The Memory Game

Hi everyone,

We've resolved our new computer's recharging issues (for the moment), so I'm posting this on our final evening in Shanghai, after a fabulous day of sight seeing. There's plenty to see in Shanghai, China's second largest city, home to some 18 million people (almost the entire population of Canada's crammed into this vast and circuitous metropolis ... Believe me, you never want to drive here if you were not born to the business.)

We are now less than one day away from receiving Maeve's mei mei. We're also collectively bushed; Maeve and I have yet to adjust to the timezone. (Maeve's been a trooper, though, touring with her eyes in the back of her head, not wanting to miss a thing) ... Nevertheless, Kath and I are more than ready to head to the airport and fly on to Nanchang for the big event of this second trip-of-a-lifetime to China:

Our Gotcha Day with Nian Yu, a.k.a. Elspeth.

This time around Kath and I are far less focussed on the impending change to us---after all, we're no longer parental newbees trying "Mom" and "Dad" on for size. So our focus is on the change in the lives of both our daughters. Elspeth is about to experience the really scary, disorienting change, of course. But for Maeve, gaining a sister is something pretty new too.

Actually, some of you know that's not entirely true. Maeve gained two sisters very very close in age to her when she entered a foster home at 10 days old. She was raised alongside those sisters, almost as a set of triplets, for most of the first year of her life. She's somewhat familiar with what it's like to have sisters, and to be close to them ... Plus, Maeve's returning to the land of her birth, to sights and sounds and smells she might yet have some sense of, memories locked up in her infancy, her life's lost beginning.

So it's a return trip for all three of us---all five of us, as Kath's parents are accompanying us again (helping hands and translators who we are eternally grateful for!)

Now to fill you in on the specifics of our journey so far:

This long-awaited trip to El began with the same giant step that we took on our journey to Maeve---a loooong flight to the far side of the planet. And Kathleen and I knew from the get-go that this flight was going to be a lot more challenging ... Travelling in cramped quarters with a 3 year old non-stop for more than 24 hours is not for the faint of heart.

So we left our house at 4:30 AM Wednesday morning well stocked with entertainment materials for Maeve---not that she needed them during the shuttle ride to Pearson. Our shuttle driver was astonished at how excitedly Maeve chattered on through the pre-dawn hours all the way to the airport. "Didn't expect all that enthusiasm from such a little girl so early in the day," he told us when he dropped us off.

We didn't expect it either. One of the first things Maeve declared once she was strapped into the car seat in the shuttle was "I can't wait to meet my mei mei!" (Mandarin for little sister).

We tried to remind her that she still had several days to wait, but to no avail.

Maeve's excitement only climbed when we boarded the 777 to Shanghai. Our own anticipation was a bit diminished by the discovery that seating in a 777 is a lot less capacious and less comfortable than in the Airbus that took us to China when we went to receive Maeve in 2007. This was going to be challenging!

Over the next 19 hours---including a 2 hour stopover in Vancouver---we trotted out the array of diversions Kath had put together to keep Maeve occupied. A bracelet building kit. A pair of colouring books. A pair of sticker books. A pair of regular books that I read to her: "Shanghai Secret", about a girl who moves to Shanghai and gets involved in a mystery about two missing pandas at the zoo; and an Enid Blyton book, the sequel to another mystery Maeve had loved listening to, and demanded me re-read again and again to her. She let me read her a chapter or two of this new Blyton on the flight back to her homeland before growing too restless for reading.

Fortunately, we had one really big hit among the diversions, a game she wanted to play over and over: The Memory Game, which came in a small box and included 48 tiny tiles, each displaying the face of a child distinctive in looks, hair, and headdress (hats, braids, beads, hoods, etc).

The Memory Game is that classic matching game most people played as children, where all the tiles or cards are turned face-down, and each player gets to turn over two at a time, to see if they can find matches ... The game boils down to remembering where you saw the match for whatever card or tile you turn over.

Does Maeve have a good memory for faces?

Oh yes she does! Despite having been woken up halfway through the night, and then missing her midday nap, she wanted to play The Memory Game again and again on the fold-down tray table, and proved capable of recalling exactly where matching tiles were way better than Kath and I could ...

We shouldn't have been surprised.

We'd discovered Maeve's memory for faces back when she turned 2 years old, in the most amazing and moving way ... A year after Maeve came home with us to Canada we were informed that she'd shared her infancy with a pair of foster-sisters---and that those foster-sisters were little girls we happened to know! They were daughters of members of our closeknit adoption group.

Upon learning the name that the foster mom had called one of her foster sisters, I held a group photo showing the faces of eight of the babies in our adoption group before Maeve, and asked her to "Point to Jiao Jiao." She didn't hesitate, and pointed directly to the right face. She clearly remembered her foster-sister well, more than a year after their separation!

Will Maeve remember her foster-mother, who we hope to meet later in the week, after tomorrow's first meeting with Elspeth? Will the foster-mom's body language, voice, other nuances tweak some faint moment of familiarity in our eldest daughter? Will Maeve experience some tantalizing echo of her own lost beginning?

That is part of the Memory Game we are playing on this second journey to China. And Kath and I have our own important game-plays to make: we must remember and record everything we can, for Elspeth's sake, on this special journey. We owe this to her, to learn as much as we can, to commit to memory the beginning of her story with our family, so that she has a place to start digging backwards from when she grows old enough to be curious about her mysterious, misplaced infancy ...

The final hours of our long first-step flight to Elspeth were hard on Maeve. She was now into her second night in the air, and instead of the usual ten hours of sleep she'd gotten perhaps 90 minutes. "I'm very frustrated, Mama," she kept repeating during those last exhausting hours. We understood how she felt.

After deplaning, we discovered the bus trip from the Shanghai airport to our hotel was a 2 hour ride---not what we needed 26 hours after leaving our front door. Maeve fell asleep in Kath's arms as we blearily blinked out the bus windows at the vast industrial wilderness surrounding Shanghai. Eventually the city itself loomed up into the night, and we were awed by the scale of the place. The highway we took in to the city center was literally a skyway with three lower highways running underneath it; half an hour from the hotel, we began to curve down an enormous concrete skyway spiral that linked the various highways at different heights. Kath had never seen anything like it, and I`d seen images like that only in 1930`s SF magazines.

So our first exhausted impression of Shanghai was one of spiralling down out of a foggy night sky into a brilliiant city that was seemed a Future-in-Watiing. China, the superpower to be, birthplace of both our precious children ... We are back in this magnificent country once again, and feeling very blessed, very grateful to be here.

Yesterday morning we took Maeve for her first daytime trek into Shanghai, exploring the wonders along the Nanjing road---a district that certainly suggests China won't have long to wait for its great future to arrive.

We don't have long to wait for our future, either. Our daughters are beautiful little futures-in-waiting with obsidian eyes and jet black hair ... How much hair does Elspeth have now, we wonder? How much has she grown since the last photo we received of her? How will she react to meeting us, her new parents---and Maeve, her new jie jie (big sister?)

Tomorrow the future arrives for us, a second time.

And like Maeve, we just can't wait :)

Pat and Kathleen,

signing off from Shanghai