Celebrating Three Trips to China

By Myck and Mark W.

In 1991 our sons and a daughter were in grades eleven, nine and five. As the oldest toured colleges we were just beginning to see on the horizon the end of swim meets, soccer games, and school concerts. Many couples in their early forties might have calmly floated toward that horizon happily accumulating tuition debt, but we had not had our fill of bedtime stories, visits by the tooth fairy, or stopping into the local toy store to admire Playmobile's latest creations. Suddenly we found ourselves in a Wide Horizons information meeting.

For us the sense of new adventure grew steadily, first we imagined a fourth child in the house, and then even more when we discovered that our age qualified us especially for the CHina program. In 1991 it was still unusual for Americans to visit China, and no group from an American adoption agency had yet made a trip. If we could complete the document scavenger hunt quickly and without an interstate collision, we could be on WHFC's "China One" journey. And that was just the beginning.

Since 1991 we have returned three times to China, twice to adopt yet another daughter, and another time to take two of them on a tour of their native land. Taegan, our China One child, was seven months old when we met her in a damp and dingy brick structure in Changsha, Hunan. But she lit up our lives, and when she turned five, none of us could resist her demands for a younger sister. We celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary by signing another WHFC application.

Word came that we were getting on in years and would need to take an older child. We worried about all the issues an "older child" would have. Would she bond as well? What about language? In a few months we stood looking at a picture of our three-year old Kaily. Three months after her arrival she was fluent in English. In four it seemed as though she had been with us for four years.

By this time we were thoroughly hooked on China. In 1999 we took the girls touring, and visited their orphanages. Although we were concerned that staff would be too busy to see us, in Changsha Taegan's orphanage director spent two days hugging the girls. The orphanage staff couldn't have been more proud of them. In Xiamen, Kaily's city, we arrived unannounced, but still got a full tour of the social welfare center, though neither we, nor the staff, understood a word of the other's language!

Our most recent voyage of discovery took us and the brave parents of China 114 to the north-central city of Lanzhou in Gansu province. This time our only concern regarding three-year-old Quincy was whether we were pushing our luck. Taegan and Kaily came along to help. Back home our older three, two now married, rolled their eyes. Had their parents done the math? But as Quincy recently advised with five months of English under her belt, "Just relax." And so, once again, despite all the costs on the horizon that we were floating toward, we and our family grew richer than ever. Each one of our trips was full of adventure and joy. Everywhere we went people welcomed us, or simply gave us the "thumbs up." Our fellow adoptive parents were all terrific people, and WHFC's China program, under Linda Lin's leadership, was superbly staffed and ready for any contingency. For us China became a fascinating place to explore, and we loved having such a special connection with a people on the other side of the world.

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