We spent two days in Hong Kong being debriefed by our adoption agency with a large group of other travellers, some of whom were going to other provinces. Then on the morning of September 11 our group departed for the trip to Jiangxi Province. Because of the time zones, we were 12 hours ahead of the time in New York. To pick up the story, here are some passages from an email I sent home a few days later:
"We were met at the airport by the Holt representative, and she had hired a bus to take us to the hotel, a very nice place on a lake, appropriately called the "Lake View Hotel," and we do have quite a view on the 14th floor. When we arrived the Holt staff person passed out itineraries and explained our schedule in detail, but of course everyone in our group was just on pins and needles waiting for the children to arrive later in the afternoon.
Amanda was supposed to be among the first group, arriving at about 5:30 pm; but her train must have been delayed because the first group of children arrived from another orphanage in another town. All of the children had long days on a long train trip. Finally at about 6:00 pm another group came off the elevator, all being carried by adult escorts (we'd all been waiting in the hallway, chatting incessantly in eager anticipation). A short while later they brought her and handed her to Mary.
I can't even describe how wonderful she is, a tiny, beautiful girl with bright eyes and the sweetest disposition you could imagine. We brought her in the room with her escort from the orphanage and a Holt translator. We asked a bunch of questions about her condition and her habits, routines, etc., then the orphanage person and the translator left and we were alone with her.
Despite the fact that she wasn't smiling much in most of the pictures we received, she is quite delightful in person, a warm, wonderful baby. She took to both of us immediately. We gave her a bottle of formula and then played with her until putting her to bed at about 8:30 pm. She slept a little fitfully during the night. It became clear that she had a small cold and was congested, so she rolled around in her crib, sometimes coughing. We tried to get mucous out of her nose with a little suction tube, but it was difficult. Naturally, she's pretty far away from being able to blow her nose.
We got up about 6:00 am and she awake by herself a short time later. We'd had the TV off since receiving her, so it was only when we went outside the room to get breakfast that one of our group members told us about the awful terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The news was pretty shocking, to say the least, but we were on such a tight schedule that we had little time to even think about it. We ate a quick breakfast in the restaurant on the first floor, giving Amanda some congee and bits of other food that interested her (like a silver dollar pancake, which she clutched and nibbled for a long time), then it was time to go to our morning appointments at government offices in downtown Nanchang.
We piled onto a bus and were escorted through the process - mostly just filling out forms and being interviewed by civil service officials. The interviews were very pro forma, no trick questions or anything. During the whole experience Amanda was quite cheerful and calm (which we can't say for many of the other children). On the ride back to the hotel about three hours later she started to nod off, and she's now taking a nap in her crib. We'll be feeding her again when she wakes up. Tonight we're having a group dinner in the hotel's Chinese restaurant at about 6:00 pm, which should be nice.
Once we got back into the room and put Amanda in her crib we finally sat down and took a look at the TV. There are a number of U.S. stations we can get here, including CNN, so they showed a bunch of footage, including film of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center and both buildings collapsing. It's all extremely horrifying and surreal. We were trying to think about people we know who work in New York downtown, but we couldn't think of any....."
Our distance from New York continued for the next two weeks, as our itinerary required us to remain in China to complete the adoption and obtain Amanda's visa in Guangzhou before returning home. We continued to get some information from the broadcast media and emails back and forth with family and local friends, but being so far away made the reality of what was happening at home very difficult to grasp. The immensity of Chinese culture as it figured in our daily interactions - to say nothing of the immensity of a child we were just getting to know as first-time parents! - was very front and center.
During the months our adoption application was in process, Mary and I made connections with other families who had experience with international adoption through online discussion lists and the like. One thing we learned very quickly was the lingo associated with significant dates in the adoption process: application day; match day; and the day your child first joins your family, which is commonly called "Gotcha Day." Not, we realized, a term we could ever use in Amanda's case.
We scheduled our return flight on what turned out to be a very large plane (a Boeing 777, if memory serves), probably the largest plane I'd ever been in. Disruptions in air travel since the attacks, however, led to so many cancellations that the passenger cabin was almost empty. It seemed there were more people working on the plane than there were passengers. Amanda had fun crawling on seats, but all the empty space was troubling. On our ride home from the airport my eyes immediately went to the New York skyline and I saw the void where the towers had once stood. I couldn't see any smoke from the Turnpike.
I kept thinking it was so strange to have been so far away when all this horror had transpired close to home. The twin towers were a constant fixture on the New York skyline every time I had looked at it - usually several times a day - for as long as I could remember. I'd been inside the buildings only a few times, once going up to the top of the observation deck, and once in the early 1990s conducting research for a paper on the early history of the Port Authority in its library on the 55th floor of the North Tower. But like many people I'd passed through the buildings many times on PATH and subway train rides. Just two months before the attacks, on July 11, Mary and I spent a wonderful afternoon in the plaza between the towers to see and hear Freedy Johnston and Jill Sobule at an outdoor concert and I remembered thinking how great the experience was at that location. "We'll have to come here again," I said to Mary at the time. But now that space was filled only with smoking toxic rubble and death.
Returning home at last we counted ourselves fortunate we had not lost any family members, friends, co-workers, or other people we knew as a consequence of the attacks, even though there were some close calls. Happy as we were to have Amanda with us, I felt a strong sense of sadness about the fact that so many people among us had been killed and that Amanda's life with us had to begin this way. I feared it would not be long before the government initiated some military response, and I didn't have long to wait, as the U.S. war in Afghanistan began on October 7. It hasn't ended yet.
While Mary and I have tried to provide Amanda (and since November 2003 her sister Olivia) with what passes for a "normal" childhood these days, this is a constant struggle. Today many people have told me that I must "never forget," and of course I never will. But time did not stop in 2001, and since then I have additional things to remember, more things I must never forget:
- I cannot forget that during the last ten years my daughter's life in the United States has included only about two weeks in which her adoptive country was not at war.
- I cannot forget the many people killed as a result of our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Libya (including over 6,200 U.S. soldiers and probably over 1 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya), deaths that do nothing other than create enormous suffering and make the world more insecure and dangerous. The September 11 attacks claimed almost 3,000 victims in one day. Imagine such an attack taking place every day for almost a year and that will give you a sense of the human cost of the "war on terror" so far, a cost paid primarily by innocent people with no connection of any kind to terrorism...and with no end on the horizon.
- I cannot forget how our wars have unleashed some of the ugliest currents in my country's political culture - including racist bigotry, religious intolerance, antilabor fanaticism, and the promotion of a bellicose nationalism - nor how these ideas have been accorded a respect they do not deserve through shrill appeals to fear, as though wrapping them in a flag somehow dignifies them
- I cannot forget that these ten years have witnessed an accelerated weakening of our rights and liberties under the Constitution in the name of "security."
I will never forget that this is not the kind of world I want for my daughters.
The bloody business of empire management has given us a world consumed by war, fear, insecurity, suffering, and pain. No sooner had President Obama finished his speech Thursday night than we were informed the U.S. was once again under an unspecified "terror threat." I don't want to live this way, and I don't want this as some type of nightmarish permanent future for my children. My government is responsible for bloody and unspeakable acts of violence in other countries, and every time a plane drops bombs from the sky on populations helpless to defend themselves from such weapons, it is itself engaging in an act of terrorism.
I joined the peace movement as quickly as I could and threw myself into it with others who tried to stop our government from going to war in Iraq. I did this not only because of my objections to my government's policies but also because I live in a country where many claim our government is subject to democratic accountability, and if there is any truth to this claim it means we who live here bear a greater moral responsibility for our government's conduct than do those who suffer under the rule of dictatorial and tyrannical states that make no pretense to democracy. So far my fellow peace activists and I have failed. But we can't give up. Ever.
What has all this violence brought to the many victims of September 11? Has it brought them comfort? A sense that justice has somehow been served? This seems unlikely. Violent retribution (if violence visited upon people who had no part in committing murderous acts can even be called "retribution") is an especially toxic balm for the spirit. It creates no peace. It defers the necessary strides toward healing and forgiveness to an ever-receding line on the horizon. It poisons our culture and extends this poison to the future our children must inherit.
I want to honor the dead, and to do so I must embrace life, without fear. For Amanda's sake, for my sake, and for your sake. Peace be with you.
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