This is us...before we knew. Before we even had an inkling of how much love could possibly stretch our hearts. July, 2008, Beijing, and in a few days our whole world would change.
Me about to walk in the door of the adoption office in Nanjing, just minutes before we would meet her for the first time.
A rainy day in Nanjing, with a very small and confused Q in her baby bjorn.
So new to one another.

Each and every day, to this day, I'm amazed at how much the heart can still expand.

Colors of China....
...from my archives.

I love the balconies of Guangzhou....ornate, elaborate, mossy, crumbling with humidity and age. Each seems the setting for a novel...
...or a fairytale. What imaginings these children must indulge in, seeing the world from such a vantage point.

Rollerskating at sunset, Guangzhou.

Me and Q in Guangzhou during our first few days together....
We did not know eachother yet...
...but there is a foreshadowing here of the love we would come to share, for which, a year later, there are no words powerful enough.

Coffee in a French restaurant, Ghangzhou. Did I ever mention that China has some of the best coffee in the world? Why is that fact not widely known?
Tree mushrooms on the street.
Strata of old and new and even older on a market street.

This time last year, we were in China, eagerly anticipating our first meeting with the girl who would be forever after our daughter. Hard is it may seem to believe, in the flurry of the past year with the Q, I have forgotten the exact dates. The 26th of July sticks in my mind, so maybe that was the day of our meeting. I have the dates somewhere, of course, but life is too full and busy right now for me to search for the details. This photo is from a day or two after our initial adoption day. Though it looks outdoors, this photo was actually in the picture window of our hotel room at the White Swan, overlooking the Pearl River. I have read some bad reviews of the rooms at the White Swan, but the room we were given was quite spectacular (and may have been more bearable for us since we are accustomed to and enjoy beds with hard matresses). We felt in the lap of luxury. I have always loved this image, for its tenderness and intimacy, and for the emotional frailty of both father and daughter at this moment. He is concerned, trying to give her comfort and solace. She is pushing against him just slightly, exerting her independence while still enjoying the safety of his embrace and support.

Oh, that tiny girl, so brave and resilient and, even then, willing to dive into new experiences wholeheartedly, eager to give us a chance, and to laugh and smile at every opportunity.

Again, outside the Buddhist temple in Guangzhou. This little girl struck me particularly. It was just as we were leaving the temple, after the ceremony, and I had to snatch my camera up, switch it on, and snap a couple of quick shots as she ran the perimeter of this building. I'm not sure where she was headed or whether she was just running for fun, but it was straight out of a film...the red shoes, the gossamer dress, the pixie-cut hair and serious face. In the end, without having a chance to adjust the settings on my camera for movement and shade, the shots came out blurred - but I like the effect. It renders her almost wraithlike.
Bicycles in Guangzhou. Is there not something so very visually captivating about bicycles en masse, whether at rest or in motion? Maybe it's the bare mechanics of them, or maybe just the fact that they are one of the last remaining non-motorized vehicles. Maybe a bicycle is just a particularly graceful and simply-engineered design. What do you think?

Outside the Buddhist temple, Guangzhou.

Guangzhou.

I find that it has taken me a particularly long time to process my photos of China...and I'm coming to realize that it's not just about processing the photos themselves, but about processing the new and tangled emotions and the unspeakably vast life changes that took place for us (all three of us) there. It's not quite a year since we traveled through China on our adoption trip, and
I am apparently still "processing".

During our early days in China, while waiting to meet our daughter, I spent a lot of time photographing children. This was a deliberate project and one in which I took great pleasure. Those photos have been the easiest and most obvious for me to go through, and I have posted almost all the best of them in previous months. The photos that relate more to our own experiences, and our first days with our daughter, have been more difficult for me to touch. I have just not felt ready, it seems, to delve into that deep (and still confusing) well of emotion.

Here's the thing: Now? It's easy-peasy. A cakewalk. A bowl of cherries. Sure, she's entering her "terrible twos" soon, and we can already see the occasional sign. But it's hard to worry too much. We are fully-integrated as a family. We are deeply, madly, blissed-out in love. We are goofy with it, and the endorphins that this daily infatuation produces just make all the difficulties fade away. The financial fears, the medical appointments, the speech therapy, the academic issues and pressures and the ongoing struggle to find the time to work...all of this is just a gnat buzzing around our ears, a shadowplay behind the brilliant scrim of our happiness. This time is pure joy. That's where we're at now...not quite a year after meeting her for the first time.

The beginning, however...now THAT was another kettle of fish. It was difficult. It was difficult in ways that I can't even describe. Adoption is in some ways a very unnatural process. Once the seed of wanting to be a parent is planted, one's body and mind begin to undergo changes much like they would during a pregnancy. But instead of waiting nine months, one waits years...years of red tape and doubt, years of upheaval and near-loss, years of agonizing decisions and the constant fear that the dream will be snatched from under one's nose before one can ever lay hands on it. It does things to a person - unnatural things. It twists the mind and creates irrational thought.

And we were the lucky ones! We only waited two years. The international adoption world is in a tremendous upheaval at the moment, and I know many people who have not been so lucky, who have waited years longer than we did, who have faced much more challenging decisions and more devastating disappointments. Adoption is not for the faint of heart, sadly.

When the wait is over, it seems to happen very quickly. But instead of the anticipation of a physically grueling birth, one faces only a photo and a journey - a photo of a stranger's face, and a journey through a country that yone has precious little time to attempt to learn. And when at last they place that little, living, breathing stranger in your arms...that's when the real test begins. Can I love him/her? Can he/she love me? Will the chemistry work? All these things run through one's mind, along with the guilt attached to one's own doubt. It is a tremendous upheaval, a trial by fire. Instead of undergoing a vast physical and hormonal change over the course of nine months, one is faced with going from freewheeling adult to responsible parent in the matter of a heartbeat, a sigh, the batting of an eye. I think there is no easy or graceful way to undertake that sort of transition. Like childbirth, it's messy and gorgeous and chaotic and agonizing and physically exhausting and the most incredible miracle on the face of the earth, all rolled into one.

So yes, those times in China are fraught with strange and lurking emotions for me. I'm not sure why, since all that is behind me, and since the future is wide and full of joy. I think the thing is that I'm still not sure how I pulled it off. I feel like I was, during those weeks, skating on very thin ice, over a tank seething with sharks and roiling, dark water. I feel like my success in this process was a very near thing...I could so easily have failed myself, my husband and her. It could have gone either way. I feel like if I turn and look back - back at the me that walked that tightrope for those few early weeks - I might turn into a pillar of salt.

There: I've mixed every possible metaphor I could think of! How do you like that?
In any case, today, I went through the remainder of the China photos. I glanced over them quickly and pulled all those I thought worthy of seeing the light of day. I put them all in a folder, and quickly closed the folder so as not to change my mind. As we approach Q's second birthday, and our anniversary as a family, I will take them out one by one, brace myself, and take a really good, close look. Maybe, in the light of day, the perceived demons will vanish. Maybe I will be able to draw the poison and banish my bogeyman. At very least, I will create a visual record for my daughter, for someday when she needs to know. And she will need to know.

Though there are so many favorites, this is one of my absolute most beloved of my photos of children from our time in China. The joy in this little girl is so evident, in her face and in her motion. And it's so easy to see from the way her father's cheek turns toward her, from the pride on his face, and from the way he holds her, his love for this child. They say there are few girls in Chinese families these days, but what we saw told a different story. As a foreigner, I don't pretend to know any more than a tiny portion of the whole picture...but what I saw is that the Chinese love their girls. There is certainly an element of cultural leanings involved in the imbalance, and an element of pure necessity in the one-child policy and its ramifications. But just look at this picture and you can see that these parents love their girls, just like any parent on this earth.

No smoking on the dragon boat.
Bats in the Summer Palace.