Wish You Happy Forever (21 page)

“Shh, baby,” we both said. “It's okay. Don't worry. It's all going to be okay.”

Give me her pain . . . let me feel the hurt so she doesn't. . . .

When he was six, my son, Aaron, raced his bike into the street from between parked cars smack into an oncoming car. A single mom, sick with guilt and fear, I rode in the back of the ambulance clutching his hand, looking at the broken femur protruding from my baby's leg. “I'm sorry, Mommy!” he cried. “I rode between the parked cars . . . you told me never—”

It's okay, baby; don't worry. Give me my baby's pain.

I was every parent who ever watched her child suffer. There was no doubt that Anya Xinmei—who once bit and pinched and spit at me—was my precious little girl now and for all time. I don't remember when that changed.

THE CORRIDORS OF
Baling People's Hospital No. 1 were even worse than Dick had imagined. The benches and any available wall space were thick with waiting patients. Most were in bad shape. Some were coughing. Some were gasping. Some were hacking and spitting. Some were doing all that and more.

When they saw the little girl arrive on a stretcher attached to two pasty-faced foreigners, all patients who were the least bit mobile crowded in for a look. We tried to herd them back, clear a path, keep the hackers away from our whimpering baby. Anya started wailing again.

The attendants set her down on the floor.

“No way!” I said.

Now Dick was frantic. “I'm getting her out of here!” He bent to lift Anya himself. She reached for him—she screamed.

ZZ barked at the attendants. “Pick the stretcher up and turn around!”

Somehow they did, and she marched the whole little traumatized bunch of us back outside. We found a quiet spot on the lawn and told the attendants to set the stretcher down.

“Tell the doctor to come to us,” ZZ said. And there we waited.

In about forty-five minutes, they returned. We must go inside for x-rays. But we could go through the back tunnel entrance.

The tunnel was . . . well, a tunnel. The x-ray room was straight out of Stephen King.

Against one wall leaned a massive split log. The face of it was covered in dried (but not too long ago) blood. The door was closed, securing us inside.

Bloody handprints, these deep brown with age, ran the full length of the door.

Dick and I did our best to block Anya's view, squeezing her hands and holding our breath as the big machine did its thing, probably showering us all with rays.

Anya's leg was fractured. We went back through the tunnel to wait outside for the chief of orthopedic surgery to finish up his current OR duties. When he was available, the chief built Anya's cast himself—the old-fashioned plaster-of-Paris way, smoothing each layer with practiced alabaster hands.

“May we take a picture together?” he asked. Of course, we did.

Peering out the taxi window at the hospital as we drove off, I swore I could hear Terri:
“AM I TALKING TO THE WALLS HERE??!!!”

WE RETURNED TO
Slick's dream hotel for the final party. Everybody on the crew signed Anya's cast.

Then, calmly as we could—as if such things happened every day at the orphanage in Baling—we led and carried the Root Cellar kids to see their new preschool. They all looked pretty shell-shocked under wizard hats and wedding veils and tiaras as they clutched their juice and cookies. The volunteers turned on the music. They blew up balloons and gently batted them through the air. One by one, the balloons began to bounce back and, before too long, there were even some smiles. It was just a start, but it felt great to see the beginning of a new life for Jingli and her sisters.

And then, during the night, while we enjoyed a deep, exhausted sleep on our luxurious beds, Terri resigned from the board.

To the Board,

I can't bring myself to continue on with the foundation after seeing the absence of procedure on the part of the executive director toward this board. . . . I completely believe in the mission of Half the Sky. I have had a wonderful time helping this organization become a reality. There have been many remarkable adventures and I will certainly miss them.

This has been a very difficult decision to make, but I have no regrets here and I'd like to keep it that way, so please accept this as my letter of resignation.

Respectfully, Terri

A couple of weeks later, Daniel also resigned in solidarity. I couldn't pretend that I would miss the angry e-mails, but still I felt sad to see them go. They'd stood by Half the Sky even when it was clear they didn't trust my ways. Now I'd gone too far, and so lost two good friends. We've never spoken since.

Always before, when criticism stung me, when I wasn't good enough in somebody's eyes, I would assume that my critics must be right. Then I would find a way to make my own exit—to slip away from my failures, just as I'd slipped away from my childhood.

This time, I wasn't about to leave. In fact, I was even more determined to push on. This wasn't just about me. We were making quiet thunder now, and while maybe the heavens didn't hear us yet, more and more people on earth sure did. I could feel the excitement of discovery and new resolve whenever Half the Sky came to a new place. I could see lives turning around. I couldn't walk away from what felt so right for those little girls. It was the first time in my life that I stood up to bullies.

I confess, however, that when I reported back to what remained of our board, I never told them about Anya's broken leg and People's Hospital No. 1 of Baling.

Chapter 12

Wait for Roast Duck to Fly into Mouth, Wait a Long Time

Berkeley, California
Christmas 2003

On the eve of the lunar New Year, northern Chinese families gather together and make vegetable
jiaozi
. The delicious boiled dumplings are then famously enjoyed on the first day of the New Year. They taste best (in my opinion) with black vinegar, hot sauce, and cold beer. Since ZZ—now beloved Zhang
Ayi
(Auntie Zhang) to our girls—was visiting us for the Christmas holidays, we figured why wait? We had an early
jiaozi
party. ZZ was the master chef and teacher—a role she's since played many times for little girls and their earnest, clumsy
laowai
parents. Every guest had a go at rolling at least a few dumplings.

Besides our grown kids (who adored their young siblings) and their families, our local staff, and friends, we invited our newly evolved board (only Dana, Carolyn, and Dick remained from the original) to join us. It was one of those count-your-blessings days. We had it all. But in my heart, I couldn't wait to get back to China.

Now the guests were gone; ZZ and the rest of our big family slept. Despite our efforts well into the wee hours, the house was still covered in flour. Floors, counters, even crannies we might not discover for months. Dick and I fried up some potstickers and enjoyed the rare quiet.

“It was fun,” I said. “Do you know, that's the first party we've had in five years?”

“Wonder why,” Dick said, not really wondering.

“Half the Sky, right? All I do is work twenty-four/seven. I miss other kids' birthday parties, and I even missed Anya's preschool Back to School Night. Our house is full of people on telephones, and you make more post office runs than Santa Claus.”

“Did I say anything?”

“No. I can do my own guilt.”

“Another potsticker?”

“Uh-uh.
Chibaole
—I'm stuffed. So what if we moved to China? All of us.”

“I guess it was only a matter of time,” he said.

I poked at the last few potstickers with my chopsticks. Skewered one. Looked up at my soul mate. I'm pretty sure he was smiling just a bit.

“You've said yourself that a cameraman can live anywhere. It would be a fantastic experience for the girls. And we'd all be together. We always wanted our life together to be an adventure.”

“We've succeeded,” he said.

“It'd just be for a year. But think what we could accomplish!”

“You don't have to
carpe diem
me, Jenny. Lay it out.”

I drizzled a little vinegar lake around the lone potsticker. Added a spoonful of
lajiao
, hot chili. Too much
lajiao
, just the way I like it. I poked the potsticker into the hot spot.

Well, who do you think you are, Miss Priss?
(That would be my mother talking.)

So what makes you think you can make a dent in the mess in somebody else's country?
(That would be me.)

Patently inadequate.
(The Greek chorus stirs in its grave.)

Okay. Well. Despite SARS, an angry board, reluctant government officials, and a constant scramble for funds, nobody could deny we were making progress. Real progress. By the end of 2003, just three years after the first Half the Sky preschool opened, we were operating our programs in thirteen orphanages and had three hundred–plus employees—most of them teachers and nannies. In an effort to spread the word that we had at least a partial solution to offer, we'd just held our first semipublic event in Hefei: Half the Sky's Fifth Anniversary Conference on Nurture and Education in China's State-Run Orphanages. Incredibly, a hundred orphanage directors and welfare officials accepted our invitation. Even CBS News and CNN showed up, and their stories had aired just before the holidays.

“Well,” I said, “I just can't help thinking that if we had a real office in Beijing, instead of ZZ's apartment—and if we could be working right alongside our government partners and not just when I'm in town—we'd be more credible; we could find more supporters and reach more kids.”

“How many are we reaching now? I can't keep up,” he said.

“Maybe two thousand.”

“And how many are you after?”

“I dunno. They say there's maybe a million.”

The sun was just coming up. Dick poured some coffee. The kitchen was new. We'd spent the past couple of years living in a construction zone so we could have it. Outside, in pinkish light, through big storefront-type windows, we could see our garden: fruit trees, vegetables, old roses, herbs, a tree we'd hauled up from Southern California. The irrigation system Dick had made by hand, turning all his fingertips blue with plumber's gunk. Twenty-seven valves. Raised beds—one of them full of baby asparagus that would produce for fifty years.

“It would just be for a year,” I said.

“Did you ever dream Half the Sky could reach so many kids?”

“Never.”

“Why can't two thousand be enough?”

Dick swears he would never have said that. I
thought
he did. Probably I said it to myself.

I dissected the last potsticker with chopsticks. Herded all the filling bits into their own little circle on my plate.

“I don't know.”

Dick put his arms around me.

“Well, the good news is—we'll see a lot more of you in China,” he said.

ZZ MADE HER
famous
congee (rice porridge, or
zhou
in Chinese) for breakfast. My girls could live happily on congee alone. They and their nephew, our seven-year-old grandson, Colin, were blissful in their jammies, slurping it up with little porcelain spoons.

“Zhang
Ayi
,” I said to ZZ, “remember the congee we had in Beihai?”

“Mmm . . . the one with the worms? Delicious.”

Three spoons stopped midair. Three children froze.

“Tell us, Mommy,” Maya said.

“Okay, so, it was lunchtime in Beihai—”

“In China?” asked Anya.

“Yep. Beihai's sort of a funky beach town in the south, in Guangxi Province. Before lunch, we strolled through a great big seafood market in front of the restaurant so the Beihai orphanage director could pick out our food. Giant octopi and squid were smooshed against glass boxes that were too small to hold them. And there were like
acres
of fish that were straight out of Dr. Seuss. And there was a hundred-year-old tortoise who looked like he'd rather be dead than in that place.”

“Did you eat the tortoise?” Anya asked.

“Nope,” I said. “I don't think he was for sale. But to tell you the truth, none of it looked like lunch to me. Anyway, so then we went inside.

“From the dining room window, we could see Vietnam, which was very cool. After a while they brought us a bowl of congee. That was fine with me. I was tired of banquets and fancy food. Then the Beihai director explained what we were eating. What did he say, ZZ?”

ZZ smiled. “He is so proud. He says, ‘Beihai
shachangchong
is our
most famous
dish! These ones are wild from Lower Dragon Pool Village—very rare!' And then your mom ask me what we are eating.”

“Zhang
Ayi
said, ‘You don't want to know.' So I glared at her until she told me.”

“Okay, so I tell her, ‘
Shachangchong
is sand worm or maggot,'” said ZZ.