Please Pass the Country Music (Part 3 in a Series)

This one’s dedicated to all my friends who live in Texas.

This is Part 3 in a 5-part Book Excerpt Series in the run-up to Orphan Sunday on November 8. Today’s excerpt is from a chapter entitled “Relentless Father.” Stay tuned for details before the end of the series on how you can pre-order your own copy of Lily Was the Valley: Undone by Adoption.

* * *

Tammy and I grew especially close to Yao Shu Ting, a ten-year-old girl that over time we came to call our “gan daughter,” something like an informal goddaughter. Yao Shu Ting was not a girl we could have ever adopted, not that we ever discussed it seriously. None of the orphans we worked with were adoptable, certainly not internationally. None had the paperwork, nor were they ever likely to.

We’d been visiting Yao Shu Ting for almost two years before an aunt in town, who I’d also only just learned about, dropped a bombshell on us when she mentioned that the parents weren’t dead, you know. No, I did not know. Horrified, we strove to imagine what could lead parents to abandon their own nine-year-old to live on her own. We later learned it was a baby brother. They could only keep one of them.

We were never going to be like parents to Yao Shu Ting. It didn’t matter how much compassion and fondness we had for her, two or three visits a year did not make us significant people in her life. Part of us wished we could bring her to live with us. But not really, as that would have been quite difficult on her. What she really needed was a local family to take her in as one of their own. Still, we wished our connections could have been more frequent, and more significant. But in the end we were only two more in a long line of the well-intentioned but ultimately non-providers of all she truly needed, destined to recede into the background.

One time we did have the privilege of hosting Yao Shu Ting for a few days in our home in the big city. She was there for an appointment with an eye specialist, but it seemed like her visit was over almost before it started. She was missing her regular life. Our loud house had to feel foreign and uncomfortable compared to her normal solitude. It was time to take her home. I would accompany her on the ten-hour bus trip the next day.

I have fond, almost fatherly memories of Yao Shu Ting from that trip. Without Tammy and the kids around she did even less talking than usual. I tried chatting for a little while, but it was easy to see we both preferred the silence of looking out the windows. At lunch, we ate our instant noodles squatting side by side in the dirt next to the bus. I am squat-challenged. Maintaining that position for a whole meal worked up an appetite almost faster than the incoming noodles could compensate for.

The farther we got from the city the poorer the roads got. And more mountainous. On one of the stops to add water for the brakes, I went inside the roadside store to find spicy peanuts or spicy dried tofu. Packaged pickled chicken feet caught my eye, and on a hunch I bought one for Yao Shu Ting. Had I had known how fast she’d gnaw it clean, I’d have bought her half a dozen. I sampled a bite when she offered it, but I’ve never been able to nibble those things without having uncomfortable visions of their previous life tramping a chicken yard. I was happier enjoying my gan daughter’s lip-smacking instead. I got pensive as I watched her, and thought about her life, trying to imagine what it must be like. I couldn’t. The dissimilarities between her and me at age twelve were too great. It was those gaps, more than her shyness, more than my standard, unnatural Mandarin and her Sichuan dialect, that hindered conversation. We were from different worlds.

She finished the foot and I offered my headphones for a listen. The flavor of the moment happened to be Bryan White, the Dixie Chicks, Colin Raye. In my youth, such a genre would not have been found in⁠ any music device in my vicinity. In fact, in 1980’s suburban Chicago I can recall hearing no answer to the question, “What kind of music do you like?” more often than I heard, “All kinds. Except country.”

Funnily enough, the first place I moved after marrying a girl from Pennsylvania was Texas. I had grown up traveling extensively every summer because my dad was a high school math teacher,⁠ but I’d never traveled south. I didn’t even have a frame of reference for a place like Texas. On our move down, we hadn’t even exited the southern end of the state in which I’d spent my entire life before Tammy and I started hearing a dialect of English I’d only ever heard on television. Once we hit Texas the culture shock was complete. I wouldn’t be that traumatized when we went to teach English in Taiwan three years later.

Texas seemed unaware that there were kinds of music other than country. Country music played in the mall, it psyched the stadium, it headlined the fair, it blared from every car. Or would have, had there been any cars. We had a car, but everything else on the road was a pickup truck. And, as we were the Yankee morons who had brought down a car without a working air conditioner, our windows were always open and we could hear everyone else’s music that much better. We had cassette tapes of non-country music, but they caused more rubbernecking than our rolled-down windows, or  melted in the heat. We left them home.

Amazingly, we adjusted. Culture shock wore off, my stereotypes faded, and Texas became home. And I’m fixin’ to tell y’all, it changed us more than we changed it, that’s for dang sure. That day on the bus with Yao Shu Ting, the country music I offered her had been put there by me. But now it was her turn to react for all the world like she was from 1980’s suburban Chicago. She took those headphones off in less than five seconds.

“No, wait, Shu Ting, try this next track. How about that?”

Her face politely grimaced a thanks but no thanks.

Maybe it was just foreign music in general she didn’t like. I switched genres. There went that theory. Her eyes lit up at a little-known group playing self-titled “astro rock.” She waved her hand furiously at me to stop, and that was the last I heard from her. She listened contentedly through both their albums until we arrived.

I may have lived seven years in Texas and have twang-appreciative kids of my own, but one unchanging truth had just been established: I would forever have at least one daughter who would never be a fan of country music. We got off the bus and I walked my gan daughter across the parking lot to her aunt. I passed her off with smiles and waves. And more than a little unease about what the future held for her.

I never saw her again.

We’ve never stopped trying to find her.

 

 

Because Kids Change Flying

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing. 

-Warren Buffett

 

I remember what the old days were like. Leisure and bliss, that’s what. Stroll down aisle. Find seat. Arrange optimal carry-on access. Sit. Close eyes. Nap? Or read. Gaze out the window. Yum, is that airplane food I smell? (My wife says I’m abnormal for looking forward to meals on planes.) Nap or read some more. Listen to music. While eating. Or reading. Go crazy and do all three. Land. Stretch, grab carry-on, deplane, arrive. Refreshed.

That was life before Enoch. After he came along, our first flight was home for Christmas when he was five months old. In those days, just getting out of the house with him was a challenge. Doing it with luggage and then having to check it all in at the airport? It hardly felt familiar to anything I’d done before. We had way too much stuff. I started getting flustered as we stumble-bumble-fumbled through security. Up went the stress a few more notches when I looked at the time and saw we would have to hurry if we were going to make it. I tried to think what day it was, and if it was the same one we’d left home on. As we speed-clunked to our gate with our carry-ons, I felt irritated with every person standing remotely in my way. We arrived to find the flight had already boarded. The airline staff took our stubs and hustled us through.

We arrived at the mouth of the plane aisle, and panic set in. I squinted toward our seats. Had nobody seen all our stuff? Why hadn’t we been pre-boarded?

Oh right, late. But how are we supposed to get all this stuff back there? And another thing, what is WRONG with us? People have been having kids since like forever—it doesn’t seem it should be this hard. 

I glanced at little Enoch’s face. Oblivious.

Buddy, you cannot walk, you cannot talk, and bringing you has turned this into something like no other trip I’ve ever taken.

Babies, who really cannot do anything that might be called…useful, have luggage and accessory requirements rivaling those of a touring Maharaja. I was baptized that day. In spite of having been warned ahead of time by more people than I could count, I came to know deep in my soul right there on that plane: my life really was never going to be the same. Sure, the change kids make would grow to become an expected, welcome part of life, a humorous familiarity, a point of commonality with friends and strangers alike. But that day was revelation itself as The Question was born. I came later to call it The Mantra Question. No father forgets his first encounter with The Mantra Question:

How can one…little person…require 

all 

this 

stuff?

We pushed, pulled, lifted, and wrestled Mr. Maharaja’s stuff down the aisle. A stroller (you could bring them in those days!), Tammy’s carry-on, Tammy’s purse, the diaper bag, a toy bag, loose toys, Enoch’s blankie, Enoch’s carry-on, a sippy cup, my carry-on. I vowed the next time to get serious. Either go all the way and bring that kitchen sink, or else eliminate my own stuff entirely. If I couldn’t wear it, I would leave it. Or burn it.

We inched closer to our seats, banging a cadence to my chanting while I willed four consecutive empty overhead bins into being. When at last we got to our row, I checked our seat mates for cobwebs and began formulating a plan for hoisting the stockpile overhead. Then it hit me: the baby.

What am I supposed to do with the baby? 

I had no plan, I had no experience. The floor?

No, I don’t think I can put him on the floor. 

The flight attendants were seating other stragglers. Tammy and I needed all four hands in our scramble to get stowed before takeoff. What was that wonderful smell coming from the galley?

Forget that! Focus.

I scanned wildly for a friendly face. A guy three rows back made eye contact. Good enough. I got to him in one leap.

“WouldyoumindholdinghimforaminutewhileIputawayallhisstuffhaha?”

In later years, in optimistic moods, I would most of the time be almost definitely fairly sure that I had waited for his response before leaving Enoch in his arms.

I was back to Tammy in a flash and we got everything overhead in record time, triumphantly utilizing a final scrap of luggage to wedge tight the travel stroller that had been refusing to stay up. Then I saw her face: vexed. Extremely vexed. Not at falling strollers, but at failing husbands, husbands who passed off offspring to strangers. So I found a bin door latch that didn’t need tinkering and tinkered, which blocked mom’s access to the aisle; she sat. I leapt. I found our son gazing into the wide grin of his benefactor.

“Thanks, man,” I said.

His laugh and loud “No problem” drew chuckles from everyone around.

I plopped my sweating self into a seat at last, and now had thoughts only for my defense. I needed something…witty. To create a diversion, to save my skin in the coming onslaught. But a sideways glance revealed the danger had passed. In spite of her best efforts, the corners of Tammy’s mouth were turning up and she shook her head. The laughter had already saved me.

 

 

 

Today’s excerpt is from chapter “Fabulously Harebrained.”

This has been Part 2 of a 5-part Book Excerpt Series in the run-up to Orphan Sunday on November 8.

Stay tuned for details before the end of the series on how you can pre-order your own copy of Lily Was the Valley: Undone by Adoption.

Thanks for reading!

Love at No Sight (Part 1 in Series)

This is part of a 5-part series in the run-up to Orphan Sunday.

Each post will be a full or partial chapter from my soon-to-be-released Lily Was the Valley. Stay tuned for details before the end of the series on how to pre-order your copy. Today’s chapter (portions of which may have been posted on a former blog long ago) is:

“Adoption’s Beginnings: Conflicted to Say the Least.”

忽冷忽热

Now hot, now cold. Or, To alternate.

-Chinese Saying

 

I loved a girl.

Kitty was the most mysterious girl in all of second grade. Her eyes could capture a boy’s soul with a glance. She even spoke to me once.

But I do not mean that girl.

Nor do I mean the flautist in my sixth-grade band. My budding love for tall, smashing Dawn was slightly less childish, but my world barely bordered the worlds in which she would soon be starring. Jazz band, tap dancing, the cool boys. Cool boys didn’t wear Huskies.

I do not mean that love.

I am not speaking, either, of my youthful love for my high school girlfriend, nor of my pretended love for the list of girls I obtusely joked about liking during the same time.

The girl is none of them.

The girl is not even my wife, though our love is real and true, spanning decades, transforming. I am not speaking here of that love.

I loved a different girl.

It was not love at first sight, for never had I seen her. I loved her without sight.

A love skeptic, practically, taken by surprise. Blindsided.

Blindsided by love at no sight.

 

* * *

 

Adopting had not been my idea.

My wife had been thinking about adoption since she was a teenager, and even while dating we’d discussed it a few times. Adopting sounded fine to me, and when she continued mentioning it after marriage and after we had kids, it still sounded fine. But I considered it something for the future. Someday, sure, let’s adopt.

But one day Tammy pressed a little. The whole family had been discussing adoption quite often of late, and our four-year-old daughter had been regularly praying that God would make it happen. “Honey,” Tammy asked, “are you seriously up for adopting? Honestly, truly? I mean, are you okay if I start researching adoption agencies that we could use?”

I looked at her. I had been thinking it over. I had no real objections, no reasons it absolutely had to be later rather than now, so I innocently ignited her dry tinder with two words:

“Why not?”

Within hours, pamphlets, packets, and portfolios came flying in from all over the country. The kitchen table listed dangerously.

“Oh, you meant, like, right now, did you?”

Whereas I might take days weighing the pros and cons of a pair of shoes, research for Tammy did not entail sitting around on one’s brains all day.⁠1 Research was an action verb. She looked at me with a twinkle and shot back, “Why not?”

 

* * *

 

“Hello?”

It’s the director of adoption services from our adoption agency. She’s never called me before. It’s a sunny spring day, and the windows and both sunroofs of our borrowed silver minivan are wide open. I have parked on the side of the road to take the call, and my wife is passing out snacks to our children—ages seven, five and one—in the back.

“Mr. Johnson, I have a little girl for you.”

“Are you joking?” I hear myself ask, grinning. As if the director might reply, You got us, Mr. Johnson. We just love prank-calling our waiting families. 

I’m embarrassed.

I swivel to face the passenger seat, cover the phone, and, still grinning, mouth one word in a silent shout: “Referral!”

Raised brows and a blank stare.

Jabbing my finger toward the phone, I mouth it again, slower. Still nothing. My wife, absolutely unhampered in any other mode of communication, is a hopeless lip reader. Yet, unaccountably, I mouth my capitulation to her as well. “Never mind!”

I go back to the call and she goes back to the snacks. I learn the little girl’s special need—a cleft soft palate, no cleft lip—and the province where her orphanage is located.

With my question, “When was she born?” my wife is finally in cahoots. I catch a view of her hands flapping. We’ve been waiting for this a long time. The joy spreads to her feet, her arms, her whole body. She narrowly misses ejecting from the vehicle entirely.

Another final question or two and I hang up.

My wife is crying. I am crying.

The kids cry, “Why are you crying?”

We explain, and they get excited too. Our crying turns to laughing: a mysterious sister-to-be has become real. Her arrival is near.

Even the one-year-old is laughing.

It was pure fun, that call.

April 15. Tax day in the United States. We took the call in Texas but had spent the previous four tax days out of country, so April 15 for us had already begun to lose some of its usual consequence. Now it was gone for good. Henceforth, April 15 would be Lily Day. The day we got the call. The day an idea—that we would add to our family via special needs adoption from the People’s Republic of China, our second home—became reality. We were matched.

We got the van back on the road and drove, madly scanning for wireless so we could download the referral email. We found an open network in some parking lot and gazed wonderingly at three pictures of a girl who had not yet been named Lily when they were taken. In the next two days, we would forward translated documents and measurements to our pediatrician, await her medical opinion, and submit our official written acceptance letter. Not until then would the referral become the official match.

But grinning and crying there in our sunny van, we already knew.

It was gonna be love.

 

* * *

 

Or was it?

I had the dubious distinction of falling in love with my wife three years after I’d married her. We’d been at a retreat where my heart came so alive and felt so raw that I wondered it didn’t burn a hole through my chest and fall to the street. Every breath pressed me up against a world I’d never known existed. Feeling everything, I saw how accustomed I was to feeling next to nothing.

“Do you mean to tell me that you live like this all the time, Tammy? Like, you know exactly what you feel all the time, without having to stop and think about it?”

She laughed at me. “Yes, dear, of course. I am a woman.”

I couldn’t believe some people—men or women—had been walking around their whole lives like that.

But we went home, and the boil subsided. The old me returned. I just wasn’t the passionate, or compassionate, type.

I’d always held my wife’s compassion, on the other hand, in a bit of awe. For instance, when it came to orphans, she could sit down to look at webpages full of children waiting for families…and actually feel things. Not me. I generally had one emotion looking at pages like that: overwhelmed. There were thousands of such kids. Far too many to feel anything for them individually. Tammy would look into the eyes of a little face and be filled with compassion. I saw strangers. Kids I didn’t know, far removed from me.

I couldn’t imagine crying over one of them, and logic ensured I never would. For how could tears for one not highlight how all the rest were being ignored? And not just from that webpage but from countless others like it? There was no way to feel compassion for one child because I knew I couldn’t feel compassion for all of them. I could gaze at children with missing limbs, a cleft lip, or cerebral palsy and be sobered or grow pensive; but I never experienced heartbreak as Tammy did.

For the most part I felt nothing.

Had I seen a picture of Lily before Lily Day, I would not have taken special note of it. I would not have thought her especially beautiful. I was excited the first time I saw her picture because someone had just told us she was ours. But, like after the marriage retreat, excitement faded. I was as taken with imagining the process behind the scenes that had whittled down those endless pages to one child as I was with the child herself.

Will I be able to love this child like I love Enoch, Haddie, and Elijah?

I didn’t know.

Even while our firstborn, Enoch, had grown in my wife’s belly, I’d not been able to predict what I would feel at his birth. It took that first glimpse to bring the tears that I had honestly not known would come or not. And of course the births of Haddie, our daughter, and Elijah, our made-in-China boy, moved me, too.

But ahead of time? Feelings remained just out of reach. With Lily, all we had were a few pictures. Yes, we knew she was eating, drinking, growing, crawling, teething. But she did not feel real. I couldn’t help but think about how—up until our match—she had been one among nameless thousands. We couldn’t see her, nor would we see her until we went to sign the final papers. What would I feel up until that time? Would adoption lead to genuine feelings of love in me?

I had no idea.

There was every chance I might end up feeling nothing at all.

 

 

End of excerpt. Details on how to pre-order Lily Was the Valley will follow in an upcoming post.

1 A phrase I borrow from Mr. Henry F. Potter’s summation of Ernie the taxi driver’s job in It’s a Wonderful Life.