Orphans No More

THE SUNDAY HERALD NEWS, OCTOBER 3, 2004
Story and photos by GREGORY J. RUMMO       

IN MARCH 2001, my wife and I began the process to adopt a baby girl from the People’s Republic of China through America World Adoption Association in McLean, Virginia. Having worked for a China-based import-export company as its CEO since 1987 and having traveled to China several times, I had developed a special place in my heart for its people. In March 2003, during an orange terror alert and around the time the Chinese began admitting to the world that SARS truly was of epidemic proportions, we traveled to China with our two biological sons, John and James.

What follows is a diary of sorts, portions of which were published as shorter newspaper columns, detailing our journey from beginning to end. It truly was such a wonderful experience that this year, we began the process all over again. Our second dossier went to China in late August. We expect to travel next spring to bring home our second daughter.

November 13, 2001

            Today marks the culmination of a “paperwork pregnancy.” Coincidentally, it’s been almost nine months since my wife and I began this long and arduous process called adoption. But the little girl we are hoping for—our future daughter, Rebecca Lee—is still at least another year away, and for all we know, she may not have even been born yet.

            The cover story of the March 12, 2001 issue of U.S. News & World Report described the ordeal many couples face when they adopt a child. “The Adoption Maze,” characterized the process as “difficult, expensive and potentially heartbreaking.” To that description I can add lengthy, unnecessarily convoluted and frustrating.

            Something as simple as obtaining a birth certificate can become a weeks-long wild goose chase. Because my wife and I were born in New York City, we had to obtain a “long-form” birth certificate—a document containing all of the detailed information about our parents as well as the birthing doctor’s signature and the official seal of the Department of Health of the City of New York. A second document, a “letter of exemplification” signed by the deputy city registrar, certifying that the birth certificate was indeed a true copy had to be attached. Then, these two documents had to be sent to the New York county clerk who certified the registrar’s signature and official position. From his office, the document, now three pages in length, was mailed to the Secretary of State’s office in New York where it was certified.

            This process of notarization and certification ascending the political hierarchy was repeated for the rest of the documents making up our dossier.       

The Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing, China's capital city. It was one of our stops on the way to adopting our daughter in March 2003.

Adoptive couples are also required to have a home study; a comprehensive and invasive process meant to assure the adoption agency and the foreign orphanage of the financial, physical, psychological and mental fitness of the adoptive couple. We had to write first person narratives about our upbringing from earliest memories. Interviews of all family members including our two biological sons were conducted. We were fingerprinted several times. We supplied photographs of our home—inside and out—and of the family in all sorts of situations including recent vacations, various hobbies and family life in general.

            This dragged on through the summer until we had everything we needed with one exception—our 171H from the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the official document we needed from the US government approving our adoption.

            Finally, this arrived in our home almost eight months from the day we initiated the process. 

            Our dossier arrived in China on Nov. 30. Now, all that’s left to do is to wait, possibly for as long as another year.  While my wife and I are hoping our daughter will be home for Christmas, a more realistic goal is that we will have our referral by then and we will travel to China in mid-January 2003.

            By then, our adoption will have taken 23 months from beginning to end. That’s longer than two pregnancies. Quite frankly, that’s too long.

            Although the documentation portion of an adoption is still a lengthy process, the waiting time for obtaining the referral (the name, several photographs and brief history of the child) from the China Center for Adoption has decreased. In 2001, it was almost 14 months from the date a dossier went to China to the time an adoptive couple received their referral. Currently the waiting time is now approximately 6 months.

January 23, 2003

            The chatter on the message boards on Yahoo! for America-World Adoption Group 108 mostly centered around a pool to see who would come closest to guessing the date we would receive our referrals. There were 29 different posts that morning before the message boards grew eerily quiet for several hours.

            Then, suddenly, the message boards were flooded with the joyous news of orphans who were orphans no more.

            Suddenly, the phone rang at my desk in the office shortly before 2 p.m.           

Sixteen of the 17 girls managed to stay in one place long enough on the steps of the China Hotel in Guangzhou for me to take their photo Our daughter, Wu Minjian, is the sixth from the left, seated behind the girl wearing the bright green dress.

“You have a healthy baby girl,” Jessica Miller, our family adoption coordinator announced proudly over the telephone. My pulse quickened and I could feel my face flush as the blood rose in my head.

            “Wh…wha…what’s her name?” I stammered incoherently.

            “Her name is Wu Minjian.”

            The sound of her name was lyrical. As I softly repeated it over and over again, the realization came over me: After 22 months, the waiting was finally over. We are scheduled to leave for China in late March to bring our little daughter home.

March 28, 2003

            It’s the middle of the night half a world away in Beijing, capital of the People’s Republic of China. I am lying wide awake in our hotel room when suddenly there’s a gentle knock on the door. “Who’s that?” my wife, who is equally as wide awake as I, asks. Jumping out of bed and walking to the door I look through the peephole to see our older son, John, standing in the hallway, showered and dressed in his street clothes. Our two boys are sharing the adjacent room on the fourth floor at the Beijing Radisson and it’s obvious their biological clocks are as confused as ours.

            Opening the door I ask, “What are you doing up so early?”

            “What time is it?” he shoots back smiling. “James said something about a buffet.” He’s looking better than he did six hours ago when we were all so tired we could barely stand up straight.

            “It’s 2:30 in the morning. Go back to sleep. We’ll call you when it’s time to get up and get ready for breakfast.”

            Marco Polo dealt with war and other adverse circumstances when he traveled to Kublai Kahn’s court in medieval China during the thirteenth century. But he never dealt with jet lag.

            Our trip to China began at 4:15 on a Thursday morning when the clock radio cheerfully went off, rousing us all from a deep sleep. We showered and I walked Chewy one last time before saying goodbye to him for two weeks. Then we ate a hasty breakfast and helped the driver load our luggage into the back of his van. We arrived at Newark airport at 6:45 a.m. Check-in and security was a snap as the airport was virtually empty due to fears over the war in Iraq and an orange terror alert in the homeland. The first leg of our journey was a short, 2-1/2 hour flight to Chicago. The plane was practically empty and we had plenty of room to spread out.

            In contrast, the flight to Beijing was oversold. When it was time to board, there was Pandemonium in the boarding area. We made like a herd of steer, lining up in a long queue that stretched as far as the eye could see.

            Forty-five minutes later the door to the aircraft was shut and we taxied to the end of the runway where we held for about ten minutes until a long enough window between arriving aircraft afforded us a slot to roll for takeoff. The flight seemed to go on for days. We ate. We ate again. We had a snack. Then we ate again. I watched a couple of movies. Our sons played Super Mario Brothers on their Game Boy Advance. We dozed on and off and talked with each other and with our fellow travelers. I read half of Steve Martini’s The Jury. Mercifully, fourteen hours later we touched down on the runway in Beijing. By the time we went through quarantine, immigration, and customs; picked up our bags from the luggage carousel and rode twenty minutes on the bus to our hotel, we had been traveling for almost an entire day and night.

            I tried to imagine the feeling of awe that came over Marco Polo upon his arrival in the Far East; as he went about immersing himself in China’s culture, meeting the

people, learning their language and sampling the cuisine.

            But we were too exhausted to follow in his footsteps. We took hot showers followed by a short nap and then walked across the street to KFC for a light supper before finally passing out.

            Good thing Marco Polo never had to deal with jet lag. There weren’t any KFCs back then to help with the adjustment.

April 3, 2003

            On a hot, sticky day my family and I visited a farm on the outskirts of the city of Nanning in southern China’s Guangxi province. The roar from the diesel trucks straining to haul their cargoes along the highway leading into the mountains disappeared in the distance behind us as we picked our way along the path that led deeper into the fields resembling a patchwork quilt in varying shades of green and umber.

            The odor of the freshly dug earth mingling with the sweetness of the new-mown hay strewn along the hardpacked clay path permeated the damp air. Every now and then the acrid odor of manure removed any lingering doubts that this was indeed a farm.

            The workers were almost all women, but they weren’t the type I would have expected to find working out in the fields in the sweltering heat. They weren’t big or outwardly muscular. Most were petite. But despite their slim frames, they rolled up their sleeves and worked hard. They went about their business quietly. Some planted, some watered, some harvested.

            I watched one woman fill a pair of wooden buckets with water. She then effortlessly shouldered them, placing the wooden yoke behind her head. She walked down a row watering what looked like a patch of onions. The water alone must have weighed more than 50 pounds.

            I stood in the middle of all this activity holding Wu Minjian tightly in my arms. This little girl would celebrate her first birthday in 10 days. She was the newest addition to our family and in less than 24 hours would officially become our daughter.

            An ancient Chinese proverb states: “An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break. As time goes on, the thread will become shorter until finally bringing the people it connects together.”

            Our adoption journey was a journey of faith. As the writer in the Old Testament book of Psalms declared: “The Lord God is a sun and shield,” we also embraced this promise, believing God had illuminated our path as bright as the noonday sun. We were also confident that his shield would protect us as we followed him.

            We had resolved to let nothing—not the war in Iraq, an elevated terror alert, or the threat of SARS—keep us from this rendezvous with destiny.      

You can read all of the details of the Rummo's adoption journey in his new book, "The View from the Grass Roots - Another Look." It's 536 pages of sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant and almost always provocative commentary on American Culture. $19.95 shipping and handling included. Click here for more information.

Minjian’s big, bright eyes seemed to take it all in. She hugged me tighter, and I was suddenly overcome with emotion as the words of our guide, Lin Don Quing, played over and over in my head: “I have taken you to a farm in rural Nanning so you can see for yourselves a place very similar to the one where your daughter was most likely born. A woman will have her baby on a farm like this one, and then abandon it in a big city, hoping it will be found and taken care of,” he said.

Lin had explained the sad story of abandonment in China to us during the bumpy bus ride out to the countryside. Most orphans are never adopted. Raised in orphanages, they attend school only until the eighth grade and then find some menial labor. They carry a stigma, which some overcome by moving to another province. Every year, millions of babies are abandoned in China. Official estimates are up to 2 million babies, but unofficial estimates put the number as high as 4 million.

The healthy ones are almost all girls. Healthy boys are rarely abandoned because they carry the family name to the next generation. That is deemed important in a society where almost all families are limited to one child.

            It was almost a year earlier when the little girl I was now holding in my arms was discovered abandoned by the roadside near the Fujiang Post Office in Wuzhou City, several hundred miles east of Nanning. Her umbilical cord was still attached when a police officer found her. He turned her over to the Wuzhou Social Welfare Institute, where the nannies estimated she was about 2 days old. At the time this was going on, we were aware of none of it. We had spent the year prior to her birth running around getting our paperwork together. When she was born, our dossier had already been in the hands of the China Center for Adoption in Beijing for five months. It would be another nine months before we would have her photograph, know her name, and be made aware of the circumstances surrounding her abandonment.

            Our bittersweet half-hour visit to the farm came to an end. It was symbolic of our own journey of faith that was finally ending. As we made our way back to the bus along the earthen path, I pondered God’s sovereignty and the red thread that had stretched more than 9,000 miles, across two continents and an ocean. It had finally brought us together. n

For additional detailed information on foreign adoptions, visit America World Adoption Association’s website, awaa.org.    

Gregory J. Rummo is an author and syndicated columnist. His latest book, “The View from the Grass Roots—Another Look,” was just published. Visit GregRummo.com  for more information.