Help! We've Been Kidnapped (AKA how we got to Civil Affairs)

After landing in Beijing, we went through customs before going to wait for our flight to Nanjing. I have been on the lookout for funny signs, and we just saw our first one. It was delineating the duties of the customs employees, and the last bullet point stated that the employees shall be supervised by passengers. Hmmmm…


Some nice young Chinese man was waiting with a luggage trolley next to the carousel, and he very kindly put our bags on the trolley and helped us find where we were to go next to get checked in for our connecting flight to Nanjing. When I tried to tip him a couple of dollars, he tried to hold us up for $20!!!! I managed to bargain down to $10, and I got the sneaking suspicion he was laughing at having managed to get $10 from the stoopid Americans.


When we got to Nanjing, we ignored all the nice young men and found a crippled luggage trolley with one flat wheel that we could push by ourselves without paying the nice young men. We made our way through the security checkpoint going clatter, clatter THUMP, clatter, clatter THUMP the whole way. Just on the other side, there was a nice-looking lady holding a sign with our names on it, so we claimed her and she took us and our luggage trolley (clatter, clatter, THUMP) out to the parking lot and loaded the luggage in the back of a van that a very nice man was driving.


She said the hotel is about 40 minutes away, so we settled in for the ride. It was nice to be out of the airplane sardine seats. She started talking about the fact that we are not waiting until 3 p.m. to go get Xiao Tian after all, because the Civil Affairs Bureau said they wanted us there as soon as possible. We would be leaving the hotel at 1 o’clock so as to be there when they finished their lunch break.


Yikes! Not much time to freshen up and make myself look like June Cleaver instead of Cruella deVille.


But then I started thinking…how did this guide know all this? OCDF, the company I had hired to meet us at the airport and handle our tours, was not doing the adoption paperwork. WACAP’s agency was supposed to be doing the adoption paperwork, which would include coordinating the appointments with Civil Affairs Bureau. I got this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I asked this nice lady if she was from OCDF. She was very confused. She was working for WACAP, and had been told to meet us at the airport and handle all of our arrangements.


Okay, keep in mind that I have by now been flying for over 24 hours and I’m not firing on all cylinders. I said, “Oh, no, that means there is another guide at the airport waiting for us somewhere—you aren’t supposed to pick us up!” and I explained about getting a separate agency. She immediately went from nice tour guide to dragon lady, ordering the driver in a stern voice to pull over while she straightened this out. I gave her the phone number for the woman in Beijing with OCDF who was planning the other part of our trip, and she called her. Chinese, to someone like me who only knows one sentence of it really well, sounds like an argument, whether it is or not. Jen looked at me rather fearfully at that point, because we were both convinced the dragon lady was going to drop us off on the side of the road for the other guide to fetch and finish the trip. Why can’t I keep my big mouth shut? She finally hung up the phone after having talked to 3 different people. They got word to our other guide that we’d been kidnapped by accident, so she could go back and meet up with us later that night; dragon lady and the driver would take us to the hotel since we were halfway there, and then we would continue on to Civil Affairs as planned. The only hitch was that since dragon lady was no longer handling our arrangements, we lost the driver, and we would have to get cabs and pay for them. Fine with me—if we kept the driver, they’d charge us something like $400 for him. Cabs cost the equivalent of about $1 each way.


Of course, this meant that there were duplicate plans for touring and duplicate hotel reservations. She discovered that the fault was her boss at the travel agency that WACAP works with—the boss basically shrugged and said that she had just been too busy to call and let her know the plans had changed. Nice boss. I felt sorry for her, ‘cause she had planned her next 5 days around us, but only for a little while.


We dumped our stuff at the hotel and ran a quick washcloth over our faces. Sorry, kid, no June Cleaver for you. Jumped in a taxi and headed for Civil Affairs. It was freezing in that building.


They showed us into a somewhat warmer room (but not by much) and I dug out my paperwork for this round of tree-killing.


Within about five minutes, they brought him in. I had really thought I’d be a tearful mess at that first meeting, but believe it or not, it was so hectic that there were no tears. Not one. He headed for me and spoke the word “Mama” (what a sweet sound!) and we hugged. He was very shy with me, but we sat down and ignored the rest of the world for a couple of minutes while I went through the list of names with him. I had thought we’d have until the next day to decide on his American name, but we actually needed it that day so they could apply for his passport. So I signed to him all the meanings of all the names (there were about 20 to choose from). Meanwhile, dragon lady is haranguing me, telling me that we have too much business to get through and don’t have time for this, I’m the parent, and I should just pick the name for him. I turned my face away from her and shut my ears, and kept signing with my son, and within about five minutes he had chosen the name Charles, which means "manly." He is now Charlie Fisher.


Little did I know that from her post on the other side of the room, my sherpa was giving dragon lady the hairy eyeball in between getting those all-important photos. Like I said earlier, you just don’t piss off the sherpa. When Dragon Lady couldn’t stare the sherpa down, she gave up haranguing me and went over to the Chinese officials (who didn’t seem to care that we were taking these few minutes) and started mocking how we were using sign language. I didn’t actually see this, but Jen told me about it later. Said she nearly came over the table at her but decided that getting the pictures and video was more important.


I could mention here that Jen has a sherpa specialty certificate in photography. She can hold a video camera in one hand filming, and take still shots with a digital in the other hand. Most impressive.


At any rate, the name having been chosen, we spent the next hour doing paperwork, and Dragon Lady informed me that my request to visit the orphanage had been approved, but that our other guide would have to make the trip. (That was the original plan anyway.) Then we got a couple of shots with the folks from the orphanage who brought him out to Nanjing. (Ms. Tang, director, and Mr. Zhang, who I think was one of his group’s teachers.) After the picture-taking was over, Ms. Tang had her arm around Xiao Tian while I was waving good-bye to her, and he thought I was waving good-bye to him, too, so he waved bye-bye back at me. You should have seen the look of surprise on his face when I looked at him incredulously, took his hand, pulled him towards me, and then told him to wave bye-bye to HER. He just couldn’t believe he was leaving with me. I don’t think they quite explained the process to him very well. They don’t sign, so it’s not entirely surprising that he wasn’t quite prepared for the schedule of events.


We made another stop or two to drop off notary stuff on the way back to the hotel, and Dragon Lady left us there after making sure our other guide had shown up. We apologized profusely to our OCDF guide, Lily, for allowing ourselves to be kidnapped like that, and she was very gracious about it. She took us for a walk through the pedestrian market area around our hotel to get us oriented, helped us shop for some clothes for Charlie (so hard to call him that after using his Chinese name for so long), and then took us to dinner.


Charlie’s first shopping expedition was interesting. He tolerated well being measured and trying things on, but he had very definite opinions on what he liked and didn’t like and was not shy about letting me know what he didn’t want. I got the jeans without much input because the choices were limited and he needed them regardless, but for sweaters and shirts, things that I thought he would like he’d just shake his head and wave his hand. Very definite thumbs-down.


One of the choices for the beef dish for dinner was with onions or with peppers, and we chose the peppers, thinking green bell peppers like the Chinese food at home has. Big mistake. They looked like snow peas, but they were hot little spikes of pure Tabasco. I enjoyed them. Charlie did not and left them alone. Jen ate a couple of them and decided they just burned too much and she wanted nothing more to do with them. We all enjoyed the beef with them, though, and the peanut chicken dish and the sauteed leek dish were fabulous.


Then we went back to the hotel and spent the night unwrapping his clothes, cutting off tags, deciding which suitcase he would use, wrapping some presents for the guides and Civil Affairs officials, and trying to play with his remote control cars. For some reason, the cars didn’t want to work.


Did I mention that my new son is a mechanical genius? Give him something that’s broken or that you can’t figure out how to use, and he will fix it. Took him half an hour, but those cars were working when he got done, and I still have no clue what was even wrong with them, because I tried everything. But he had fun playing with them until bedtime. He dressed for bed and brushed his teeth without any fuss, and once he was under the covers, I explained what activities would be happening over the next two days (Civil Affairs office again and then orphanage visit) so he wouldn’t be caught off guard by any of it and think he was going back to the orphanage to stay, that we were only going to be visiting and taking gifts to the other children. Then I tucked him in for the night. He seems to like being fussed over just a little bit as long as it’s in private. We each held up opposite hands with the sign language “I Love You” sign that everyone recognizes, and joined them together, and he got the most angelic smile on his face. It reminded me so much of the smile my older son, Rick, had when we put him on a carousel horse the first time, like this is just too good to really be happening. That was when I felt the first tears stinging. I kissed him good-night, got ready for bed, and turned out the lights after thanking God for adding yet another wonderful child to my family. I’ve always considered myself blessed with Rick, because in so many ways he has matured into such a fine young man, and I wondered if I was tempting fate by taking on another child, especially at an older age like this, where a lot of his molding and shaping has already been completed outside of my influence. But as I was drifting off to sleep, I felt a sense of peace that it was all working out exactly as He intended it to. He has plans for this boy, and I’m just a tool He is using to accomplish them, just as with Rick. All is going according to plan.


Good-night.
K