We have a video, that we received as an update. The video is
of Luna and her class from school doing a dance to a song, xiǎo píngguǒ, or “My
Little Apple.” Our guide told us that it
was a famous rock song “all over China” and that it was used for all sorts of
things, including, apparently, a dance at Luna’s kindergarten. Luna spent this
morning as she did most of our time in the hotel, watching it. She insisted on
watching it over and over and telling us all the kids’ names. We wondered if
she felt like she was visiting with them. Next, out would come her schoolwork. It was
like the next part of the ritual, “This is what I’ve done,” she’d open her
coveted backpack, pull out some food, have us open it, pull out another one and
hand it to Q-Boo. I told Q-Boo, that
this was a very large deal, “This is how she loves you; she’s sharing her very
special stuff with you.”
She had a hand gesture that she used when she’d ask us, in Mandarin, to go the bathroom. We asked John about it and he laughed, “I have no idea what that is, we don’t do that gesture. It’s the number one. Maybe, she’s telling you has to do number one.” I thought this was hilarious, she’d figured out that her folks understood her about as much as they didn’t and so she’d come up with another way to reinforce the idea with us.
She had an emotional moment at breakfast, but then she asked to go outside with Bàba, got her coat on, told me in Mandarin, “I’ll be back mama, zàijiàn (goodbye)” and, when she came back in, she’d calmed herself down. I was completely impressed with how well she, as a six-year-old, was handling such a huge, life changing, thing as this adoption.
An adoption trip is a whole lot of waiting. We were now waiting on her passport to be ready so that we could take her out of China and to the US. If our family has to wait, it will explore.
This day John took us into the mountains surrounding Hangzhou to Longjing Tea Village. Longjing tea, translated as “Dragon Well,” tea is a green tea that has been grown around West Lake in Hangzhou for over 1200 years. This tea is grown and produced mostly by hand and is known as the number one tea in all of China. I found out most of this via the internet. I wish I had understood exactly where we were, at the time, but this is another part of an adoption trip - it’s not a vacation and sometimes, you figure out what you’ve experienced after you’ve experienced it. I was always careful to write down exactly where we were so that I could research it later, at home, back in the States. At the time, John told us that the tea was a very famous and very selective tea in China. It was sold at a price that translated to about $350 US a pound.
Surrounded by acres and acres of tea, the village itself had tea planted in every available space. We walked around the village, where generations of families had grown tea, looking at the tea plants, and discussing ways for John to acquire some. None of the ways that we came up with seemed to be very legal. He laughed, “I don’t speak Hangzhou-ese. I don’t think that Hangzhou jail will be a good place for me.” In fact, we couldn’t acquire it the legal way, either. The G-20 Summit was coming to Hangzhou, and China was actively stockpiling Lingjing tea specifically for this occurrence. At some point, one of the girls picked a tea leaf, John looked around and quickly took it from her, he closed his eyes, smelled it, and then let it fall to the ground. He grinned at me, “I have no idea how that happened.” I liked John, a lot.
Near the tea village was a museum for the Xinhai Revolution. Also known as the Chinese Revolution, or the Revolution of 1911, this was the war that overthrew China's last imperial dynasty (Qing) and established the Republic of China and thus the modern age.
We also saw Yue Fei Temple. Yue Fei Temple is also known as The Tomb of General Yue Fei, a General during the Song Dynasty (960-1279.) According to TravelChinaGuide.com, The Tomb of General Yue Fei has been demolished and renovated several times. The existing one was rebuilt in 1715 in the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911) and comprehensively repaired in 1979.
Afterwards, we walked around the lake and that allowed us time to just be together. We stopped to buy more cotton candy. Luna did not want cotton candy, she was not convinced that it was even really food and when John assured her that it was candy, she said, “Well then, it’ll hurt my teeth.”
We bought just Q-Boo, it turned out, some cotton candy, and a young lady came up and asked if she could take a picture with Luna. John turned to me to ask permission, to which I answered that it was okay with me if Luna was okay with it. Luna agreed, but as soon as John told the young woman that Luna was, in fact, Chinese, she no longer wanted the picture and retreated to her friends across the path. It hurt my heart because I was fairly sure that Luna had heard the exchange, but how was this different than her whole life, in China, before I’d met her? It wasn’t. At some point, I heard John say “albino” in Mandarin to another woman. I asked him about the translation. He said it translated as “white chemical disease,” but not chemical like the substance, he explained, chemical like something that changes into something else, like something that has been transformed. In my mind I thought of it like alchemy because, yep, she was a treasure, even if they couldn’t see it.
We spent a lot of time talking to John about everything. He was funny and smart and very open. Another very large group of Chinese maneuvered around us and John started laughing, he looked at me and dropped his voice, “That guy, that just passed us, told his friend, ‘That American girl speaks really good Chinese.’" I wondered out loud about what the locals must think about our family. John said, “What they are probably thinking is that I am an amazing Chinese teacher, that I’ve taught the little white girl to speak perfect Chinese, and that you are an amazing English teacher, that you’ve taught the little Chinese girl to speak perfect English.” “We should pass out business cards,” I told him.
John decided that while “Yin Yang Sisters “ would be an excellent nickname for the girls in the USA, in China it had a bad connotation. In China if you say that sisters are “Yin Yang sisters,” he explained, you are really saying that one is alive and that one is dead (because Yin and Yang are opposite states) so he decided that he’d need to come up with a more appropriate Chinese nickname for them. He decided on hēibái jiěmèi or “black/white sisters.” He loved this and he told Luna that she should introduce them to her Chinese teachers in the states as hēibái jiěmèi. (At this moment, there is a Chinese scroll with 黑白姐妹 -black/white sisters- hanging in our home.)
We’d been encouraging Luna to try to pronounce her name and so she was running around, constantly exclaiming, “Luuu-nar Si Yu!” John explained that she kept getting it confused with niúnǎi or “milk” in Mandarin, because the words sounded similar (she thought we’d named her “milk!”) Then John pointed out to her that I’d named her Luna because Luna means “the moon” and that “your momma thinks that you shine as brightly as a beautiful full moon.“ She answered, “Well, you’ll have to show me a full moon because I’ve never seen one.”
During our walk around the lake, we’d come upon a place to rent boats. We looked at one another and I looked down at the girls and shrugged. “Do you want to ride in the boat?” John asked Luna. She answered, “Only if Mama holds me in her lap.” I laughed and told K-Man that she may like to hang out with him, but we now knew who she trusted to keep her safe. It really is only fair that Luna loved him, because Q-Boo HATED him when we adopted her and so I had gotten to do all the” carrying the kid” stuff. It was his turn.
While we were out on the lake, the weather cleared finally and there was the tiniest hint of blue in the sky. “A blue sky!” I exclaimed. John asked, “You think that’s blue? “
“Well, no. But it’s better than dull grey which is what the sky has been since I’ve gotten here.”
He smiled, “I don’t call that blue, I call that ‘Hangzhou Color.’”
 |
| Plum trees were blooming. |
The entire afternoon Luna babbled in Mandarin to John, she asked constant questions about what we were doing and where we were going. She picked up on us calling her “a silly girl” and said it over and over, “Sill-a Gull!” She corrected my Chinese regularly. I wondered what she thought of us, we couldn’t talk correctly, we ate non-food, we named her “milk moon,” and we were constantly smashing ourselves into taxis, and waiting in buildings, and climbing onto boats. “Who ARE these people?” I imagined her asking herself, dumbfounded.
I told John that I couldn’t wait for Luna to learn English so that I’d really be able to talk to her, but that I was going to miss this part of her, the part that we were seeing right at that moment. He answered, “I really do hate this part for you. Since you can’t really talk to her, you are missing out on how funny she is.” She was not the only one, between the humor of Luna AND John, we spent a lot of time laughing.
We stopped for coffee after cruising the lake and K-man looked at me across the table:
“Well, are you just kinda holding your breath and waiting for it all to fall apart?”
“Yes.”
‘I mean, she hasn’t shed a tear since that hard first morning and she just seems to be bonding at an incredible speed.”
“It may not be over. It could all fall apart at another time.’
“I agree, but this? This, I was not prepared for.”
Me, neither.
After we left the lake, we went to a local Chinese street market where I bought Luna a silk scarf to hang in her room, at home, in the States because Hangzhou was known for tea and silk.
That night, after she fell asleep, I watched Luna flop over in the bed and get comfortable. Until that point, she’d been sleeping like a little robot, on her back, stiff as a board, hands down by her sides – she’d still be in the same place when she woke up the next morning that she’d been in when she fell asleep the night before. I found it very comforting that she was finally getting comfortable, herself.
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