Golden Girl

Jiejie has not been eager to embrace her ethnic identity or even talk about being Chinese. It simply is not on her radar.

But Meimei, meanwhile, is a little distressed. "Mom," she said one day, looking at her juicy little legs in shorts. "My skin is too dark. I want light skin like my family." (She named all the family members including Jiejie and the two Chinese students who live with us).

Meimei has lovely golden skin, and I told her so. It's soft and beautiful and a healthy, glowing hue. When she's in the sun, no matter how powerful the sunscreen, she becomes a little bronze beauty.

"Mom spends lot of time in the sun to get a healthy, golden look," I told her. "We all have different colors of eyes and hair and skin. No one is exactly the same as anyone else."

Still, she inspected her arm, not thrilled. Then she caught sigh of a vaccination scar and moved her fascination and her questions to another topic.

Happy Adoption Day, Jiejie, From Your Zombie

Today we celebrated the six-year anniversary of Jiejie's homecoming. It was thrown together at the last minute when we realized that once again her Adoption Day would fall on or near Mother's Day and that it would be hard to venerate Grandma and Jiejie in the same short weekend.

So, once more unprepared, we had a too-late, makeshift observance of the day that, more than any other so far, changed us all.

Sometimes I can't believe that this leggy little wiseacre was once that tiny, timid beauty. I remember walking down the stairs of the office building in Nanning carrying her, numb with fear that I would drop her or break her, worried about her cough, and knowing that my best efforts and all my love would never completely heal her grief.

She was 14 months old and a 17-pound featherweight endowed with amazing lungs. Her wails pierced the hotel walls. Ever watchful, she slept with her eyes partly open, when she slept.

We took a little field trip the second day. I had only slept a few hours. I carefully packed a bottle of hot formula mixed from bottled water, which Jiejie, of course, refused, but although we had three adults in our party, no one thought to put some diapers in the bag. When we stopped for lunch, all the other moms rushed to change their babies in a corner of the restaurant (no changing areas in Nanning). I was a zombie. I sat there holding Jiejie, feeling like a neglectful parent (not to mention an idiot), yet I did not ask to borrow a diaper.

That hypnotized state did not lift immediately.
For days I was afraid that I would fail this lovely, willful little being, and my fear overpowered me and exhausted me, but it must have been insignificant in magnitude compared to Jiejie's own.

Meimei and the Beasts

Meimei's nursery school class went on a field trip today, Meimei's first. She had little to say about the animals (beyond the reptiles) but much to say about the bus ride and her classmates. Her new friend is Rachel. She tells me Rachel's father has a big beak and sharp, scary claws and so she will not go to her new friend's house for a play date. Right now she is jumping on the bed pretending Rachel's beastly dad is chasing her and roaring.

Now, normally, I would say this is just her wild childish imagination, but Meimei tells me she met the sharp-clawed dad when he picked up his daughter after the field trip.

Meimei's Wish

I heard a whisper from somewhere in the sprawling bed.

"I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish."

It was Meimei, lying with her head pointing toward the foot of the bed.

"I wish, I wish, I wish, that my Mama would kiss me on the head."

If only all our wishes were so easily granted.

That Time of Year

Around Jiejie's birthday in March, she starts to have little periods of sadness, tears, maybe anger, frustration, sometimes creeping toward the borders of rage and fear. This continues on and off until May or June, the time of year we returned from China with her in 2004.

The other night, she started talking about wanting a kitten. It was bedtime, the lights were going out, and her insistent whining about a cat might have been one of the endless ploys to delay sleep. Her father told her it was out of the question because of his allergies, and she began to cry. "We'll never get a kitten. Never." Her tears and squeals of anger drove Daddy and Meimei downstairs to a sofa.

"I want a Siamese. Two. One named Milky and one named Way." I listened to her tearful pleas, interwoven with plans for caring for kittens and teaching them tricks and buying them some of that cat milk that comes in little juice box-type containers, and how do they get that milk out of the mother cats, anyway? Before bed she had been reading a book of children's poems about cats. Perhaps that was the inspiration.

Then she began to talk about the homeless cats, the ones who needed families. And perhaps it was just cats she was thinking of, but her words reminded me of ho she used to like to reenact the time we went to the animal shelter almost three years ago to get our youngest cat, Luna, presumably a Father's Day gift for allergic Daddy, and how for months afterward she had climbed behind the baby gate at the bottom of the stairs, meowing for food and for a Mommy to take her home and pet her.

Long after her tears had dried, she kept wailing in my arms as the night disappeared and the school day loomed closer. I made all sorts of promises about going to the animal shelter to visit and pet some kittens who needed homes.

The morning dawned warm and sunny. I heard nothing more about the homeless cats.

Easter Bunny

For some reason, on Easter, Meimei found this old Halloween costume, chosen when she was 2 so she could be Max of Max and Ruby and not worn that year or the next because it was "scary." it's a perfect fit.

Tikki Tikki Tembo

Jiejie's class is putting on a play. A 20-minute adaptation of our old favorite bedtime story "Tikki Tikki Tembo." Everyone is the first grade has a part. Jiejie, who hardly speaks above a whisper in class, is playing the mother of the little boy with a long name and a propensity for falling into wells. Jiejie has one line.

She's a little nervous. Well, a lot nervous. She wants very much for me to come and see her, and I managed to arrange it, but I had to promise not to take any photos or video.

"I wish I was playing the well," she said wistfully. "All she has to do is stand there and look pretty."

A Girl's Life, Part II (Barbie, the Lifesaver)

Continued from post below...

Our solution was to delay the cupcakes a day, so I could come to school and help Jiejie present her life story. I frantically e-mailed a mom I had never met whose daughter had been the star of the classroom edition of "This Is Your Life" the day before. She kindly filled me in on the tradition, which had surprised her as well. I e-mailed the teacher for tips, too, thinking I could never be too prepared. The teacher explained that telling life stories was not a big deal; parents were not required to attend, and if they did not the teacher would interview the child, asking questions like how much hair did you have when you were born? How old where you when you learned to walk? These questions are potentially treacherous for an adopted child. I knew I had to be there.
When I got home that night, Jiejie and I made a plan that would appeal to my girl of few (public) words. A life in pictures. Jiejie went to her special photo album, in which she has preserved a collection of pictures of herself and others that were carefully selected and bound together by some logic that is beyond me. We flipped through and chose a few. Jiejie wanted baby pictures. I fetched the tiny album, a camo-covered Mickey Mouse knockoff that held a handful of pictures of Jiejie from the "babyhouse" in Laibin: the row of tiny metal cribs, the picture of her looking first bald, then Maolike, dressed in layer upon layer of puffy clothes and propped against a scruffy stuffed panda or slumping onto the tray of a wheeled walker seat.

"Is that all?" she said.
I bit my lip, wishing we had started that life book project long ago to give some shape and substance to the 14 months she lived without this family. I reached back into the drawer of keepsakes and pulled out that toy only found in families with children from China, Mattel's peculiar incarnation of a leggy Caucasian Barbie attached to a tiny Asian baby.
"We'll take 'Going Home Barbie.'" Since she rarely gets to see that boxed-up Barbie, she was delighted. Then her tummy began to hurt. And hurt. It kept hurting for hours, then rumbling.

"It hurts so much, Mama. Make it go away!"

"Oh, honey. If I could take the pain and put it in my tummy, I would."
"No, no you wouldn't because it would hurt you so much you would give it back to me."

***

By morning she was perky and hungry and decked out in a puffy pink plaid skirt and black lace-trimmed leggings,ready for school despite the downpour outside.

At 9:30 the phone rang. Jiejie had vomited in class. Could we come pick her up?