Red thread of destiny knits family together

THE RECORD, THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2003
By GREGORY J. RUMMO

ON A HOT, sticky day in April, my family and I visited a farm on the outskirts of the city of Nanning in southern China's Guangxi province.

The roar from the diesel trucks straining to haul their cargoes along the highway leading into the mountains disappeared in the distance behind us as we picked our way along the path that led deeper into the fields resembling a patchwork quilt in varying shades of green and umber.

The odor of the freshly dug earth mingling with the sweetness of the new-mown hay strewn along the hard-packed clay path permeated the damp air. Every now and then the acrid odor of manure removed any lingering doubts that this was indeed a farm.

The workers were almost all women, but they weren't the type I would have expected to find working out in the fields in the sweltering heat. They weren't big or outwardly muscular. Most were petite. But despite their slim frames, they rolled up their sleeves and worked hard. They went about their business quietly. Some planted, some watered, some harvested.

I watched one woman fill a pair of wooden buckets with water. She then effortlessly shouldered them, placing the wooden yoke behind her head. She walked down a row watering what looked like a patch of onions. The water alone must have weighed more than 50 pounds.

I stood in the middle of all this activity holding Minjian tightly in my arms. This little girl would celebrate her first birthday in 10 days. She was the newest addition to our family and in less than 24 hours would officially become our daughter.

She was the reason we had come to Nanning.

An ancient Chinese proverb states: "An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break." As time goes on, the thread will become shorter until finally bringing the people it connects together.

We believe in the concept of the red thread. But we refer to it as the will of God.

We began our adoption journey two years earlier. It was a journey of faith. As the sons of Korah wrote, "the Lord God is a sun and shield," in Psalm 84 in praise of Jehovah for his guidance and protection, we also embraced this promise. We believed God had illuminated our path as bright as the noonday sun in leading us to adopt, and we were confident that his shield would protect us as we followed him. We were resolved to let nothing - not the war in Iraq, an elevatedterror alert, or the threat of SARS - keep us from this rendezvous with destiny.

Minjian's big, bright eyes seemed to take it all in. She hugged me tighter, and I was suddenly overcome with emotion. The words of our guide, Lin Don Quing, played over and over in my head.

"I have taken you to a farm in rural Nanning so you can see for yourselves a place very similar to the one where your daughter was most likely born. A woman will have her baby on a farm like this one, and then abandon it in a big city, hoping it will be found and taken care of," he said.

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Lin had explained the sad story of abandonment in China to us during the bumpy bus ride out to the countryside. Most orphans are never adopted. (According to U.S. government statistics, the total number of immigrant visas issued to orphans during 2001 was 18,669. China was at the top of this list with 4,690, a number that increased the following year to 5,053.) Raised in orphanages, they attend school only until the eighth grade and then find some menial labor. They carry a stigma, which some overcome by moving to another province.

Every year, millions of babies are abandoned in China. Official estimates are up to 2 million babies, but unofficial estimates put the number as high as 4 million. The healthy ones are almost all girls. Healthy boys are rarely abandoned because they carry the family name to the next generation. That is deemed important in a society where almost all families are limited to one child.

It was almost a year earlier when the little girl I was now holding in my arms was discovered abandoned by the roadside near the Fujiang Post Office in Wuzhou City, several hundred miles east of Nanning. Her umbilical cord was still attached when a police officer found her. He turned her over to the Wuzhou Social Welfare Institute, where the nannies estimated she was about 2 days old.

At the time this was going on, we were aware of none of it. We had spent the year prior to her birth running around getting our paperwork together. When she was born, our dossier had already been in the hands of the China Center for Adoption in Beijing for five months. It would be another nine months before we would have her photograph, know her name, and be made aware of the circumstances surrounding her abandonment.

Our bittersweet half-hour visit to the farm came to an end. It was symbolic of our own journey of faith that was finally ending. As we made our way back to the bus along the earthen path, I pondered God's sovereignty and the red thread that had stretched more than 9,000 miles, across two continents and an ocean.

It had finally brought us together. n

Gregory J. Rummo is an author and syndicated columnist. His latest book, “The View from the Grass Roots—Another Look,” was just published. Visit GregRummo.com  for more information.