Earlier this year, at the tail end of a 24-hour Hong Kong-Tokyo-New York flight, my wife, Julie, was at wit's end. The trip was a last-minute thing, put together after a phone call telling us that her grandmother had suffered a heart attack. In the best of circumstances it is not an easy flight. With an 18-month-old in tow, and no husband to switch off with, it ruled out any chance for rest.
As the plane pulled into the gate at Kennedy, my wife packed up the detritus of a trip with baby -- the much-abused copy of Goodnight Moon, the favorite pink blanket, the half-empty bottles of milk. A United Airlines steward of Asian descent passed by. "From China?" he asked, noting the discrepancy between Julie, an Irish-American redhead, and our daughter, a Chinese. My wife nodded yes, and the man disappeared.
A moment later he emerged with a small bottle of champagne obviously pinched from business class. He pressed the bottle into my wife's hands. "You have done a good thing," he told Julie. Then he melted away into the crush of passengers trying to disembark.
In the year and a half since we brought Grace Wenying McGurn home from China, we have been touched by many angels, friends and strangers alike, most of whom will never know the potency of their individual acts of kindness.
In particular the airline steward will never know, because I suspect that to try to track him down would have him fired. In truth such kindnesses as his are misplaced, because all adoption has done is in our case is to take a man, woman and child and transform them into a very ordinary dad, mom and daughter. There is a beauty particular to adoption -- the mystical joining of souls that in retrospect seems foreordained -- but the beauty lies in the bewitching normalcy of it all. We feel the same sense of awe and wonder as other new moms and dads; we buy the same toys; and we bore all our friends with the same repertoire of stories.
In the newspaper world in which I live, the circumstances of Gracie's arrival makes for what we call good color, yet trying to confine Gracie to the boundaries of the printed word has proved utterly beyond my meager capabilities. There are, to begin with, the political complications of a Chinese adoption. For entirely legitimate reasons, many of my colleagues have wanted to use our case to illustrate the realities and complexities of adopting from China.
From the start, however, Julie and I agreed that neither we nor Gracie would be the subject of any news stories, certainly not as ammunition in any of the acrimonious debates over adoption itself (involving single parent adoption, homosexual adoption, and so on), not even in such a supremely just cause as the fight against China's repellent one-child policy.
The reason is simple: Grace Wenying McGurn is not a cause. Gracie is our first child, and adoption happens only to be the means by which she joined our family.
Yet I did volunteer for this particular article for publication by Notre Dame magazine for two specific reasons. First, my experience within a relatively small circle of University of Notre Dame acquaintances suggests that this is an audience more disposed to adoption than most. Gracie's story might perhaps help still the entirely natural anxieties of some would-be adoptive parents struggling with their own decision.
The second was the knowledge that in the security of the Notre Dame family, I could be sure that I might refer, without embarrassment, to the immanence of a loving God in this world and our lives. By this I mean the clear understanding we had each felt, well before we ever laid eyes on Gracie's shining face, that this as yet unknown little girl lying on her back in some orphanage in China was yet joined to us as a tiny but profound part of God's design.
Of course, the seeds of the decision were more prosaic: We wanted a family. Despite the absence of any medical reason why my wife and I cannot conceive a child, the fact is that we haven't, and at that point hadn't. Growing up, I had not really known anyone adopted (or at least known that they were adopted), and though we never had anything against adoption, neither did we know much about it. What we couldn't see then, but understand now, all came at once. Open your heart a crack to the possibility, and if it was meant to be God will do the rest.
Once we broached the possibility it loomed before us everywhere. In my office, the fellow next to me adopted a little boy. Articles on adoption now jumped out at me from the paper. We had been receiving a steady series of announcements from a former Notre Dame classmate of mine, Mary Clare Birmingham, who with her husband, Pat, now has five adopted children. With each announcement, the last heralding the arrival of two beautiful sisters from Russia, adoption began to take on real faces. Why not us?
As it turned out, the precipitating event was the 1995 broadcast of a British documentary on Chinese orphanages. Called The Dying Rooms, it shows orphanages full of infant girls, where a crude Darwinianism dictates that the less hardy -- or the less delightful -- will be left to die of neglect. I attended a screening at the Foreign Correspondents Club here in Hong Kong. My wife refused to see it. Her response was more to the heart. "We can't change things in China," she whispered to me that night. "But maybe we could change things for one little girl."
So there we were. Unlike some adoptive parents in the United States, we did not decide to go overseas for an adoption: We went to China because we are overseas. Race was never a factor, and the families on both sides opened their hearts when we told them. We had only two negative comments, one from a Hong Kong Chinese who thought Chinese should be adopted by Chinese, and one from a Notre Dame friend. But both were off-the-cuff reactions, and each has been marvelous to Gracie since.
Chinese adoptions may be more difficult than most, if only because adoptive parents are torn between speaking out on the abuses (which may jeopardize the chances of other parents) and keeping silent. We faced constant delays and setbacks. Unlike a pregnancy there is no natural terminus for an adoption. Our only tangible link would not come until many months later, when we received a crude 1-by-1½ inch Polaroid photo. For biological parents, who every day have some sacramental reminders of the miracle of life -- even if it is just morning sickness -- it may be hard to imagine the intensity of feeling that accompanies a photograph. Or how many times, from how many angles, we would look it over.
The accompanying form informed us that Grace was from Yangzhou in China, a town on the Grand Canal where Marco Polo was said to have served as governor and where the sitting president, Jiang Zemin, was born. Four months later, after more delays, we were finally allowed to come get her. There was little ceremony The morning after we arrived in Yangzhou, orphanage workers brought Gracie in, plopped her down on our bed, collected their money -- and left, with Gracie sleeping through the whole process. That's how I became a father.
At first Grace was horribly bloated and pasty faced from the bad diet. Mostly she had been drinking powdered milk and seemed to have been fattened up for the big day. While the last bits of paperwork were being completed, we got to know our daughter. First we put on the new clothing we had brought and changed the powdered milk for formula, with immediate implications for her bowels. Then we took her outside, up along the old canal. The old ladies of Yangzhou would come up and coo and offer advice. Piaoliang di nu er! (Pretty girl!) Hao yunqi di xiao wa, dao meiguo qu! (Lucky baby, go to America!)
I am sure Gracie in that one day had more physical interaction than she had had in her whole tiny life. In the orphanage, which we later visited, the children lay on their backs, three to a crib, craving human warmth and attention. That first night, when we put Gracie to bed in a makeshift cot, she lifted up her head and cried like a wounded animal. She was checking to see if we were still there.
In the more than a year since then, Gracie has grown strong and happy. When I watch her play or hear her call "Daddy," I shudder at how easily we might have missed the most wondrous thing in our lives, how tenuous the connections of chance that brought us together and yet how inevitable they look from the perspective of today. It is one reason we have always believed that in some unknown way God meant for all of us to be together, and he, not us, chose Grace.
I am sure this sounds like happy talk, but let me tell you my friends, happy talk will not get you through an adoption. Like any biological parents, we hoped -- and prayed -- for a happy, healthy baby. Our social workers reassured us frequently that if we didn't like the look of the child with whom we were matched, if we had any doubts about the medical report, if we simply couldn't take her, we could ask for a rematch. But how could we second-guess God? From the start we decided we would take whatever child he sent us.
Accept that and everything else falls into place. In China, the authorities told us they knew nothing of Gracie's background. That might be a blessing, for it does free us from the nightmare that someone might emerge to take her from us. Yet for Gracie's biological mother, we have nothing but love. In a country that encourages abortion, even forces it, this woman chose to give our daughter life, a fact that compels a gratitude beyond this world's ability to pay.
And though the process itself has more in common with applying for a mortgage than the joy of finding a child, the irritations I thought so sharp at the time have long since receded from memory. But our way was cleared by many helping hands, from the candles lit at the Grotto at Notre Dame by friends on campus to the prayers of our families and friends.
Does any of this really help? You bet it does. I have mentioned the exceptional Mary Clare and her husband, Pat. My father also told me of a friend of his, a second lieutenant in the Korean war who on impulse during an evacuation peeked into an abandoned church, where he found a desperate nun and an abandoned child: Then and there he decided to adopt the child.
I recalled a conversation with a friend in New York who had once offhandedly told me she was adopted and how much she loved her parents; another with an impressive student at the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, who said the fact of his adoption made him feel especially strong about the evil of abortion. Fragmented bits and pieces of memory that I had thought lost in the different recesses of memory took on the glorious mosaic of God's purpose.
This is not to say that all is peace and light in the McGurn household. Our lives are far from perfect, and as much as we adore our little bundle of joy -- and the sister we hope soon will join us -- we have the same problems and disruptions other families have. But all that is dwarfed by the same joys that bind all families. Like every other adoptive parent I have met, the daily experience of these joys leaves Julie and me feeling guilty when people tell us how wonderful we are and how lucky Gracie is, because we know all too well that it is we who are the lucky ones.
We feel the same way about Gracie's sister-to-be, who also will be from China. As is their way, Chinese officials have informed us that any second adoption will have to be a special-needs child. If this in fact turns out to be the case, it is just God's way of telling us that this particular girl needs us -- and we her -- in some special way.
This may not be the path for everyone. Other people ought not to be condemned for what they cannot do. But the trust of which we speak is not an act of heroism. It is an act of surrender, the kind of surrender that makes the decision easier rather than harder. It sounds unbelievable, but I know it to be true firsthand. Leave the decision to God and you relieve yourself of the anxiety that comes from thinking that the choice is yours -- the sneaking suspicion that you might have done better had you been a little more careful, a little luckier, a little more thorough.
In preparing for the possibility that this might mean a handicapped child, I have looked around at the moms and dads who have accepted similar decisions with good faith and found an absence of martyrs. Now I no longer pray that we be delivered of the perfect child. Instead I ask only that I am man enough to be father to the girl whom God in his wisdom, mysteriously and against all evidence, believes needs me in this most special way.
With Gracie, the social workers had from the start counseled that the child we would adopt might not even have been born, but I had always sensed otherwise. Three weeks after we brought her home, I looked back through the paperwork and dug out the Form I-600 we had filed with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It is a document the Chinese officials never saw. It was dated July 12, and we filled it out at the consulate the day after we decided to go ahead with the adoption. Gracie's birthday is July 11 -- which means she entered this world at more or less the precise moment we decided to adopt. The Lord may indeed work in mysterious ways. But not always.
