel, won't the
baby like to swim?
I pack a second-hand bathing suit for her; my mother packs a bathing suit
for the baby in a different size: as it turns out, Baobao is frightened
of water running in the sink, terrified of water in a bath. Swimming?
How absurd.
What I Knew About Babies
My Aunt Marilyn advises:
"If she cries, there are three things that might be wrong. Check that
she doesn't want anything by mouth -- Is she hungry or thirsty? Check
her diaper. Check to see if she is tired."
My mother said. "Playing with her in a concentrated way for a limited
time is more effective than half-heartedly playing. They know the difference."
My friend Mary, single adoptive mother of two, affirms: "I love my
children dearly, but I advise you to adopt only one."
On January 11, 1999 my
mother and I travel Toronto and Edmonton to Vancouver where we take a
13-hour flight to Hong Kong. China only allows adoption in groups so our
group of 22 has assembled from across the country to adopt 11 children.
We're booked into Kowloon's Baden-Powell Hotel. Ron, a fisherman turned
logger from Vancouver Island and father of two grown daughters, is travelling
on his own because his wife fears flying. After breakfast he buys a Scout
compass in the tuck shop. It must have helped. On the way home to Canada,
I snap a photograph of Ron asleep in his seat, his tiny beautiful daughter
snoozing on the fold-down tray in front of him. Would a Kowloon Girl Guide
compass help navigate my new motherhood?
Awaiting our meeting with the new family member, my mother and I expend
anxiety the morning of the 13th in a beautiful Kowloon park
watching Tai Chi experts and fabulous pink flamingoes spread their wings.
A few hours later, our group boards a commercial bus for Guangzhou, the
former Canton, third-largest city in China. At the border I am the only
one detained by the Chinese authorities who meticulously go through my
voluminous luggage. They make no comment about the Cheerios, the syringes
and I.V. connections (in case of sudden hospitalization) or the dozens
of diapers. My paranoid and possibly self-inflated explanation for their
suspicion is that my passport announces "professor" making me a potential
suspicious suspect. On the other hand, perhaps the officials sniffed a
capitalist pig shopper in there midst. After an embarrassing long time
repacking my overstuffed bags, I rejoin our bus that rolls along the highway
through a landscape of intricately connected factories, apartments, and
small gardens – everything in a state of apparent constant expansion and
construction.
Adoption Affairs
Our group of Canadian adoptive families hails from cities and towns between Halifax and Vancouver Island and includes expectant parents, aunties, friends, a niece, a grandmother, and a very special little girl named Tama who was adopted from Northern China three years ago. Parents Peter & Kathy accompanied by their devoted aunt Jan are travelling to adopt their second child, Kira, as is an Ottawa couple. No matter our life circumstances and histories, the collective anticipation grows increasingly intense as we journey towards Guangzhou. The calm in the midst of collective nervousness is our agent Bonnie Wong who meets us as we check into our Guangzhou hotel, the luxurious Dong Feng. When not travelling with her groups of adoptive parents, this kind and canny strategist, originally from a coastal city near Maoming, makes her home in Vancouver. Bonnie’s transformation into international "stork" began during Vancouver student days when she was asked by adoptive parents to assist in the translation of adoption documents. This work developed into "Tribo," the business she and her husband Dale now devote themselves to full-time. Working with eager and sometimes demanding adoptive parents, Bonnie travels a half-dozen or so times a year to China to facilitate the adoption of orphanage children -- almost exclusively girls -- by Canadian parents. The first time I heard of Bonnie was when I met the brilliant Vancouver writer Sky Lee and her lovely new adoptive daughter. After my eager interrogation, Sky described her adoption and the positive advocacy role Bonnie played in its success. On a Christmas visit to Vancouver in 1997, I went to Bonnie’s apartment and enjoyed tea and conversation in a living room filled with over 100 cards and photographs featuring a collective tableau of dark-haired sparkling-eyed babies. (Did I notice the play of exhaustion around the smiling parents' eyes?) This display of familial bliss as well as Bonnie’s quiet and unassuming, though confident manner, confirmed my decision to adopt –even though a year of serious illness was to intervene and delay my plans.
Entering Maoming: What’s in a Name?
On the early morning
of January 14th, we drive to the Guandong Province Ministry
for Foreign Adoption where we swear to love and care for our children,
never to forsake them. Our formal declarations make us all cry as we sign
adoption papers. In these dreary offices, surrounded by newfound friends,
I see the first sight of my baby's body traces on an official document.
The shape of a red-inked footprint blurs at the edges as though my baby
has been on the move and flying. Another welcome sign of the lively child
I will soon meet. That same afternoon we drive seven and a half-hours
south in a chartered bus to Maoming a city near the South China Sea at
about the same latitude as Hanoi, Haiti and Hydrabad. Stopping for a riotous
dinner on the way, we admit to anticipatory temporary insanity. Before
bed, Tama and I played a rousing make-believe game with my bright red
baby blanket. What begins as "rock-a-bye-baby" soon mutates into "drop
the baby!" -- a game of Tama's invention that creatively articulates her
own 3-year-old anxieties about becoming a sister.
On this last non-mothering night, we all sleep (more or less) at a
Government guesthouse in Maoming with unexplored pool and gardens. What
was supposed to be a temperate climate plummets to unseasonable cold.
I wear all the clothes I have brought layered for warmth. The following
morning after breakfast we are told to wait on the third floor for the
babies to arrive at 8am. Queenie, a fellow-traveller and soon to be adoptive
mother of Fraser, has asked my baby’s name. "Mao Xiao Bao," I reply mispronouncing
her name. (In Cantonese her name is pronounced "Mao Tsue Beau.")
"Her familiar name in the orphanage will probably be Bao-Bao [pronounced
Beau Beau]," prophesies wise Queenie, " Bao is her familiar name. Mao
is her "family" name. Xiao is the name of those children born in her generation."
All of the children from an orphanage share the invented surname.
Earlier in the week, I tell Bonnie Wong that I will leave the baby's
name "Mao Xiao Bao." After clarifying that Baobao's "Mao" is not the same
as "leader" in Mao Tse Tung, her reply is firm, and for the first time,
directive: "But you wouldn’t want to call the baby after a city would
you…? Edmonton Williamson? I decide not to call her Little Mao from Maoming
and return to my original idea of calling the baby "Rae Xiao Bao" – "Rae"
is my middle name, as well as a name that is sprinkled through my paternal
family beginning with my wonderful Aunt Marilyn. According to friend Jennifer
Jay, Rae can mean "auspicious" in Mandarin. At this point I am ready to
read the entrails of birds to fathom some particulars about my lovely
Baobao. For the moment, I maintain her affectionate name Baobao, "treasured
treasure," so there will be at least this thread of continuity in her
life. Later she can make her own mind up. The "Bao" in her name actually
means "the one to be defended or protected." Will she later become "Rae,"
"Rae-Xiao" or remain my darling "Bao"? Only avian entrails know for sure.
Baobao
Lives in Maoming Baobao Lives in Maoming Baobao Lives in Maoming
And MahMah Goes to Fetch Her There
The first six babies,
including Baobao, are driven in a van from the Maoming Welfare Institute
at 8am. Later at 10 and then at 11, the remaining seven children arrive
from two different orphanages in the surrounding area. As the allotted
hour approaches an eager voice yells, "They're here!" and I sneak down
the stairs to see if I can catch an first glimpse. One after another,
dark-haired women, each bearing a child, mount the stairs in a ceremonial
hush. I call out "Baobao." A woman who has arrived almost at my side turns
the child in her arms towards me. I later learn this is Baobao’s beloved
caregiver whom she calls MahMah and cries out for during our first weeks
together. In this MahMah's arms I find the same pensive dark-eyed girl
I have loved in the photograph sent to me on November 12, 1998 to announce
my "match." In this unseasonably chill early morning weather, Baobao is
dressed for the occasion in bright pink and white striped socks below
several layers of corduroy and cotton topped with a pale-yellow hooded
jacket that frames her perfectly round face and intense intelligent glance.
Her now familiar rosebud lips turn slightly down in anticipation of she
knows not what.
All I remember of these moments is an unearthly ecstatic chorus of
non-verbal sighs, cries, sobs and coos as mothers and friends or fathers,
grandmothers or nieces meet their already beloved chosen children. Baobao's
caregiver draws the child away from me as I hastily, indeed desperately,
reach for her. When I am able to take my own eyes from my beautiful baby,
I notice with almost perverse relief that this woman’s eyes fill with
tears and her own loss of a loved child. Why should I feel relief in imagining
the gravity of this woman's loss or indeed in witnessing the grief Baobao
expresses in her cries during her first few days with me? The sadness
helps me know how love has marked the heart of my little girl during her
first seventeen months of orphanage life.
Maoming Child Welfare Institute
We are invited
to visit the orphanage though not admitted any further than the courtyard
where we find the completed orphanage on one and a half sides of the courtyard
facing a large addition under construction, funded in part by our donation.
The orphanage, which cares for 100 children, is being expanded into a
compound encircling a courtyard that will care for 400 children. I am
utterly grateful to the dedicated orphanage director and caregivers for
their work in caring for these children. My Baobao was a tough little
girl to have survived abandonment at two days old, but her survival appears
not to have been plagued by some of my imagined torments since she continues
to flourish having been tended with care and devotion.
My baby comes with her own explanatory manual, "The Baby Nursing Common
Guide of Society Welfare Court of MaoMing City," a six-page booklet translated
into innovative English. Some excerpts: I: Ways and feeds of number of
milk made…. Normal babies are fed on Jinding Growing -up Milk Powder and
Heinz Growing-up Rice Powder made in China.)…. II: Sleepy time and habit.
…The babies' room are kept clean. The air is clear and fresh. Avoid the
traditional custom. At sleepy time the temperature of the babies' room
is 20 °C to 23°C: left gently light in the whole night…. III. Nursing….
IV: Life Time: music and regular fresh air develop brain and love of nature.
Baobao's love of music and singing have been nurtured in musical sessions.
Her limbs are stronger than they might have been since she must have been
given daily exercises. (While these are not detailed in the "Common Guide,"
the first morning Baobao awakes, she performs a series of leg stretches
with her feet ascending the wall in various patterns. I imagine her rehearsing
something she knows, but this could be mere fantasy on my part.) When
I first meet Baobao, she walks on her own, though somewhat unsteadily
-- the orphanage workers proudly display this skill that has required
patient tutelage. The baby is generally clear-skinned and plump enough
to suggest her health is excellent, an observation later confirmed by
doctors in Bejiing and Edmonton. Some of the children from one of the
other orphanages are tinier and several have scabies -- but these children
are also obviously well loved and attentively cared for in jaunty knitted
gold and red wool hats. Heart-shaped jade pendants looped around their
necks are a traditional Chinese sign prophesying future good fortune.
Their less-healthy status appears the result not of neglect but of impoverishment
and the limited resources available in smaller more rural orphanages.
My conclusion at this point is that while there may be some "bad" orphanages,
many Chinese orphanages are very fine indeed.
Treasuring Gram
Baobao and I are blessed
by our travelling companion Gram who gave me welcome advice on everything
about the baby, especially during the first days when I found Baobao's
evening grief almost too much to bear. During these tearful hours, Gram
sat on the floor playing patiently with the baby. Her advice (rarely fought!),
comfort (gratefully received), and wisdom (desperately sought!) made our
good-tempered travels possible.
One night Kathy and Peter and Jan and Tama and Kira and Gram and Baobao
and I visit a traditional restaurant in the hotel where we have a grand
time watching the delicate spray of boiling water arch across the table
into our tiny tea cups filled with delightful aromatic mysteries. Baobao’s
tastes span the delicious encyclopedic variety of Chinese cuisine -- but
her favourite remains noodles. Her noodle ritual -- a wonder to behold.
One flimsy end of any two-foot noodle clutched in one hand, she dangles
the other noodle end in her lips. Over the course of five minutes, Baobao
can slowly and soundlessly make it disappear. Is this surprising? Eating
for Baobao is a fascinating ritual. The first day she falls asleep while
sitting on my belly, a piece of apple is clutched in her hand, inching
its way to the bed sheet as her arm drops in slumber. Just as the apple
is about to fall from her hand, she jerks herself awake and grabs it.
In the orphanage, food was not to be wasted and there seems to have been
little to share. Since her caregiver had to look after four babies, there
was always another open mouth. Gram's advice: keep food at the ready at
all times.
Lifting the Cabbage Leaf
When I was a child, my
mother told me I was found under a cabbage leaf – a common response to
preempt keen questions about the "birds & bees." In China, Baobao
would not be considered an orphan unless her parents were dead. The adoption
documents confirm that Baobao’s parents were "unknown" and that she was
abandoned in a residential area on the north side of a bridge on August
7, 1997, just two days after her birth. On the map of Maoming, the bridge
is a mere five blocks from the orphanage. Was this was a common spot for
children to be abandoned? Later I am told that in China, grandmothers?
Or fathers? Or friends? stand watch over the tiny abandoned child obscured
from view. If no one finds the child the first day, they might return
with the baby the next day. It is illegal in China to abandon a child
so other alternatives include abandoning children in bus or train stations
where crowds obliterate identities to assure anonymity. I know that the
heat of the Maoming tropical summer helped Baobao’s state of health during
the minutes or hours of her abandonment in the street. Her second journey
would be to the police station where her status as abandoned child was
registered. Later she is carried to the orphanage where she finds her
first home.
In a recent anthropological study of the abandonment of Chinese children,
it appears that at least twenty-five percent of those who abandon children
are found out, a sign perhaps of the risks people undergo to ensure the
safety of the child. It is rare that a mother makes the decision to abandon
a child on her own. Most often it is a family decision; sometimes one
that the mother herself does not enter into. Most abandoned girl babies
are the third or fourth daughters. As one social critic writes: It isn't
that the Chinese don't love their girl children; they must have a boy
for the family to survive according to custom. Women's lives in rural
China appear impossibly difficult from the outside. China has the highest
percentage of female suicide in the world: "Thirty-three percent of all
injury deaths in China are caused by suicide… and most Chinese suicides
are women."
You birthed this girl I've loved from the first moment. Your decision to leave her cannot have been guided by your gaze into her eyes. Or the sweep of your hair across her beautiful face. The touch of your fingers the length of this tiny body. Your sorrow at great loss cannot be compensated for by anything -- not the love I feel for our daughter, not my gratitude for your labour, nor the knowledge that my daughter will one day understand that even in your absence, she has another mother to love. Your identity -- a tragic though necessary secret -- as long as the law determines that both the birth of your daughter and her abandonment are forbidden.
Parenting would be impossible were it not for the phenomenon of childish charm -- the smiles and hugs and kisses and jokes and play that make possible the tyranny of care, nay, the enslavement called "motherhood." I'm certain that Baobao watched not only cartoons but a lot of Chinese opera in the orphanage. Her games are utterly melodramatic. My favourite -- the "disappearing hand act" -- seems to have begun before we met in China. She usually performs in her highchair while awaiting delivery of her first course. Oops, her hand disappears up her left sleeve while her right hand covers her mouth and her eyes round in feigned horror. Then -- Brava! The left hand reappears to a shout of glee -- Hurrah! Baobao has two hands all the better to feed herself with fork or spoon or fingers or the poke of a chopstick. A biologist friend thinks Baobao's character is what evolves in a culture where girl children are not prized. Her special performances mean that she might have had an extra morsel of dinner in the orphanage or a loving pat on the arm. For the first few months I noticed that she wasn't ticklish anywhere but in the fleshy pockets between her shoulders and neck. Was this a result of her care? Without dedicated caregivers she no doubt spent a good deal of time in a walker or crib while other babies were tended -- perhaps a ticklish touch would bring peals of Baobao's laughter as her caregiver moved hurriedly about the room moving from open mouth to open mouth.
Baobao's Crie de Coeur: Biology IS NOT Destiny!
May 25, 1999: I have to confess an hilarious interruption as I write this letter -- while my mother has been visiting for ten glorious days, I've been madly doing organizational chores abandoned to chaos while on my own with the baby -- like cleaning out the cupboards and drawers where almost everything of importance has disappeared. As I write about biology and the baby, BB tugs at my leg, opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to reveal -- eek! a button she found in a pile of precious objects unearthed in one of my archeological digs. The button from a Women's Day March sometime around 1979 announces "BIOLOGY is not DESTINY."
So there, MahMah, chortles Baobao silently.
The medium is obviously NOT the message for this mother or I would be frantic and fearful that she might have choked to death. While I'm very careful with her putting things in her mouth, falling out the window, down the stairs etc. -- this oral gift and message seem so timely, nay cosmic! Fear is the furthest from a mind astonished.
Baobao
Climbs the Great Wall Baobao Climbs the Great Wall
Baobao Climbs the Great Wall And We All Survive
The long and short of it was that the Baobao Song grew longer on the way up the steep incline. The Great Wall was very high, the day was very cold, the stone steps were very uneven, the sights - from the modest heights we were able to scale - were beautiful. The new mother grew quickly exhausted as the baby on her back slumped heavier and heavier with each breathless step. The baby made not a sound but was probably cold in a parka and blanket that still couldn't keep out the chill. The grandmother often appeared more energetic than the new mother as usual, though near the top, they all sat panting on the steps.
The short of it is that we all could have enjoyed being tourists were we not so enmeshed in
becoming mother, daughter, grandmother.
Baobao
Sighs En Route to Canada
Baobao Cries En Route to Canada
Baobao Writhes En Route to Canada
And Mah Sighs Too