Adoption Journal (7)

By Ridley Pearson

Rain today. Doesn't stop anything. Guys out on the roof next door still breaking rocks with hammer and chisel; I have no idea what they're doing up there. I've been watching them for days. There's nothing to build up there: it's a flat roof of a funky three or four story building. But there are eight or nine guys out there busting up rocks every day, all day. Place looks like it'll crack under the weight.

We are beginning to gain a "locals" eye. We've been here just long enough to notice the old, old "Tudor" and brick buildings - ramshackle but stunning. Two story. Grass growing TALL and THICK off the ancient tile roofs. Wedged between ugly newcomers erected by a government always behind, always desperate to catch up. They never will, of course. You can't catch up with a billion people. That's a race you'll lose every time.

The Chinese are bright, inventive and, now that the economy has opened up (which it has throughout the country, though this is not widely publicized), creative entrepreneurs. Capitalism is a many-headed dragon here. It is devouring the government's attempts to be what it once was. There are Chinese here in Kunming who speak three languages and have not yet been to Beijing, but have been to Las Vegas TWICE. There are Lexus cars in the streets (in a country with 100% import tax on luxury vehicles). IT IS COOKING here. You feel it. It's inescapable. And when this economy finally busts loose of the lame attempts to contain it, as it most certainly must - and soon, no doubt - the world is in for a shock. Labor in this country is dirt cheap - absurdly cheap, embarrassingly cheap. When that labor force becomes more trained, more educated, even more hungry for what the west has to offer.... LOOK OUT. It's going to blow the doors off anything we've ever seen. Tsunami, here we come....

We are loving it here, but SO anxious to get home. As a group we are restless. We await paperwork. Patience is running thin. The group itself is disjointed and not feeling like a team, but instead a group of disparate players. Marcelle and I live for the morning phone calls and the emails from family and friends. We are isolated here - in a hotel room that is constantly too cold, in a country where we are the favorite freak show, and with our other daughter home waiting for us. Tuesday we finally head to Guangzhou and the last leg of this amazing journey. And none too soon. Were we simple tourists, we would be in hog heaven; but we're new parents, a partial family awaiting permissions and stamps and notarizations, and our focus remains getting out of here, safe, sound and intact.

Despite all of this, each day is invigorating, exciting and leaves us filled with wonder. The Chinese people are so wonderful. Huge smiles everywhere we go (and those cameras)  - hard, hard workers, and eternal optimists. We have no idea what tomorrow holds for us, but we're eager to find out.

These last few days, all spent in Guangzhou (old Canton), a city of six million that should be about 2 million, have been a whirlwind of medical appointments, photos, and panic attacks. In the few remaining hours, we did manage to get into the streets of the old city and wander an enormous neighborhood, endless really, of open air markets and tiny shops, one after the other. The atmosphere is more SciFi than reality, apartments stacked on top of apartments, laundry high overhead, chickens and turtles and eels out for sale, the pungent smells that turn one's head, the thick smog and thicker humidity. A landscape of human on top of human. Curio and tea shops selling over fifty varieties of Chinese medicinal teas. We encountered a young man named Billy, and anyone who has seen Year Of Living Dangerously knows the significance of that name. Just like in the film, Billy escorted us deeper and deeper into the urban outback, in search of antiques (my eyes wide open so we wouldn't be burned)  - and down a narrow lane where we sat with a woman and negotiated over two Ming Dynasty rice bowls for the better part of thirty minutes - Marcelle and I sweating from the unbelievable heat and sipping from sodas we had bought on the street - Sprite and Orange with straws delivered by tweezers to prove the vendor had not touched them.

We stepped back in time, the heat sucking us down, the woman negotiating with us through our little Billy and his clipped English. In the end we didn't buy, but OH what an experience. We shall never forget it. And you in the cuddly at Marcelle's chest, eyes wide, curiosity never ceasing. What a jewel you are. What a mystery.

(part 7 of 10, to be continued...)