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A Family Journey
by Cristine M. Klika

This photo journal contains both photos and prose. All photography was taken by the author, and all prose was written by the author. Click on the images directly following to open Cristine's photo journal in a new window.

Our journey to China in November 2000 was not so much a journey to China as it was a journey to our family.

During the couple of days off from doing paperwork while we waited for our daughter Piper's adoption papers to be completed by the Hubei provincial government, Tracy, our guide, was kind enough to take me to the place where Piper was found abandoned. The reported location was the entrance to Gongchenying [image 1]—a "committee"—which translates to mean an apartment complex.

It's more than an apartment complex, though. It's the starting point for how the government keeps track of 1.6 billion people. To me, a person born in 1956, the word "committee" elicits images of intellectuals forced to labor in coal mines and of farming cooperatives where people wade through water buffalo dung to plant rice. However, I learned that the everyday lives of people in today's urban China are much less dramatic. Get to work. Prepare supper [image 2]. Take care of the kids [image 3]. Play, if you're a kid [image 4], and even if you're an adult [image 5]. The reminders of strictly controlled lives are signs telling people the rules of conduct in the complex, such as not spitting in the street [image 6], and a person peering critically out a doorway as we strolled and took pictures [image 7].

Tracy and I pieced together a scenario. There is a park adjacent to the committee. It is a pleasant shady area with croquet courts and pony cart rides on the banks of a small lake [image 8]. The area is paved, with stone curbing around the tree trunks—not the grassy sort of parks we have in the United States. Perhaps Piper's birth mother had visited the park. She would have seen the committee, and she would've known that if she put her baby down in the entrance to the main building, someone would be along shortly to find her. Perhaps she even waited to see that her baby was safely picked up.

As we walked along that path, a deep sorrow came over me. But it wouldn't last long. In only a few days, happiness would replace it, as the love for a child began to take over our lives and our world.