Teng Wang Pavilion (Friday)

Teng Wang Pavilion in Nanchang.

This is one of the places we tried to visit in 2004. We arrived too late in the day and had to settle for a couple of pictures from outside the complex. Not this time. We arrived in the morning, but it was already blazing hot. The complex itself spreads out over many acres. The main building, the pavilion, is quite large. It has six floors, each about two traditional stories tall. Following the pattern of ancient Nanchang architecture, the floors alternate between open and closed walls. Inside the pavilion, there are displays of ancient texts describing the pavilion. When it was originally built it was the tallest structure around and you could see for miles in every direction. Now it’s in the middle of downtown Nanchang and the only direction you can see for any distance is up and down the river. Since it was constructed over 1300 years ago, the main building has been rebuilt 29 times due to fire and conquest. The most recent renovation happened in 1989. Teng Wang Pavilion owes much of its fame to a poet, Wang Bo, who wrote about its beauty. The poem is supposedly unsurpassed in Chinese literature (at least according to our guide). There are many panels in the pavilion dedicated to the poem, and it appears in its entirety on one wall of the second (I think) floor.

Bell performance on the top floor of the pavilion.

We worked our way up to the top floor for a performance. If it was hot downstairs, it was miserable upstairs. Keep in mind the architecture…the top floor (6^th) is enclosed and has no air conditioning. Fortunately, the performance, which ended with traditional Chinese musical instruments and large bronze bells, was fairly short and we were able to get back down quickly.




More pictures from Teng Wang Pavilion...

Main plaza of Teng Wang Pavilion.

Silliness.

Ally waits for something interesting.

Gardens and ponds in front of the main pavilion.

Amanda in front of the main floor doors.

Wang Bo's famous poem.

Set of bronze bells on display.

Domes ceiling meant to symbolize water. This building has been destroyed numerous times by fire...

Family transportation...seats four...sort of.

Delayed Departure (Friday)

Delayed yet again.

Delayed departures seemed to be the recurring theme of this trip. Our flight from Nanchang to Beijing was delayed over an hour. That created an issue because we were already arriving in the evening, and we had a motorcycle sidecar tour scheduled for about 8pm. We would have made it on time but for the last couple of blocks before the guest house. We’d arranged to stay at a “Hutong Guest House” in downtown Beijing. The pictures and reviews looked good. What they don’t tell you is that getting to the guest house is an adventure all its own. We made it from the airport to within a couple of blocks of the guest house by about 7:50pm. Not bad, or so we thought. Hutong streets are very narrow and wind around in the neighborhood. We were in a minivan that was just barely small enough to make it down the streets under the best of conditions. However, there were other cars parked along the street, pedestrians walking, scooters scooting, and other vehicles coming the opposite direction. When this happens, one of the vehicles has to back up to a point where there’s enough room to move over and let the other car pass. The first time this happened it was a work truck offloading something. The truck had to move back a little after we moved onto a sidestreet. Then a BMW came down the street from the other direction, so we had to work our way around that car, too. The worst one happened after coming around a corner. We met another car just after making the turn, and knew that the last place open enough for us to get out of the way was back quite a ways. So we started to back up in this narrow alley with cinder block walls tight on both sides and cars parked wherever there was room. At the corner there was just enough room, if we went as far as possible to the left, for the other car to tuck in right at the corner and each vehicle jockey a few inches at the time until we were past one another. Just a block from the guest house (although we didn’t know that at the time) we met two more cars coming the other way. This time there were a bicycle and a motor scooter parked in the road preventing us from passing. Our guide got out and started asking who owned them. A lady came out of a store and gave her permission to move the bike. Only after several minutes did a man who was sitting at a table about ten feet in front of the van get up to move the scooter. He’d obviously seen what was happening and made no attempt to get up and move the scooter. Once he did move it, he sat back down at the table with his friends, just inches from where we’d have to pass. He never made any attempt to scoot his chair in, even though the street was too narrow for us. We did eventually make it past that obstacle and Charlotte started looking for house numbers to locate our guest house. Well, we ended up back out on the main street we’d left almost 45 minutes earlier before starting our hutong driving fiasco. It turns out we missed a turn (one I don’t think the van could have made anyway) and had to carry our luggage several blocks anyway…hutong blocks, not city blocks, there is a difference…to the guest house.

Hutong Guest House Pictures...

Downstairs.

Front door from the inside.

Going upstairs...steep stairs.

Master bed...Ally crashed.

Second bedroom...Amanda crashed.

Front door from the outside.

Common area in front of the bedrooms.

Stairs to the rooftop.

Common area.

Ceiling in the common area.

Motorcycle Sidecar Tour (Friday)

After quickly getting checked in and dropping off our luggage, it was time for a wild ride through Beijing. Jerri had made arrangements for us to have a motorcycle sidecar tour of Beijing. The two drivers were a study in contrasts. Amanda and I had an older guy with crazy long hair and a motorcycle I swear is older than I am. Jerri and Ally had a younger guy with a gorgeous blue Triumph (or something comparable). I opted not to try and use our digital SLR, which realistically takes two hands to operate. Instead I used Jerri’s Flip video camera, which means I have no pictures to post of this little adventure. The videos are pretty cool, though.

We rode through crowded hutong streets and main roads. We saw tourist areas around lakes crowded with domestic tourists having fun at the bars and shops along the way. We went through business districts and public plazas. Everywhere the buildings were lit up like it was a holiday. All throughout the ride my driver tried to explain what we were seeing. He did a pretty good job considering his limited English. Sometimes he would say something and I would just repeat it back to him, which seemed to make him happy (not that I had a clue what I was saying half the time). We went around Tiananmen Square in front of the Forbidden City. We passed the Great Hall of the People and the National Center for the Performing Arts (the “Egg”). We went completely around the Forbidden City, stopping at the same entrance where it had been so crowded two weeks earlier. Not so bad at 10:30pm. There was a squad of soldiers (I think) marching from the front gate area to their barracks. We finished up at a McDonald’s a couple of blocks from the guest house. Since our flight was late we hadn’t had any dinner yet and we didn’t really feel like trying to order Chinese that late at night, we opted for the easy out.

The Plane Ride Home (Saturday/Sunday)

We thought the train trip from Changsha to Nanchang was bad…and it was, but that turned out to be nothing compared to the plane ride home. We boarded the plane on time for its scheduled 1:00pm departure. After sitting at the gate for an hour or so, we taxied out and got in line for takeoff. Then it started raining. Hard rain. And lightning. After about an hour the announcement was made that we would be returning to the gate to refuel and wait for clearance to leave. Then we sat at the gate. And sat. And sat. And sat. It rained harder and thundered more. The plane got hot, almost unbearably hot. And we sat some more. We knew we had a four and a half hour layover in New York before our connecting flight to Norfolk, so we hoped we’d leave soon. No dice. Three more hours. To make things worse, Jerri was already dealing with a cold and I started coughing, sneezing, and having a runny nose while waiting on the plane. We figure we probably picked something up while on the train from Changsha.

Flooding in Beijing on July 21/22.

We finally left the gate at 6:00pm, five hours late. Once we taxied out to the runway it started raining again and we saw some more lightning. We hoped we’d get out in the break before it got too bad. Fortunately, we did end up taking off and the ascent was pretty rough. Only later did we find out it was the beginning of the worst storm in 60 years for Beijing. Major flooding killed 37 people. 500 flights were cancelled and over 80,000 people were stranded. It kind of put our five hour delay in perspective.

On a positive note, I was fortunate enough to end up sitting next to a Chinese high school student who was part of a group of students headed to the U.S. to look at universities and stay with host families in several cities to find out about life in America. She said they’d be staying in New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco before returning to China. She was very pleasant and made sure when announcements were made in Chinese only that she translated them for me.

Our flight from JFK to Norfolk was due to depart at 7:00pm Saturday. It’s a twelve and a half hour flight from Beijing to New York. We left Beijing at about 6:00pm Saturday (Beijing Time), which meant that the earliest we’d be in New York was 6:30pm Saturday (Eastern Time). We circled JFK for a while and didn’t actually land until nearly 7:00, which means by the time we got our luggage and checked in at the transfer counter we missed our connecting flight, and the next one wasn’t due to leave JFK until 8:35am Sunday. So we stayed in Jamaica (New York) for the night and caught a flight the next morning. Fifty minutes in the air. Left on time and landed early. What a pleasant change. Hardly time to get settled in compared to our other flights over the last two weeks.

Amy and Andrew met us at the airport, welcome signs in hand. Boy, are we glad to be home.

Post Script

On People

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals...” –K, Men in Black

We met individuals in China who were incredibly nice. They were interested in our situation and wanted to let us know they thought it was great. They wanted to be friends. They wanted to help us in difficult situations, going out of their way (literally) to make sure we were OK. They danced with us and laughed with us. They delighted in speaking English with us.

We encountered people in crowds who were rude, pushy, and self-centered. They stared and pointed. They cut us off in lines, often separating us from one another. They drove like maniacs.

I suppose we encountered both types of people on previous trips, but I was much more aware of the latter type of encounter during this trip. I was much more aware of being awkward and out-of-place on this trip.

On Personal Cars

The traffic we encountered on this trip was much worse than any we experienced in 2002 or 2004. And although there are many more personal cars on the road than what we saw before, most of them are (out of necessity) compact or sub-compact in size. When asked by one of our guides what kind of car we drove at home, it was interesting trying to describe a Ford Excursion to someone who’d never seen an SUV larger than a Subaru Forester. And then I tried to explain the reason for owning such a large vehicle was because of the 10.5 meter long travel trailer we use for camping vacations -- for which she had no frame of reference at all. A small house on wheels? Say what?!

On Adoption

We discussed adoption with several of our guides. In particular, we wanted to know if the atmosphere had changed in the eight years since our last adoption. International adoptions from China now routinely take more than five years to process, compared to just 14 months with our first adoption in 2002, and barely 7 months for our second adoption in 2004. It seems we adopted at the height of international adoptions and the number fell off dramatically within a few years. We were curious why they thought that was the case. Their feeling was that the "one-child" policy was not being enforced as strictly, particularly in rural areas. We learned that the policy is different for minority groups, which make up about 10-15% of China's population. We also learned that Chinese families are simply not having as many children...not because of penalties, but due to the expenses associated with child rearing. As a result, there are not as many children available for adoption, and most of the ones that are in orphanages have significant special needs (which was borne out in our visit to Changsha SWI #1).

Still, I would make the following observation: We saw families with more than one child, but nearly every time it was an older daughter and a younger son. I can't recall a single instance where there were two sons or where there was an older son and a younger daughter. So even though enforcement of the policy may be relaxing, it appears that the reality is Chinese families still prefer sons over daughters. A thousand years of culture is a hard thing to overcome.

In any case, it seemed to us that our family's mixed race structure was clearly an oddity wherever we went. Perhaps it was more understandable and acceptable when we were with a group of adoptive families and the children were all infants.

Changsha SWI #1 (Wednesday)

Today we visited Amanda’s orphanage, officially known as Changsha Social Welfare Institute Number 1. There used to be an ornate entrance off of Furong Road, but that has been removed  and the older buildings razed. A new hospital and orphanage combination have been built on the property.

Amanda's original orphanage record.

We had the opportunity to view Amanda’s orphanage record, including the original photographs that accompanied her dossier. The edges of the binder were slightly burned in a fire that occurred at the orphanage several years after Amanda’s adoption. Rainbow translated some of the entries for us, including some that were made the first week she was taken to the orphanage. There are also records of her reaction to her caregivers (smiling and happy) and when she first held her head up on her own (4 months).

The girls pass out art supplies to orphans.

The receptionist who was assisting us called one of the nannies to help us identify the caregiver in one of the pictures from our visit to the orphanage in 2002. She positively identified her and said she still worked at the orphanage, but that today was her day off. She called the caregiver and since she didn’t live too far away she agreed to come over to see Amanda. While we were waiting for her to arrive we visited some of the current orphans under the care of SWI #1. The children have disabilities ranging from minor to very severe, but all are considered unadoptable and are therefore destined to be cared for by the state indefinitely. We had purchased some drawing pads, writing pads and pens the day before, and the girls passed those out to the children in each room we visited. The children seemed genuinely excited to see the girls and receive the gifts. In the preschool room the children sang a little song to us and then took off across the hall to art class.



Amanda's caregiver in 2002.



After visiting about four or five rooms we headed back to the office and shortly thereafter Amanda’s caregiver arrived. She saw Ally first and assumed that was who was here to see her. Rainbow corrected that quickly by showing her a picture we had emailed to her that was taken on our 2002 trip. Once she made the connection she smiled broadly and hugged Amanda. Amanda was already being pretty shy and seemed to dislike being fawned over, but she handled it well.



Amanda's caregiver in 2012.



It was pretty cool to see the photo of the two of them from 2002 held as she hugged Amanda. We talked with her for about fifteen minutes and gave her some gifts. We also looked through a photo album we left for the orphanage director that has pictures of Amanda from six months of age until recently. Her caregiver really liked being able to see how she developed through the years. We thanked her for all she had done for Amanda.

In front of the old orphanage building.

Finally, we went next door to the building that housed the orphanage when Amanda lived there. It is now a home for senior citizens. We opted not to go up to the eighth floor, which was where the nursery was back then because the configuration now is nothing like it was in 2002, so we figured it really wouldn’t mean much. Instead, we took a couple of pictures at the entrance, which, other than the asphalt being built up much higher than it used to be (there is only one step up now) remains unchanged. We have pictures of our travel group on those same steps 10 years ago.

Amanda's Finding Spot (Wednesday)

Amanda's finding spot.

After lunch and a short rest we went to the Changsha South Bus Station a few blocks from our hotel. Other than the bus station itself, the area is nothing like I remember it. In 2002 it was on the outskirts of the city and the attached hotel and office buildings were the tallest structures around. It is now in the middle of very dense development and there are office buildings and apartments easily rising 30 stories or more all around. The small, beat up road we drove down to get there in 2002 is now a six lane divided roadway that normally carries more traffic than Virginia Beach Blvd. at rush hour. The parking lot of the bus station was nearly empty when we visited before, but this time it was packed with buses and people, making crossing from the street to the strip mall sidewalk quite an adventure. We made our way to the area where Amanda was found before being taken to the police station and ultimately to the SWI in 2001. We stopped at the spot indicated in her orphanage record, which was the same spot we took pictures of her in her stroller on our first visit. Amanda was kind of underwhelmed by the experience. I think it meant more to Jerri and me, but someday I hope she’ll appreciate having returned to the place her biological mother last saw her.

Changsha South Bus Station

Rainbow took us to dinner at a “Chinese-Western” restaurant and ordered some local dishes for us to try. There were beef and chicken dishes, mushrooms, green beans, rice noodles, a local sweet treat for an appetizer, and of course, white rice. All of this served to us in a private dining room. It was very nice and everything was delicious. Even Amanda, who has been kind of cool to most of the Chinese food we’ve eaten so far, loved the rice noodles. They were kind of spicy for my taste, which is saying something, because I tend to like spicy foods, but mild here would be considered hot at home.

Train Station (Wednesday)

Rainbow and the girls play games while waiting for the train.

We traveled the five minutes or so from the restaurant to the train station, which was very crowded and chaotic. Getting through the initial security scan was frantic, with literally hundreds of people trying to squeeze through two checkpoints similar to the TSA baggage screening machines at airports in the U.S. It was nuts. We tossed our baggage onto the conveyor and walked through a metal detector, then tried to grab our stuff at the other end along with dozens of other people at the same time. I can’t imagine the check really accomplished much. Once we arrived in the enormous waiting area and found a place to wait, we discovered that the train we’d arrived an hour early for was going to depart 30 minutes late. Great. Over an hour and a half in a crowded waiting area that lacked air conditioning. Rainbow entertained the girls, and they entertained her for the next hour or so. Then they announced that the train would be further delayed, now departing more than an hour later than the originally scheduled time. That meant we would not be arriving in Nanchang until well after midnight. Poop.

Once we actually started boarding the train it only took about five minutes or so to get the mass of people waiting in the station on board. I was impressed with how fast it all happened.

As of this writing we are en route to Nanchang. The train is comfortable and we have a lot more room than if we were traveling by air. But the point of going by train was to see the countryside and since we left so late it is now well after dark and we can’t see anything in the windows other than our own reflections and occasionally a few lights outside.

Train Mess (Wednesday Night)

We left Changsha over an hour late...around 8:30pm. Approximately an hour later we stopped in Pianxing (I think), which was expected. After we were stopped for about 60 minutes it was obvious the other passengers were becoming very restless and agitated with the train crew. When an explanation was offered there was quite a commotion among the passengers. Something was clearly wrong and they were not happy about it. I called Helen, our Nanchang guide, to see if there was anything I could learn from her or if she could talk to someone on the train to find out what was going on. She spoke to a gentleman seated one row in front of us, who told her that due to flooding in the section of tracks we were about to enter, the train could not proceed safely and that there was no indication when the condition would improve enough for us to continue. Our options at that point were to wait on the train indefinitely or get off in Pianxing and try to arrange for other transportation, neither of which was particularly appealing. We told Helen we'd wait for awhile and see what happened. After about 2 hours stopped in Pianxing, the gentleman in front of us showed me a text message on his phone (I think he used a translation program) that said we should be underway in another 15 minutes. I called Helen to let her know, and she spoke to him, as well as one of the crew, and confirmed that we would be proceeding, but at a reduced speed due to the unknown condition of the tracks. Not real comforting. She told me to try and get some rest because we had a busy day ahead. Right. I'm on a train that is headed into a remote area of China that has recently flooded, it’s on suspect tracks, and I'm supposed to get some sleep. Not so much.

We spent the next 90 minutes or so crawling through the valley at 25 mph in a train that normally would have been going well over 100 mph. Once we passed Yichun station our speed increased and we proceeded to Nanchang. We finally arrived at our destination at 3:45am on a train that was originally supposed to arrive at 11:00pm. We met our guide outside the train station and after checking in and settling into our room made it to bed at 5:00am. The alarm was set for 8:00am.

Foster Mother and Orphanage (Thursday)

Just like I-64 near Charlottesville.

The alarm went off at 8:00am…just three hours’ sleep. Helen met us downstairs and we headed out for Fuzhou, which is a two and a half hour ride southeast of Nanchang. Once outside of the city we started seeing rice paddies and fruit orchards on both sides of the road. Eventually the landscape began to change into low rolling hills and then piedmont. It was almost exactly like riding up Interstate 64 from Norfolk to the Shenandoah Valley, but compressed into a couple of hours instead of three, and substitute rice and fruit for Virginia’s corn and tobacco.

Ally and foster mom (she really is that short).

When we pulled up to the orphanage in Fuzhou, Ally’s foster mom was sitting on the steps waiting. We recognized her instantly from the photos we have.  She smiled as she got up and accompanied us to meet the orphanage director in a conference room. One wall of the conference room had a large banner welcoming Ally home to Fuzhou. We got to ask Ally’s foster mother about her experience with Ally as a baby, like her disposition. We also got to see her original orphanage record, which included handwritten information regarding her finding and placement in the orphanage. This was the first time we’d seen this particular document. Helen translated the information for us. Before we left, Ally exchanged gifts with the orphanage director and we got to take down her banner to bring home. Although we were under the impression we would be taking her to lunch, Ally’s foster mom left and we went to lunch with the orphanage director and his assistant, who really had little to do personally with Ally or us during the adoption process. We were to meet up with Ally’s foster mom again later.

Ally's finding spot in front of the Red Cross hospital.

Unlike Amanda’s adoption trip, we did not get to Ally’s home city on her adoption trip in 2004, so we had no pictures of where she lived or her finding spot. This time we got to do both. Ally was found at the gate of the local Red Cross hospital, not too far from the orphanage. We were able to get pictures of the hospital and the street in front of the gate itself. Then it was bonus time. Amanda spent all of her infancy prior to adoption in an orphanage. Ally spent all of her infancy in a foster home. There was some confusion as to the exact location of Ally’s foster home. Fortunately, Helen was able to locate her grandson, who agreed to show us where it was. Good thing, too, because we’d have never found it on our own, even with directions and an address. Ally’s foster home was in an older part of Fuzhou. Her foster mother has lived in that home for over 60 years. We drove as far as we could, leaving the city behind and going down progressively smaller dirt roads through the middle of rice paddies until the car could go no further and we had to walk. As we walked through the village we collected quite a little following of curious locals, including some who turned out to be neighbors who remembered Ally. Her foster mom was not there when we arrived, and we found out through her grandson that she had stopped at a local free clinic on the way back from the orphanage because she wasn’t feeling well. We talked (through interpreters) to some of the neighbors about the village and Ally’s foster mom. The village itself is devoted to rice farming. The first crop of the year is due in August and some of the early rice was being processed. Ally’s foster home had two rooms: a front main room and a back bedroom. Allys’ foster mom had told us at the orphanage that Ally slept in bed with her (in the back room) when she was young. I guess the best description of Ally’s foster village is simple and gritty. The people we encountered were friendly and happy. Three of the neighbors are pictured with Ally and Jerri in front of her foster home.

With Gary, who would have been like an older brother.

When we left the village we stopped by the free clinic to check on Ally’s foster mom. She was still there and feeling a little better. Jerri gave her an additional gift and we got out picture taken with her one more time, this time with her grandson “Gary” who was living in the foster home with Ally back then, but has since graduated from college and has his own home within walking distance of the village.

We enjoyed our visit, but we are tired and looking forward to being home. One more day and then it’s back to VB.

More pictures from Fuzhou...

Reviewing Ally's orphanage records.

Typical "street" in Ally's foster village.

Front room of Ally's foster home. The small picture is Ally's foster father (deceased).

Three neighbors who remembered Ally as a baby.

Rice production in Ally's foster village.

Return to Changsha

View from our hotel room. Rainy day, not just hazy.

We got up at 4:30am today in order to make our flight out of Chengdu. Then we sat on the plane for over an hour waiting to take off, which put us into Changsha very late in the morning. We met our guide, Rainbow (really, I’m not making that up), and headed into Changsha. On the way she told us that there had been a fire at the Dolton Hotel recently and that we’d be staying at the Tong Chang Hotel instead. It’s a kind of odd twist that the last time we were in Changsha we could see Amanda’s orphanage from our hotel room and this time, due to the fire at the Dolton, we can see her “finding spot” from our hotel room at the Tong Chang Hotel. In the picture, it’s on the left about two blocks past the curve in the road. This hotel is very nice, definitely the fanciest room we’ve had so far on this trip, but no one here speaks any English except one of the managers. He has gone out of his way to make sure we are comfortable, but we are on our own when we go to the restaurant or leave the hotel (more on that later).

Koi pond at the ancient academy in Changsha.

After checking in at the hotel we visited a local academy on the grounds of Hunan University. This academy has been in existence since about 1000 A.D. Rainbow showed us around the academy’s buildings, which have been preserved as they were in ancient times. Some of the lecture spots still get used for special occasions. We also visited a museum (an honest-to-goodness museum) that houses ancient texts and artifacts related to the academy. The museum opened so recently that some rooms on the top floor are still under construction. One of the texts on display dates from the year 1340, and it’s the real deal, not a reproduction. Jerri and I enjoyed that part of the tour immensely, but the girls were unimpressed. Someday they’ll appreciate the history…maybe.

More academy pictures...

Keeping a local tradition by touching the symbol of prosperity on an academy wall.

Academy text from the year 1340.

So not impressed.

Hunan Adoption Administration Center







Welcome sign in the conference room.

We went to the Hunan Adoption Administration Center today. Honestly, we didn’t even know about this part of the adoption process prior to today. This office is responsible for (among other things) collecting information for each child’s dossier from the orphanage and compiling everything for submission to the China Center for Adoption Affairs in Beijing. They are also responsible for coordinating activities for returning adoptees. We met the current director, Zhang Ying, who said she was a registrar when Amanda was adopted, so we probably met her in 2002. She and Amanda exchanged gifts and then we sat down and talked with her about some of the tasks of the office she directs. It was just a little wierd that everyone consistently addressed Amanda as Xiaofeng, never Amanda. The director also made a point of noting that at least one adoptee had returned to China to work in Beijing, and that she might make that decision someday, as well. We toured several of the offices and met the current staff. We asked what kind of things the children in the orphanage might like to have and she suggested art supplies, so Rainbow took us to a local stationery shop after our visit and we picked up some drawing paper, journals, and a bunch of pens. We will give them to the children at the orphanage when we visit on Wednesday.

With director Zhang (black blouse) and her assistant.