Miss Jenny dropped us at the airport, and wrote a note for us to take through the ticket line. Our baggage had been weighed, and the 19 of us were just over the 20-kilo (each) limit: 410k instead of 380k. The note explained that, since we were going to adopt 10 little Chinese children, we were carrying extra weight for them, and would he please waive the usual fines for being overweight. It worked – we got waived through with nary a blink.
But that came later. First came tearful goodbyes, as Miss Jenny exchanged cards and addresses with all who cared to – and all of us cared, very much. She was rhapsodic about what a sweet, yet focussed, group we were, and said she felt sure we would make a lovely set of parents for ten lucky little girls. Well, nine, actually, and one little boy – the Marshalls were here to adopt a truly special-needs little boy, a four-year-old with neck problems. But that's OK – everything was drowned in a welter of hugs and tears. We left her red tip envelopes, with the $3-per-day for her, the $2-per-day for the driver, and the $2 for the baggage boys, and hauled our carryons into the depths of Beijing Airport.
We felt pretty lost in line – we had gotten so used to depending on the invaluable Miss Jenny, it had practically slipped our minds that we were actually in the middle of a huge, alien country, thousands of miles from home. But now it hit us all again: Barb had a whole fistful of claim checks and airline tickets and a handwritten begging note, and not a clue as to where we should go. Yet again, a higher power intervened.
The man who quietly cut ahead of us in line turned out to be a Mr. Louis Liu, Shanghai Office Manager for the Motorola Corporation. He spoke excellent English – had just got back from visiting his 16-year-old daughter in Chicago! – and he told us where to walk, what to say, and where to go when we got through – and we WOULD get through, he assured us. Then he got his ticket stamped – I don't know why he would need an airline ticket: surely all angels have their own wings!? – and vanished from our sight.
After that, I could no longer be concerned about our little band of Israelites, for we were no longer lost in a strange land: Someone was definitely looking out for us, and sending us help when and where we really needed it. Even the announcement that our flight was being delayed forty minutes caused no more than a short ripple of concern. Eventually, we were shuttled in the familiar straphanger bus across the concrete to a new plane, got on board, and made the hour-plus hop to Shanghai.
A word about this flight is in order. I had heard that many of China's internal-airline pilots are ex-military fighter pilots, with little or no additional training. It certainly felt like we got one of those. I've never flown straight through so much turbulence on such a short flight – which sounds military: isn't a little rough treatment good for discipline? And when it was time for the landing pattern, there wasn't any: he just shoved the nose down, and zoomed for the pavement: one good body-slam, and he kicked in his REVERSE-afterburners. It felt like we stopped in, at most, fifty yards. It was, Good-bye Cowboy, from the whole Bethany group.
And another word: the inflight movie (went with our inflight dinner) was a VERY strange collection of shorts. Half an hour of what looked and sounded a lot like Official Chinese Government TV was intercut with soccer footage ("Goal!" every ten seconds – yup, just like a real game); incredibly silly Chinese MTV (if you ever get the chance, you GOTTA see this doofus pair of Wham! wannabes named Harlem [no, he's not black] and Jeff); and the weirdest of them all: a Chinese fashion show, in which the models appeared to be wearing open hoop skirts, but instead of skirts, the hoops carried a half-dozen evenly spaced cloisonne pots! Well, I have to admit: it didn't look any sillier than Givenchy's spring collection this year. And what a boost for the cloisonne trade if it caught on!
We were not met at Shanghai Aerodrome by Ms. ShiYan, but by Jimmy, a lean, bright-looking lad who got us quite competently to our buses, and then gave us what WOULD undoubtedly have been an entertaining travelogue on the forty-minute ride to the hotel, had we not all been thoroughly beaten down. We all promised to be livelier tomorrow morning (empty words, I know), and staggered up to our rooms.
The Hotel Equatorial, finally, WAS a four-star hotel. (Here's a view from the hotel room window.)
It was, in every way that could be compared, a cut or two above the Beijing Radisson/SAS: a more spacious room, better air-conditioning, bigger beds, more closet space (although, with less than two days to spend here, we decided we still didn't need to unpack), and a MUCH nicer-looking lobby and stores complex on the ground floor. Even the freebies in the washroom were nicer: besides the obligatory soaps, shampoos and lotions, the little basket now also contained combs and toothbrushes. (And Daddy got another sewing kit for his collection...)
Day Four (Sunday, August 2nd) - We slept well, but surprisingly, the stresses of the previous two days had thrown out, not MY back (I had lived in terror of my well-known trick back throwing itself out before we got Jade) by Barb's. She woke up almost unable to get out of bed! Fortunately, we were able to solve that problem soon after breakfast.
We had already decided to skip the day's program tours, which included a (hot, humid) garden tour and a (probably somewhat less hot, but still humid) river cruise, in favor of staying in our nice, expensive, thoroughly air-conditioned hotel, and checking out the pool. I went on a very short shopping trip. It really was impossible to walk more than two blocks – and this at 9:00 in the morning! Our weather had become clear and blisteringly hot - it had to be over 90 degrees out there – and we almost turned back. But a shop came up quickly, down a nice, tree-shaded avenue; we bought our water, Coke and sundries, and headed back. By the time I joined my wife and daughter in the capacious pool, her back spasm had vanished, to our general relief. Lunch, too, was at one of the hotel's restaurants; in the afternoon, we chatted with the other two families - Fran Murphy and Christina & Dee Lynch, and the Gargalas - who had also opted out of the (hot, humid) tour program, then trooped down to join the (melted) returning road-warriors for dinner.
Curiously, we didn't see any of them – probably besides the fact that we dined in an unusual hotel restaurant (for us) – a steakhouse – the roadwarriors were taken, after the (air-conditioned) river cruise, to a performance of the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. It sounded like an enjoyable day – but we were much too hot, and Barb's back was far too sensitive, for us to have risked it. Besides, our evening was great. The steaks were quite good (somebody back there knows the way to Americans' hearts!), Christy blossomed with someone "interesting" to talk to – i.e., an adult who didn't treat her like their daughter! And Fran's suggestion that we try out the bowling alley later went over like gangbusters. Now we can tell our fall league, "Well, you'll have to excuse my form – I haven't bowled since Shanghai!" We piled into bed tired, but happy; and this time, we made it almost all the way to daybreak without waking and lying awake.
Day Five (Monday, August 3rd) - Which was REAL good, because we were in for a shock that morning. (No, not the addition of our final two families: Randy Anderson and his 14-year-old daughter, Audrey, and Marty and Brinda Bogard, our group leaders - they joined us on schedule, as did our Bethany "shepherdess", ShiYan Zeng, a lawyer living in Singapore.) We had expected to fly out of Shanghai for Nanchang in the evening, and get our babies the next morning. Instead, ShiYan told us our flight would be leaving at noon, and that we would be getting our children between three and five that afternoon! Evidently, the roadwarriors had gotten this news on the cruise. I went into hyperventilation (or maybe it was the coffee?!), but a good breakfast (as usual) settled me nicely.
The morning program was brisk and simple: a visit to a Children's Palace, one of thirteen in Shanghai City. These are an interesting feature of the city's educational system. For the youngest children, it is simply an after-school play place, with playground and pool. But for the older children, it becomes much more. Children may, at their parents' choice, receive lessons in voice, music, art, calligraphy, and – THIS fascinated me – chess, among other things. We saw a piano duet, a vocal lesson for a choir of about a dozen, a Suzuki-style violin lesson, a stunning recital on the pi-pa (a sort of Chinese stand-up lute) by a little girl who couldn't have been only eleven, yet she was; and finally, the piece de resistance: a dance recital by sixteen of the absolutely cutest little girls on the planet. No one cared what steps they missed: at the end of that recital, every adoptive parent in our little band was thinking the same thing: "I just hope my little girl grows up like that!" They got a HUGE round of applause.
At the end of the tour, we were ushered into the inevitable store, but with a difference – much of the artwork here was done by Palace students, and the proceeds from sales went to support the Palace. That opened the wallets of several weary travellers – including one young lady who saw a dozen Beanie Babies and went berserk – and we piled, tired but happy, and a little heavier-laden, back in the bus. Lunch was at an airport restaurant, followed by another lunch on the plane! No one was hungry, and a good thing too: the stewardesses had barely finished serving when the plane went nose-down for Nanchang.
I had expected a much more primitive edifice at the Nanchang Airport – it didn't look TOO bad, from where I stood on the blistering tarmac. However, when we got inside, we found that the baggage claim room was blistering, too. I was SO glad Barb & Christy had elected to buy hand fans for the three of us back in the Children's Palace! When our bags came, we hauled them together, and then trekked back across the blasted waste of asphalt to our busses – the air-conditioned one, fortunately, was for the passengers. Our new local guide, Judy, welcomed us to Nanchang, and gave us a running commentary on our trip to the Lakeview Hotel.
Nanchang is, to even the most untrained eye, a desperately poor place. We swerved twice, on the way into town, to miss cows in the middle of the road. The buildings we passed along the way were somewhere between dilapidated and outright falling-down, with all manner of pickup businesses budding, striving for a while, and then collapsing within them. Standard construction appeared to be square vertical-brick two-story, with a series of open fronts – stalls, really – and apparently storage behind, and maybe living quarters up. One could well imagine these exact same buildings - which currently housed, say, a shoe-repair shop - having made wooden clogs a century ago, or having been razed by the Mongols and rebuilt of brick by the Qing – or was it the other way around? Anyway, Judy conveyed the thanks of a grateful province that we Americans had chosen to adopt the children of Jiangxi province, one of the poorest places in China, and to bring them out into a more prosperous world. No doubt, China hopes someday to see an influx of cash from these prosperous adoptees, much like that which drives the economy of Anhui province from the masses of ex-Chinese who now populate Montreal's nicer neighborhoods.
Anyway, I'm afraid she only got half an ear from each of us, because all we could think about was our babies, babies, babies. It was already past two by the time we arrived at the Lakeview Hotel (gigantic airconditioned lobby – very nice!), and Judy had said our babies would be here between 3 and 5. We raced up to our rooms, and began a mad rush to unpack. I'm afraid Christy was treated to some sharp words, as Barb & I tried to get set up in a strange hotel room (again, very nice – but who cared!?!?!) for our first new baby in fourteen years! At 3:30, all unpacking came to a standstill, as the cry of, "They're HERE!!" went up from the elevator. But it was only three of them – the Andersons (Randy & daughter Audrey, here for their second baby), our friends the Boisverts, and the Marshalls, who got their four-year-old boy, FuBing, with the sidelong neck. He proved to be a handful. Although we had heard at breakfast from ShiYan that FuBing had been asking about his new Mommy for weeks, he was anything but ready to be dumped among this swarm of strange white faces. He immediately set off a howl that would have wakened the dead, and absolutely refused to be comforted. Eventually, the orphanage director, his wife, and their teenage son had to leave the poor little fellow in his mother's and aunt's hands. Liz set off walking him into oblivion, round and round the circular 14th-floor hallway. His cries came and went, came and went, for a good forty minutes; eventually, he sobbed himself to sleep.
Meanwhile, Randy was having an almost criminally easy time with his little girl, Daley, a sparkly, spindly little waif we promptly dubbed "Miss Personality". She was grinning and cooing, not only at Randy and Audrey, but at virtually anybody else on the floor within minutes. The Boisverts' baby, a 20-month-old they named michaela, was rather more typical: a tad introverted, and completely devoted to her new mother – poor Papa Mike couldn't get a hug in edgewise for two days.
The rest of us? Well, we paced a lot – including Christy, who suddenly discovered she was nervous about this event after all. In fact, at one point, she was pacing the circular hallway one way, while Liz Marshall and her Fire Engine Boy were pacing (and yelling) the other. I found myself experiencing a rather curious response: after the excitement of getting the first orphanage's babies wore off, I felt pretty much like taking a nap. We waited, and waited – five o'clock came and went. Then some news – they had been held up in traffic, due to the rerouted roads from the recent Yangtse floods, but they were IN Nanchang, and would soon be here. What "soon" meant was anybody's guess. So – we waited some more. And talked, and paced, and wondered. What would our little daughters look like? Our referral pictures were months old – eighteen months, in our case – would we know our own girls when we saw them? What would they think of us? Would they cry? Withdraw? Or giggle and love us from the first minute?
