We got Zoe exactly one week ago today.

After lunch last Sunday, the director of the orphanage came to our hotel and brought Zoe to us.

Wow. So here’s our new daughter!

The adoption home study had required us to meet with a therapist who specializes in adoptive families. She ‘checked us out.’ She asked us a bunch of questions like she was supposed to, but she also gave us a heads-up.

She herself had two kids from foreign adoption and she spoke directly to us about attachment issues. She said the worst thing that can happen is if the kid is ambivalent about her new parents, and just goes along without protest.

If the child does that, it means he or she never attached to anyone in the first place and may not have developed the ability to ever attach to anyone. Very bad. (Ever meet someone who was chronically unable to sustain a relationship?)

She said if the kid has a hard adjustment period – even throws severe fits for awhile – that’s good, because it probably means he or she is capable of developing meaningful relationships.

We reach into the box of chocolates, and…..

She cried a little. Mostly she was super quiet. Poker faced. Stoic.

Laura asked the orphanage director a bunch of questions. She said Zoe was one of the staff’s favorites, that she was bright and active and inquisitive.

What we got was a very quiet little girl that was going ‘internal’. An extreme introvert, an observer.

My buddy Jim Heydt says exposing people to trauma is like dropping a giant dictionary on the floor in a room full of cats. The cats scatter every direction you can imagine.

How is one particular person going to respond? Are they going to yell and scream? Are they going to crawl inside a thick shell? Are they gonna go postal or turn psycho? Your guess is as good as mine…. pick a cat and watch what it does when you drop that dictionary on the floor.

Our hotel in Nanchang is a sort of headquarters for adoptions in Jiangxi province. The 11th floor features a big cushy play area. We pretty much had the whole place to ourselves the entire week. It was like getting a super deluxe suite for the price of a regular room!

So we spent lots of time there, just hanging out with Zoe.

Zoe let me hold her at first but she quickly decided that the only person she wanted was Laura.

Little by little she would relax a little. She liked to sit on the floor and play with Z-man. Our little guy is great. He’d sit with her and her stacking rings and stack. She came with a little photo album that we’d sent the orphanage several months ago and point to our pics and she’d smile a little.

Every time I picked her up, she’d start crying.

This is NOT unusual for adopted kids. Especially young ones who can’t talk. It’s not like anyone could fully explain to a 19 month old Chinese girl that she’s about to get English speaking parents and life as she currently knows it is over.

I didn’t take it personally. As long as she likes mom, that’s cool with me. We got on video chat with her 15 year old sister at home. Drama Queen thinks little sis is adorable! She says when we get home she wants to take Zoe into a cave and keep her little sis all to herself.[mc src=’http://perry.videos.s3.amazonaws.com/zaelyn_taking_lid_off.mp4′ type=’video’ width=’480′ height=’360′ skin=’modieus’ controlbar=’bottom’ /]

The first night, Zoe went to bed at 8pm and slept until 8am. No fits, no incidents. It was like she’d been trained to obediently sleep in her crib at the orphanage. WOW.

When presented with food, she wouldn’t grab it. But when we fed her, she’d eat. The poker face would go away just a little bit when she was getting love from mama or playing with Z-man or her toys.

Her first trip out, our guide took us to Wal-Mart. The poker face came back full force. We came home and put her down for a nap and she woke up in a good mood.

We went to a Western-style restaurant called Dio Coffee. Serves Pizza and french fries and she LOVED the french fries. We’d dip them in ketchup and she’d always grab the ketchup end of the fry.

She slept through another night without incident. She still cried every time I tried to pick her up but she grew more and more comfortable with mama.

We visited a famous temple from the Tang dynasty (an era known for art and musical innovation). We went to the city of Nanchang and got our adoption paperwork completed; on Thursday Laura took her and the boys to an amusement park in Nanchang.

At the amusement park, they had “bumper boats” and also a ride that bounced kids crazily on padded surfaces. There’s no way this thing would be legal in the USA, but our kids L-O-V-E-D it.

While they were at the amusement park I made a trip to Zoe’s home town of Xinyu. Xinyu is 100 miles southwest of Nanchang.

We knew she had been dropped off at the bureau of civil affairs, abandoned by her mother.

In the US we have laws that say a mother can abandon a baby simply by bringing it to a police station or fire station and she is free to walk away. At first blush this seems downright irresponsible.

But the alternative is much worse: a desperate young mom, fearing reprisal, sometimes tries to kill her baby, or abandons it in a garbage dumpster or whatever. Giving her a safe ‘out’ which puts the baby in the adoption or foster system is better for everyone.

China has no such law. The penalties are severe, so Zoe’s mom took quite a risk in placing her on the steps of a government office. Obviously she wanted her daughter to be cared for.

Make no mistake, there’s a l-o-n-g line of people waiting to adopt a newborn baby. For “normal” babies from China, the wait is 5 full years. Because Zoe has special needs, the wait is much shorter – once our paperwork was approved and our home study was done, it only took 11 months.

I visited the office where she was dropped off; I also drove by the orphanage and took some pictures. I traveled around the city and got a feel for it. I’d heard it was a steel mill town so I expected something like Gary Indiana. Nope. Xinyu is a very modern, thriving city with high rises going up everywhere, and lots of trees, flowers and boulevards. Even in December, it feels like spring.

My only gripe about Xinyu was the same gripe I have about most of China: The smog. Even the 100 miles of farmland was thick with smog. It was an overcast day and you couldn’t see the clouds above.

When I got back from my trip, I sat down and started feeding Zoe snacks out of her cup. She held her cracker out to me so I ate it. Then she gave me another one and another one. Zoe’s feeding daddy!

After that she let me pick her up and she didn’t cry. She still had her poker face but she was OK.

Then she started drinking out of straws and feeding herself. For the first few days she didn’t do any of that. It was puzzling. We couldn’t help but wonder, what in the world did they do to this girl?

Any number of answers is possible, including the possibility that she was just regressing back to baby behavior in a very foreign situation. A 19 month old acting like a 5 month old. A few days later we met some adoptive parents who know more about the orphanages than we do. They said if she was a ‘favorite’, the staff might just feed her and not expect her to feed herself.

On Friday, the day we left Nanchang to go to Guangzhou, she started babbling.

The boys would talk to her and she’d talk back in baby babble. FUN! Now she’s letting me hold her; she’s letting Laura leave sometimes without protest; she’s playing with her brothers.

She sat very nicely on the plane to Guangzhou. The guy sitting next to Laura wanted to touch her (everyone likes to touch babies) but Zoe turned away from him. This is GOOD because it means she’s bonding to mama and not just letting strangers in her space. That’s GREAT news in the attachment department.

She’s not into cookies and stuff, but she sure likes spicy food. On Friday I bought some congee (rice porridge) from a street vendor, with some meat, extra peanuts, vegetables and red peppers, and Zoe slurped it up.

(Chinese food has some pretty strange things in it…. I think there’s probably a course in Chinese cooking school called “Advanced Culinary Applications of Fungus.”)

Guangzhou is the Silicon Valley of China, it’s the hi-tech manufacturing capital. It’s slick and modern, and while not as big as Shanghai, I’m guessing peoples’ personal income here is higher. It looks more like the US or Tokyo or Singapore than China.

Our guide told us at one point Guangzhou was adding 500 new cars to the road every single day. “Guangzhou, where cars are cheap and parking is expensive.”

We have to spend a few days in Guangzhou because the US Embassy is here and the US government has to accept her as a citizen. Guangzhou is the adoption capital of China. The hotel here is crawling with adopting families; many are “serial adopters.”

Quite a few of the kids here have very significant special needs – club feet, club hands, cleft lip and palate, limb differences, heart issues.

The other day one of my friends sent me a review of a book called “Jesus Potter Harry Christ.” According to the review, Harry Potter is “a repacking of the Jesus Christ story, but one that eclipses that story completely.”

How many people do YOU know who are flying around the globe and taking in kids nobody else wants because they were inspired by… Harry Potter?

I have a ton of friends who are serial entrepreneurs; now I’ve got a bunch more who are serial adopters. Folks who reach into that box of chocolates repeatedly, at considerable expense, and provide whatever is necessary – medical care, mothering, fathering, brothers, sisters, communities.

We went to the Guangzhou medical examination office. The place was a ZOO. Tons of adoptive families with kids in tow, and a few Chinese people getting ready to move abroad. Zoe got checked out and signed off.

Then today at breakfast I met…. one of my customers!

A certain Kurt Hjelle from Oswego Illinois, with his wife Lynn. Kurt walked up to me and said, “Are you Perry Marshall?”

“Yes I am!”

He says, “I came to your 2006 AdWords seminar, the one where you gave away the MacBooks. I was there when that heckler started yelling at you. We’re here adopting our new little girl!”

Wow, how cool is that?

We invited them to sit down and have breakfast with us. They told this story of getting on a steam locomotive – like a train that seemed 100 years old, where they shovel coal into the tender with a giant spade. They traveled 6 hours to some strange city so they could get one single form stamped by the police department.

Crazy.

So here we all are, members of the same incoming class of Freshmen adopters.

Yesterday Number One Son strapped Zoe in her stroller and sprinted down the sidewalk. Wheee! She LOVED it – the huge grin on her face was priceless.

Zoe’s babbling; she’s letting daddy hold her, sometimes she lets her older brothers carry her around; she’s pointing at everything and making noises. Right now as I write, she’s taking a nap.

This girl’s gonna grow up FAST. I plan on enjoying every minute of it.

Perry Marshall

P.S.: At dinner today she was singing to her french fries.

More pics at http://compassionmama.blogspot.com/2011/12/guangzhou-day-15.html