El Dia (The Day)

 

Erich and I have always referred to our Gotcha Day (a term lauded by the adoption community) as El Dia or as translated from Spanish to “The Day”.

Today started innocently enough. Waking to a panoramic view of the Pearl River from the White Swan Hotel on Shaimen Island. A rain water shower followed by a buffet breakfast of Willy Wonka proportions. Rations of every kind laid out for the taking. Fresh dumplings, French pastries, assortments of unusual fruit and even fairy sized glasses of petite layering’s of colorful gelatins for the sweet tooth were ours for the taking. Coco sat on the red couch famous at this hotel for capturing many adoptees images as their families camped out to gain their US Citizenship on this tiny Colonial Island.

Our guide Grace and fearless driver Mr. Z. scooped us up to head to Coco’s home town of 2 ½ million beings… Yangjiang City, Guangdong Province China. A working class City famous for its knife making, kite festivals and motorcycles. It took us fifty minutes to clear the urban nature of Guangzhou. The last time we travelled here it was countryside, rice paddies, water buffalo (or as the Chinese refer to them as yellow cows), sugar cane, bamboo and white ducks of the Peking variety. Not so much these days. Billboards everywhere, wild flowering trees and manicured shrubs, a tall awkward tree planted to produce the wood for the fast food style chop stick that is so popular, in essence urban sprawl.

We approached our girl’s hometown with a mix of emotions. A big day, El Dia only with a moody 12-year-old in tow watching downloaded movies on her Mac Book.

Holy Cow, scooters everywhere, a city that stretches for miles, a destination long remembered, not forgotten. How would it look to the now American kid we are raising… how would it feel to be there again?

The woman holding a 15-month old Yang Mei Ya captured in the photo above met us for lunch on the fourth floor of a municipal building a few blocks from the orphanage. She is now the Orphanage Director after 26 years of working her way up. She brought her Mom to meet us for lunch. Coco was the fifteenth adoptee to return to the Yangjiang SWI this calendar year. They asked her what she wanted for lunch and proudly clucked that she is truly a “local girl” as she liked the noodle dish best. She hugged Coco. She asked us if she could have the pictures we brought of Coco when she still lived there under her care. We showed her this photo… she hugged Coco and told her how tall she was (which went over big with the shortest kid in the seventh grade at Forcythe Intermediate School in Ann Arbor Michigan) a million miles away.

Next we went shopping at a local shopping center for clothing to donate to the Orphanage. Now home to about 150 kids, most of them with special needs and a bourgeoning group of elders that have found themselves with nowhere else to go. We had groupies at a place that was a cross between Target and a Grocery Store. The locals stared, gathered around at the few Caucasian faces that they had seen loading a trolley with kids clothing and socks and candy to donate. Any variation of red hair stands out in China enough so to have people stop and stare. We resisted the urge to buy a suitcase and load it up with some of the least expensive merchandise that we have ever seen… but really a suitcase full of toilet brushes, cookies, plastic bags and sweat shirts adorned with oddly worded sayings in English would only seem like a good idea at the time.

We pulled in to the orphanage an hour later. Much more road worn than we remembered. The kids swarmed, reached to be held, clasped wrists and pushed fitbit buttons, clamored for candy, needed forever homes… and left us with an ache that we could not shake off.

One dinner (that Coco fell asleep at the table) and one exceeding strange hotel later we prepare for bed many hours off our internal compasses… changed as human beings. How much fate plays a role in all of our lives. How lucky we are to love a moody 12-year-old. How lucky we were to have the chance to parent such an amazing kid. 

Tomorrow morning, we go to the spot that she was abandoned twelve years ago to leave behind two agates that come from Lake Superior in Erich’s hometown, we left a Petoskey Stone from my hometown eleven years ago when we walked there misty eyed and overwhelmed at the commitment that we had just made. What a day this has been.

Tomorrow we will then go knife shopping (and Yaingjaing speciality) to purchase cutlery that Coco will take to her first kitchen as she approaches her own adulthood. Then back to Guangzhou and on to the bullet train (240 miles per hour) to Guilin where we will have a break from this walk down memory lane and simply be tourists again.