Travel Group

If you live in Massachusetts and have friends and family in New York, Pennsylvania and beyond, as we do, you cannot help during road trips blazing through the town of Willington, Connecticut on Interstate 84. If you ease off the pedal and veer off at exit 71 and coast the 7.85 mile stretch of Connecticut 320 you are likely to spot a variety of lodging options, ranging from convenient to cozy – Econo Lodge to Tolland Inn Bed and Breakfast. Why is this worth noting? What is the significance here? Well, while it more intentionally offers beds to the weary traveler, Connecticut 320 has unwittingly handed us a name for our blog, since the mini rural route that binds Interstate 84 with Nipmuck State Forest and Village Hill community is more locally known as “Ruby Road.” For the two years or so prior to our adoption trip we used to drive by the green sign that says “Exit 71 320 Ruby Road” and we’d glance at each other knowingly with soundless, stupid, sappy expressions that spoke to a distant expectation, an event yet to happen, a tiny gift in the offing, a basket down the road apiece. It became a travel tradition and - I’m almost embarrassed to admit - we still do it as routinely as my daughters declare “yellow punch buggy no punch backs.” There is something about the timelessness of the highway that releases us from the present and delivers us elsewhere, where cruise control allows us entry to the past or accelerates us to the future. With Ruby now on board we think back to the group that shared in our trip to China.

About two or three times a year we reunite with our China travel group either at someone’s house for a potluck barbecue or a centrally located Chinese restaurant for some nostalgic spinning of the lazy Susan. It’s an opportunity for the parents to chat about, among other things, recent dispatch and gossip from the rumor circles of Chinese Adoption and for the girls to get their serious faces sticky. There seems to be a tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) understanding between the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), the connecting adoption agencies, and the adopting families that a red thread be forever tied to our collection of daughters, lacing them to their birth land and to each other. It is an intangible code we pledged to when interviewed by a Chinese official at the Civil Affairs Office in downtown Nanchang. While Fionna and the nannies kept Ruby entertained with squishy turtle and key rings, Rosie and I anxiously sat down to answer interview questions pertaining to our marriage, our motivation for the adoption, our plans to care for and educate the child, our promise never to abandon her, and we nodded in agreement with the official that it would be important to keep our girl culturally connected to her country of origin. If our dutiful compliance then was a robotic impulse to ward off any chance of China reneging on our deal, it is now, as we look back, a vow made in our daughter’s best interest. We have since been to various Chinese New Year celebrations, dragon boat races along the Charles, dim sum in Chinatown, but when we reunite with our Jiangxi families, and with our larger group that includes the Hunan families, I feel even more so that we are honoring our agreement. That these girls who were on the same auspicious day ushered out of their respective orphanages and foster homes and driven blank-faced along dusty roads to a hotel lobby hours away would years later experiment with popsicles on a swing set in someone’s breezy back yard halfway across the globe. I give thanks to our agency, and especially the director of our agency, for starting this charitable business on her kitchen table a decade and a half ago, for keeping the travel groups together, for joining us at the airport and future celebrations, for instilling in us the importance of that connectivity for the girls by whom we have pledged to do our best.

One commonality our travel group mutually sighs at is the relief that our log-in dates were at the beginning of what has become an ever-stagnating process. The waiting time has doubled in the past two years, and while we can swipe a collective phew off our foreheads for our own good fortune we find it natural to empathize with those currently waiting families whose log-in dates continue to recede into the irritation of redoubled home studies and INS fingerprinting. Various factors contribute to this swell of wait time, including the increase in foreign applications, a proliferation of Chinese domestic adoptions, a national focus on the 2008 Olympics, a supposed decline in abandonment, and a disproportionate number of CCAA employees to the thousands of dossiers in need of processing. Other rumors point to internal politics and China’s caginess of being perceived as a baby exporter. According to http://chinaadoptionforecast.com/ , if we were to start the process today the wait could be as long as eight years.

We understand the distress waiting families are having, the despair they endure while we and the families in our travel group cozy up on the snugglier side of the divide with a kind of survivor’s guilt. We wonder what will become of Chinese adoptions, what does the future hold for the program; will we be the last of a dying breed? While waiting families can only hold vigil for the future of the Chinese Adoption program and are faithful but powerless to control the fate of their seemingly fading girls, we who have been thrown a bundle of luck can, with inked assurance, control the role we play in our daughters’ forming identity.

Our adoption agency is beginning a program for returning families, a travel group that returns with their adoptive girls to visit the orphanages from whence they came. We and some of the other families have already started planning six to eight years down the road, when we might return, where our daughters can sense for themselves the dust of their heritage. Many adopted girls who are reaching the age of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen are returning on their own to volunteer in the orphanages where they were once foundlings themselves. It gives me a shiver of pride when I read about these stories, the kind of delight their adoptive parents must feel after raising a young woman who in self-discovery comes to see it as her role to aid orphan babies as she had once been nannied herself. In Karin Evans’ remarkable memoir, The Lost Daughters of China (2000), she makes this optimistic forecast:

“It’s my guess that some of the best grassroots diplomacy in years to come will be accomplished by China’s lost daughters themselves and by the growing links between orphanages, orphanage officials, and adoptive American parents. It is natural for people to want the best for a country that has allowed them to come home with such beautiful little children.” (225)

Recently, we joined our town’s “Adoption Group,” families with children adopted domestically and internationally, old and young, girls and boys. We met a family whose thirteen-year-old daughter came from China those many years ago. They later informed us that she is very much in-touch with her Chinese identity, that over the years she has learned Mandarin and has taken Chinese dance classes and involved herself in other aspects of Chinese culture, and that she is now interested in babysitting, has been certified, and wondered if we were interested in having her babysit some time. I couldn’t help thinking of Karin Evans’ prediction, and the road we parents promised China we would pave. I think of that exit 71 in Willington, Connecticut, where an eight mile stretch of road extends, for us, over continents.

“Yes,” we say. “Of course.”