Anqing SWI Revisited

In honor of La Nina's birthday, I'm posting another essay on our trip to Anqing. We visited the city of Anqing in April 2004, 16 months after we adopted La Nina. I posted the experience of visiting her finding location on our family day.

Finding My Sentinel

When the young girl with her sleek, black hair bound in a neat ponytail grabbed my hand and pulled me toward her, I had no choice but to follow. She smiled back at me and beckoned me to keep up. She never slowed her urgent pace as we entered a building in the back of the grounds.

We had first met the girl a few minutes before in the office of Anqing SWI. She had been listening intently to our translator explain the nature of our visit and her eyes opened wide as she looked at the pictures of our daughter and the 6 other girls adopted with her. Before I could stop her, she disappeared with my pictures. But now she and my pictures had reappeared and we were dashing together: destination unknown.

The building she led me into was white with a terracotta tiled entrance and a stout gate. The center of the structure was an open courtyard with a couple of trees and brightly painted murals of animals danced on the walls surrounding it. I deduced we had entered the “Baby House” (aka orphanage) where my daughter and her friends spent 8 months waiting for their forever families, but I didn’t see any young charges, only clean floors, white walls, open doors and windows.

My wordless friend with soft warm hands stopped in front of a collage of picture frames. Each frame was an umbrella cradling a picture of a baby. The girl gestured to my pictures, then to a picture on the wall. I looked hard at the two pictures and the girl trying to discern her message. As I stood there, a slow realization swept over me. The baby on the umbrella was my daughter. My breath caught in my throat. Tears filled my eyes. For a moment my heart stopped beating. I looked at the girl she smiled and nodded. More slowly this time, she pointed to my daughter’s picture in the album I carried with me from the US then to the baby’s picture on the wall and she nodded her head. I nodded mine too. The girl was right. She found my daughter.

By now, several seconds had passed and the group of men including my husband and our translator caught up to us. My husband came up behind me and I wordlessly pointed at the treasure on the wall. Our baby’s face greeted him and emotion flickered across his face. It’s one thing to know your daughter is from a place far from your home. The words used to describe her beginnings become habit. We had said those words so many times they had lost meaning. But to see her picture. To see my baby in that place sent a chill down my spine. She had been there, oh yes, she had. The proof was staring at me with familiar soft brown eyes.

I took a step back from the wall and surveyed the pictures in front of me. The umbrellas framed several different snapshots. Probably left over referral pictures put to use to decorate the walls for the current charges. I looked more intently at the pictures. If my daughter was here, chances were some of the other girls adopted in her group were as well and I wanted to find them. I wanted to tell their families their daughter’s faces graced the wall of Anqing SWI as a group. Slowly the girls I knew as healthy toddlers morphed into the waiting babies on that wall. I recognized them one by one, with painstaking slowness. I wasn’t as intimately familiar with their faces, their moods, their development as I was my own daughter. But, in time, I found them. I found them all. And my eyes kept returning to my daughter’s face.

What was her life like here? That is the question we traveled so far to answer. We didn’t trust other information that Anqing SWI was a good place. My husband did much better than I with the trust. But I couldn’t. Late at night, when my daughter cried out and my attempts to comfort her were rejected, my mind envisioned this place as the ghost haunting her dreams. For me, this place became a hell hole conjured from the imagination of Charles Dickens and I needed desperately to rid myself of those images. So, there I stood. Ten thousand miles from home, surrounded by my daughter’s history, staring at her picture and still wondering, what was her life like here?

I drew back from the wall and nearly tripped over a silent invader that launched a sweet assault against my leg while I was distracted. I looked down at my nemesis and found a baby in a walker smiling back at me. She learned to escape the confines of her room and was off exploring the halls of the orphanage. Apparently I piqued her curiosity. As I bent to say hello to my new little friend, she flung down her toy to see if I knew how to play fetch. Always game for a little casting exercise, I grabbed my buddy’s toy and handed it back; she squealed in delight. Realizing she had a live one, she cast the toy off again, and I repeated my duties, insuring our game would continue. Her squeals echoed among the baby community and soon two more babies in walkers joined our little group. Before I knew it, I was picking up toys, playing peak-a-boo and singing silly songs to all of them.

Seeing I was outnumbered, the girl who had led me to my daughter joined in my games and about 8 babies surrounded us. Thankfully, my husband was off gathering details on my daughter’s life, because the questions that seemed so important to me on my arrival were lost in the squeals of delight that I was eliciting from these babes. Finally, the sight and smell of hot bottles was more appealing than our simple games and my little friends wheeled their way back to their room for some lunch.

Left alone in the hallway with my wordless friend, I stood and returned to my daughter’s picture. It was still there, watching me play with these babies who were following in her walker tracks. I glanced in a nearby window for the first time and saw babies in cribs. Curious, I grabbed our translator and headed into the room.

The room we entered held the smallest babies on the first floor, maybe 5-6 months old. The room was naturally lit by 4 large windows on either side. About 8 cribs were huddled together in the center of the room; a few more lined the walls of the room. Some of the cribs were occupied by sleeping children. Two nannies were holding and feeding babies who were awake.

In some ways, the room was the answer to so many of my prayers. It was well used, but immaculate and airy. There was heater in the corner for wintertime and cabinets lining one wall were filled with clean bedding and clothes. The current occupants looked well-cared for. I quickly counted 14 babies to 2 nannies. Not great by US standards, but it wasn’t 20-1 as I so often read about on line. Relief coursed through my body. No, this wasn’t great, but this was so much better than I expected.

The translator stayed with me as I approached the nanny who was sitting in a rocking chair feeding a baby. I showed her a picture of my daughter and asked, “Do you remember Yue Ming?” She looked at the picture closely. She gestured to the baby she was feeding, and I understood her meaning without waiting for the translation. “Yes, I cared for her a while ago,” she answered. She remembered feeding my baby. She rocked my baby in her arms as she rocked the baby in her arms now. I staggered, grabbed the translator to steady me, and said something I had longed to say to someone, “Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.”

“I was just doing my job” was the answer, but to me she had done so much more. For eight months, this woman held one end of my daughter’s slender lifeline while she lived in these walls and my gratitude was overwhelming. She kept my daughter warm, safe and dry during her darkest days. This woman and her coworkers were the mothers’ my daughter was missing before my arrival on the scene. This woman and her coworkers were the reason my daughter was the healthy, vibrant 2 year old I loved with a fierceness that frightened me sometimes. My translator held me up until my husband took over, the words “thank you” just didn’t seem enough to express my gratitude to this woman and this place.

As I turned from this woman, I was drawn to the cribs. Sixteen months before, my daughter had lain in this room, in these cribs, warmed by these blankets, fed by these women. I went to the baby nearest me, I stroked her cheek and I whispered, “Your family is coming, little one. Your family is coming.” Before I knew it, I was chanting this refrain and stroking the cheeks of every baby. “Your families are coming, little ones. Your families are coming.” It was not a promise; so much as it was my prayer for them.

The time passed fast at that place and too soon, it was time for my husband and I to return to the safety of our hotel. But before I left, I returned to look at my little girl’s picture hanging on the wall. A new realization dawned on me: my daughter’s picture represented hope in this place. Hope that life beyond these walls did exist. Hope that families would come. Hope that love would be found. Hope that prayers would be answered. I was glad her picture hung on these walls. I was glad that babies played below her and had my daughter’s image as a sentinel for their journeys. And I was glad to see her face in this shining moment.