Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

This much we know. Across the playing fields just east of the Jericho Beach Youth Hostel they hobbled, some of them holding hands, Mei Li and Xiao Yu for sure, yes, they would have been holding hands-fingers threaded together in a tight weave, like a waterproof basket made of reeds bobbing along an irrigation canal, a baby girl wrapped in newspaper mewling inside. The other girls hurried alongside them. Mei Ming would have started singing; she was the musical one, the one with that voice, as we often heard the mothers of the other girls grudgingly admit.

They stopped halfway across the field. We can tell you that. The moon that night was a fat crescent, like a window on an outhouse door in a New Yorker cartoon. Their strange footprints must have shimmered in the fresh snow. A herd of deer, an early-morning dog walker might have thought, how odd.

How much odder the truth.

A number of the girls appear to have eaten chocolate bars, miniature Caramilks no doubt left over from Halloween, the wrappers casually tossed near the second baseline of the ball diamond. One of them smoked a cigarette, a Matinee Extra Mild, the butt found lightly rimmed in marzipan-scented Lip Smacker where the footprints abruptly ended. Another wrote Up yours in the snow, not with swaggering piss the way a boy would have, but by clumsily dragging her small heel. (Not my daughter, Frank de Rocherer insisted the next morning, stamping his slipper-clad foot-in their panic most of the parents hadn’t thought to get dressed. As if that mattered now, which daughter smoked, which daughter was profane, which daughters had insatiable sweet tooths.)

From a distance, if you approached the snowy field from the west, their footprints looked like a series of brushstrokes forming a long-necked bird. A crane, Myra Nagle insisted, and soon that’s what it was, a crane rising skyward. A most auspicious symbol, we have since learned.

Of course we weren’t there to witness all this. We can only imagine. Conjecture, you understand. And if it hadn’t been for the snowfall, a rare Christmas Eve snowfall in the coastal city, we wouldn’t have anything to go on at all.

THE YEAR OF THE STORK

We watched, those of us who were too old, too divorced, too medicated (too selfish, some said, too lazy) to have adopted Chinese daughters. We watched some dozen years ago as couples living on our cul-de-sac disappeared into the smog-cloaked air of Guangdong Province-one of the most polluted places on earth, where the clang and clatter of an almost desperate progress hearkened back to Dickensian England- and returned with tiny, clear-eyed girls whose provenance was a mystery, known only to the hollow-armed mothers who had forsaken them, and whose only forms of identification, besides the Resident alien stamps beside their names in their new passports, were the ragged pieces of rice paper, marked with their footprints in red ink, that their new parents framed behind glass and hung above their cribs in white bedrooms overlooking the ocean, as if to say, Watch your step.

We’re making it sound as if all this happened seamlessly. In fact, ethical debates stormed through our cul-de- sac for an entire summer on the issue of bringing children into a world beset by woe, when more than a continent away dark-haired babies lay on greying sheets, their futures rapidly fraying at the edges.

We know most of the men cheerfully submitted to vasectomies. “Too much information,” we’d say if we met them while hauling our blue boxes to the curb and they jocularly pointed out-although not before noting (once again) that we hadn’t flattened our cans-that they’d spent the previous evening parked in front of the Discovery Channel sitting on a bag of frozen peas, adding that it was the least they could do to help save wear and tear on the planet. Or, as prematurely grey, ponytailed Gary Forsythe put it, making a peace sign and then scissoring his fingers much too close to our faces, Snip snip. The women were also aggressive about birth control, although even Carol Fawcett’s closest friends admitted they found her opting for a full hysterectomy a little, well, “show-offy, don’t you think?”

Jiang Li was first. “You should call her Pearl!” one of us exclaimed as we all crowded around for another look at those fingers, those toes. “Oh, no,” said Laura Warkentin, scrunching up her face as if we’d suggested calling her daughter Rover or Spike. Her husband, Joe, standing behind her, recited a Chinese proverb: “Human beings are like falling water. Tip them East and they flow East. Tip them West and they flow West.” He sounded like Master Po addressing the young Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu. At the time we thought he was just trying to be amusing.

We found it touching at first how Jiang Li’s parents offered a wealth of detail about the circumstances of her abandonment. Wrapped in elephant-leaved taro and left by an irrigation canal in the Pearl River Delta, water buffalo in a neighbouring field looking as if they were standing guard, an illegible note pinned to her diaper. But as our formerly quiet street swelled with the sounds of cooing and crying, the oft-repeated stories became overwhelming, like some life-sized game of Clue run amok. Xin Qian by a freeway bundled in a pair of worn blue work pants. Fang Yin on a bench in a moonlit park clutching the stub of a movie ticket (Flashdance). Li Wei at a railroad station teething on a wizened yam.

It was as if where they were found explained who they were. As if looking back was more important than looking forward. As if there was something intrinsically romantic, rather than profoundly disturbing, about a baby found at an open-air market in a cardboard box amidst a pile of pole beans or winter melons.

THE FENG SHUI OF ANDREW MACINTOSH

We watched, those of us who lacked the emotional fortitude, the capacity for sacrifice, and the largeness of spirit (the chutzpah, some said, meaning it, of course, in the ecumenical sense) of our neighbours who had adopted Chinese daughters.

We watched Nina Sawatsky mastering homemade pot-stickers, brushing away our compliments with a breezy, “Oh, you know, they’re just like perogies.” We watched Jamie Tate patiently guiding his girl through her calligraphy exercises, until her brushstrokes were swift and sure, promising her a Shar-Pei puppy if she could master the character for bliss. We watched as Caitlin Rogers (yes, those Rogerses), holding her straight, honey-blond hair out of the way, showed her small daughter how to clear her throat and release a frothy gob curbside, just as the girl’s ancestors had done for thousands of years (according to primary sources Caitlin Rogers herself had interviewed at the Chinese Benevolent Association on Pender Street). We watched Andy MacIntosh, a ruddy Scot, standing amidst the rubble of his house, his family ensconced at the Westin Bayshore, while he directed a construction team to favourably reorient their mock Tudor so the wind could blow through it in a manner that maximized the flow of positive ch’i, and to set the doors at an angle to the sidewalk so as to thwart evil spirits. (We were surprised to learn evil spirits were so easy to fool.) And he was just the first.

Feng shui, feng shui, feng shui-the cry rose and spread through our cul-de-sac like the swishing wings of a thousand cranes taking flight. The girls must have heard it, too. They held their hands to their ears; they each pulled a Sony Discman out of hiding places deep in the laurel bushes at the edge of the Gill- Campbell property, plugging themselves in as if to drown out the ancestral murmurs emanating from their newly situated houses.

We watched one particularly wet autumn morning just over a year ago as the girls, dressed in identical puffy quilted cotton jackets and worker pants, participated in group exercises out in the middle of the street, led by Marshall Evans. Their hair appeared to have been cut with pruning shears and was of a uniform, unflattering length. They were assigned households at random and sent off to greet their new parents and tidy their new bedrooms. The traditional-medicine phase of the summer-when the girls, bristling like porcupines, lay in their backyards on bamboo mats while Greig Ladner, a do-ityourself kind of guy, applied his newly acquired acupuncture skills to everything from sunburns to hurt feelings-seemed so harmless now.

“Let a thousand flowers bloom,” we suggested tactfully as we watched the girls form a human pyramid in order to clean out the eavestroughs on the Simpsons’ stylish West Coast Modern, all the while singing patriotic marching songs praising Mao Tse-tung. “Oh, mind your own beeswax,” said Dana Simpson, who was, we can be sure, echoing the sentiments of all the other parents.

We often wondered over the years what the girls really heard as they lay quietly in their beds at night in their embroidered silk pyjamas. There must have been something beyond the sharp clack of mah-jong tiles as their parents gathered around dining-room tables into the early hours of the morning, something just beyond the wind shivering through the thick stands of bamboo that obscured the view of the ocean from their bedroom windows.