Wish You Happy Forever Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  For Maya, who opened the door,

  For Anya, who turned on the light,

  And for all the little girls who showed me the way

  Author’s Note

  This is the truth as I remember it—which doesn’t mean it’s precisely as it happened. I have consolidated a few events to better tell the story. For various reasons, I have changed some names of people and places.

  I spend a lot of time in airport bookstores. They are full of books about how to do business wherever you’re going. Bookstores at the Hong Kong airport are especially packed with tips for success in China. Most of them are written by Westerners who have succeeded in some small or large way or who have interviewed others who have. Most include cautionary tales and warnings that China will not be easy.

  Although I am a Westerner writing about China, and although I have achieved a certain amount of success there (beyond my wildest dreams, actually), this is not one of those books. As you will quickly surmise, I am not an expert on much of anything.

  But I still believe my story should be told, for it is not really my story.

  Contents

  Map

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One: Laowai (Foreigner)

  1 Clumsy Birds Have Need of Early Flight

  2 Do Not Hope to Reach the Destination Without Leaving the Shore

  3 Do Not Upset Heaven and Earth

  4 To Move a Mountain, Begin with Small Stones

  5 Pick the Roses, Live with the Thorns

  6 A Good Beginning Is Half the Journey

  7 Enough Shovels of Earth, a Mountain; Enough Pails of Water, a River

  8 Unless There Is Opposing Wind, a Kite Cannot Rise

  9 A Burnt Tongue Becomes Shy of Soup

  10 Push One Pumpkin Under Water, Another Pops Up

  11 One Who Is Drowning Will Not Be Troubled by a Little Rain

  12 Wait for Roast Duck to Fly into Mouth, Wait a Long Time

  Part Two: Guoji Youren (Foreign Friend)

  13 Why Scratch an Itch from Outside the Boot?

  14 A Sparrow Sings, Not Because It Has an Answer, but Because It Has a Song

  15 Eat the Wind, Swallow Bitterness

  16 One Who Rides a Tiger Cannot Dismount

  17 Our Lucky Star Is Shining

  18 Every Day Cannot Be a Feast of Lanterns

  Part Three: Zijiren (One of Us)

  19 If the Sky Falls on Me, Let It Be My Quilt

  20 Count Not What Is Lost, but What Is Left

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  One joy may scatter a thousand sorrows

  Guangzhou, China

  July 7, 1997

  The others had come and gone. The little girls had been carried or marched into the room by smiling caretakers. One by one, they’d met nervous clutches of new mommies and daddies, aunties and grannies. Bright, tinkly toys had been passed into little hands, sometimes inspected, sometimes ignored. And then, gingerly, their eyes full of trepidation and knowing, the new mommies reached for their little girls. A few babies screamed bloody murder. Most went easily—another day, another pair of arms.

  We still waited. I could hear the fading cries of the screamers. An official returned. Please wait a moment. Please have a seat. Please have some water. Then she left. We waited.

  My heart had been in my mouth for so long I was afraid to swallow. Somebody, maybe Dick, my husband, told me to relax . . . take a deep breath. I didn’t know where to start.

  I blinked, tried to focus. I glanced out the window, at the building across the way. I thought I could see the desperate eyes of children peering through barred and blinded windows. Was it forbidden to see that? I shut it out, turned back to the reception room, and for the thousandth time scanned my surroundings.

  The hot water they’d given us to drink had turned lukewarm. The fan blew warm, sticky air. Even the plastic flowers were limp. There was a yellowed calligraphy scroll on the wall.

  “What does it say?” Dick asked, though both of us were beyond caring.

  “It says, ‘When the horse is on the brink of a precipice, it is too late to pull in the reins,’” our guide volunteered cheerfully. “Ha. Just kidding.”

  FORTY-EIGHT HOURS EARLIER I’d been on a film set, squeezing the last few moments of daylight on the last of the grand old California ranchos in the Carmel Valley. It was the finale of what would turn out to be the last independent feature film Dick and I would make together, the last I would direct: an earnest little potboiler called In Quiet Night.

  So it was us and the crew, out there in rolling-hill oak-studded glory, trying to capture the climactic moment when a mountain lion springs from out of nowhere and does away with the villain. The lion, in real life, seemed friendly enough; he had been declawed and defanged and probably neutered. Still, he commanded your basic lion respect, and the crew was on its toes. Except me. I was already thinking China and Let’s get this killing in the can so Dick and I can board that plane and bring home our little girl.

  Poor baby (although she likely hadn’t a clue) had been waiting for us for the twenty or so months she’d been alive. Enough, already! The endless pregnancy had done something to me, for sure. I was starting to believe in destiny—that we were meant for each other. I was ready and impatient to meet my fate. And we hadn’t even seen her picture yet.

  It was a different little face that led us to China.

  EARLY ONE SATURDAY morning, eighteen months before we shot the lion pouncing on the bad guy and left for China, we were at home in Pacific Palisades, California. Dick, a cinematographer, was shooting a Chevy truck commercial and had a late call. A rare moment to kick back with coffee and the New York Times.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table in my bathrobe, sorting seeds we’d ordered from catalogs at the start of the new year. Vegetables for Dick; herbs and flowers for me. This was sanity in our ever-precarious Hollywood existence. Today I was going to plant the first of my seeds in the potting shed. It was probably too early. Just as well, because I never did make it outside.

  “Jenny, you’ve got to see this.”

  In the newspaper, a photo of a tiny girl—really just the shadow of a child—eyes crusted over, cheeks sunken and dark. Her body, all bones.

  “U.S. rights group asserts China lets thousands of orphans die.” The story was about the just-released 1996 Human Rights Watch report, Death by Default: The Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State-Run Orphanages.

  Based on records smuggled out of a Shanghai orphanage along with a limited set of statistics relating to nationwide orphan mortality, the group claimed that thousands of healthy abandoned infants were dying of severe malnutrition only weeks or months after being admitted to orphanages across China.

  And it said that the two thousand or so adoptions by foreigners couldn’t begin to solve the problem. And it said that virtually all of the abandoned babies were girls.

  Unwanted little girls.

  I guess that somewhere I may have heard that children were given up in places like China and India because they were girls. I may have heard it, but somehow, reading it now, seeing the photo of a child nobody wanted, a dying baby girl . . .

  Now we both knew what we had to do. Sort of.

  “What can we do?” Dick said.

  “I don’t know. Send money?”

  Isn’t that what we usually did? But who would we send it to? How could our money make the slightest difference? We
sat looking at each other, eyes red and throats lumpy.

  “We could bring one home.”

  He said it. It wasn’t even my idea. But I guess, to my credit, I knew he was right. That’s what we would do.

  So we set out on our adoption journey not to build a family—we had raised two lovely children, the nest was empty—but to save one life. That was how we saw it then.

  Nanoseconds later, I was at the computer, logging on to the Internet, trying to figure out how the thing worked. It was 1996, and I’d only begun really exploring the web a few days before. I’d been having a rotten writing day—my screenplay wouldn’t shape up—so I’d lost a few hours poking around cyberspace as a distraction. Or that’s what I thought at the time.

  Now I spent the entire day learning to “surf.” There was no Google back then, but somehow I found the State Department guidelines for international adoption, the INS guidelines for orphan immigration, lists of adoption agencies, and information about an organization called Families with Children from China. I read personal stories. I called a friend who always seemed to know everybody and, sure enough, she had a friend who’d met somebody at a dinner party who had just returned with a baby from China. I got the name of a Chinese adoption facilitator to check out first thing Monday morning. I called San Francisco to give my grown daughter, Cristin, the news.

  “I’m sorry I have to do this by phone,” I said. “I’d so love to see your face right now.”

  “It’d make no difference, Mom. My face has no expression. I don’t know what to feel.”

  Fair enough. Who knew?

  I didn’t get dressed until 5:00 P.M. When Dick called to say he was heading home from his shoot, I asked him to meet me at JR Seafood, our favorite Chinese place. I arrived with a giant red binder, crammed full and organized into categories—adoption agencies and immigration info and first-person adoption stories and lists of what to pack and what sorts of shots you need for China. Dick wasn’t surprised to see the red binder. His wife was, if nothing else, a consummate researcher.

  That night and all the next morning we talked. We tried to weigh the pros and cons. Were we doing the right thing? Would we be saving a life or taking a child away from her country? Away from what? What future could she have in China? We could find no wrong.

  And then altruism began to morph into the endless pregnancy. We were like any other expectant parents, focused on one little life, eagerly waiting for the moment we would hold our daughter in our arms.

  Somewhere in China, that one little life had already begun. Born but not yet abandoned. Fate was in motion.

  EIGHTEEN LONG MONTHS passed. After the pre-adoption fingerprints, paperwork, home studies, FBI checks, and scrutiny of our now-fat dossier, and after China had taken a hiatus to completely reorganize its international adoption process—and while I was finishing my movie script, storyboarding each shot with Dick, scouting locations, casting actors, interviewing animal trainers and composers and editors, and then finally, finally rolling the camera—the telephone rang in the production office of the old California rancho in Carmel Valley. The wheels of Chinese bureaucracy turn slowly. No more so than making movies.

  The phone call was for me, but I was off somewhere in paradise—a paradise of my own design.

  EXT. IDYLLIC WILDERNESS VALLEY—DAY

  Beside a meadow pond stands a tumbledown shack. Joey, a brash young lawyer, has escaped to the California hills to protect Dinah, her seven-year-old client, from further harm. This is their refuge. Joey, not exactly a natural mother, is giving it her best.

  DINAH

  I don’t like it when there’s brown

  stuff on the side of the eggs.

  JOEY

  It’s iron. It’s a kind of vitamin.

  DINAH

  I’m not eating it.

  JOEY

  Fine.

  (She drops the pan. It clatters to the ground.)

  I’m not cooking.

  “Cut.”

  That’s me. I’m staring at a slip of paper someone has put in my hand. I’m hyperventilating. “Sorry, everyone: Dick and I are going to need a moment. Let’s take a break.”

  We’re already racing to the waiting truck. It flies over the bumpy roads, splashes through a muddy ditch, skirts a meadow, pulls around behind the hacienda-turned-production-office—

  And just like in the movies, suddenly we’re standing there, looking at the telephone with pounding hearts. I dial Los Angeles, call Norman Niu, our adoption facilitator.

  “Congratulations. You have a healthy, beautiful daughter. Yue Meiying. Meiying means ‘Beautiful Hero.’ She’s seventy-six centimeters. Nine kilos. Almost two years old. Playful. Smart. Guangzhou—best orphanage in China. You can come to China next week.”

  Oh my God. This is it.

  I look at Dick. But we can’t go to China. We have a cast and crew and investors depending on us here, and we can’t go to the other side of the world to get our little girl who, even if she doesn’t know it, has been waiting for us since the day she was born. Already we’ve failed her.

  Somehow, we will make our way through twenty-two more shooting days, our hearts in limbo.

  Guangzhou, China

  By now we’d lost all sense of time. The plastic flowers had wilted. The hot water was tepid. We’d kept her waiting untold months and twenty-two extra days. Payback time? Was she old enough to decide she’d changed her mind?

  And then Meiying was in the doorway.

  Her hair was slicked down like a guy on prom night. Her big eyes looked tired and confused—and deep, old-lady sad. Her face was splotched with itchy-looking sores. A smiling woman in a rumpled white uniform lifted her up to me.

  I felt my heart beating in every part of me. Ears. Knees. Toes. Eyelids. I reached out and took Meiying, my little girl, in my arms.

  She barely glanced at me. Even my foreign face wasn’t enough to rouse her curiosity. She’d been handed around to strangers before. Everybody was a stranger.

  Meiying

  The first time I held her is as immediate today as if I were transported back in time. The heat, the sticky air, the people all fall away. It is just us.

  She smells of pomade and pee. She weighs nothing. She is all bits and bones. She doesn’t nestle into my arms in that instinctive baby way, but rigidly arches her back. Her belly, too hard and round for this tiny body, pokes out of the thin white shirt. Her yellow pajama bottoms say Novèlli Crayon down one skinny leg. Her socks say Baseball. She is wearing clear jellies with pink rosebuds printed on the soles. They are too small. The bottoms have not been walked on. Her impossibly long, thin fingers tightly clutch a dried lychee nut in each hand, put there to keep her from scratching her face full of sores. She is beautiful.

  What does it feel like to hold her? It feels both intensely foreign and awkward, and absolutely right. It feels like I am holding someone else’s child, and yet there is no doubt that she is mine. That she has always been mine.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long to figure out that “healthy,” “smart,” “playful,” and “best orphanage in China” were soothing gifts the Chinese bestowed upon all anxious parents-to-be. Within hours of returning to our hotel room, we’d seen the bloody diarrhea that turned out to be amoebic dysentery, we’d called doctors, arranged for urgent hospital visits, learned that our little almost two-year-old could barely walk and had no language at all. No Cantonese. No Mandarin. Meiyou. Nothing. Zip.

  The one thing she could do like a champ was eat. Massive bowls of noodles disappeared into that swollen, malnourished belly. No wonder: she was feeding millions. A parasite zoo full of six kinds of creepy crawlies lived off our tiny girl. Helicobacter pylori, Giardia intestinalis, Entamoeba histolytica, Clostridium difficile, Sarcoptes scabiei, and Ascaris lumbricoides, better known as giant roundworms.

  Healthy?—hardly. Playful?—under the circumstances, who would be?

  As for smart, it was impossible to know. She didn’t speak. She wouldn’t even look at us. She di
dn’t respond to anything except food. She was a little shell being eaten alive from the inside.

  I’ll confess we were a bit scared. We were exhausted from eight weeks of film production. It was our first trip to China. Our new daughter was sick and shut down and not doing any of the usual toddler things. Between useless (though undeniably cinematic) hospital visits, the three of us sat on the king-size bed at the China Hotel, two of us watching for hopeful signs.

  Meiying wouldn’t go near Dick (and barely tolerated me), but he soon learned that she would let him feed her Cheerios one by one. He went through dozens of flying cereal maneuvers, one at a time, each O finally making a perfect landing between sweet little rosebud lips. Did I mention that she was beautiful as advertised? Even with running sores marring her pale cheeks, that part of Norman’s promise could not be denied. Our new daughter was a stunner.

  Day two on the big hotel bed, the first small miracle occurred. Bone-weary, I was propped against the headboard, watching on television as Hong Kong was officially returned to the motherland, ending 156 years of British rule. Despite the pomp and fireworks, my eyes drifted shut.

  While awaiting her ration of incoming Cheerio flights, Meiying gradually began scooching backward on the bed, back toward my leg. I opened my eyes. Slowly . . . scooch . . . scooch. I held my breath. She wouldn’t look at me, but I could feel the warmth of her little back coming closer . . . and then lightly touching—contact!—and then (bliss!) pressing against my leg.

  Now we were ready to take on the world.

  AFTER TWO WEEKS of appointments—visa photos, consulate clearance, inoculations, and a physical exam (which she mysteriously aced)—our new family flew home to California. Meiying was sick the entire flight, necessitating several wardrobe changes. She crossed the finish line at U.S. Immigration wrapped only in Dick’s T-shirt.

  The jet-lagged days back home were a blur of doctor appointments and preparations to start editing the movie.

  The former Meiying became Maya, a name I’d heard months before in a dream. That it was so similar to her orphanage name seemed like another whim of fate. We were getting used to those.