February 24, 2016

Some things stayed constant with Luna and two of those things were that, in the morning she got up EARLY, and that she wanted to be dressed immediately. After she got up this morning, she let us know that she wanted to have the bandage on her finger changed.  From our bedroom I heard her say something to K-Man, he repeated it back to her like we did when we had no idea what she was saying,  she was quiet for a second as she came into the room where I was and then she showed me her finger. I kissed it.  As she rejoined K-Man in the living room, he spoke to me from there, ‘She wanted you to kiss her finger.”  

When we’d gone to Jinhua for Luna’s passport photos, Q-Boo and I had waited in the lobby and found ourselves trying desperately to find things to do. We’d found a collection of African flags with the names spelled in English. I’d read them all off to Q-Boo and I’d purposefully mispronounced the country, “Republic of Djibouti.”  To make Q-Boo laugh, I’d pronounced it “did-ja-bootie.”  She thought this was hilarious and, since she was missing her brothers, she was anxiously waiting to tell them all about it.  That morning we Skyped with her Grandma, Grammy, and her Aunt Nicole, and then we called her brothers.  Q-Boo thoroughly enjoyed reporting to them all about “did-ja-bootie”” and, while Luna was very interested in everyone, her brothers got her immediate attention. She quickly came to the computer said, “Nǐ hǎo, gēgē !”  “Hello, big brother!” to Middle Child and “Nǐ hǎo,  xià gēgē !” to Wild Child.  Luna always called Wild Child, “xià gēgē” ("little big brother") to differentiate him from Middle Child, whom she just called “gēgē.”

Often during breakfast, K-Man and I would watch her eat and comment to one another, “It’s a bit Lord of the Flies...”  I’d get tickled, “She corrects our Chinese when we tell her that she has to ‘wait a minute.’  You know, she’s probably thinking to herself, ‘How did I get such dumb parents?’  We can’t communicate, we eat non-food, she probably thinks OUR table manners are atrocious."

We were still waiting on Luna’s passport to be prepared and knew that it should be ready that day. The next day, we were planning on catching an airplane to Guangzhou, where we had an appointment with the American Consulate to continue steps for immigration and to receive an American visa for Luna’s Chinese passport. ( Guangzhou would be the farthest that Luna had ever been away from her hometown and the first step in her leaving her old life truly behind. It'd be a very big deal. It'd also be my 45 birthday - as birthdays go, it'd be a good one.) That means that this day we had nothing to do, but kill time. So, back out to West Lake we went.   The sun had come out at little bit and, for the first time, Luna complained about the sun hurting her eyes. Regardless, I didn't have much trouble convincing her to keep her sunglasses on.

In my mind, this is what our time in China will always look like, a bàba between his two girls.

For lunch, today we would be walking around the Lake to that La Luna restaurant that we’d discovered earlier. We’d already eaten there once and knew that it was delicious. That, and I just LOVED the fact that it was there.

The sign on the door of the restaurant said, in Mandarin, "hug the moon," it made me smile.

Our waitress tried to talk to Luna.  “She only speaks Mandarin.”  The waitress tried anyway, “Hello?”  Even when I told them, they couldn’t help it, they expected her to speak English. I almost felt sorry when Luna looked at them with a blank expression and didn’t answer. Almost.  At lunch Luna asked John why we were calling her "Luna," she still couldn’t figure that out. I mean, why would she?   John explained that it was the name that her gēgēs would call her and that in the States everyone had a first name and a middle name, that her name would be Luna Si Yu just like Q-Boo had an American first name and a Chinese middle name. Luna tried again and asked John exactly why she’d need a new name.  I think he ended up just telling her that the “brothers” wouldn’t be able to say “Si Yu.”  He was not wrong, but I hated this part. She literally lost everything, even her name, to become our daughter.

We took our time walking back to the hotel. After about a week in China, Q-Boo has decided that she wants to "change to Spanish language,"  because Mandarin is just too hard. Sorry, babe. The girls had developed their own language, combining English words with Chinese, and badly pronounced words, and some just personal to our family.  They literally screamed them everywhere that we went.  At one point I found out the word that Luna was using, to tell us that she had to go to the bathroom, that she was loudly proclaiming all over China, would be the equivalent of announcing “I’ve gotta take a shit!” in English.  No wonder people stared.  I just merrily pretended not to notice and went about my way.

On the way, we stopped to watch old men playing cards (and sleeping) and a large group of people dancing.  It was always a party at West Lake.

 

The plum trees (the whole thing) continued to be stunning.

Some words that you’d have heard, loudly expressed and often followed by little girl giggling, if you’d been hanging out with us during our two weeks in China:

Did-j-a-bootie! –Q-Boo   

Did-ja-boo-loo! – Luna

Hēibái jiěmèi ! Hēibái jiěmèi! 

Lunar-Si Yu! Sill-a-gull!

This does not take into account my and K-Man murdering Mandarin whenever we were without John and needed to communicate with Luna, and her constantly demanding to use the bathroom. Sometimes, I still laugh thinking about it and I wonder how many of the Chinese tourists took home souvenir stories about this weird foreign family that they saw while in Hangzhou ( and Guangzhou) “And, then she said…..!”  Followed by gobs of laughter.

Luna was also trying very hard to pick up English words. We stopped for ice cream at Haagen-Dazs and, while she refused to eat any of it, she would feed it to K-man. I don’t think Luna had ever eaten ice cream. She told the lady who brought her water, “thank you,” and she started telling K-Man, “O-kay!”  Out of the blue, that night, Luna would look at K-man and tell him, “wǒ ài nǐ”  or “ I love you.”  I didn’t think that she really understood what it meant, but it was a start.

(This is one of the reasons that they love him:  He plays with them. They're jumping around in a circle.)

We finally got back to the hotel and decided to just stay put for the afternoon. Thankfully, John reported to us that Luna’s Chinese passport was ready and he was going to go pick it up. 

While he was gone, K-Man and I busied ourselves getting ready to leave the next day for Guangzhou.  We watched the girls, noticing that Q-Boo actively participated in playing with her toys –as I typed the original notes that I made about this day, Q-Boo’s new Hello Kitty toy was eating a breakfast of Silly Putty with a group of her friends, including a pony and a panda- and Q-Boo seemed to roll with any schedule that we may have had. Luna did not.   

Honestly, it was a lot like Luna didn’t know how to play.  Luna would watch her videos, she’d obsessively look at her schoolwork and her photo album that we’d sent her, she’d color in the water books that we brought and, if she was bored with all of that, she’d practice writing Chinese characters, but none of it was really imaginative play.  The toys that we brought for her, and that we’d bought since we’d gotten to China, sat in a pile in the room. If she really liked a toy, she’d put it in the special backpack from the orphanage, but they were just piled in, no special order, just shoved into the bag.  K-Man made the great point that we’d completely changed her circumstances, but she’d created a new structure for herself, “she’s very ritualistic.”  A few times she’d opened and closed the toy airplane that we’d brought with us, probably since she’d been alerted to it because of our discussion of riding in one the next day.  She’d put the people in the seats, but moving past that, into an internal story line, she really just couldn’t do. Yet.  She’d learn, our other kids would teach her.  I knew that, when we got home, I would be in charge of school on a daily basis, but the kids would be in charge of play.  They were very good teachers.  To this day, when I hear her playing by herself in her room, it makes 

me smile.

(Practicing her Chinese characters.)

John  returned with a special treat for K-Man- Chinese beer- but, most importantly, Luna's completed Chinese passport. He then spent some time trying to explain to Luna that, the next day, she would be getting on an airplane, or fēijī.  She’d never been on a plane, to begin with, but what he really stressed was that she and māmā and bàba and mèimei would be going together. Luna allowed me to go through her sacred stuff and rearrange it for the trip.  John asked her who she’d like to sit next to on the plane, and, of course, the answer was “bàba.”  She then told John that her stomach had "a lot of butterflies in it."  Her eyes started to tear up and we gave her lots of love and attention, I pulled her into my lap and held her until she perked up.  She was such a little sweetie. She came on really strong, but I suspected that she was, underneath it all, really very sensitive and sweet.  When I was putting her clothes in her suitcase, Luna pointed at Q-Boo and then back to the suitcase, “mèimei?” I nodded my head, “mèimei.” Yes, she’s going, too. We are a family, sweetie, and you're just going to have to trust us while we prove to you what that means. She had no choice, but to trust us.