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21 Chapter Two When Sophie was about six, she first heard Iris DeMent’s agnostic anthem, “Let the Mystery Be” on an old tape I was playing in the car: “Everybody keeps wondering what and where they all came from. . .” “Play that again,” Sophie said from the backseat, so I rewound and replayed. “Again,” she said. It’s a playful, catchy song, but it surprised me that she kept wanting to hear what was essentially a philosophical examination of religious beliefs about human origins and the afterlife. Finally, she asked, “Is that song about adoption?” and it all became clear to me. These weren’t existential questions for her. She wanted to know, quite literally, what and where she came from. Not long after, she requested Paul Simon’s “Born at the Right Time” over and over again: Down among the reeds and rushes, a baby boy was found His eyes were clear as centuries, his silky hair was brown. . . Whenever I heard that song, I thought of my own clear-eyed, dark-haired baby girl, found, according to documents, on the steps of a police station. When I heard the song, I thought of the birth mother hidden somewhere between the lines. I wondered if my daughter also heard echoes of her own story in those words. The birth mother question looms large for many adopted children. Classmates raise the issue in kindergarten and first-grade taunts: “Your real mother didn’t want you!” Before we left for China, strangers and acquaintances were endlessly curious: were we going to see Sophie’s family? Track down her birthparents? I can give a talk about race and culture and adoption, and at the end, someone will always ask, “But do you know her family?” Nancy McCabe 22 “We are each other’s family,” I tend to say, but I know what they mean, and the answer is no. In China, it remains illegal to abandon a child, to bear a non-government-approved child in the first place. Those having second, or in some places, third, children face heavy, sometimes crippling fines. There is no legal mechanism for placing a child for adoption. As much as many adopted Chinese children would like to meet their birthparents, we don’t know what risks seeking them could pose—even if we could find them in a country of 1.3 billion people. All we have been promised is a tour of China. Toward the end, we will visit Sophie’s orphanage, but it is hard to know what to expect. Most people go with many questions but get few answers. It would be nice to track down some link to my daughter’s past, someone who knew and cared for her in the orphanage, someone who can fill in gaps and relieve, at least a little, the acute sense of loss reflected in the questions she sometimes asks. This is why I pack the picture of the man who brought Sophie to me. I know from hearing about the experiences of others that it is unlikely we will be able to track him down, to meet him, to talk to him. I just hope that we can find out who he was. In my adult life, I have lived in six states and, until now, never spent more than five years anywhere. I often wonder what it feels like to know a place deeply, to live there forever, to have a firm concept of home. So I relate a little to my daughter’s feeling of disconnection. I’m not quite sure what we’ll find, but we’re setting off for China because I believe the past is important. That was something I learned from my childhood friend Stacey. “Your parents got stuck with you, but mine chose me,” Stacey used to fling at me when we were in third grade. Indeed, the story went, Stacey, a beautiful olive-skinned, dark-eyed baby, was born to young married college students. It turns out that many adopted children were told this in the ’60s, reassurance that they came from moral, educated people, as if it were too shameful to be the child of unwed high school dropouts. Told that Stacey was likely to be retarded, unable to assume such an overwhelming responsibility, the young couple who’d brought her into the world had magnanimously given her over to a better life. I used to picture a warehouse lined with cribs containing babies in...

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