The meaning of courage

Charlie is one of the bravest people I know. Maybe even THE bravest.

Up to now, a lot of my blog since Charlie has joined our family has been all the funny stuff that happens when four cultures (American, Chinese, hearing, and deaf) collide. The blog was an affirmation that melding that many cultures can work, and indeed it has. But has it all been a bed of roses? Not by a long shot. My friend Jen (author of the Four Little Hawks blog on my blogroll) recently opened up about the issues and problems she is facing with her children, two of whom were adopted from China, and one of those two who is deaf. Her openness and willingness to share have given me courage to talk a little here about some of our darker moments and discoveries...not as a sympathy-getter, but more to show other adoptive parents or those considering adoption that even the greatest success stories have those dark times, and we get past them and can still consider our experience a success.

I'm going to start a series of blog posts, a little bit at a time, and each will deal with some of the issues we have run up against, some of which I was prepared for and expecting, and some of which totally blind-sided me. But in dealing with each of them, I have come to not only love but respect this child more and more, and I am sometimes in awe of the fortitude he had.

I knew the day Charlie signed his Chinese name to those papers in court that he had a lot of courage, but I really had no clue then just how much. He, the product of a society without faith, took an incredible leap of faith that day, and I can only now appreciate just how much he was risking in his own mind.

It was different for Charlie than for most other Chinese adoptions. For most orphans, the choice is taken out of their hands. Some loving couple here in the U.S. or elsewhere sees the child's profile, feels a stirring in their hearts, and whether they acknowledge it as a call from God or just call it fate, they somehow know that they are supposed to go get that child. They make all the decisions; the child has no clue what is going on until the day the staff at the orphanage take the child to some far-away city, sign over custody to these strangers, and walk away and leave the child with these people who look and smell different, and eat way different foods, and even use funny-looking toilets that these kids have never seen before and are sometimes terrified of.

But if the child is over 10, it's a whole new story. Children over 10 have to AGREE to the adoption in court before a judge. The deaf ones, especially the younger ones, usually don't even know what they're agreeing to, because they have never gone to school and they get by with whatever home signs they create for themselves at the orphanage, which doesn't exactly lend itself to in-depth conversations when they are the only deaf children there in a sea of hearing children. The staff usually don't learn any more "sign" than what is needed to give the child orders regarding personal hygiene. So they certainly can't tell this child that he or she is about to be adopted and will need to give permission. The child signs the papers with the Chinese equivalent of an X (an inked thumbprint), because he also has never learned to write, and it is pretty much the same as the other adoptions at that point, because now the child is committed and the parents are making all the decisions.

But Charlie--he had been sent to school, he could read and write, and he could hold in-depth coversations. Not with the orphanage workers, because they never did learn sign. They simply got two inches from his face (as though his sight were the problem) and spoke very loudly (like that would help him hear better) and expected that he could read their lips. But with the kids and teachers at the deaf school--ah, there communication could be had.

What I just found out not too long ago, what left me in awe of this kid's resilience, is that once the word was out that Charlie was to be adopted, by an American family at that, a campaign was set afoot to persuade him to not agree to the adoption. Teachers at the school told him and the other children that Americans adopt kids to use them as servants and then kill them. Giving a small element of credence to the story were recent articles about one family who starved their adopted Russian child to death and another family that abused their adopted child and beat the child to death. (The starvation episode was actually here in Maryland, 2005.)

Can you imagine the pressure? The only adults he's ever been able to truly communicate with are telling him not to agree to this because he will end up dead. The other kids are telling him the same thing.

Here I am, literally on the other side of the world, with no clue of the pressure he is under over there. I'm dealing with my own set of pressures here, stalking FedEx delivery personnel, driving the people at my adoption agency nuts. Then a miracle happened, and I found a liaison, someone who could get word to Charlie for me, someone he would occasionally sneak out and visit with while he was "home" at the orphanage on the weekends.

And so the letters started. (See the blog during the timeframe of about July/August of 2006 to December 2006 if you don't know what I'm talking about here.)

Now Charlie is getting it from both sides: People at the school are telling him don't go, but these letters...this person he has never met is saying he will have equal status in the family as her other son? He will have not only responsibilities, but equal rights?

He's torn. He wants to believe the letters, he really does. But then he goes back to school for the coming week, and they're at him again--don't do it, you'll be killed. And they have printouts of news articles about Americans killing their adopted children to back it up. But then he goes back to the orphanage, and there's another letter...this woman is writing to him faithfully, keeping him informed on the delays, telling him details about life over there. Maybe this family would be different from the ones the people at school are telling him about?

Somehow, he got a defiant streak in him and decided to go ahead with it. But he didn't tell them. He never did get to tell them, because one weekend when he went back to the orphanage, they simply didn't send him back to school, because the adoption date was imminent. Once the CCAA had approved the adoption, it was a definite, and they didn't need to spend the money trying to educate this one any longer, they could just keep him there and wait until it happened, and let the new parents take on the expense of educating him.

I have no way of knowing what his decision would have been had he not received those letters, but I thank God for the angel that was our go-between, because I believe that tipped the balance in my favor. Charlie signed those papers knowing there was a chance that he could end up abused or worse, figuring that if that happened, he would just try to run away and survive as best he could--in a country where he knew nobody and nothing.

What is scary, and has not yet come up in conversation, is this: What about his life there was so awful that he was willing to take that chance?

We got into a discussion recently about what his future would have been there and what it is here. He thinks that when he aged out of the orphanage, they would have tried to keep him on as hired help, because he was pretty handy and industrious about cleaning things and fixing things. But he understood that was the best-case scenario. (If you don't get that reference, read the blog post titled "The future of deaf orphans in China.") When he first got here, he had no clue how far he could reach. His big aspiration in those days was to be a cook in a Chinese take-out restaurant. Then, because we kept telling him "deaf can, deaf CAN--this isn't China where deaf can't," he moved up to wanting to OWN the restaurant. Now he's talking about being the engineer who plans it. He's knocking himself out at school so that he can learn enough to be accepted to NTID, a technical college for the deaf, where he can try for an engineering degree. Deaf CAN.

He found the courage to sign those papers on 12/28/06. That's really all that matters.

I have just been summoned--he wants to read me a story.

I'm so in awe of this kid.