My wife is thirty-two; I’m forty.  Last February (2007), after we entered our adoption dossier with the Chinese government, our agency informed us that China had not finished processing dossiers received in November of 2005, so on a day-for-day  basis, we were still 14+ months from hearing from them.  Twelve months later, the Chinese government is only mid-way through December 2005.  That’s fine, of course.  Apparently, there aren’t as many abandoned Chinese girls as we were led to believe and that’s a good thing.  I would have liked to adopt from China because I am half-Chinese and my lovely Uncle Thom, before he died, asked my cousins and myself to remember China and who we are. 

My wife, who is from New Hampshire, is the kind of white that only long winters and cold mountains can create.  She’s a kind of Tolstoy character –big-hearted and numinous– married to me, an aging half-Chinese Huckleberry Finn.  When we met, I’d spent most of my adult life in a kind of half-planned wandering around the world, trying to articulate this unspoken crush I had on everything.  When we first started talking about our family, my wife asked me if I could imagine adopting from Africa, and I said, yes, of course.  She started thinking.  My wife was reading Melissa Fay Greene’s terrific book, There Is No Me Without You.  I was reading Dave Eggers’ What Is the What and we were both somewhat paralyzed by need and big feelings as we finished our books.  When our Chinese adoption began to look more and more imaginary, we looked again at Africa and I read Greene’s book.  One of my wife’s childhood friends had adopted from Ethiopia and we looked at their photos and it slowly came together: maybe life is like this.  Maybe this is what our life is. 

As for what we look like . . . S. has covered that here.