Throwaway Daughter (2 page)

The New and Bright Restaurant should have been called Crammed and Smelly. As we followed Mr. Wu in single file though the crowded, noisy waiting room, Megan pointed to a gigantic fish tank. She whispered that all the sad-looking fish, half-dead lobsters, and spidery crabs were going to end up, cooked, on people’s plates.

“Don’t be gross!” I hissed.

“If you don’t believe me, ask Mr. Wu,
Glace.”
When we were seated at one of the many large round tables, surrounded by strange smells and hundreds of people talking at once, I looked about. The red walls were covered with paintings
of pine trees and cranes, tigers and pandas, mountains and waterfalls. At one end, a dragon hung opposite some kind of bird, both in bright gold. Waitresses walked up and down the aisles, pushing carts of food from table to table, reflected in the mirrors that covered the entire left wall, making the room look ten times bigger than it was. I had never been to a place where people who looked like me made up the majority—a sea of Asian faces, brown eyes, black hair. At most of the tables, everyone in the family had the same complexion and colouring. Just then I realized I had never been as close to a Chinese person as I was to Mr. Wu at that moment.

“They fooled me, too,” he said, smiling at me. “The mirrors, the first time I came here.”

“Oh?” I answered, uninterested in anything he had to say. Then I remembered my mother’s repeated commands to be polite to Flank. “It’s neat,” I quickly added.

Megan was doing her big sister act, on her best behaviour, trying to act like one of the adults and butting in on their conversation. Mr. Wu and my parents were having a good time, yakking away as small plates of food were put on the table—weird-looking stuff that I’d never seen before in my life. Even my dad looked panicky
when a plate of chicken feet appeared. They looked gross but I had to admit they smelled tasty. I picked at my food, nibbled at some steamed rice mixed with soy sauce. I already planned to ask if we could stop at a fast-food joint on the way home for a bag of fries. Maybe a burger, too, depending on my mood.

Since I didn’t have much else to do, I listened in on the conversation. I learned that Mr. Wu had been born in China and that he had come to Canada five years after I had. His family was still back in China. China is not a good place to live, he told my parents. There is no freedom, and your life is not your own. Now he lived above a grocery store near the restaurant.

I wondered why he would have given up a teaching job in China to bus tables and wash dishes in a restaurant at night and stock shelves in a grocery store on the weekends. Occasionally he made some extra money by giving private Chinese lessons. He looked poor, yet he didn’t look unhappy.

I nibbled some more rice and looked around. I noticed the family gatherings all around me included at least three generations—babies, teenagers, parents, grandparents whose hair had gone white, enough adults to mean
uncles and aunts, enough kids to mean cousins. It struck me for the first time in my life that I had a whole bunch of relatives in China. And did they know they had a relative in Canada named Grace?

W
hen I asked Megan, who was turning seven in a few weeks, what she would like for her birthday, she piped up, “A sister!” Her words struck my heart like stones.

Kevin and I were from small families. We knew when we got married that we wanted a big family, but it didn’t turn out that way.

There had been a time when I began every day wishing evening would come quickly so I could lose myself in sleep. I spent the day in my housecoat and slippers. I didn’t bathe or comb my hair. Sometimes, when he came home from the office at noon to check on me, Kevin found me where he had left me, sitting on the couch, staring at nothing.

I didn’t feel sorry for myself; I didn’t feel anything. I changed my dressings with the disinterest of a cop writing a traffic ticket. Sometimes I wandered from room to room in the empty house, aimlessly picking up toys, knickknacks, books, magazines, turning them over in my hands and setting them down again. I yearned to be interested in things.

Kevin phoned from work every hour or so. I let the machine pick up. After the first sympathy call from the school where I taught, I wanted no more. I couldn’t bear the honeyed tone of voice, the soft concern, the kindness that grated like broken glass. The solicitations of Kevin’s and my parents set my teeth on edge. When they came over I screamed silently for them to go away, to ease my burning nerves. Megan, bewildered by the woman her mother had become, avoided me. Kevin understood. He left me alone, but seemed to know where I was every second.

When the anger came, seeping into me the way spilled blood soaks a paper towel, I welcomed it. For a time, rage was my friend. Unable to rail against god or fate, I cursed the doctors. The operation left me empty and barren as sand. The thought of the hospital
churned my fury. On one floor people in white smocks struggled to bring another day’s life to a premature infant in an incubator, while on the floor below others casually performed abortion after abortion. The absurdity was cosmic. I was somewhere in the middle. My baby lost through miscarriage, what they clinically called my reproductive system damaged beyond hope. And removed, leaving me empty and bitter for a long time.

Megan must have overheard conversations between Kevin and me, and the phone calls with adoption agencies. A few wouldn’t even give us appointments after they learned that we already had a girl of our own. Those who had finally agreed to interview us marked us down on their long waiting lists with little hope.

We eventually stopped talking about adopting altogether. Until Megan brought it up again.

It was a typical fall day. The sky was a vast sea of blue, embellishing a forest of coloured leaves. I was in the staff room at lunchtime, waiting for my lunch to heat up in the microwave, when I noticed a newspaper clipping pinned to the bulletin board. It was a brief report on China’s family-planning law. As a grade four teacher,
most of my reading was confined to student projects on insects and reptiles, or spelling tests and arithmetic quizzes. When I did get a chance to branch out, I settled down with something refreshingly literary, so I knew very little in detail about China. But I had a husband addicted to his three newspapers a day and a father who was a retired head librarian, so I had picked up a bit of information. China was changing, opening up more and more to trade and tourism. By the end of the week, after talking to both Kevin and Dad, I had a good grasp of China’s attempts at population control. And the more I learned, the deeper I was drawn into what I came to call China’s baby policy, which allowed only one child per family and strictly punished parents who broke the rule. They were subject to fines, demotions, and ejection from the Communist Party, and a cruel second-class citizenship awaited the forbidden second child. But one thing we discovered with delight: people outside China were allowed to adopt Chinese babies.

I called the Children’s Aid Society in Toronto. An agent advised me to get in touch with the federal government’s International Adoption Desk in Ottawa. They in turn told
me to write to a certain private adoption agency in Vancouver, which had in the past couple of years brought back overseas children to homes in Canada; a few of them were from China. The woman who answered the phone informed me that the agency had no problem accepting applicants who already had kids. But I would have to take an older child, she told me, or one with a disability or questionable health. Or a girl, if the child is Chinese, I said to myself.

After months of phone calls and tons of paperwork, a letter arrived with a photo of a little girl named Dong-mei. The poor thing looked too small for a six-month-old. Along with the picture came instructions to apply for a Chinese visa, and more documents and forms to be filled in by our family doctor, employers, and banks. Megan was delighted by all the official forms, and we watched her go through them page by page as we looked at each other across the kitchen table. Suddenly it had all become real.

The colour photo showed me nothing about the child who, if all the bureaucrats could be satisfied, was going to be our daughter. How could a baby’s face be so grave and blank?

On Tuesday afternoon when I got home from school, there were three phone messages from a reporter at
The Milford Daily
, asking us to return his call as soon as possible.

“Mrs. Parker, this is a fascinating story,” he pressed me when I called back. “A Red Chinese baby is coming to Milford and—”

“Mr. Jenkins, I understand that you have a job to do. But at the moment I have nothing to say.”

A few days later, on the front page of the paper, was the headline “Milford’s First Chinese Citizen.” I read the article, trembling with anger. At least he hadn’t brought politics in; there was no mention of “red.”

But I had more on my mind than a newspaper story. In a letter we received a day earlier, via the adoption agency, we learned for the first time that Dong-mei had been born deaf. That surely explained her sad face in the photo. But why had we not been told until two weeks before we headed across the Pacific to get her? I went through every single letter sent to us and failed to find even a hint about the child’s disability. A phone call to Vancouver didn’t help much. All I got was an earful of apologies from Ms. Chow, who promised to look into the matter as soon as
she could. I wasn’t interested in who was responsible or where to lay the blame. It was no one’s fault if Dong-mei was deaf. What would matter to me, and to Kevin and Megan, was whether or not her disability would change our decision.

Ms. Chow called me back three days later. She related that Chinese government policy dictated that if the adoptee was a second child as in our case, the adopting family must accept an “imperfect” baby. The rule also applied within China but in reverse. Only couples whose first child is deformed are allowed a second. Chow added that if I changed my mind about adopting Dong-mei I should let her know as soon as possible.

I’d like to say that Kevin and I weren’t bothered by this new development. But we both tossed and turned in the darkness. Say what you will, a disabled child brings added responsibility, strain on the family, expense, and demands on emotional energy. I knew that from being a teacher for years. And if Dong-mei’s hearing impairment had been kept from us, what other problems might the Chinese bureaucrats have overlooked—or hidden?

We got up in the morning, carried on our normal routine. My mind, though, was a stormy
sea, and as the day wore on I became more agitated.

“Would we have given up Megan if she was born deaf or mute?” I asked Kevin as soon as he stepped into the house that evening.

Kevin looked at me with the same sense of determination that had attracted me on our first date. “Let’s do it, Jane.”

I picked up the phone. For the first time since our contact with the adoption agency I was thankful that Vancouver was three hours behind. “Nothing has changed,” I told Ms. Chow. “We are going to China as scheduled.”

The Nanjing Hotel was a rather forbidding Russian-style pile of stone set in a garden in the northeast part of the city of Nanjing. The trees and hedges surrounding the building drooped in the heat.

“Ten days?” the young woman at the front desk said incredulously.

There followed rapid dialogue, frowning, and head-shaking between the clerk and Ms. Cai, the woman from the Nanjing Foreign Affairs Office who had met us at the airport and would be our interpreter and liaison with the orphanage. Kevin and I exchanged glances.

“Ten?” the clerk asked again, this time in English, holding up both hands with her fingers splayed. “Here? Nanjing?”

While Kevin filled out the registration form, I asked Ms. Cai, “Is everything all right? The hotel isn’t full, is it?”

This brought a laugh from the interpreter. Cai was a small woman in her mid-forties, garbed in a white blouse and black trousers. “Oh, no, Mrs. Parker.” She pronounced it Pokka. “Everything just fine. No problem at all. The young comrade is curious about your long staying. In summer, Nanjing is known as one of China’s ‘three furnaces,’ so tourists usually try to avoid to come here. Or to have short visit at least.”

I looked at the clerk. “Please tell the young lady that where we come from it is winter six months of the year. We don’t mind a bit of hot weather.”

After Cai translated, the young woman smiled behind her hand. “Wer-come,” she said.

Although our room had an air conditioner that wheezed away at the window, I would be stretching things if I claimed it was cool. It was frustrating, sitting in our room, bathed in our own sweat, waiting to see Dong-mei. The
closer we came to seeing her, the more anxious we became that something might go wrong.

Ms. Cai was all right, doing what she was supposed to do—acting as a go-between and tour guide—with grace and politeness. The pumpkin-faced woman tried her best to help us occupy our time. Upon meeting us, she had handed me a typed itinerary of sights to see. But after a tedious trip to the Sun Yat-sen tomb the next morning, I pitched the itinerary directly into the garbage.