Min Meng Lu - In China

My aunt took her best friend, Lori and her cousin, Deb to China with her.  Lori brought experience and Deb brought a video camera to film the whole trip.  Deb made a documentary for her thesis and gave a copy to my aunt.  I would love to post the documentary on my blog because it shows you first hand the experience that my aunt had, but due to personal reasons I cannot.  The three of them traveled around China for three long days with their group before they received their babies.  In the documentary, you can see that everyone is experiencing hundreds of different emotions as they are riding in the bus to go see their babies for the first time.  When they got to the orphanage, everyone waited anxiously.  They started bringing the babies out one by one.  When they turned the corner with LuLu, my aunt knew it was her and gasped for air.  The orphanage workers just handed off the babies like they were a football.  You could tell that they do this very often and it doesn’t mean much to them to just ship off a baby to someone.  When they threw her into my Aunt’s arms, Lu started crying and grabbing anyone that she could find. 

Lu was in an orphanage in Guangxi for the first 5-6 months of her life, and then she was put into foster care and lived with an older lady and her daughter who was 25.  She lived with them from 6 months of age up until my aunt got her.  We were relieved to hear that she had been in foster care because we assumed it was better than living in the orphanage, but little did we know the problems it would bring.  They are supposed to take her out of foster care a while before my aunt got her, but they took her out the day of.  LuLu was 10 days away from being two years old, and she was old enough to realize that my aunt wasn’t her mom.  She knew nothing different than her foster mom and sister, so she thought that they were her real mom and sister and she even referred to them as that.

While watching the documentary, it is very clear that my aunt had the hardest time out of everyone.  Lu was almost two years old, and the other kids weren’t even close.  She was speaking Chinese pretty fluently while the other kids only knew how to say mommy and daddy.  She was very much aware of what was going on and that the white people all around her were very scary.  They were in China a total of 13 days, and the 10 days she had Lu were rough.  Lu wanted nothing to do with my aunt and she would go up to random strangers on the street and say “take me” in Chinese.  She wanted strangers before she wanted my aunt.  They experienced many sleepless nights listening to Lu scream words in Chinese.  We later found out that she was screaming for her foster sister and saying “help”.  She thought that my aunt was taking her from her family and she just didn’t understand (Harrell, Interview).

Here is a map of China with the Guangxi province(where Lu was from) circled