The good, the bad, & the ugly

We’re on Shamian Island in Guangzhou. It is a containment island for families on the last leg of their adoption journey. The Island was severed from the mainland more than a century ago and filled with the banks and embassies of many countries—it was the first city allowed to bring in trade from outside. The atmosphere of those now-derelict buildings is “empire left to moulder.” We are here, shielded somehow from traveling street vendors and beggars. There are only a handful of stalls hawking cheap souvenirs across the street from our hotel, the White Swan, and they do not chase us down—they only call out as we pass.

What is good, so good, is that we’re almost finished. Our little prince plays with us, clings to us, snuggles with us each morning. He chatters during dinner, and he tries so hard to teach us Chinese. One morning, as he told me that he wanted to go downstairs, I tried his patience. The words in Mandarin for “small” and “down” sound similar to me. Each time I answered his “down” with “small,” he said, “No!” and gently corrected me. Finally, he took my face in his tiny brown hands and said, “Mama, ni shodo bu how” (“Mama, you speak poorly”). I laughed so hard!

Today was bad in many ways. We walked as a group of 10 families to a clinic on the Island for physical examinations of all the children. For most families, it was an in and out affair, with some tears and cries of anguish on the children’s part, but mostly painless.

Then there was us. We were early in line, but as soon as the examining physician pulled off Tian Yo’s clothing, we knew there was a problem. She asked about his bowel movements and his urine. We said they were good. She looked at his medical notes, then at him again. She pressed his colostomy pouch. “What is this?” she asked. I explained carefully, without too many words-her English was poor. Her hands were bare, unwashed throughout the last dozen children examined. Only the small square of disposable paperlike fabric had been changed on the examining table. She began to press his genitals, actually pulling at some parts as he cried out. “Elsie!” I called for our agency’s guide, frantic. The doctor pulled another doctor in, and the two of them began pressing YoYo’s flesh while he screamed. Elsie came in, took one look at Tian Yo, and draped a comforting arm across my shoulder. “How sad! How hard!” Her voice was thick with tears of pity for my son, and I felt my anger choke me. “Tell them that it is all in his medical notes—in Chinese,” I urged her. She translated, and the first doctor paused in her exam to speak. “She wants to know how he urinates,” Elsie explained, as both doctors pulled on him for what must have been the tenth time. My head spun, and I thought I would faint. I could not see these three as people at all, only as objects of my anger in their incompetence. I yanked a catheter from YoYo’s emergency kit in Shane’s backpack. Shane was tightlipped with anger. The doctor pulled the guaze back from YoYo’s stoma with her bare unwashed hand and TOUCHED IT (I can’t explain here how bad that is without launching in a completely different direction, but that is so very unhealthy, exposing his bladder directly and instantly to a profound amount of bacteria). They pressed him one or two last times, and the second doctor left. As I tugged his clothes back onto his sobbing body, she asked if we had any record of his surgeries. This was totally unexpected. We had given our guide copies of every piece of medical information that they were supposed to have. But now they wanted more. Out came my notebook, and within seconds, I covered her in letters and records from Shanghai, Singapore, and Johns Hopkins which I had carried in my notebook “just in case.” She stared at the English papers, uncomprehending, then ordered an assistant to make copies.

A sick feeling hit me. What if all this just led up to, “No, you cannot have this boy?” Did they have the power to try that? What would we do if that happened? I tried not to let my imagination run wild as this doctor sat staring at words which held no meaning for her in Chinese, much less English. YoYo was clinging to Shane, his tears abated, his face a picture of a child overwhelmed. The color of his face was terrible, pale and tearsoaked, exhausted. Our useless guide was back in the main waiting area, sorting the paperwork from all the other families in our group, who had long since finished their examinations.

When the assistant returned, I took my papers back and restored them to the notebook, and we fled. The examination was over. Back at the hotel, I doused his stoma in Betadine and gave him extra antibiotic. He was asleep the minute I picked him up from catheterizing him.

Tonight, we sailed a brightly lit cruise boat up the Pearl River. YoYo was grumpy, unwilling to touch his food, still breathing roughly from the cold he has had the entire time we have had him. I tasted my own food, something unidentifiable from a large and cold partially cooked buffet. It was awful, and instantly, I felt like an ugly American inside. “Pizza,” I said to Shane, and when we returned for the evening to our comfortable room with uncomfortable beds, we feasted on Papa John’s pepperoni pizza, and I didn’t care what message it sent YoYo as long as he had food in his belly and a smile on his face-finally.