atomic pop

Apparently at some point during my efforts to both pack our bags and make sure that we had plenty of fully-charged batteries for my camera and our vide camera (they take the same batteries), I left the power cord for the video camera at home. This cord is not really needed when video taping, as long as you have sufficient battery power. However, it is needed to charge the batteries. Since I can charge the batteries directly in the camcorder, I decided only to bring that cord and not a separate charger. You see the dilemma.

I have a total of four batteries, and as soon as I realized my error (and completed unpacking and repacking all our bags to make sure it was true), I set aside two of the batteries (good for over two hours of video taping), so there’d be no worries about the five minutes or so of critically important video time on Sunday (for which we brought the camcorder in the first place).

Getting a charger didn’t seem like it should be that difficult, but when the shopping stop we thought we’d be making today didn’t occur, Stephanie started worrying. Okay, actually she’d been worrying all along, but now it was worse.

Our CHI coordinator, Lina, offered to help me and suggested we walk to a nearby camera shop. Unfortunately, they didn’t have chargers (though usefully they did have replacement batteries ready to be put into a charger if one should happen to already have one), the next place we went had stopped selling camera equipment two weeks before, and we ended up finding one in a department store that, except for the presence of lots of Chinese characters under the brand name signs, could have been a Macy’s or Nordstrom in the US. After two hours running around Beijing in traffic (between 8pm and 10pm), I walked into the lobby bar where I’d left Stephanie and a bunch of folks from our group with my arms and the bag raised in triumph. I got a round of applause and a kiss from Stephanie. All was right in the world again.

And we have less than 40 hours before we meet Lina…

I’ve completed the previous post, which was “to be continued…”.

Just after leaving the Forbidden City, Stephanie and I were standing in the square in front of the South gate (the one with Mao’s picture above it) when a couple of Chinese students asked us how we were doing. We responded that we were doing well, and asked them how they were doing. They clearly knew this ritual and followed it pretty much as you’d expect anywhere in the world, articulating very carefully. Our good friend Art, who is teaching English at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, has told us that it’s very common for Chinese English students to try to spend time with native English speakers so they can practice. Consequently, we were not surprised by this behavior. She said her name was “Coco” and and he said his was “Shadow”. You can see a picture of them with Stephanie in today’s post on Lina’s page.

It turned out that they were going in the same direction we were headed (south to Tian’anmen Square). We had also planned to go to the Temple of Heaven, but Shadow informed us that the “famous places” all close at 3pm, so it was too late. He suggested that we go to the hutong district, and since this was what we had planned for after the Temple of Heaven, we agreed. They said they were also going there since Coco had not yet been there (she hadn’t been to the Forbidden City yet, either, which was why they were there in the first place).

Coco and Shadow were not a couple; they were neighbors in their home town in Wuhan who both came to Beijing to study English. They were two years into a five year program for translators, and both spoke very reasonable English, though there were some phrases they got stuck on and they occasionally used odd idioms.

It was nice to have local “guides”, and they were both friendly and interesting. They seemed to have a set of questions they had learned to ask, like “Where are you from?” (I tried to explain the difference between Washington DC and Washington State, but it is a bit confusing) and “How many people live in your country?” (neither of us was sure–we guessed 400 million). When we asked how many lived in China, they also didn’t know. Billions, they guessed. They did know numbers for Beijing (13 million) in and Shanghai (25 million).

Along the way, Shadow asked me whether I had seen the traditional tea ceremony. I said that I hadn’t, and he said that it was the time of the tea festival and that that later they were going to “see the tea ceremony” at a place that “a friend to us” had recommended. After touring the hutong area, we ended up in a shopping district that Shadow called the “First Walking Street” (our guidebook calls it Qianmen) and eventually in front of the location of the tea ceremony: the “Catital Tea House” [sic].

Mystic portal to the tea ceremong [sic]

[it's late and I'm tired, so the rest will have to wait for tomorrow...] [sorry for the intermission; now the story continues]

Shadow asked us whether we would like to “see” the tea ceremony, and we said that we would very much like to. We went in and up three flights of stairs (pausing to rub the buddha’s stomach along the way) and were immediately seated in a small private room (there were others along the same hallway, including one with a shrine and another where tea paraphernalia were on display for sale.

It turned out that “seeing” the tea ceremony, essentially really meant tasting, meanwhile learning about what ailments or parts of the body the teas were good for, what water temperature was appropriate for that tea, how to properly hold the cups (different for men and women), etc. For some teas, the first steeping was discarded, for others not. The leader of the ceremony was a young woman in a simple but elegant silk outfit. She spoke only Chinese, which gave first Shadow and then Coco chances to practice translation, which they did very well.

The five teas we tasted were:

• Oolong with ginseng
• Jasmine
• Fruit
• Green
• Black tea with something that I can’t remember right now

They were all exceptionally good. While we were waiting for the water to reach 100 degrees Celcius for the Fruit tea, the ceremony leader left for a moment and brought back “tea snacks”: some flavored in-shell pumpkin seeds and some crunchy-coated peanuts. All in all it was very enjoyable and we were happy that we were able to experience it.

Perhaps not surprisingly (if not for the fact that we are in a communist country), at the end we got a hard sell to buy some tea. It started with the offer of “free boxes”. Our choice of beautiful cardboard or “wood” (we’d call it pressboard) tea boxes, to be filled with whichever teas we liked. Again, much emphasis was placed upon the fact that these boxes were “free”. Since our luggage was already very full, we chose a single box (the first ones presented were double–two tea boxes inside a larger box). Coco chose the double wood box to share with Shadow.

Next, there was an opportunity to buy a tea set, which we declined (we didn’t even consider it due to our luggage space and weight limitations. Plus the whole “free” box thing reminded me too much of the hard sell at the end of a time share presentation, and I was sure I didn’t want to get suckered in to overpaying for a tea set.

At this point, you may be wondering about prices. I was, too, but our experience in Beijing has been that stuff is very inexpensive and besides, these two university students were in with us, so it couldn’t be that bad, right?

Yeah, yeah, I know. My hindsight is 20-20, too.

Our ceremony leader left to fill our tea boxes, brought them to us, and then left again to get the bill. When she came back, she brought a well-worn laminated price card and an itemized bill. Okay, first problem, there’s only one bill–we can work that out. Second problem, there are an awful lot of lines on it. On closer inspection it turned out that there was a room charge, a charge for each tea we tasted, a separate charge for the tea snacks, plus the teas we were buying–I’m sure I’m forgetting some miscellaneous charge. The third and most worrisome problem was that there seemed to be an extra zero the total. Not two zeros such as would be appropriate for “hundredths”. Could this bill really be over three hundred dollars? The “free gift” tea pot (a small one just like the one used in the ceremony) did not raise my confidence about the price. While I was still trying to rationalize this (that is, still in denial), Shadow asked, “You pay us?” I noticed (in a detached way, still not wanting to focus on the reality of this bill) how his (and Coco’s) English got worse when we–and they–got stressed.

I told them I’d pay for the ceremony, but not for their tea. They both looked very nervous and concerned (even before I said this) and said that they hadn’t known how expensive it was. The “friend to us” had just recommended it. They said that they would “go back the tea”. I agreed we should all go back the tea and they explained this to the tea master. After some negotiation in Chinese, they apparently got to go back their tea (which took $100 off the total), but we did not get to go back ours (it’s really great tea, but no, we would never pay this for tea on purpose). The explanation for why our tea couldn’t go back apparently had something to do with something belonging to the government, and at this point communication was really breaking down. With no knowledge of appropriate pricing for this kind of thing (our CHI coordinator Lina later told us “nothing in Beijing costs that much”), and with no ability to communicate in Chinese, it seemed the best path was just to pay and go, which we did.

Coco and Shadow said they felt very bad about all this. To make it up, they would like us to join them that evening for “the Peking duck”. We said no thank you and caught a cab back to the hotel. Coco, in particular, looked very upset as we waved goodbye and the cab drove off. It took an hour and a half to go 23 km, but that’s another story.

Was this a scam or just ripoff pricing? The prices were certainly set up to confuse, what with all the line items. Were Shadow and Coco in on it the whole time? I’d prefer to think that maybe we just paid the “dumb tourist” prices because we didn’t ask to see how much it cost in the first place, and that Shadow and Coco just got caught up in it, but my skeptical brain tells me…well, it tells me that we’ll never know.

What did I learn? Don’t underestimate the capitalistic side of this communist country. I’d never have gotten in this situation at home, where I’d have been much more skeptical or even suspicious.

Well, we finally got notification of our TA today in an e-mail at 11:01am. So that’s a big relief–one more check on the list. As you know if you’ve been following along, we were really hoping to get it yesterday because then we’d still have a chance to get our actual travel dates (based on the US Consulate appointment) before the weekend and the ensuing holidays. Our agency received the TAs for all their September 1st referrals this morning and immediately faxed the requests to the US Consulate in Guangzhou to get us in line for consulate appointments. Unfortunately, the Consulate will be closed Monday through Wednesday for Chinese National Day, and it’s possible that not much will get done Thursdayand Friday, especially since the Consulate is also closed the following Monday to celebrate the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere. So all this means we may not have our actual travel dates for another 10 days or so. Nevertheless, today was definitely progress and at least now we have a date range (we expect to leave some time in the first two weeks of November).

To celebrate, Stephanie and I went shopping. We bought a chenille braid rug for Lina’s room, a diaper genie, and some other stuff. We wanted to get a high chair too, but Target was out of the Consumer Reports top-rated model we were looking for.

Earlier in the day, I got a super nice surprise at work. Today was a big event for Microsoft “MVPs“. There’s a group of Help MVPs (experts in online assistance and technical communication) with whom I’ve been working for a few years now. I only see them about once a year, but they’re really a great group of folks. I didn’t realize they all knew about our adoption, but I found out they did when they presented me with a baby gift. I opened it, only to find a ladybug bath towel and a ladybug washcloth-like thing that you put your hand inside like a puppet (I don’t know what this is called). I knew that Stephanie would love them, and said so. Char told me she knew that. She’s been reading our site so she knew all about Stephanie’s attraction to creature or fruit-themed clothing! And of course, she was right. So a great bit thank you to Char, Rob, Dana, Dana, Rick, Paul, Paul, and Bill! (Cheri, we missed you; I’m sorry you couldn’t make the trip. And if you had anything to do with the gift, thanks to you, too.) Now we just need a little ladybug to wash, dry, and cuddle in them!

All that stuff I wrote yesterday about being patient? Forget it.

I don’t know why, but today I’m pissed that we didn’t get our TA. I think part of it is that I really thought we’d get it today. Then to see all those other folks get theirs, and now we’re waiting until at least the end of next week to get our US Consulate appointment, around which all the travel dates are built. Hopefully, this won’t delay our actual travel too much, but it seems likely that it will–other agencies are getting their TAs and booking consulate appointments. Instead of Halloween, we may spend Thanksgiving in China now. Just another step (or lack thereof) in the hurry up and wait experience that is adoption.

It’s been a while since I had time to post. Mostly I’ve been working. Working on the house (some bookshelves, hanging curtains and a new living room clock (a cool George Nelson “turbine” design that we got on sale as a closeout floor model at DWR), working on work stuff, and working on the website. What’s that you say, it looks the same to you? Yes, unfortunately, it will be a while before the work I’m doing becomes apparent. One thing I’m doing that’s not obvious is trying to get it set up so it’ll be super easy to post entries while we’re in China and after. Maybe I’ll even get RSS set up like a real blog so you can subscribe and get notified when we post an update–no promises but I’m working on it.

Another activity that seems to be taking increasing amounts of time is surfing the adoptosphere, our current neighborhood in the blogosphere. For those of you unfamiliar with that term, it refers to that growing percentage of the internet that is taken up by blogs (short for weblogs), which is pretty much what you’re reading right now. For those inclined to do things the easy way, it’s trivial to set up a blog (try blogspot.com, for instance)–you don’t need any special knowledge or skillz. Or if you’re like me you can set up a regular website and then spend way too much time training yourself in a bunch of acronyms (XML, XSLT, XPath, FTP, .NET, and more), get a bunch of crazy ideas about making a blogtacularly simple tool to post from anywhere in the world, and hope you get it done before your world changes drastically and you’re too busy feeding, changing, playing with, and otherwise taking care of an amazingly great small human to worry about why browsers aren’t turning ' into an apostrophe even though the XHTML standard says they should (long story having to do with more acronyms like MIME).

The blogosphere contains a remarkable number of blogs by adoptive parents (mostly moms) and especially (it seems) parents of children adopted from China. Many of them are simply chronicles of the adoption process (often called something like “Journey to Hildy”); these are very interesting to us right now. We even found one set of parents traveling to China this month (the Werkmeisters) for a child from Lina’s orphanage (they just brought Allison home today!). Then there are the “famous” bloggers who build up huge readerships (generally due to just plain good storytelling). Virtually the whole adoptosphere was waiting with bated breath when Baby Gwen got sick while still in China (she’s home and doing much better now). Among our current favorites are Macy Day (note: contains pugs!), and dooce (not focused on adoption; dooce is an entertaining writer–and now pro blogger supporting her family on advertising revenue from her blog).

But back to all that work we’re doing. A lot of what we’re working on is trying to get ready for Lina, and another large part is trying to fill the time while we wait to hear our travel dates. As we get closer to the time when we’ll finally meet Lina, as Stephanie grows more and more impatient for news from our agency, I find myself growing both more excited and yet more calm. I’m not feeling very impatient at all, which surprises me because I’m normally very impatient about upcoming good stuff. After talking to Stephanie earlier today, I started to feel a little guilty about not feeling more impatient. But while Stephanie was at yoga class tonight I realized what I think is going on: the magnitude of the greatness, the incredible stupendiosity of what’s about to happen is so amazingly overwhelming that I…can…wait. Lina is literally worth waiting for, and I’m prepared to do so (within reason, of course). There’s really nothing I can begin to compare this to. Where else in life do we know in advance that something really really (I mean really really) great is going to happen?

This brings me some peace of mind. Not in some cosmic one-with-the-universe kind of way. Maybe it’s in the hands-pressed-against-my-ears I’m not listening kind of way. A not-a-river-in-Egypt kind of way. Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that when I think about Lina and I know that I’ll see her soon, it all seems okay. It stops mattering whether we get our TA today or tomorrow.

I do want to bring Lina home soon. Okay, now. I wish she were here already. But I’m okay with knowing that it will happen, and that it will happen soon, and that all my expectations about what I think it will be like to be a father are likely to be wrong, with the lone exception being my expectation that it will be incomparably good.

No, I’m serious. She totally rulz. She’s at her yoga class right now, but before she left she mentioned that she “…wrote another blog entrytoday.” Which means that I get to post it tonight (I haven’t quite worked out the details on the workflow part of this website authoring “system” yet). Which means that I get to read it first. Which means I’m sitting here with a dog and a cat on my lap LMAO. Or, more accurately, LMCO. I’ve already heard the story, and she still cracks me up! Smart (I mean, c’mon, quantum mechanics), beautiful (but you already knew that), and funny (read her page and you’ll see what I mean). And she wants to be with me. As they say in Raleigh, NC, “Tell yoo whut… It don’t git enny better ‘n this, friend.”

No, friend, it don’t.

I think I hurt my dad’s feelings the other day. I knew I was going to but I did it anyway. Not that I intended to hurt his feelings, but I had to tell him something uncomfortable. I had to tell him that when we get home from China with Lina, and they come to visit us, they can’t hold Lina (for a while). That’s the part that he said was the craziest thing he ever heard.

This is just one of the things I’ve come across in learning about adoption that seemed counterintuitive at first–how could it be bad to show a child that she is surrounded by lots of loving family members? The problem is that everything will be new for Lina: the faces, sounds, smells, and tastes will all be literally (but temporarily) foreign to her. She needs to know that in this crazy, mixed up world where she has already had many different caretakers, there are two people who will be constant for her. She needs to learn that she can trust us (and herself) first, then she can learn to trust others. It’s important that we give her as much chance as we can to bond specifically to us, her new and forever parents. We need to do everything we can during those first few months to help her attach to us; to know that she can rely on us and on the fact that we will be there for her. She needs to learn that she can literally depend on us specifically and exclusively.

There’s no reason to expect that Lina will have a particularly hard time attaching, but we will do everything in our power to provide a safe, trustworthy environment for her.

So how’d grandpa take being told he couldn’t hold his precious granddaughter when he first meets her? Pretty well, actually. After telling me it was the craziest thing he ever heard, he said he was definitely ready to read the book I’d recommended (Adoption is a Family Affair. And then he said something very typical of my dad: “The important thing is what I told you the other day: We love her already.”

Thursday, September first was an amazing day, but it didn’t start out auspiciously. I woke up early with a headache that got worse as I started to get ready for work. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d probably slept four hours the night before. Stephanie was in Ashland visiting her best friend Kerry, and since I couldn’t sleep I’d stayed up late assembling furniture from IKEA (Effektiv for Stephanie’s part of the office in our home) and reading the DTCFebruary2005 Yahoo group, where the rumors were converging on Thursday as “referral day”.

Referral day. We’ve been waiting for this day for literally years now (but that’s a story for another time). Now it was nearly here, and I’d spent most of my waking, non-working hours reading the messages on the group list and anticipating. Of course, there were no guarantees that we’d get our referral on the first day, but we were pretty confident we’d get ours in this batch as rumors were consistent that referrals would come out for at least those with LIDs of 2/26 and earlier, and ours was 2/5. I checked the Yahoo group–the first referral had just come in on the East Coast!

By 8am, I knew I couldn’t go to work. I took some ibuprofen, sent e-mail to my colleagues, and sat down in front of the computer to watch the list. Our agency has a local office but is based in St. Louis, so that’s where DHL would be delivering the package of referrals from China. That meant they’d arrive a couple hours before the West Coast agencies would get theirs. I called Linda at CHI to tell her that Stephanie would be on the road, so if there was any news, she should call me. She told me she’d heard the night before that referrals would be here “soon”. I didn’t ask her to define that, but knowing Linda she would only have told me that if she was sure it was true, so my hope grew that we’d get our referral before the long weekend.

I grew more excited with each new announcement of referral on the list. These people that I’d come to know a little bit in the few days that I’d hung out on the list were now my comrades in waiting, and I felt a surprising amount of joy for each one as they announced “Just got the call!” and shared the vital details: birthdate, Chinese name, orphanage, province, and agency. I kept a lookout for the referrals from CHI, but so far there weren’t any. I called Stephanie and told her that Linda would be calling me, which she agreed was a good idea. I found a document listing all the vital information, with blanks to be filled in during “The Call”. I printed it out and set it and a pen by the phone.

Then I read a message from a woman whose agency had called, but it wasn’t “The Call.” Her referral wasn’t in the batch from China, and they didn’t know why. I remembered at that moment that as consistent as it usually is, adoption from China isn’t a sure thing. There are all kinds of things that could go wrong. Things that could have gone wrong for us, too. My cell phone rang, and I looked at the display: “Linda Annable”. This was it. Or not. I answered and mumbled something into the phone. “She’s so beautiful!” were the first words I heard, and I knew it was happening for us. It was real.

I didn’t even try to pretend I wasn’t crying as Linda gave me those simple but amazing bits of information: March 1st, 2005 (”It’s her 6 month birthday today,” Linda pointed out), Tong Min Juan, Tonggu in Jiangxi province. She was healthy and if the data is right big for such a young child in an orphanage. I wrote everything down, but I had the hardest time just finding the right places on the page. I thanked Linda, and she excused herself so she could make more happy calls to other families.

As soon as I hung up with Linda, I called Stephanie. She said, “Hello”, and I said “We got our referral.” It sounded stiff in my own ears, but I heard her intake of breath and knew that she was instantly crying too. “You’d better pull off the road,” I said. She told me there was no place and she’d have to call me back. It turns out she was going over a pass and even the shoulder was being used by slow trucks. Ten minutes later, she called back and I shared all the details I’d heard from Linda. It still wouldn’t be until the next day that we’d see her picture (together–Stephanie didn’t open the package until I got home from work), but we were already in love–with her name, her province, her birthday, her length, her orphanage. We didn’t choose any of those details, but each one is precious to us. It was CCAA who matched us to her, who matches all the children adopted from China to their parents. And in doing so, they work an amazing kind of magic–they turn dreams into reality, people into parents, me into a father. I hope they know how much we appreciate the work they do; I don’t know how I could ever put it into words.

Oh, and my headache was gone, too.