Please read Names and Faces (pt.1) first.

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We asked our contact if they had pictures of the family.  Yes, there were pictures of the father, brother and sister. (There were no digital photos of her mother.) But they couldn’t be emailed right away.  We would end up waiting a week before we saw the pictures of L’s supposed family.

On a weekend morning, I went to my computer and there was an email with three attachments.  I sat down to open them.

The first photo I opened was small.  Maybe one inch by one inch on my computer screen.  It was a photos of an attractive Asian man.  But…I couldn’t be sure he looked like L. He looked serious, not smiling and looking straight at the camera.  And attractive.  (I will admit, I was a little distracted by the fact the he was quite attractive.)  He also looked pretty middle class.  He had a stylish haircut and a very nice shirt.

He certainly wasn’t how I imagined L’s father would look.  He didn’t look like a peasant farmer.  He wasn’t unshowered or sunburned or wearing dirty clothes.  The photo was clearly taken by a cellphone or computer.  He wasn’t in the countryside.  He looked like a guy Mr. A might hang out with.  He didn’t look like a guy who goes around dumping babies on the side of the road.

Then I opened the picture of L’s little brother.  He was a chubby little guy wearing a slightly grubby shirt.  He was cute and I thought maybe just maybe there was a hint of a resemblance to L.  But the photo resemblance wasn’t like those stories you hear of an adoptive family recognizing their child’s sibling on an orphanage group. It was more like here is a chubby Asian baby and L was a chubby Asian baby.  Babies look just kind of babyish, don’t they?

Then I opened the photo of L’s sister.  My first thought was, “Damn. This whole family is so attractive!”   The picture was of a pretty little girl, but she wasn’t the spitting image of L.  I still wasn’t sure.

As I stared and stared at her pictures, I noticed she was wearing very nice clothes.  Matching clothes.  A matching shirt and jacket that looked very new and nice and clean.  She had a cute little haircut too.  She looked like a child who was loved by her parents.

It was like a kick in the gut: These parents love and take care of their little girl.

They kept this little girl but abandoned my little girl.  My baby girl who was alone in an orphanage where she didn’t get enough love or attention.  They let my little girl end up in an institution where she didn’t get enough stimulation to make her eyes work right and where she sat in a walker so much her thigh muscles were very underdeveloped when we met her.  They left her alone in the world to fend for herself as a helpless little baby.  These are the people who made the choice that resulted in my daughter suffering so much trauma when she entered our family.

And they loved their daughter.  The daughter they kept.

Where in these pictures was the Evil Birthfather Who Dumps Babies?  Where was the Tragic Unwanted Older Sister?  Where was the Little Brother I was determined not to like?

These were just pictures of a family.  An ordinary family that looked a lot like mine.

All the unconscious assumptions I didn’t even know I had made were crumbling around me.

To be continued…

Names and Faces (Pt.3)

I want to go back and fill in some of the gaps in the story of finding L’s family. I am going to feel my way along and try to share my part of the story without impinging too much on L’s story or her family’s story.

Before I put my toe in that water, a note for the sake of clarity:

I am just going to skip the whole “Birth mother” “birth father” thing.  I call them L’s mama and L’s baba or her mother and father and I will call myself “me/I” and Mr. A “Mr. A” .  I am going to assume that my readers know that I also consider Mr. A and myself to be L’s parents without needing to qualify her Chinese mother and father as her “birthmother and birthfather”.  If calling them her mother and father bothers you, well, then that is about you. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest.  When I write a new post, I will try write “birthmother” at least once toward the beginning of each post for people who are new to our story.

Also, please excuse my bad grammar in using “they” as the pronoun for our Chinese contact.  I do not want to identify that person’s gender so bad grammar and bad conjugation is my only option.

How We Found Out

When we found out Mr. A’s job was going to be ending in early January, I had just about reached the end of my rope with our Chinese contact.  For many months, the contact told us they knew who the family was but they had not agreed to tell us who they were.  Our contact also told us they had met with the birth family.  It was becoming increasingly clear that at least part of that story was not true.  Another Chinese contact asked our local contact to describe the mother and father’s age and appearance and the local contact hedged and wouldn’t commit.  Then other times, we were given details that were inconsistent with other things we had been told.   It was really annoying.

When we decided to go to China in January and February, I had the person who calls China for me tell our Chinese contact that we couldn’t wait any longer.  We were going to go look for them ourselves.  We would use posters and business cards and we would spend a week in the area talking to anyone we met.   We would go to many local villages and look there too.

It wasn’t that we didn’t believe our contact was looking.  We thought that information was being collected. But we didn’t know how much was actually true and how much was related Chinese cultural issue of telling us what we wanted to hear.  We sent that message on Thursday.  On friday, the friend who calls China for us called and said our contact wanted to talk to us the next morning.

On Saturday morning, we had a three way call including me, my friend who translates and our Chinese contact. I was sure the story was going to be wishy washy again, so I videotaped the call on speakerphone  to make sure I was clear on the details.  (I thought SOME were true, so I didn’t want to lose any info to forgetfulness or distraction via annoyance).

Almost immediately, our contact told us “I am sure I found the right family.”

I burst into tears and nearly dropped the phone as they told me L’s parents names and year of birth. Despite years of believing it was possible to find them, part of me believed the party line that it was impossible to find a birth family in China.  Yet, here I was, writing down their names with shaking hands.

Then there was more.   “They have an older daughter and a younger son.”  Again, it was like being hit by a bolt of lightening.  L has a sister and a brother who live with her family.

As our contact went on, they told me that L’s parents work in another province and that is why it took so long to get in touch with them.  We learned that their children live with relatives in their home village.  (Not unusual for China, though surprising to me nevertheless).

We learned that L’s parents are not farmers or rural people, at least not any more. They live in a big city.   In fact, our contact had been communicating with her father via instant messaging –They have internet access and email!

Going back and forth through the translator, our call took about two hours.  I couldn’t think of the questions I wanted to ask.  I had always been suspicious that another little girl on L’s orphanage yahoo group could be her sister, so I asked our contact about that (because I couldn’t think of anything else!)

“Nooooo!  American’s think all Chinese look the same!  It is impossible!” they said.  I thought this was hilarious and told our contact that it may be true for many Americans, but I have Asian family!  I can tell Asians apart!  (Also, if you told me that girls’ picture was L’s, as a baby I would have believed it. They looked very very similar.)

As we finished our call, I asked our contact “Do you think they will agree to see us when we are in China?”

They replied, “They said they would give anything, if only the could see her one time.”