Wish You Happy Forever (22 page)

“Yuck!!!” said the three children.

ZZ said, “First you turn them inside out to get rid of the sand. Then you dry and fry with oil and salt. Yummy!”

“Zhang
Ayi
!” screeched Anya.

“Did you eat them, Mommy?” Maya asked.

“Well, I wanted to be polite . . .”

“Eeeyewwww,” shrieked the chorus.

I threw up my hands in disappointment. “But then my phone rang. I had to take the call.”

Actually, I was
going
to taste the things; I swear I was. What I didn't tell the kids was that it was Carol on the phone. Since Terri's departure, she was our official building director. And she was crying.

It was late summer, a few months after the SARS scare. While ZZ and I scouted future sites in Guangxi Province, I'd sent Carol back to Baling with our building assistant, Mr. Ji, to do a check on the progress of our new programs in Slick's would-be hotel. It was her first site visit alone. Now she was sobbing into her cell phone. The words tumbled out.

“The toys are gone. The shelves are empty! The children are nowhere—maybe back in the Root Cellar! Director Slick made me . . . pose for a photo with him in our beautiful rooms. He must have sold all the toys. He put his hand on my butt!”

“Where are you now?”

“I locked myself in the bathroom! What do I do?”

“You wash your face. You walk out the door. You ask Mr. Ji to help you hail a cab. Carol, we'll fix this, I promise. The children will have their school. One little battle in a very big war. Don't say goodbye to Slick. Pretend he's just not there. Invisible.”

“I'm really sorry.”

“You are not the one who needs to apologize, kiddo. Go on. Wash and walk. I can stay with you on the phone if you want.”

“No. I can do this.”

“That's right. You can do it. Just walk.”

I SHRUGGED AT
my grossed-out little audience. “So when I came back to the lunch table, the congee had been cleared away. Worms and all.”

The children collapsed with relief.

“When we live in China, I'm not eating worms,” Maya said. “No way.”

“Who says we're going to live in China?” I asked.

ZZ changed the subject. “Who wants to help me clear the table?”

 

FIVE MONTHS LATER
, my family moved to Beijing. We left our beautiful old farmhouse in the Berkeley hills in the care of neighbors who were doing their own major remodel and needed temporary quarters. Our U.S. staff of three moved out of my basement and into a little office by the Berkeley railroad tracks.

When I told the new board our plan, no one flinched. They were even enthusiastic. It felt beyond great to have the board at my back again. “We're like a dot-com startup,” one said. “Moving out of the basement at last.”

Dick had a shooting job that would tie him up until late August. I had three new children's centers to build in May. We'd rendezvous in Beijing when our work was done. I pulled the girls out of school, set up e-mail accounts for them so they could stay connected with their U.S. friends, and we took off for our new lives, each of us clutching just a backpack full of precious possessions.

Part Two

Guoji Youren

(Foreign Friend)

Dear Lady,

I am so happy to write to you. I am Ailin. I am 12 years old. I live in Hefei Children's Home. I study in a middle. I am the girl who you help, though I don't know your name. I'm sorry to that. But this time, if you say your name, I think I can remember it and remember it forever, for I have the honor to take part in Half the Sky.

Your love moved me deeply. I will try my best to make what you did worthy. I represent all the children to say very much Thank You.

Wish you happy forever.

Ailin

Chapter 13

Why Scratch an Itch from Outside the Boot?

Beijing
Summer 2004

We rented an apartment in Beijing, half a block from the North Korean Embassy, across the street from barracks that housed the Chinese military embassy guards. Every morning at 5:00
A.M.
the troops sang patriotic tunes. They dried cabbage and socks on the roof. Whenever we ran across to Jenny Lou's, the expat grocery, to buy crusty German bread, or strolled over to Yabaolu, the Russian market, past the fur-coat stores and the pink-haired ladies, to buy mittens or frying pans, we dodged little platoons of mechanical soldiers, rigid and brisk, marching to keep watch over the embassies or marching back to the barracks to cabbage and noodles.

Our apartment compound was full of families, both local Chinese and longtime expats. Our girls had instant friends. With our neighbors' help we found an
ayi
to look after our home and lives. We loved Gao
Ayi
at once. She was openhearted, playful, and semiefficient—a round-faced beauty who was way too smart to be anybody's servant—she'd just had some bad breaks in life. Gao hated to cook and wasn't much good at cleaning, but she was wild about our girls, so we were content.

We might well have begun living the cliché of privileged expats in Asia at that point, but I couldn't wait to get back to work. Before we'd fully unpacked, ZZ, my girls, and I raced off to Jiangxi Province to meet up with a new crew of volunteers.

Nanchang, Jiangxi Province

The provincial party secretary of Jiangxi had the worst case of tobacco teeth I'd seen in China, yet his dining room was palatial; the banquet was sumptuous—replete with shark's fin soup and other fare made from costly endangered creatures. I watched my girls, just a few years away from institutional slop, wolfing the delicacies (no worms!) down. I poked around the edges. I resolved to become a vegetarian.

We had come to open centers in the provincial capital, Nanchang, and two other cities in southern China's Jiangxi Province. The year before, the Nanchang orphanage director—a tall, effervescent lady who wore bright-blue contact lenses and teetered on the highest possible high heels with the pointiest possible canoe-shaped toes—attended our conference in Hefei and, tottering on her pointy toes, she'd bubbled: “You must come to my institution! I also have studied early childhood education! You are doing just what I am trying to do in Nanchang! But the children here in Hefei are much smarter! Much stronger! This can only be Half the Sky programs! So exciting I am almost dizzy!”

“Maybe you should change your shoes,” ZZ said.

The Jiangxi provincial government was exceptionally accommodating as well. This was a first. We'd never seen such cooperation! It turned out that an intern in our Berkeley office, a girl who rarely said a word and never smiled, was the party secretary's daughter.

A fly landed on the party secretary's forehead, just above his left eye. It sat there. He didn't flick it off. He thanked us for taking care of his daughter. (Who knew?) He offered us whatever we needed in his province.

“I suggest you try the shark's fin soup,” ZZ said to me. “It's delicious. Very rare and expensive. A sign of friendship and respect.”

“I think there's a boycott in the United States,” I said.

“In China, we need friends,” ZZ said. “We are always honest, of course. But we don't always speak. Without friends, we can do nothing.”

I ate it.

ONCE THE WORK
in Nanchang was under way, ZZ and I prepared to leave the build for a couple of days.

Led by Wen, Janice, and Carol, our volunteer crews and trainers no longer needed ZZ and me hovering over them as they accomplished the Half the Sky miracle. Janice and Wen always left the new nannies and teachers inspired and ready to begin their work transforming children's lives. Carol, now our full-time building director, was a superb crew leader; she certainly didn't need our help mixing paint or assembling trikes. Maya and Anya were now seasoned crew hands—happy to reconnect with old friends while slapping a bit of paint here and there, mostly on themselves. Feng
Ayi
and her helpers entertained the little girls when they tired of painting the walls and each other. Once we'd squared away any necessary issues—“We really need to knock down this wall”; “We can't afford to buy uniforms for the whole institution”; “We need to convert your office into a reading room”; “Sorry, we just don't purchase motor vehicles”—ZZ and I were free to go off and explore potential new sites. But first, we had to make a quick trip to Shanghai.

A brief stop, with a not-so-brief backstory.

I hadn't been able to get little Jingli of the Root Cellar out of my mind. After much probing, we'd learned that she had spina bifida and that, once upon a time, she'd had surgery to “detether” her spine, but it had been botched and now scar tissue was causing further nerve damage, ruining any hope she'd ever be continent. Even as we continued our work to improve conditions at her orphanage in Baling, I knew we had to get Jingli out of there . . . and out of China.

I contacted everyone I knew who might help find a place back home where she could be treated. I figured that once we got her out of the country, we'd find a way to get her a family. Others had done the same for children with complex medical needs that might be better treated outside China. But, after many inquiries, it became clear that her case wasn't unique enough to appeal to a U.S. hospital. Spina bifida is common—it was Jingli who was not.

Medical care was outside Half the Sky's purview. I was dead set against succumbing to the “mission drift” that I'd been warned weakened many nonprofits. We just couldn't do it all. Certainly, there was need everywhere you looked; it was hard to refuse to help. Adoptive parents asked. Orphanage directors asked. But time and time again, we forced ourselves to say, “Sorry, Half the Sky can't send a donation to your child's orphanage to buy diapers. Sorry, Half the Sky can't pay for a surgery or an ambulance or a study trip to America. We develop and operate programs to provide family-like nurture and enrichment for orphaned children. We don't give money; we give programs. That is
all
we do.”

Back in that hotel room after my first visit to the orphanage in Shijiazhuang in 1999—that night I fell apart—I'd decided that helping a few children here and there just wasn't good enough when thousands were hurting. I was out to change a whole broken child welfare system. I was going to move a bureaucratic mountain aside and write a whole new story for forgotten children. Quietly.

And despite the doubters (there still were plenty), I didn't think I was fooling myself. It would never be easy; it was China after all. But we were absolutely making progress. In our small way, we were beginning to fill a pressing need. Still, we were alone in our work, and that mountain was looming large. “Stay on mission” was my mantra. So I figured I'd have to find somebody else to help Jingli.

By now, the international adoption exodus from China was nearing its peak—more than fourteen thousand children in 2005 (95 percent of them little girls). There were now a number of parent-led charities offering orphanages donations of cash for goods, foster care, and medical services. I contacted an American group that was said to be funding orphan surgeries in-country. They told me yes, they could pay for surgery for Jingli; then, after several weeks, but with no explanation, they told me no, they could not. Then, finally, they told me that they could cover 3,000
yuan
(365 dollars in those days)—a tenth of the actual cost. Perhaps the orphanage director would cover the rest?

China had already begun to teach me patience, but only when I saw no other solution. We had to help Jingli
now
if we could. We arranged for a new surgery in Shanghai; Dick and I would pay for it ourselves.

Shanghai

Jingli and an
ayi
from Baling arrived at Shanghai Children's Medical Center early that morning. They were having a hard time being seen, let alone treated. Funded by the American medical NGO Project Hope, the hospital was state-of-the-art. It offered the best pediatric care in the country. As long as you could pay.