Anyone who has slogged through this blog in its entirety is aware of how important the visits to the girls' hometowns are to me. Further, if you read the last post, you will be aware of what kind of shape we were in when we rolled in Fuzhou - severely lacking in sleep. Rather than the 1am bedtime I had hoped for, we instead laid heads to pillow at about 4am. Honestly, at that point I lapsed into a coma and don't remember a thing until I woke just before my alarm at 7:15.
Before heading down to breakfast, we took a photo of T, Spring Flower, and me in the 12th elevator lobby of the Lakeside Hotel in Fuzhou - the very Genesis of our life with Spring Flower. Wish we had had a bit more time but we literally had a train to catch. Before that, however, we quickly had breakfast (so fun to remember those first few breakfasts with Spring Flower) before heading out for the train station.
The bullet train in China is great! What used to be a three-hour one-way drive from Fuzhou to Nanping is now an easy 45-minute train ride. Progress! I also enjoyed the ride because it gave us a chance to get to know our guide (and Sun Travel head guru), Sophie. I had some reservations about her initially because she is the "Boss," but am so happy to report that she is flexible, supportive, funny, and just genuinely loves people, Sophie is from Xi'an, but spends most of her time in Seattle. In the summer she oversees heritage tours pretty much every week but personally takes many families to the individual orphanage visits.
From the train station, we were picked up by a driver from the orphanage who took us straight there. Talk about "ready or not, here we come!" I immediately recognized the area because I had a general map of the Nanping area in my head and because I have studied so many photos of the Nanping Yanping SWI (Social Welfare Institute), aka Spring Flower's orphanage.
I knew that SF's finding area was just outside the gates of the SWI, so, unprepared, I was suddenly standing there with her and started tearing up. She seemed okay and let us take her photo, but I don't know if it had really sunk in with her yet. Next we were warmly invited to come inside for a tour and to meet many of the staff members. They were absolutely wonderful. They all seemed so genuinely happy to see SF, though when I showed photos of her when she was a baby, we were told that the amahs in the photo had retired. We also met the Director, who was very kind and friendly, but he took over in 2004, two years after SF's departure.
His assistant took us for our tour and we got to visit with many of the children at the SWI, which is now almost 100% for special needs children as most non-special needs children now typically live with foster families. SF just lit up having a chance to interact with the children. She held babies, hugged toddlers, and helped one little girl go down a plastic slide at least 100 times. At this point, coincidentally, a second Nanping adoptee arrived for her tour. The crazy part is that they probably only see a dozen former adoptees a year, as only about 300 children, total, were adopted from this SWI (and we know more than ten personally). I think SF liked not having 100% of the attention on her.
At one point of the tour, something crazy happened. Apparently, according to Sophie's wonderful translation, one particularly nice amah commented, "she came back? She was here last year." Upon further questioning, the amah claims that she thought SF was another 14 year old who visited in 2015. She says SF looks exactly like her and could not stop staring. Cue the Twilight Zone music. My stomach lurched just with the possibility that it could be anyone who resembles SF closely enough that it could be a possible bio relative. Sophie was amazing and asked lots of questions. She also got the amah's contact information. A bit later one of the "helpers" - a former orphan, who now works in the orphanage, confirmed that a girl who looks remarkably like SF had been there last year and she thought she had a photo on her phone. Try to imagine our stunned silence as we waited for her to go through her photos. She wasn't able to find it, but again Sophie got her information and asked that she let us know if she finds the photo. Sophie has also agreed to follow up with the SWI to try to find out which girls visited last year. I will definitely be following up via the two huge Chinese adoptee groups on FB. We have to find out more about this.
Next we were invited to sit down and have some local fruit (the cherries in this area are unlike any I've ever had - they even have a prickly outer skin - but we all proclaim them delicious and they wrapped some up for SF to bring back to the hotel. Meanwhile the girls were then able to review their official orphanage files. Wow. Most of what is in the file we already have at home but there were some amazing additional nuggets including her finding ad - which I didn't know existed - and which gave us a few additional details about which we had been previously unaware. This means so much to us. They both SF and the other visiting adoptee were asked to put their handprints (in red ink) in a book of all the children who have come back to visit. They asked if we had any photos of SF growing up and I told them that the gift we had presented was a photo album. They asked to open it and of course we said yes. It was an absolute joy to watch them seeing all of SF's photos they told us repeatedly that it makes them so happy to see her living a good life.
Next we headed off to lunch in a local restaurant and I did my best to remember my Chinese table manners and apparently the girls had paid attention to my adominitions because they were reminding Tony to leave a morsel of food on his plate to be polite. I had a chance to chat with the other adoptive mom and her daughter, who is 18 and about to start her freshman year of college.
After lunch the orphanage staff dropped us at our hotel, which while VERY Chinese, is also extremely comfortable and has a gorgeous view of the Min River, which snakes its way all through the middle of Nanping. I LOVE this city even though people literally stop dead in their tracks to stare at me. I have not seen a single non-Asian person since we arrived except the other adoptive mom.
In the early afternoon Sophie took us for a walk. She has been to Nanping once before and proclaims it one of her favorite cities in China. Beautiful mountains form a back drop, the river is beautiful, and the neighborhoods are really cool. We wandered around the back alley markets and I can't believe how much fun it was - especially with Sophie, who stops to speak to many people and ask them questions. The people are incredibly nice and enjoy explaining things to her so that she, in turn, can explain then to us.
Then our amazing day took a turn for the ridiculously amazing. We stopped into a tiny tea shop run by a young man who was maybe 30. His parents opened the shop several decades before. Sophie was asking questions about the tea, and he began mixing up multiple batches and proceeded to keep filling our cups for the next 30 minutes. She explained why we were in Nanping and he and his friend were very interested. Like all Chinese people here, they offered advice for what we should do. But his plan was brilliant. He immediately took a picture of SF's "search" poster and put it on his WeChat account (sort of like Chinese Facebook). He also explained that there is a channel within WeChat for people in Nanping that is basically a "classified" section like a newspaper. He put a post there for us and now has Sophie's phone number in case anyone responds. While we were there enjoying our tea, four of his friends reposted for us. How flipping incredible.
Our WeChat hero (right) who also brews a mean cup of tea.
We continued our exploration of Nanping and we all just loved the charm of this relatively small but very quaint city. We stopped for a quick dinner in a small side restaurant that specialized in dumplings, fish soup, and won ton soup and I have to say the food here was better than what we had in Beijing.
I hesitated about asking Sophie about posting some "searching" posters for Claire but she was amazing about it and suggested that we should try talking to some of the locals and hand out the flyers I had made. We agreed to meet on Friday morning at 6:30am to try to talk to some of the people who regularly gather in the parks.
To be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment