From the United States.

There’s more detail about his adoption in this rather critical Guardian column, which mentions quite a few things about the context of Miliband’s happy day – in that he wound up snubbing a Saudi Arabian delegation because he had to “dash off to America.”

There are extra helpings of “but it’s only an adoption, not a birth” and “surely Prince Saud should take precedence” in there, but to the columnist’s credit, he does say he’s wrong about that. He just doesn’t *feel* wrong.

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Miliband’s wife is American (which the press says gives her “adoption rights“), but a little digging shows that there are plenty of non-citizens who view America as an ideal “sending country,” as mentioned previously here and here on this very blog.

It’s probably also good for us (in much the same way that eating unsweetened shredded wheat or jogging laps) to have to read stories like these every so often – at least as long as these things actually happen. It’s not pleasant, and it would be better by far if things like that didn’t happen, but as long as they do…. That link goes to further coverage of the Focus on Children agency in Utah, including a rather sordid description of a disrupted Chinese adoption that took place under Focus on Children’s auspices and seems to have resulted in an unhappy daughter and two unhappy families – at least for now. Happiness should come with resolution. At least, let’s hope it does. And let’s hope not too many people read that and think that’s what this process is generally like.

_{Photo credit: Public domain image of the US Civil Flag from Wikipedia}

Of course, babies have their own language, and chances are, if you’re an average parent adopting from China, you’ll be meeting these new kids when they’re really quite new indeed, so what you need right away is some kind of baby translator to know what the latest bout of crying is over. And now (supposedly) you can know for sure.

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Yes, the good researchers at Dunstan Baby Language spent (supposedly) eight years researching the system that all babies use to communicate, regardless of culture. They say babies have five words they all use. One of these is “neh,” which means, “I say, good fellow, would you be so kind as to direct me to the kitchen? I’m feeling rather peckish and thought I might sample whatever victuals are on offer.” Yes, new parents tend to have their priorities in order, so it’s good to know when the squalling youth requires food. Neh.

OK, so maybe I’m a little skeptical of the way Dunstan Baby Language is framing their product. I do think, though, that there’s something to the idea that we’re all basically wired the same at birth, and we all try to express ourselves in basically the same way, no matter where we’re from.

That’s why my eyebrow tends to rise when faced by evidence of neurological differences between Us and Them – especially when Us happens to be Americans and Them happens to be Chinese people. But apparently, according to some scientists, they really do see the world differently. Researchers led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan studied people’s eyes – specifically, the movements people’s eyes made in the first instant they were confronted by a new photograph. North Americans focus directly on the central image. Chinese people flit around the background.

The researchers say this is because Chinese people seek context and want to know social roles in relation to each other, while Westerners evaluate things on an individual basis. They also, uh, trace this back to ancient rice farmers who had to share water, rather than the Greek vineyard owners who grew grapes without talking to their neighbors. Or something.

At any rate, the only bit that’s really of use to adoptive parents comes right at the end, where they talk about the results of Asians raised in North America, and found their eye movements more closely matched other North Americans. In other words, what seems like a difference in brains (the way we move our eyes, the things we see first) is actually a difference in culture. We (and our kids) are Westerners in some surprisingly deep ways.

_{Photo credit: public domain image by Andreas Vesalius found on Wikimedia Commons}

If you haven’t heard of Cassingham, he’s one of the godfathers of internet publishing. He’s been running a for-profit e-mail newsletter, This is True, since the mid-90s. It collects news stories from the world press – focusing on the bizarre, idiotic and just plain unbelievable – and presents them in a snappy little digest with just a little bit of wry editorializing. There’s a free version that’s worth checking out if you haven’t already. Anyway, he and a bunch of subscribers recently got a package deal on a trip to China, and he chronicles it on his blog with his characteristic keen eye for the absurd and the remarkable.

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Adoptive parents (since we spend times with large crowds of children in institutional settings) might be most interested in his observations on China’s public health concerns, particularly what they’re doing about avian flu. But I was also curious about what he was saying about Tibet, especially since his group was there at the same time as those recent tensions I’ve been referring to over the past couple of weeks. And his group was followed around by secret policemen.

He had some trouble with China’s internet blackout of sites that deal with Tibetan news (like, quite possibly, this very blog here). But there’s been quite a bit of chatter on electronic channels about what life is like behind the Great Firewall – the censored version of the internet available inside China. That link goes to a Wired article describing how some high-profile bloggers – and Western reporters – run into problems with the police. And how some of those same bloggers (and, quite probably, the cleverer Western reporters) get around online police surveillance. There’s a network of tunnels beneath the Great Firewall of China, for those that know how to find them.

_{Photo credit: The Great Wall, photographed by Herbert Ponting in 1907, public domain image from Wikimedia Commons}

Scientist. Adventurer. Atom Scrambler.

Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz is a Costa Rican-American of Chinese descent. The Chinese press typically calls him Zhang Fulin (張福林 ), his Chinese name. That’s the same “Fu” you’ll see in a lot of adopted kids’ names – the lucky one. Within China, he’s considered the first Chinese person in space.

Being in space is, as previously established on this very blog, pretty cool. And on one of his missions, he hung out in space itself, not inside the shuttle, while helping put together the International Space Station.

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That’s all well and good, but some kids (freaks!) just aren’t impressed by astronauts. (Sorry. I’m actually not sure if Daughter’s particularly impressed by people in space yet, but she will be.)

No, what’s really cool is the big, fast fires Dr. Chang-Diaz makes. Here’s one explanation of why this is cool, but to really get it, you have to watch the effusively brilliant Dr. Chang-Diaz himself this child-friendly NASA Connect video explaining, as simply as possible, how plasma rockets really work. By turning atoms into scrambled eggs.

Yes, Dr. Chang-Diaz is mighty. Look at that fire! Hot, hot fire! And he makes things *go really fast* with it!

Pretty.

Today, he seems to divide his time between testing the plasma rocket in in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and being an adjunct professor at Rice University and the University of Houston in Texas. There’s a Florida Today interview with him over here (click the link under his smiling face), in which he declares, “I think that humans began exploring space the day they walked out of their caves, and that’s what we really are doing here is nothing less than ensuring the survival of the human species.”

Pretty. And pretty important.

_{Photo credit: Public domain image of Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz from NASA, a government agency.}

This is a page from a Chinese music-and-food blog, translated by Google’s new Chinese translator.

That is, it’s a translator that doesn’t do pinyin – it translates written Chinese characters into English sentences. That (more or less) make sense.

Like, here’s the original front page of that blog. And here’s what the writer is actually saying. (Duck’s blood? Um, delicious.)

Why is this remarkable? Well, for one thing, it’s already working better than Babelfish as far as getting something comprehensible out of the original text. One can also directly link to translated pages, making it easier to share translations with friends and family – like documents and announcements and such.

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But it’s also Google – and it’s only beta. That means (for those to whom “beta” is all Greek) that it’s still in the early, shake-down phase. Soon, all the kinks will be out – it’ll be even more efficient at making sense out of “as if the street outside in India, the immediate one is a partisan Democrat various spices are placed in the small market” and it’ll be part of a globally recognized system.

In other words, documents on a computer somewhere – say, the China Center for Adoption Affairs‘ matching room, or a local government office, like a Social Welfare Institute – can be immediately read on a computer somewhere else – like an adoption agency headquarters. Or, if you’ve got a gmail.com address, your email inbox.

Which would make referrals that much quicker, along with things like evaluating medical records, researching the city in which your children were born or, if you’re up for it, swapping informal communication with institute workers and foster parents.

I’m not saying anyone is actually planning on doing any of this. I’m just saying it’s becoming awfully *convenient* to do it, and (as things like Google maps & gmail show) when things like this become convenient, they tend to spread rapidly.

Personally, I’m also interested in this thing for another reason – the way you can compare the original text with the translation just by moving your mouse over it. It makes the process of learning characters (or even just recognizing Chinese names for people, buildings and cities) that much easier. All I have to do is move my wrist two inches.

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That’s the interesting thing, to me. Both those common metaphors – milestones and hurdles – describe singular events. It’s not like there’s a gradual slope upward on the road of maturation. There’s a series of these big, sudden changes – a digital process, not an analog one. A switch is flipped, and then – bang! – not a baby, but a toddler. (This is not unlike the process of adoption itself, actually, in which you wait and wait and then – bang! – there’s a photo in the mail, and then – bang! – you’re far from home being a parent to strange new creature.)

Which is all by way of introducing the fact that son (son!) has spent the last week talking. I’m not sure if he’d be officially considered “delayed” any more, so we’re looking for other things to worry about at night. For him, this is a great new game. You point to a thing (or, more often, a picture of a thing – I’m sure a Lacanian would have something to say about that). You name the thing. You make a big smile. Parents squeal ecstatically. Then you do it again.

The two words (or, um, images) he seems most enthusiastic about are “truck” and “flower” (which he pronounces “shloweh”). He’ll point to a truck, or a picture of a truck, and say, “truck.” And we squeal ecstatically. Can’t help ourselves.

He’s also asking what things are called by pointing and saying, “Da!”

What’s even more pleasing is that this breakthrough seems to have pleased him on some fundamental level as well. His frustration levels have dropped and small things make him laugh.

It feels good to clear a hurdle. Now, let’s see what the next one will be.

I’m quite fascinated by the story told in Cindy Champnella’s The Waiting Child, although I haven’t read the whole thing. There are excerpts online at Google books that give you enough of the flavor of the tale. It’s the true story of Jaclyn Champnella, who was adopted at age four. She’d been taking care of a younger boy at the Social Welfare Institute, and refused to forget him even after coming to live with a new family in America. Until finally, she got her new aunt and uncle to go to China to adopt the little boy. Amazing. It’s not the story of one trip to China, but two.

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Less adoption-centered, but more this-is-what-it’s-like centered is this sample from a comic book that’s about as good a preparation for traveling to China as anything I’ve ever read. It’s Guy Delisle’s Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China.

The graphic novel tells the story of a Western animation director going to direct a cartoon show being animated by a Chinese studio. This might not seem too similar to travel for the purpose of adopting, but he’s got the hotels *down*, and the scenes of city life seem just right. That’s what it’s like to be there. Do you remember that? I do. Pictures worth a thousand words.

And speaking of journeys, good luck to the Chang’e One lunar orbiter, set to launch this week. It’s going to spend a year mapping the moon’s surface in preparation for a 2012 lunar rover expedition – which I think will make China only the second country to send someone to walk on the moon, won’t it?

She’s four, she’s brilliant, and she’s taking ballet.

She likes ballet. She does well at it. But when she’s 24, I wonder if she’ll have built up a tremendous reservoir of resentment over not having any real mastery over the language of the country of her birth.

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I know that it matters to some people who were adopted across language lines. Like Jane Jeong Trenka, who recently did a radio diary focusing on the hard work of learning Korean, her birth language – and not one she ever heard growing up in Minnesota, but one she’s gradually mastering now that she’s moved back to Korea. People need these connections. People like the ones our children are becoming. Of course, she’s a writer, so language is singularly important.

Then again, I’m a writer, too. (Or so my editors tell me.)

For now, I’m keeping the worst of the guilt at bay by keeping some kind of Mandarin activity (translating the Tao Te Ching character by character on zhongwen.com, or just listening to Chinese new wave music) in rotation on my list of things to do.

That’s why I’m interested in something I’ve just heard about called Livemocha.com It’s another one of those playing-to-the-strengths-of-the-internet sites, linking people who speak one language and want to learn another with people in the opposite boat – so I could do a little English teaching and Mandarin learning at the same time. At least that’s what it looks like to me… I haven’t actually signed up and started doing any networking yet.

One more thing to feel the guilt over, I suppose.

Anyway, I’ll be looking through their lesson plans as soon as I get a moment to spare. Maybe they’ll even have something suitable for a 4-year-old’s learning level – if we do it together.

• The Dalai Lama just got a medal from America’s government, and boy, is the Chinese legislature ticked off. That official statement is as good a way as any to learn China’s version of Tibetan history. It also ends dramatically:
  

  No force can stop the progress of Tibet in the great family of the Chinese nation. All attempts to interfere in China’s internal affairs and undermine China’s fundamental interests are doomed to failure.

  You can practically hear the ominous music swell, can’t you?

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• On a marginally related note (and of more interest to people trying to do a little uncensored net surfing while cooped up in a Guangzhou hotel), a Chinese geek has issued a report on ways around the Great Firewall. I actually never ran into the Firewall while cooped up in my various hotels, but part of the thing with it is it keeps changing. And if American news, say, is being seen as “undermining China’s fundamental interests,” well then, imagine CNN.com vanishing off computers across the country. Except those that know the ways around the Great Firewall.
• Not that everything is all black and white (of course). In fact, I was just reading a Time magazine article from this summer about China’s “Me” Generation — the folks who are coming of age in post-Communist China. It’s an interesting piece overall for anyone who’s a little curious about what everyday life is like over yonder – the stories behind the news. The “Me” Generation — they don’t much care for Communist politics. They don’t much care for any politics. They’re probably a lot like the rest of the world that way.
• And if you want to know just how much like the rest of the world folks in China are, scientists have just sequenced the first genome for a Han Chinese person, opening the door to all kinds of genetic therapies focused on folks of Asian descent. This could be valuable for treating various heritable diseases that occur in Asian populations (like our children) and that occasionally have non-Asian doctors (like some of our pediatricians) scratching their heads.
• On an even more cheerful note, there’s another maybe-extinct animal besides the baiji that might just be not-so-extinct after all: the South China tiger. They’re extremely rare, of course, and not doing so well as a population. But they seem to be hanging on. At least there’s one of them left alive… for now.

One day, the Leader of the School called all his pupils and declared, “Life and death are serious things. You pupils waste your time making offerings, seeking worldly blessings and not even trying to break out of the cycle of life and death! If you give yourself over to delusions, how can blessings save you? Go to your rooms and think for yourselves!

“Those who have true wisdom, use it! Each of you has to write a verse for me. For the student who best sums up the basic ideas taught by the Buddha, I will hand over my robes, naming that person the next Leader of the School. Go on! Hurry!”

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…Late that night, Head Monk Shen-hsiu snuck out and wrote a verse on the wall by candlelight:
The body is the tree of perfect wisdom (like the tree under which the Buddha sat)
The mind is the stand holding up a bright mirror.
Always clean it diligently
Never let it become dusty.

The Leader of the School said, “This verse is good, but it’s not complete – it comes to the door of wisdom, but doesn’t walk through. Ordinary people can follow these words and succeed. But you can’t reach the ultimate wisdom while following this view. You have to walk through the door and see your own nature. Write another verse, show me you’ve seen your own nature, and you’ll have my robes of leadership.”

But the Head Monk spent days trying to come up with another verse and couldn’t.

I’d also written a verse:
The tree under which the Buddha sat is not his enlightenment.
The mind is not a bright mirror.
Since everything is originally empty,
Where can there be any dust?

The other monks were surprised by my verse; I went back to the kitchen to pound rice. But the Leader of the School realized that I alone understood the basic ideas taught by the Buddha.

_{— tr. by me, loosely after Dr. Wing-Tsit Chan}

Hui-neng (also written in pinyin as Huineng) is one of the most important (and entertaining) figures in Chinese Buddhism – specifically in the school that was known as Dhyana in India and as Ch’an in China. In the West, most people know it by its Japanese name: Zen. These are all versions of the same name, a word that means “meditation”, specifically the kind of meditation where one sits and empties one’s mind of all distractions. Before the first Dhyana Buddhists traveled to China, there were Chinese Buddhists who practiced something they called “meditation,” but it was more about visualizing internal energies and preserving your outer jade fluid and that. But in the 600s (just before the time that Mohammed was moving his mountain and the Christians were deciding to shave their heads in circles instead of sideways ((and no, I’m not making that up))), a fellow named Hung-jen took the lessons of Bodhidharma and said, “THIS is the way it oughtta go!” He’s the Leader of the School mentioned up there – the Fifth Patriarch of Ch’an.

Hui-neng was his most notable pupil. He was actually a kitchen boy in the monastery – an orphan who supported himself selling firewood – but, after the little poetry contest quoted up there, he went on to become the Sixth Patriarch, founder of the influential Southern School of Zen Buddhism. His school is the one we all recognize as Zen today. It emphasizes sudden enlightenment (no long waiting!) and the concept that the mind is best understood as a single, indivisible thing that emanates from True Reality. Since it can’t be divided, that means that anything, anywhere can be understood as a part of our minds (and that our minds are just a part of the bricks, sofas, cars, nightclubs, rain drops and eggplant parmigiana around us). And if everything is part of our mind, then everything has Buddha-nature… which means that everything can lead directly to sudden enlightenment.

There’s another version of the Zen poetry duel over here, and a fun “what happened next” story at the e-sangha.

(As a language note, the name “Hui” means “bright,” as in the “bright mirror” and as in “Hui-neng.” You’ll see it as an element in lots of Chinese names – including my daughter’s.)