The Pandemic Blues, Part 21: A Zoom adoption reunion to cherish

 

In honor of the Chinese New Year (the Year of the Ox), which started today (Feb. 12), I’d like to share this column that I wrote for this month’s (February) edition of Jewish Rhode Island in Providence, R.I., about a recent reunion that we shared with our older daughter’s adoption group.
Of course, due to the pandemic, the reunion had to be held on Zoom – that equally frustrating and miraculous online platform that is keeping human beings connected in these days of being stuck in our never-ending virtual purgatory.
We all hope and pray for the day when we can again enjoy our fellowship in person.
Happy Chinese New Year!

This column was published in the February of 2021 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence R.I.

Compared to the two most recent reunions of our older daughter’s adoption group, the Zoom gathering that we had to settle for on the Saturday night after New Year’s Day would have been considered a letdown.
That’s understandable because those reunions, in the winter of 2017 at a restaurant in Sturbridge and on the Cape the following summer, were the personification of what fellowship, friendship, community and celebration used to be before the pandemic:
We met in person, shared relaxing dinners in honest-to-goodness restaurants and enjoyed lively conversations and heartfelt bonding. The weekend summer reunion also included lazy afternoons and evenings by the motel pool, informal chats catching up with old friends and the cutting of a cake after our extended Saturday night dinner.
Those reunions added more fond memories to the ones formed during the more than two decades of gatherings that we held to celebrate what we had accomplished on Sept. 19, 1997, in Hefei, China, where we had journeyed to adopt our toddlers. Those little girls, whom we cradled so carefully in our arms on the girls’ Adoption Day, are now young adults who have graduated from college or are pursuing advanced degrees while also working in a variety of professions --- teaching, engineering, biogenetics, to name just a few.
Much has changed since we first adopted our daughters at a time when international adoption still wasn’t quite so popular or routine as it eventually became for American couples yearning to start families. The movement to adopt Chinese girls at that time gained steam because of that country’s one-child policy, which the Chinese government ended in 2015.
It was a different world in 1997, the year that Hong Kong was given back to China. That country was just starting to become an industrial giant, there was thick smog in the girls’ home city, and a perceived limit on the availability of retail products in China that were widely available at home led to us being told to take plenty of toilet paper and formula for the girls, who were between 13 and 17 months. (The latter came in handy, but there was plenty of the former at our hotels.)
What would soon become a tight-knit group of new parents first met in the Hong Kong airport, where a flight to the girls’ home city awaited. When we landed in Hefei later that Wednesday night, we boarded a bus to the hotel and were told that the adoption would be pushed back one day to Friday.
No one was disappointed; the chance to rest one more day was a divine gift, because all of us were nervous and anxious just thinking about becoming parents. The reality that we would be handed a life to take care of was daunting enough to make sleep rare on the final two nights before parenthood changed our lives.
The handover from local Chinese adoption officials in a hotel conference room on Friday morning went as smoothly as possible as the girls seemed to adapt to their new surroundings, although the sight of fathers and mothers walking the hotel halls with their kids at night became common.
The next two weeks in China breezed by, and we flew home forever transformed. I’ll never forget how animated my daughter, Ari, was when we got into the car that picked us up at the airport; sensing the excitement, she clapped her hands, as if to say: “Get me home already.”
We quickly grew accustomed to the challenges of parenthood, and each year, our adoption group – which included families from New York, Rhode Island and Florida as well as Massachusetts – would hold a reunion, something that we remarkably did every year through 2012.
Reunions then became less frequent; with the girls in high school, they kept in touch on social media, but getting together became difficult. Some of the girls attended Ari’s high school graduation party in 2014, but it had been a while since the parents had gotten together until we had the first of our last two in-person reunions in 2017 at Sturbridge’s Publick House. We had a grand time, and at one point, I turned to one of the mothers and said, “Janis, we’ve done good.”
Grammarians will scold me, because I should have said “we’ve done well,” but my point was that our perseverance during those two weeks we spent in China in 1997 produced two equally important results:
* They forever changed our daughters’ lives for the better.
* They made us parents for the first time, and created unique and strong bonds between strangers.
At the 2018 reunion on the Cape, we made tentative plans to gather again in a couple of years – over the summer of 2020. But like nearly all plans made for 2020, that reunion didn’t happen.
That’s why, when the email invite arrived Jan. 2 to hold a reunion on Zoom that evening, several of the 10 parents who have kept in touch enthusiastically responded. What followed was typical of the reactions that people have had when they’ve been finally able to reconnect with friends during this pandemic, which has stolen our ability to meet in person:
We shared stories, we laughed, we received updates about our lives and those of our daughters and we commiserated about this terrible pandemic.
We all felt incredibly grateful that we’ve survived this “new normal” that has robbed us of our humanity – and we vowed to meet in person as soon as we’re able to do so to celebrate the miracle of adoption that happened so long ago in China.
It's the least we owe each other and our daughters.
LARRY KESSLER (larrythek65@gmail.com) is a freelance writer based in North Attleboro. He and his wife Lynne adopted a second child, Alana, from China in 2002. He blogs at  https://larrytheklineup.blogspot.com/