Wish You Happy Forever (2 page)

That night and all the next morning we talked. We tried to weigh the pros and cons. Were we doing the right thing? Would we be saving a life or taking a child away from her country? Away from what? What future could she have in China? We could find no wrong.

And then altruism began to morph into the endless pregnancy. We were like any other expectant parents, focused on one little life, eagerly waiting for the moment we would hold our daughter in our arms.

Somewhere in China, that one little life had already begun. Born but not yet abandoned. Fate was in motion.

EIGHTEEN LONG MONTHS
passed. After the pre-adoption fingerprints, paperwork, home studies, FBI checks, and scrutiny of our now-fat dossier, and after China had taken a hiatus to completely reorganize its international adoption process—and while I was finishing my movie script, storyboarding each shot with Dick, scouting locations, casting actors, interviewing animal trainers and composers and editors, and then finally, finally rolling the camera—the telephone rang in the production office of the old California rancho in Carmel Valley. The wheels of Chinese bureaucracy turn slowly. No more so than making movies.

The phone call was for me, but I was off somewhere in paradise—a paradise of my own design.

EXT. IDYLLIC WILDERNESS VALLEY—DAY

Beside a meadow pond stands a tumbledown shack. Joey, a brash young lawyer, has escaped to the California hills to protect Dinah, her seven-year-old client, from further harm. This is their refuge. Joey, not exactly a natural mother, is giving it her best.

DINAH

I don't like it when there's brown

stuff on the side of the eggs.

JOEY

It's iron. It's a kind of vitamin.

DINAH

I'm not eating it.

JOEY

Fine.

(She drops the pan. It clatters to the ground.)

I'm not cooking.

“Cut.”

That's me. I'm staring at a slip of paper someone has put in my hand. I'm hyperventilating. “Sorry, everyone: Dick and I are going to need a moment. Let's take a break.”

We're already racing to the waiting truck. It flies over the bumpy roads, splashes through a muddy ditch, skirts a meadow, pulls around behind the hacienda-turned-production-office—

And just like in the movies, suddenly we're standing there, looking at the telephone with pounding hearts. I dial Los Angeles, call Norman Niu, our adoption facilitator.

“Congratulations. You have a healthy, beautiful daughter. Yue Meiying. Meiying means ‘Beautiful Hero.' She's seventy-six centimeters. Nine kilos. Almost two years old. Playful. Smart. Guangzhou—best orphanage in China. You can come to China next week.”

Oh my God. This is it.

I look at Dick. But we
can't
go to China. We have a cast and crew and investors depending on us here, and we can't go to the other side of the world to get our little girl who, even if she doesn't know it, has been waiting for us since the day she was born. Already we've failed her.

Somehow, we will make our way through twenty-two more shooting days, our hearts in limbo.

Guangzhou, China

By now we'd lost all sense of time. The plastic flowers had wilted. The hot water was tepid. We'd kept her waiting untold months and twenty-two extra days. Payback time? Was she old enough to decide she'd changed her mind?

And then Meiying was in the doorway.

Her hair was slicked down like a guy on prom night. Her big eyes looked tired and confused—and deep, old-lady sad. Her face was splotched with itchy-looking sores. A smiling woman in a rumpled white uniform lifted her up to me.

I felt my heart beating in every part of me. Ears. Knees. Toes. Eyelids. I reached out and took Meiying, my little girl, in my arms.

She barely glanced at me. Even my foreign face wasn't enough to rouse her curiosity. She'd been handed around to strangers before. Everybody was a stranger.

Meiying

The first time I held her is as immediate today as if I were transported back in time. The heat, the sticky air, the people all fall away. It is just us.

She smells of pomade and pee. She weighs nothing. She is all bits and bones. She doesn't nestle into my arms in that instinctive baby way, but rigidly arches her back. Her belly, too hard and round for this tiny body, pokes out of the thin white shirt. Her yellow pajama bottoms say
Novèlli Crayon
down one skinny leg. Her socks say
Baseball
. She is wearing clear jellies with pink rosebuds printed on the soles. They are too small. The bottoms have not been walked on. Her impossibly long, thin fingers tightly clutch a dried lychee nut in each hand, put there to keep her from scratching her face full of sores. She is beautiful.

What does it feel like to hold her? It feels both intensely foreign and awkward, and absolutely right. It feels like I am holding someone else's child, and yet there is no doubt that she is mine. That she has always been mine.

IT DIDN'T TAKE
long to figure out that “healthy,” “smart,” “playful,” and “best orphanage in China” were soothing gifts the Chinese bestowed upon all anxious parents-to-be. Within hours of returning to our hotel room, we'd seen the bloody diarrhea that turned out to be amoebic dysentery, we'd called doctors, arranged for urgent hospital visits, learned that our little almost two-year-old could barely walk and had no language at all. No Cantonese. No Mandarin.
Meiyou
. Nothing. Zip.

The one thing she could do like a champ was eat. Massive bowls of noodles disappeared into that swollen, malnourished belly. No wonder: she was feeding millions. A parasite zoo full of six kinds of creepy crawlies lived off our tiny girl.
Helicobacter pylori, Giardia intestinalis, Entamoeba histolytica, Clostridium difficile, Sarcoptes scabiei
, and
Ascaris lumbricoides
, better known as giant roundworms.

Healthy?—hardly. Playful?—under the circumstances, who would be?

As for smart, it was impossible to know. She didn't speak. She wouldn't even look at us. She didn't respond to anything except food. She was a little shell being eaten alive from the inside.

I'll confess we were a bit scared. We were exhausted from eight weeks of film production. It was our first trip to China. Our new daughter was sick and shut down and not doing any of the usual toddler things. Between useless (though undeniably cinematic) hospital visits, the three of us sat on the king-size bed at the China Hotel, two of us watching for hopeful signs.

Meiying wouldn't go near Dick (and barely tolerated me), but he soon learned that she would let him feed her Cheerios one by one. He went through dozens of flying cereal maneuvers, one at a time, each
O
finally making a perfect landing between sweet little rosebud lips. Did I mention that she was beautiful as advertised? Even with running sores marring her pale cheeks, that part of Norman's promise could not be denied. Our new daughter was a stunner.

Day two on the big hotel bed, the first small miracle occurred. Bone-weary, I was propped against the headboard, watching on television as Hong Kong was officially returned to the motherland, ending 156 years of British rule. Despite the pomp and fireworks, my eyes drifted shut.

While awaiting her ration of incoming Cheerio flights, Meiying gradually began scooching backward on the bed, back toward my leg. I opened my eyes. Slowly . . . scooch . . . scooch. I held my breath. She wouldn't look at me, but I could feel the warmth of her little back coming closer . . . and then lightly touching—contact!—and then (bliss!) pressing against my leg.

Now we were ready to take on the world.

AFTER TWO WEEKS
of appointments—visa photos, consulate clearance, inoculations, and a physical exam (which she mysteriously aced)—our new family flew home to California. Meiying was sick the entire flight, necessitating several wardrobe changes. She crossed the finish line at U.S. Immigration wrapped only in Dick's T-shirt.

The jet-lagged days back home were a blur of doctor appointments and preparations to start editing the movie.

The former Meiying became Maya, a name I'd heard months before in a dream. That it was so similar to her orphanage name seemed like another whim of fate. We were getting used to those.

Maya's new pediatrician told us that our daughter wouldn't have lived another year untreated. A life saved for sure. The facial sores began to heal. Dead worms appeared in the diapers (that is a
good
thing!). Weight was gained. But even as we dutifully stashed Flagyl in ice cream and force-fed our little darling the foul-tasting stuff, we quietly worried.

We celebrated the first steps, the first faint smiles, the first gluttonous pumpkin-suited Halloween—all milestones were accompanied by food—but Maya never seemed truly present. Even as she began to let me hold her and occasionally (briefly) rested easy in my arms, it was like she didn't get that cuddling was a worthwhile activity. The only sign that something was going on in that lovely little head was the furrowed brow that had appeared the moment we met her and refused to fade. In fact, the worry lines seemed to deepen when I held her. We had snatched her away from her everything. All was lost.

It seemed like our baby had never known love. She didn't know what to do with it. But could she be taught? Could she learn what should come naturally? Could these strange new people teach her to experience and accept love?

“Give it time,” I whispered to her. “We'll find our way together.”

I dearly hoped that was true. Was I mother enough to bring this hurt little being out of her shell?

I hadn't been exactly nurtured as a child. I came late in the post–Depression era marriage of two hard-working first-generation Americans who were entirely focused on making ends meet and saving for the rainy day that would likely come at any moment. My two sisters were born several years before me. I was not planned, and although it wasn't said (well, only once in anger), I never felt particularly loved or even wanted. Of course, decent families would never think of abandoning their unwanted babies in the 1950s in California, USA. Certainly not. But I don't remember being held or played with or talked to much. I wasn't unhappy. It was just the way it was.

When she wasn't off at work, my mother was tired and impatient and, it seemed to me, impossible to please. She never spared the rod. My father came home from work and lost himself in sports scores and bowling and his weekly pinochle game with the boys. We never talked.

When I looked at Maya . . . the utter aloneness of her . . . maybe I saw something of myself.

TO KEEP MAYA
with me every waking moment, I decided to edit my movie at home. A film editor and assistant, trim bins, and editing equipment soon consumed our living room and all other available space in the house. I plopped Maya on my lap and did my best to make up for all the cuddles and kisses she'd missed out on, while we reviewed shots over and over, assembled and reassembled scenes.

Throughout that first winter, I tried to focus on both my babies—Maya and the movie. It was the best I could manage under the circumstances. Maya won hands down. While the editor cut, I sang silly songs and show tunes and lullabies and rocked and blew bubbles and fell in love. It probably wasn't an ideal introduction to family life, but at least our little girl knew somebody was paying attention.

Sometime around our first rough cut, as we replayed the opening courtroom scene for the thousandth time, Maya began to softly babble.

“What's she saying?” asked the editor.

I leaned down.

“
Tewwa twoo
. . . omigosh, she's talking!
Tewwa twoo
. . . Tell the truth! She said, ‘Tell the truth'!”

Okay, so it was dialogue from the movie, but my little girl was talking! I covered her little babbly face with kisses.

July 1998

Whenever we can, we like to do something special on the Fourth of July to celebrate Dick's birthday (which falls on the fifth) without making too big a deal about it. Dick's the kind of guy who slips out the back door if you offer him a singing-waiter birthday cake in public. But a year earlier on the fourth we'd flown to China to adopt Maya, so his entire birthday had been wiped out by the International Date Line. Time to make amends and have a party.

Our house was full to bursting with a happy combination of film types and China adoption types. Conversations of every sort in every room. The mood felt upbeat, and why not? Our movie was done and in the hands of its distributor. That same distributor had offered to finance and distribute another independent film that I would write and direct. It was such a rare offer, I didn't let myself even think about whether I wanted to be consumed like that again so soon, or whether, in my heart of hearts, I really believed that the world needed another little movie by Jenny Bowen that would likely come and go, not adding up to much. I should be grateful for the opportunity. I started a new script.

We knew how lucky we were. We'd worked hard for the life we had. And, although we were yet again dreaming of and scheming about moving away from Los Angeles and back to our San Francisco roots (Chinese daughter, San Francisco—no-brainer), we were reasonably content. We were not thinking of turning our lives upside down again.

We were in the kitchen, refilling food platters. I could hear children laughing and playing a noisy game in the garden. I looked out at them through the kitchen window.

Somehow, through that kitchen glass, the world was a movie frame. Whatever was going on in the rooms of my house, beyond the edges of the frame, faded away. I could hear only the laughter of children.

And as I watched a gaggle of three- and four-year-old girls skipping up a path, trying to go fast, faster, yet keeping the line, giddy with the effort . . . I saw Maya.

She was positively radiant. Her cheeks red, her eyes bright. She was giggling so hard she could barely keep her balance. She called out and grabbed a friend's hand. A friend! The girls collapsed on the grass in laughter.