Hi Max,
My readers love this article and I would like to share it with my Wine and Meat friends. I will also send three photos.
 

A Gift of Love

What mother does not want to wake up to a sweet innocent voice gently whispering in her ear, “Mama, I love you. You are my best friend”? And that’s how my neighbor, Andrea, wakes up every morning to the face of a toddler with large luminous eyes and wispy hair looking down at her sleepy form.
Mother and daughter is an unlikely pair: Andrea is a Messianic Jew and Estee Li Li is of Chinese descent.
According to Andrea, Estee Li Li was “born in my heart”. She came into the lives of Andrea and John Hendrix through prayers and Andrea’s fasting when she could not conceive. But one day, it dawned on her that she and John could provide an abandoned child with a family and home. That realization was the answer to her prayers as if a window opened from Heaven, letting sunlight into her soul. Thereupon, Andrea and John went to China to bring their daughter home.
Andrea confides in me, “We waited two years for Estee Li Li to come into our lives. I know that she is my baby the moment I saw her photo sent by the orphanage in Hunan. Her looked like a football player with her little padded jacket.” She pauses and then continues with her intense green eyes looking into mine.
“ I couldn’t have loved her more if she had come out of my womb!”
Although Estee Li Li is only three and half now, she has seen far too much for a child so young. Five days after Estee Li Li was born, she was found abandoned. She was taken to the police station dressed in a white outfit with little blue flowers and then transferred to the Welfare Institution where she lived until she was twenty-one month old. When the Hendrixes first saw their baby girl in the arms of a nanny at the hotel in Changsha, they looked at the little bundle much too small for her age with hardly any hair and covered with bug bites on her legs. It was already nine in the evening when Estee Li Li met her new parents for the first time. She had traveled 5 to 6 hours by car and the Hendrixes had just arrived from the airport when the nanny gently admonished the baby, “bu ku”, don’t cry. John and Andrea’s heart went out to their baby. Estee Li Li did not dare to make a sound for she was very brave.
Adjustment for little Estee Li Li was not as easy as one might think. Those first two mornings, Estee Li Li had an enormous appetite as though she had never eaten before: she ate four eggs, two rolls, a bowl of fresh fruit salad, and cereal. She was hungry. Instead of clutching at a doll or a stuff animal, she held tightly a cheerio in each hand. Although she was twenty-one month old, she could not walk well because her leg muscles have not developed sufficiently to carry her body weight. There was also a long scar at the joint between the body and each leg from sitting in a walker for too long. She only learned how to crawl much later from her American cousins.
And then, there was the language problem; Estee Li Li could only speak baby Mandarin. But Andrea, not wanting language to be barrier between herself and her baby, stopped any Chinese whether at the local supermarket or restaurant, trying desperately to pick up a Chinese phrase here and there. And that’s how I met Andrea.
Having learned that Chinese mothers are physically closer to their babies, Andrea decided that she would be in the tub with Este Li Li when they bathed and that the baby would sleep in her arms. Until this day, Estee Li Li’s bed is still in her parents’ room while the dog has long been banished elsewhere.
At first, Andrea found it strange that Estee Li Li did not like other children and she did not want to play with them. Before she could even express herself verbally, she would cover her eyes with both hands whenever she saw Asians. Finally one day, she told Andrea, “Mama, I don’t want them to take me away. I don’t want to go back. That’s why I covered my eyes.”
The Hendrix’s story is not the only story I heard that families are made in heaven, perhaps “Lao Tian Ye”, Father Heaven, had tied a red string from the toe of Estee Li Li to her parents across the Pacific Ocean.
Because I wanted to seek out my roots, I traveled to China three times in ten months to do research. On the first leg of my journey, I arrived at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou after dusk. In the hotel, I saw an uncommon sight, mostly middle aged white couples with curly hair dressed casually wheeling strollers with yellow babies with straight black hair as if they had just returned home from MacDonald’s. Following from behind are yellow and white toddlers. It was a touching sight.
The next day, I mentioned this scene to my guide; he remarked “American women don’t want to have the inconvenience of being pregnant for ten months, and so they come here for their children.”
I was outraged by his misrepresentation. Perhaps, two or three out of hundred American women might feel this way, but certainly not the majority. Chinese babies are popular as adoption babies in the United States because the laws are not as stringent governing requirements for adopting parents. Some adoptive parents do not want to consider open adoption because they fear birth mothers may be difficult to deal with. In addition, Chinese babies are healthier than babies from other parts of the world since it is unlikely that birth mothers have drug problems.
The following morning at breakfast not wanting to sit alone, I sat with a white American woman in her thirties. Accompanying her was her younger sister of Vietnamese descent. Apparently, the older sister had come to China to adopt a baby girl. Meanwhile, her younger sister had taken time off from her job to accompany the sister on her trip to China. The beautiful Vietnamese sister, spoke English without a hint of any accents merely smiled demurely during our conversation. I thought it was rather strange that the older sister, who has a successful career in the Midwest, would choose to adopt a child while she still has to care for her husband and their sons. And so, I did not pry.
Then she asked me, “Would you like to see a picture of my brothers and sisters?”
“Of course, I love to!”
From her wallet, she produced a photo of a mid-western family: a father and mother with six children. Three are white and three are yellow, four boys and two girls.
“What a beautiful family!” I said. My heart was warmed knowing that even during these trying times when the rest of the world view America as a boogie-man while Americans are silently adopting children others have abandoned.

Catherine Li, La Jolla, 6/2004