Thursday,
October
28, 2010
Groundhog Day in Guangzhou. That was April's first comment at
breakfast this morning. If you're not careful, routine can
become monotony. If ever there was a family that lacked routine,
we're it. We should probably have MORE routine in our lives, but
that's just not the cards we've been dealt.
Today was the first day without any kind of official business so
we had planned to visit Liuhua Hu Park to let the kids run
around and play. Liuhua is a large "Hu", or lake, park in the
center of Guangzhou. We left the White Swan around 10:00 and
arrived at the park around 10:30 or so. The park was teeming
with people doing all kinds of things. People were exercising on
the mechanical exercise machines, there were community sing-alongs,
women practicing Tai Chi in unison, ping pong matches, and of
course the ubiquitous groups of hackysack players. We stopped
here and there to group together and see the sights of all the
locals doing things that are very normal to them and very
foreign to us. Gemma and Faith were roaming around together
squealing and giggling about various things. We bought some
cheap tickets for them to ride a carousel and they had fun.
At one point we stopped at a scenic little knoll overlooking the
lake. It was a good place to let the kids play and capture some
photos. Pretty soon we were the subjects of the photos as quite
a few locals showed up to see what we were up to. A couple of
them were snapping pictures of us.
We ventured out onto a little island that had intricate designs
in the architecture and vegetation. From there we roamed back
across the park into a small play area that cost a couple Yuan.
The kids ran around from play structure to play structure
squealing and laughing some more.
So far we haven't seen a single tear out of Gemma. She's a
good-natured kid that is very playful. She can definitely be
obnoxious at times and does not yet have a handle on her volume.
We've been looking for her to show some grief - any grief at all
just to know that she has a healthy sense of loss. If she's
grieving at losing her foster family or friends in the
orphanage, it's not manifesting itself in any way we've seen. We
were getting a little worried that maybe she is too detached,
that we might start having attachment issues. Of the two of us,
she seems to attach to April the most. She shows more respect to
April which leads me to believe that her foster mom was the
disciplinarian and her foster dad was perhaps more lax about it.
I've tried to say "wo ai ni" to her several times but she just
laughs and rolls her eyes.
I had actually begun to be really concerned about it and then as
we were walking through Liuhua park, she suddenly asked me to
carry her. Lice or no lice, I was going to carry that little
girl. (truth is, we haven't seen any bugs at all and have pretty
much gotten rid of all the nits we could see). She soon switched
from the front to the back and I was carrying her piggy-back
style, happy as could be that she reached out like this.
Hopefully this was the beginning of our father-daughter
connection.
Back at the White Swan it was time for a quick stop at the Deli
Shop to pick up some food. April was wanting something a little
more substantive than the snacks we'd brought for lunch. Gemma
got her noodle and ox bowl again while April chose the curry.
Gavin and I opted for some of our protein bars.
We spent the rest of the afternoon indoors, just passing the
time with various activities like drawing, writing blog posts,
etc. We discovered how to enable the Chinese and Pinyin
keyboards on the iPod, so Gemma and I translated some sentences
back and forth. She can now just draw a character freehand and
Jibbigo will translate it. I tried for several minutes to write
the character for father and couldn't get it. About to give up,
she showed me that I was doing it wrong and needed to write the
strokes in a particular order. Once I did that, the translator
picked it up perfectly. I just learned something about what it
takes to be a child growing up in China. The characters are
complex, but there is a definite order to things. It must be a
monumental task to teach a child how to write in China. Watching
her write character after character with her finger on the
keyboard, I developed a real sense of admiration. April and I
will need to work very hard to make sure she preserves her
ability to read, write, and speak Chinese.
At 5:00 we all gathered at the tour reception area for a group
dinner at J.M. Chef - the Chinese food place half a block down
next to the photo shop. We struck out across the parking lot
when suddenly Gemma wanted to ride piggy-back again. YES! I have
never been so happy to have a kid on my back. I carried her
until she wanted to get down just at the entrance to the
restaurant. Since then she's been allowing me to hold her hand
more on walks as well.
Dinner was very nice. We sat at a table with the Perrys since
our girls are such buddies, and the Downes and Leuck families
sat together with the guides. Dinner was family style but not
quite dim sum. We had some kind of tomato-beef dish, cashew
chicken, fried rice, and some kind of fried pastry with
condensed milk. It was tasty but not as good as we remembered
from last time. It was filling though and soon time to head
back.
Arriving at the room, it seemed like it should have been 9pm but
it was only around 7:00. Gemma had a Coke at dinner (which
apparently they had drank a lot of in their foster family) and
she was completely wired. For the next couple hours we had an
extremely entertaining game of Uno. She won two hands and Gavin
the third. Gemma was speaking mixed English the whole time and
being overly-expressive about the cards she was drawing. She
said the letter "W" over and over again, presumably because she
liked the way it sounded. We kept thinking of Will Ferrel's
character in Elf when he says "Francisco…that's fun to say…Fran-cis-co".
The way she said it was almost indistinguishable as the letter
"W", but it was hilarious and got us all cracking up. Whenever
she'd win a hand she'd flash us the V for victory and laugh in a
most obnoxious way.
Pretty soon it was time to turn in for the night. We headed to
bed knowing the connection was getting tighter, and fearing less
and less about our inability to communicate. Between Gemma's
natural expressiveness and the Jibbigo translator on the iPod,
there's not much we can't understand about each other. It has
been really fun having the language barrier and being forced to
adapt to each other. It won't take long for her to really begin
speaking English, and we're doing a pretty good job of learning
some Chinese phrases too. |
The kids riding the carousel at Liuhua Hu Park
A little morning Tai Chi for the ladies
Community sing-along
The girls posing for pictures
Gavin striking some kind of Kung Fu pose
All the kids at play on the rocks
Gemma and Faith on the playground equipment
Delighted to be carrying my girl
Lunch break |
