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Travel Date: 1/15/2009
Subject: The Surreal World

What we did today:
While our princess is napping, I was tempted to use this time to jot down a few thoughts.

Okay, the nap ended and so did my writing, but now a whole day later – I’m back!

WARNING – This is not about our daily activities. This entry is more ponderings and thoughts, not necessarily positive in nature. Read at your own risk.


Maybe this trip to China may seem like some great vacation, but this is the hardest trip I’ve ever taken in my life. Nothing seems real. We are on the other side of the world. Days and nights are flip-flopped. I keep adding and subtracting time…military time…time at home…what day is it here…what day is it at home?

We are living in a hotel. Yuck! I just want to go home. I miss my other four kids something awful. Life with a six-year-old in a hotel is never much fun.

When we go out shopping or to walk on the streets, we are so alone. On a crowded street, we are quite a spectacle. We are foreigners. We don’t speak the language and we don’t look like everyone else. But there is this little Chinese girl who holds our hands or we carry her in our arms and she calls us Mama and Baba. She chatters in Chinese, and we don’t understand a word. Some people just politely do a double take. Others stare and stare so much that they can barely keep walking. Some peoples’ faces are curious, other are shocked, but others are look at us almost in disgust.

Chongqing is located where two rivers come together. The temperatures have only been ranging in the 40’s to 50’s from night to day while we’ve been here. The skies have been so foggy and dark. Morning never looks like morning. The afternoons are so foggy that it hardly seems like day time. Some times you can’t even see that far away through the skyscrapers. We really miss sunlight.

On Wednesday, I let my daughter and husband eat potato chips and cookies for lunch? I usually insist that everyone at least have some source of protein to make lunch a real meal at home, even Josiah, who doesn’t eat hardly anything.

I have a daughter. She is 100% my daughter right now. But she is stuck between countries. She is still Chinese, but her parents are Americans. We can’t leave Chongqing until we have her passport. We can’t leave China until we get her visa, and we have to go to Guangzhou to do that.

China is a wonderful, beautiful country. Its people are amazing. Its history stretches back through time for thousands of years. My heart breaks to take my daughter away from her people, her home, the only life she has ever known. Yet, I am also terribly homesick.

Every part of this trip is so emotionally draining for me. It is such a paradox of extremes. Joy and sorrow so intense and so unpredictable. I hold back tears every day or I think I’d be crying all the time.

The paperwork pressures are also very overwhelming. We have a package of documents that we must keep safe at all times. Documents required to adopt our daughter, documents required for her visa. We carry copies of our passports with us at all times. We even have made copies of some of her adoption documents and carry them with us too. We’ve tucked a copy in her coat pocket. Just in case we need to prove that this is our daughter.

Money is a continual concern. Everyone sees us as rich Americans. One of our travel mates put it best I think when she asked if any of the Chinese people realized that many of the Americans adopting go into debt to bring their children home. We have money with us, but are trying to budget it to last the whole trip. We have to eat. We need to have laundry washed. We do need to buy some special things to remember our trip. Our daughter needed shoes. Will we have enough? Yet we also need to spend all of the RMB we have before we leave. You pay a fee to exchange the RMB back to US dollars, and since we’ve been here the exchange rate has changed. We would be loosing money if we changed it back to dollars.

These are just some of my thoughts. Not all the happy news related to adopting our daughter. Not the daily adventures we have. But I wanted to record them. They are also a part of this journey…a part of the story of how a little girl named Fu Hui Dong came home to her family.

Photos... (click image to enlarge)