We all went shopping after her kids woke up from a nap. One of the coolest things we ran across was an art called finger-painting. The artist has a bowl of black ink that he dips his palm or fingernails in and then paints pictures. He was making the most amazing pictures of rocks, waterfalls, and trees. The lady standing next to him, who spoke good English, was extolling his virtues, but explained that he was the student, not the Master (so hard not to laugh recalling Jen’s description of the Master of the Crystal Balls in Nanjing). After looking through works done by the student versus the absent Master, we decided we liked the student’s style better, and we all bought a bunch of his stuff. He looked very pleased.
We were told the McDonald’s was just over the pedestrian bridge over the Pearl River and on the corner. (The area of Guangzhou where everyone stays during adoption work is called Shamian Island, and it’s separated from the rest of the city by a footbridge.) So we crossed over into the city, where nearly no one speaks English, and looked for a Mickey D’s on a corner. No can find. We started looking at 3 p.m. We finally found it at 5 p.m. And boy, did we get some stares while we were wandering around. Heidi’s family consists of two Caucasian teen-agers, a Chinese child, and a Haitian child, and I’ve got a Chinese child, and the two Chinese children between us and most of the rest of us as well were signing. We were a crew like nothing this island has ever seen before.
Later that night, Heidi’s deaf son, Nicholas, came up and played remote control cars with Charlie. The hotel room wasn’t quite big enough for races, so we took them out in the hallway, and Heidi, Jen, Shannon (Heidi’s teen-age daughter) and I all sat in the hallway chatting while the boys crashed cars into the walls and doors. Thank God most all the rooms were empty! Heidi has some absolutely fascinating and horrific stories about her former adoptions, and I have an enormous amount of respect for this woman. When she realizes that a child is meant to be with her, she is tenacious in bringing that child home and I don’t think anything can stand in her way for long. These stories belong in a book, and soon!
On the second day, we had some touring in GZ. We nixed another dead guy from the itinerary. We went to the Chen Family Temple, which was fabulous. Who should we happen to run into there? The whole Hales family! They had a separate guide. We agreed we should have coordinated this better and all shared one guide to save on some $. When we first arrived, our guide told us there were many executions going on there that day, so we wouldn’t be able to see everything. Well, gosh, if there were executions going on, I’m sure we wouldn’t WANT to see it all…it took a while to realize he meant excavations. There were a number of rooms that were closed to the public because workers were excavating things from them and renovating woodwork, etc. Whew! That was a close call.
Our guide then took us to lunch at a local dimsen restaurant, and we were seated in a semi-private room. It had two large round tables in it. The other was empty. They started serving our meal, which had a lot of shrimp stuff (apparently that’s another local delicacy), so sherpa was doing her push-the-food-around-the-plate-and-act-like-I’m-really-eating act, when the Hales family walks in and sits down at the other table. Their food started coming, and although they had a lot of the same stuff we did, their dimsen did not contain shrimp, and they had some other dishes without crustaceans of any kind, so the next thing I know, my sherpa is begging for food. Well, not begging exactly—more like bargaining, offering some shrimp dishes in return for anything, anything at all, that looked like noodles or rice.
After lunch, we went to a beautiful building we had seen from the road and inquired about earlier in the day. It turned out to be a music hall that was erected as a monument to Dr. Sun-Yat Sen, the first president of China. It was a gorgeous building, and the gardens around it were lovely. Very conducive to letting lunch settle while on a leisurely stroll. Then Wen took us to Yuexiu Park, which was simply huge. We had a great time there, rented a paddle boat (bike boat, as the Chinese call them) for an hour and paddled around the lake. Charlie had immense fun at this.
On Jan 3, we had a free day with no plans, which was a good thing, because breakfast ended up being a long, drawn-out affair. We went into a hotel that promised in English on the outside marquee that it had good food in three styles. The problem, we found after we were seated, was that the menu was not in English, nor did any of the staff speak English. We were the only Caucasian faces in the joint, and I do believe we may have been their first American customers ever, despite the English on the outside.
Did I mention that sherpa and I are brave? Rather than trying to pantomime eggs and bacon and pancakes (ever tried THAT?), we actually gave the Chinese menu to Charlie and let him order. You do remember that in earlier posts, we caught Charlie eating things like dog meat and ostrich kidneys, right? I handed him the menu, told him to order, and told him severely, “NO DOG!” That sent him into gales of giggles. He ordered three dishes, and we held our breath and waited for the results.
The first dish to come out looked like cubes of fried potatoes. I took his dictionary and asked him if it was potato, and he shook his head no and started digging on the Chinese side of the dictionary to find the word. Couldn’t find it. I tentatively tried it—not bad, so I had some more. Jen even tried it, and didn’t gag on it. Then Charlie finally found the word. Radish. Jen carefully set her chopsticks aside.
The next dish out was congee. This, for the uninitiated, is rice that has been cooked in water until it turns to mush, with whatever the cook decides to throw in for flavor or color. The cook in this case had thrown in cilantro and meat. Charlie hastened to sign “cow.” Hey, I’m all over this one. It’s basically beef soup with rice.
Turns out sherpa hates cilantro. She did her little pushing-food-around-the-plate routine again.
The next dish out was noodles with baby squid. Ain’t no way sherpa is touching that. Strike three, Charlie.
Charlie and I left full, but I heard a large growl from sherpa’s stomach on the way out the door. Fortunately, the guide had shown me an internet café on the way past the day before, so I knew where to take her. We headed down to a place called Blenz, where I planned to caffeinate my sherpa well. What did we see when we walked in the door? Cheesecake! Honest-to-God cheesecake, not white cake with rubber icing. We were both drooling at the sight, and they had three different flavors, forcing us to choose. We almost ordered all three.
The rest of the day we just wandered around the island, shopping, getting laundry done, etc. Nothing majorly exciting.
The following day was the consulate appointment, which meant we had to sit in our hotel while our guide was at the consulate getting Charlie’s visa processed. Our room felt like a sauna, and we couldn’t get the heat down any, so we were getting crabby by the time our guide was supposed to call. Eleven-thirty came and went, no guide. He finally rang the doorbell, looking harried. Apparently one form he had filled out still needed a signature (he had originally told me that section didn’t apply to me due to the category visa my son was getting, but it did), and he had to re-do the form and get it back to the consulate, which was 45 minutes away, within an hour. He said we could leave at that point, but me being the paranoid person I am, I made him promise to call us once all was clear, and THEN we would go. So we had another hour of sitting in the sauna before we heard word back that everything was good to go.
It was so nice outside that day. We didn’t even need sweaters. We went out to Friendship Park with a hackey-sack (those things are harder to use than I ever believed) and Charlie’s remote-control cars. We raced cars for a while, and even got a couple of the local kids interested. Then Charlie wanted to play at a little bit of karate, so I showed him a couple of stances and how to punch. Then I realized that a couple of guys were staring at us from the sidelines. Here’s a crazy western woman showing this kid karate moves and waving her hands about like crazy. They just kept on staring and staring. That’s when my sherpa found a secret weapon. She trained the video camera on them very conspicuously. I don’t know if it was even running or not, but it made them nervous. They immediately started smiling and waving and backing up. Eventually they backed their way out of sight.
Charlie is really starting to blossom. There are times when communications are tough, so we have our misunderstandings, but most of the time he seems to understand things pretty well, and he is starting to give me back more signs now and not just take them in. Not what I'd call full-blown conversations, but if I tell a funny story or I'm interpreting something funny that Jen has just said, he laughs at the appropriate time or asks just enough of a question that I know he got the basic gist of it. He is mostly happy, but on occasion introspective, which is totally to be expected, since he's been transplanted from everything and everyone familiar to him. I find it amazing that he's as good-natured and happy as he is, really. But I see him opening up a little more each day. He's a very sweet child, and it's easy to see why he's everybody's favorite.
The following day was oath day, when we go to the consulate, take an oath, and get the child’s visa. We checked out of the hotel, and since we were supposed to meet the paperwork guide at the consulate at 3:30 for our 4:00 appointment, we had time for a trip to the zoo, which our touring guide kept referring to as the ZOOM.
This ZOOM was one of the saddest places I have been in my life, and keep in mind, I’ve been to my son’s orphanage. We saw a monkey who had such a bad case of mange that he couldn’t decide where to scratch next, trying to scratch everywhere at once. The tiger was in a cage that only gave him enough space to pace for four strides before turning around. One of the lions was so near death that he had no fur left and you could see every vein popping up through his thin skin, just a bag of bones. Their national treasure, the panda, looked dirty and unkempt instead of white and fat and happy. He had a huge cage, but it was all concrete. It was just a sad, depressing little place, and I was happy to leave it.
Wen got us to the consulate where we were to meet the paperwork guide. (Wen was not licensed to enter the consulate and process adoption paperwork.) However, our paperwork guide was not there. We can’t get in, because the guide has to procure an entry appointment ticket. When it became obvious that our guide wasn’t going to show up, Wen had a stroke of genius. Another adoption group from another hotel was about to come through, and their guide had a group entry ticket. Wen suggested we just tag onto their group to get in and go from there.
Sure enough, we snuck into the consulate with this other group. Got through security and another family who had been through this before gave us advice on what lines to get in, what to do, what to say, what to look for. We took our oath, and this family “lent” us their guide to check over the visa and make sure everything was in order. Then we were outta there and on our way to the airport.
Sherpa could tell I wasn’t capable of coherent speech right then, and she had Wen try to get this other guide on the phone for us. When she got him, all he would say was that he was stuck in traffic.
My initial inclination was to contact WACAP and tell them what a disaster every contact we’ve had with this agency has been (first dragon lady making fun of my son’s signing, and now this no-show guide) and insist that they try to get back the $600 I had paid for this agency to process my paperwork. But I needed to calm down first, so I set the issue aside for a few days so I could settle a bit.
Later, in Beijing, by the time I was actually ready to write, I found out what really happened. I had sent a note to Heidi, telling her about this and to watch out if she got this guide when she returned to Guangzhou with her new son, and it turned out he was assigned to her. She discussed the situation with him to make sure the same would not happen to them, and he admitted to her that his mother had died that morning, and he had been stuck in traffic trying to get back to the consulate. Why didn’t he call me and tell me there was a problem and he would need to send a replacement? Because he was afraid for his job—in China, you do your job, it is your duty. There is no replacement to send, no one to cover your responsibilities. Even as much as parents are revered, apparently their deaths still do not interfere with your duties. He felt shamed because he had failed us, and he had tears welling up when he talked to Heidi about it.
I’m certainly not going to add to that man’s troubles at this point. I feel like a heel for being steamed up over him not showing up. It’s so sad that he felt like he had to try to rush to get there even at a time when he needed to be with his family, and failing to make it to that appointment just added one more thing to go wrong on what had to be the worst day of his life. I sent him my condolences through Heidi and prayed that God would give me a little more patience in the future when it feels like there must be more to the story.
The important thing was that we got the visa (since I didn’t have my guide with my paperwork, I won’t know if everything is perfectly in order until I get to Los Angeles) and we got to the airport on time for our flight to Beijing.
The flight was delayed, not sure over what, so we all had plenty of time to sit around the airport and eat potato chips. I couldn’t wait to get to Beijing, because I knew Rick was waiting there for us.
Charlie had some trouble on this flight, too. He did okay with the take-off, but we hit some more serious turbulence on this flight—my stomach even dropped a little—and it really unnerved him. And he felt sick the whole time we were descending for the landing. He spent the whole 20 minutes or so before landing with his head forward in his lap cradled in his hands. We had taught him on the last flight how to clear his ears when they hurt, but this seemed to be either a headache or some upset. He was better once we got on the ground.
Our guide met us once we got out of baggage claim. His name was Tony, and his English was fantastic. He informed me that Rick had landed okay and was at the hotel waiting for us, so we headed for the hotel. More on Beijing in the next post.
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