![]() Not as good." I wondered, "What's the emotional music? Maybe some ancient Chinese folk tune, orchestrated with lutes? Or a little Yo-Yo Ma?" An officious Chinese gentleman standing next to me announced, "First we will begin to give you babies, then we also play emotional music." He turned to me and said in a confidential yet offhand manner, "Last time we no play emotional music. The next morning, all the nervous adults dutifully showed up in the hotel's garish gold ballroom. When we arrived at the hotel, our Chinese facilitators told us, "Come to ballroom tomorrow at 10am, we give you babies." This is what I wrote on all the documents. People would think it was the only Chinese name I could think of. Even though I thought it was a lovely name, I couldn't let her keep it. "Mu" means strong in Chinese, and "Lan" beautiful. Mulan was the name they'd given her at the orphanage. Tian was the name of the town in which she had been found, and was presumably from. The baby I was adopting was officially named Tian Mulan. The expectant mother, who already looked wiped at the prospect, joked, "I figure it must have been all those fertility drugs." One couple had just found out they were getting twins, which they hadn't requested or anticipated. In the abstract." And, maybe more accurately, "What the fuck are we doing?" When we gathered for the first time at LAX, we all had these expressions on our faces, like, "This was such a good idea. Most of us were in our 30s or 40s, and childless. I was travelling with a group: 40 of us were going to Guangzhou to adopt 19 babies. I hadn't childproofed the inside of my house! I ran to the bookshop and bought International Toddler Adoption to read on the plane. I'd been preparing myself for an infant, maybe six months old, but this child was a toddler. The baby was 17 months old! This was a surprise. Her gaze was sceptical and somewhat menacing at the same time. I was given a form with a two-inch-square photograph of a baby with black hair standing straight up like she was Eraserhead. She was from a suburb of Guangzhou called Tian. I didn't find out any details about the baby I was assigned until a couple of weeks before I was scheduled to leave for China. And at the time I was adopting, China did not discriminate against single men or women seeking to adopt a baby. ![]() ![]() This has meant that many Chinese girls have been abandoned. The Chinese prefer sons because, traditionally, it's the boys who take care of the parents in their old age. It quickly became clear that it was all about China.Ĭhina has a one-child-per-family policy. I tried to figure out what this whole single-woman-adopting thing was all about. Why couldn't I just adopt on my own? I realised I probably could. When I thought about it that way, it was a big plus. But I figured that if I could not provide a father for this child, or an example of a loving adult partnership, what I could provide was this: a home without a bad adult relationship in it. It was true, if I had a child on my own, this kid would most likely never have a father, and that was sad because I had really lucked out in the father department myself. It was like a gong clanged in my heart, and I realised that I just had to have a child of my own. I felt physically weak.Īnd suddenly I was overwhelmed with such a deep explosion of need. I had no uterus, sure, but now I didn't even have a boyfriend. The issue of a child came up in the wee hours, when both of us were so exhausted from arguing that we didn't know what day it was or what part of the day it was. I wanted a husband and at least one child.īut Joe and I began to quarrel. Like most converts, my zeal was deep and unwavering. After years of making decisions that led me away from being tied down in marriage and with children, I reversed course. My career as a comedian and writer suddenly seemed superficial and empty. I was devastated and unmoored after his death. This tragedy had thrown me for an existential loop. I'd nursed my brother, Michael, who had his own cancer diagnosis (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma), until he died.
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