gong xi fa chai

1994 was the Year of the Dog, the second Chinese New Year I was aware of. The first, in 1993, was the Year of the Rooster, when I was in London. Somehow, I heard about the party near Leicester Square and threaded my way through a mob of faceless pushing persons cramming narrow streets. To make my way down an unseen sidewalk as a cell might travel a clogged artery was as fascinating as the celebration. Every now and then, I could work my way to the edge of the mass to see a cart of oranges, a "lion" dancing up to eat cabbage, a calligrapher swaying.

The Year of the Dog found me back in Kentucky, finishing college. I’d forgotten until a Malaysian student bounced into the studio with a bag of oranges, brightly announcing the New Year and giving everyone fruit. I asked her what year, and as she answered, our instructor barked fiercely. My face streamed with juice and pulp from laughing.

Tian You was born in the next Rooster Year, 2005. There are no newborn photos of him-no one constant person from birth to hospital to orphanage to nuns could bear witness through a lens to his journey. The foster home assumed the task on his arrival. Their first photos were tenuous as his health, and then there emerged what John Berger might call a likeness, as the little boy in a bed in Singapore smiled with laughing eyes, his legs bound so that his incessant playfulness wouldn’t re-open his enormous hernia.

When Tian You went to Singapore in December 2005, Shane and I saw change coming. We had begun the adoption journey, and we realized we must go to Iraq. The two seemed at cross-purposes, but we were convinced otherwise. We’d been involved with a school in the Kurdish region. For years we’d been asked to work there, but we were unable financially to make the commitment. Finally, the opportunity arose to host a day camp, and we jumped. Christmas found us sending letters to friends and colleagues, asking for support in the monthlong endeavor that would take place in the coming summer. Our adoption plan was to be finished with homestudy and dossier, merely waiting for a referral by that time.

New Year came, the Year of the Dog. Tian You was in Singapore, and surgeries to correct his exstrophy and close his hernia had just been completed. His legs bound, he smiled as his ayi took pictures, first of him laughing, then of him holding one of the little red envelopes given to children for New Year, then with his hair pulled up in a wet pointy shape, surrounded in his bed by oranges and red paper lanterns. We shared oranges wrapped in red paper with friends at the Nashville Chinese Association party, unknowing that across the world, our son was being cherished like a prince by his ayi.