A little over one year ago, on my third to last day in Jinhua, my translator E. suddenly turned towards me. “Can I tell you? I have a secret wish,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. I stopped too, and the evening foot traffic of downtown broke and flowed around us, a mix of tired businessmen and young shoppers who barely spared us a glance as they passed. A nearby food stall laced the air with the scent of hot oil and frying chicken; ahead of us, on the street corner, a group of musicians played a waltz.
“Yeah, of course,” I said.
“I have a dream,” she said. She paused to find the words, hands already gesturing her meaning. “That I help you find your birth parents before mid-Autumn Festival so you can spend mid-Autumn Festival with them.” She laughed again. “It is silly, I know—”
“No,” I said quickly. “No, it’s not silly.” It was my turn to hesitate. Her unexpected words, and the kindness and the earnestness within them, had rendered me speechless of response. I was very near tears. “Thank you,” I finally said, and hoped she could tell how much I meant it.
The conversation moved on. What she said stayed with me, echoing through the rest of my trip and my return to the United States. Even more than the words I remember the feeling: the unexpected, exposed, wrenching sensation of someone reaching straight into my heart to show me what lived in theirs. I didn’t even want to find my birth parents—even now, I don’t want to; the cultural difference is less of a gap and more of a chasm, the expectations built over 22 years inevitably different from reality—but it had afflicted me with guilt throughout my trip, particularly when I reached Jinhua and met the birth parents so desperately searching. E.’s words threw all of that into stark relief, but for the first time I didn’t feel guilty. Oh, I remember thinking in the moments after she spoke. She is dreaming for me.
The Mid-Autumn Festival, or 中秋节, is held on the 15th day of the 8th month in the Han calendar, and is a traditional celebration of family, thanksgiving, and prayer. (In 2016, it fell on Sept. 15th, which I did not realize until arriving in Jinhua.) It’s well-known in the United States because of its association with mooncakes, but it was the emphasis on family that made her words especially moving. I was actually leaving on the 15th, and the image that she conjured—me, eating with my birth family, reunited—was breathtakingly impossible from what I knew would be my reality: traveling on a rattling sleeper car, alone, back to Guangzhou. By this point I had spent five weeks in China and had one more week in Korea to go. I was emotionally exhausted, lonely, and homesick, but that evening I realized something, although it was a long time before I could explain it.
I had found a small family. Fleeting, of course, and I will probably never see them again, but in the TV crew and my AirBNB hosts and the birth parents who saw in me their missing daughters, I found a group of people who reached out and cared when I was lonely and vulnerable. They felt for me, when my feelings were so wrung out I was afraid to feel anymore, and they showed me a kindness that I could turn into strength. On the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, my host family cooked a meal and we ate it with the reporters and the cameraman. I gave them mooncakes, and they gave me mooncakes, too, and bags so heavy with fruit I could barely carry it all.
“I am sorry we did not find your family,” E. said later, over the phone, when the final DNA test came back negative. She sounded sad and disappointed, and I was struck by it again, how selflessly and straightforwardly she could dream for me.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s okay. Please don’t worry - it’s okay. Thank you for… thank you.”
In the end, I was never able to say to E. what I was thinking. Maybe that’s why I’m saying it now, one year late.
To all those who took care of me in Jinhua: Thank you for your hard work and investment in me. Thank you for your patience and your caring and your kindness. Thank you for supporting me, even when you could barely understand me. Thank you for taking me to my orphanage, and for telling me I was welcome back in Jinhua anytime. Thank you to my hosts, for putting your lives on hold while I was there in order to shuttle me around and welcome the TV crew into your home. And E.—even though we didn’t find my birth parents, please know that you helped find me a family after all. As fleeting as it was, it means everything in the world to me.
Thank you.
The main group of reporters I spent time with. From L>R: M. (main reporter), Me, E. (translator), and I. (reporter).