China's one child rule and other random thoughts about being here

Well, we're here in Guangzhou, the last leg of our journey. It is here that we get Mia's visa from the US government and permission to bring her home. This is where the paperwork I've been collecting for the last year or so and have been carrying around since we got here, finally gets filled out and filed. But, let me take one step back and finish up our days in Nanjing.

Last night, we had a celebration dinner with our facilitators and their families and the other members of our travel group (we are 5 families in all). After dinner, we were each given our daughters' Chinese passports along with the last of the documents about her from the orphanage. (She come home with a Chinese passport and a US visa, just like we came here with a US passport and a Chinese visa) We received a beautiful handwritten growth report, with pictures of Mia glued in. Unfortunately, there was not time to have it translated, so here I'm making my official request to anyone who reads Mandarin to help us out (David?? are you out there?) I've included a couple of photos of the growth report, one of which has a picture of Mia at 2 months old.

The photo of the 4 beauties are of Mia and her Lianyungang "sisters". These are the other baby girls who were adopted by the other parents in our travel group. At 10 months old, Mia is the eldest, the others being 7,8 and 9 months old.

This morning we all loaded our stuff together and flew to Guangzhou. I felt sad to leave Jiangsu Province since it is our baby's first home. I felt sad for her. The people there were lovely and warm and gracious and friendly. And they love babies. When we walked along the street carrying her, we were stopped numerous times by (mostly)women wanting to know about her. Since no one we met spoke English, and my Mandarin is limited to the most simple greetings, there was not much we could say with words. But looks tell all as you can see from the photo of the woman with Mia and Evan. That says everything.

Before we left Nanjing, I wrote Mia a letter about our experiences here so far, what it was like to see her for the first time, and how I imagined her birthparents to be. I won't tell you all the details because those are just between my baby girl and me, but I will tell you that I think her birthparents must have been extraordiary people because she really is an extraordinary baby. And you only get to be that way if someone loves you to pieces from the moment you are born. I am sure that they loved her as much as we do (if that's possible). I mean, they wrapped her in red and took her right to the orphanage door. Need I say more?

I mailed the letter from Nanjing to her at our home in New York. And I'm going to save it to give to her when she's old enough to begin to understand the monumental events that began her life.

Just as an aside, I have been referring to our baby girl in the posts by the name that we gave her, Mia. But I have not been able to call her by that name here. I call her by her Chinese name, Kai Xin. It is the name that she recognizes and to which she responds. And to me, she doesn't feel like Mia yet. She is Kai Xin from Jiangsu Province. You can see in the special way she perks up when Chinese women speak to her in the language she recognizes, that this is her home. I don't want to take that from her. I feel like she's lost so much already.

Which brings me to China's one child policy. I'm embarrassed to admit that I had been kind of fuzzy on the specifics of why there were so many babies in the orphanages, particularly girls. But finally, I picked our facilitator's brains and she gave me a really clear explanation. Essentially, she said that China instituted a one child rule for population control. (ok, this we all knew) To have a boy to carry on the family name is very important for Chinese families. So, if the first child is a boy, often families will stop there. But if the first child is a girl, families may decide to give her away in hopes of having another child which will be a male. Sometimes, she said, families try multiple times to have boys and when they have girls, they don't keep them.

The penalties here for having more that one child are very steep. There is a fine. Also,the second (or third, or fourth...)child is not entitled to a free education. And private schools are very costly. In addition if you are employed by the government, you are not allowed to keep your job if you have more than one child. This last penalty is a particularly severe one because up until a few years ago, the government ran almost all of the industry here. So, pretty much everyone was employed by the government.

Our facilitator explained that as China has been allowing more non-government owned businesses, there are some people who may choose to have more than one child and not have to forfeit the opportunity for employment. These people may also be able to afford private education and pay the fine for having more than one child. But these folks are clearly in the very small minority.

So, for us, we're not just bringing a baby girl home from a far away place. We're in some way, a part of this culture now - the last piece of China's population explosion puzzle.

From the little I've seen of this country, I can tell you it is a fascinating place with incredibly rich and beautiful traditions. It is also in so many ways, caught between the old and the new. When I went to the post office the other day, it was modern and all of the clerks had computers. Each one of them also had an abacus. I thought that was a great metaphor to describe what I've observed in the short time we've been here.

Hope you can follow the pictures.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention! I was able to get on the blog and read the comments. Thank you to everyone. I wish I had been able to respond along the way... Janet, you're right, Guangzhou is lovely, and just so you know, your suggestion to bring Cheerios was a godsend! They're her favorite food. And Uncle Peter, I've already got her eating eggs, so eggsalad can't be far behind. And I swear, the other morning when she woke up, she babbled something about One Life to Live.... And also, my friend Jennifer definitely needs a cosmo, so email me, I'll give you her # so you can take her out for one!