Our trip to Jiaozuo

Yesterday we drove to Jiaozuo, the city where Ellie’s orphanage is located, to have our adoption certificate and other paperwork notarized. (Orphanages in Henan province have not been involved in international adoption as long as some of the other orphanages in China, and for a time every city in Henan required adoptive parents to travel from the provincial capital to have their paperwork notarized locally. A few years ago, our agency began a program to place children with special needs – like Ellie – from Henan, thus increasing the number of children from Henan being adopted by foreign parents and making the trips to each individual city a logistical nightmare. So, after some discussion, the outlying cities relented and agreed to have the Zhengzhou notary handle the adoption paperwork – every city except Jiaozuo. So off we went.)

The complete experience of our trip to Jiaozuo will have to be detailed in another post. Suffice it to say, there was a very small problem with our adoption certificate that both we and our agency had missed. This very small problem became a very big problem when it became clear that our paperwork could not be notarized. I don’t want to go into the details of how our agency representatives and the kind staff in the notary’s office set about trying to fix the problem. But we were there for hours, missing a chance to visit Ellie’s orphanage and wearing thin the patience of everyone involved – including our new daughter, the world’s most cheerful and resilient toddler.

I can, however, talk about the drive. It would come as a shock to most Chinese that I have been a mother for nearly seven years and have never once held any of my children in my arms in a moving car. Until yesterday. We took a van out to Jiaozuo, driven expertly by a driver hired by our agency – and it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. Seat belts and car seats aren’t widely used in China. It is common to see children seated in the front passenger seat of the family car, or on the front of their parents’ moped, not a seat belt or helmet in sight. As expected, our van had no seatbelts. I took the middle row of the van, and held Ellie in my arms as we made our way out of Zhengzhou and onto the highway. Initially, the highway consisted of a stretch of asphalt approximately six lanes wide. I say "approximately" because there were no lane lines. But about half the traffic moved one direction, and half moved the other, so in spite of the exuberant honking of horns and do-it-yourself turns lanes, it was at least somewhat orderly. Ellie bounced around, looking excitedly out the windows, blissfully ignorant of the laws of physics, while I tried desperately to maintain at least some sort of hold on her and Tom kept digging stuff out of the backpack to try and distract her and get her to sit in my lap. Finally, Ellie fell asleep in my arms as we turned onto a more carefully-marked highway, and I was able to relax a little – silently thanking God that we’d left the boys at home and therefore only had to fear for the life of one child at the moment.

I had hoped that the smog would lessen somewhat once we got further from Zhengzhou and out into the countryside. Unfortunately, it didn’t, and it made me all the sadder for the people of China. The pollution here is terrible. And to the extent that our Western desire for cheap goods has contributed to it, shame on us. The ultra-conservatives who balk at any kind of environmental regulation need to come live in China for awhile. And bring their kids. They might experience a change of heart.

Jiaozuo turned out to be a fairly large city, with several parks and monuments that looked quite beautiful – except for the thick haze hanging everywhere. We arrived at the notary’s office a little after 3 PM, planning to be done in less than half an hour and then pay a visit to Ellie’s orphanage – something we’d been hoping to have chance to do ever since we heard that it was required for us to go to Jiaozuo. Many parents consider the orphanage visit to be a highlight of the adoption trip, with a chance to take pictures of their children’s caregivers and friends, and a chance for the child to say goodbye. Which may seem like it would be distressing for the child, but I have heard so many adoptive parents’ accounts of their visits to their children’s orphanages, and even the young children seem to experience a sense of release once the orphanage nannies see them with their new parents and give their "blessing" for the child to go with them. It’s typically not the nannies who bring the children to the provincial capital to meet their adoptive parents – it’s the orphanage director or assistant director– so the children don’t have a chance to make a connection between their former caregivers and their new parents. We had decided that, given the opportunity, we would take Ellie to say goodbye to her ayis (eye-eez – in this context, "nannies"), and thank them for taking care of her.

As it turns out, we left the notary’s office a little after six, with one extra passenger – a notary who had agreed to drive back all the way back to Zhengzhou with us to notarize the new adoption certificate (I told you this was complicated) – and a very grumpy toddler. Fortunately, we had another bottle with us and plenty of snacks left, so Ellie didn’t have to endure the trip hungry – but she was fussy, bored, and tired of being cooped up. Because of traffic, the drive back to the hotel took over two hours and was equally harrowing – in fact, even more so, because there were more cars on the road and people were in more of a hurry. And Ellie didn’t sleep at all.

I’ll have to detail the experience at the notary’s office in another post, but there were some highlights – Ellie charmed everyone with her infectious smile and silly toddler antics; she learned the signs for "fish" and "candy" while we waited (there was a little goldfish in a bowl on a small table in the notary’s office, with which Ellie was quite fascinated, and at one point Tom was feeding her mini-M&Ms in desperation to help pass the time); she walked with Tom up and down the stairs of the building, leaving me out of sight without crying for the first time since we met and showing a fierce determination to master the difficult task of step-climbing; and best of all, when the notary office director – a lovely woman who spoke Chinese in a sweet voice to Ellie – tried to get Ellie to come to her, Ellie turned and ran toward us, only turning back to smile at the woman once she was safely back in my arms. It may not seem like much, but that was a huge moment for Tom and me. Even the notary director noticed, smiling and saying something to the effect of, "She wants her mommy!" A very big day for little Miss Ellie.

So that is our long post about the trip to Jiaozuo, and it isn’t even really the half of it. Throughout the afternoon, I just kept reminding myself that this would be a funny story for us someday. Not yet – but someday.