China revisited

Each year on the anniversary of her adoption from China, Gianna Mei Li Horak composed a letter to her birth parents. She taped it to a helium balloon and released it into the sky -- sending it back, her mom and dad told her, to the place of her birth.

At age 4, Gianna dictated: “I go to school. I am the farrest reader. Do you miss me? I miss you. I like Cat in the Hat stories. Sometimes I am very silly.”

By age 7, Gianna wrote in block letters: “Dear Chinese-Mother and Chinese-Father. I hope it is going okay in China. I miss you. Sincerely, Gianna Horak.”

The next year Gianna, who had been studying Mandarin at home in Pasadena, sent a full-page letter, single spaced, in Chinese. At 9, she wrote a longer letter in English listing her hobbies: Chinese dance, piano lessons and the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus.

Last fall, Gianna’s choir director announced they were going on a two-week overseas tour in June. Their destination: China.

Gianna, then 13, had to decide if she was ready to return.

The phone rang after lunch on the afternoon of Dec. 12, 1994, just as Mindy Schirn, 42, and Jan-Christopher “Chris” Horak, 43, returned to their hotel room in Hefei, a Chinese city about 600 miles south of Beijing.

“Your baby is here,” a Chinese woman said and hung up.

They had not been allowed to visit the government orphanage in Tongling, about 75 miles away.

The couple spent months arranging the adoption. Schirn wanted to adopt from China after reading a news story about officials there straining to care for thousands of abandoned girls in a country that limited families to one child and had a traditional preference for sons.

The orphanage sent one photograph: a grainy, underexposed head shot about 2 inches square. A thin girl with tufts of dark hair stared straight at the camera, mouth slack.

Someone had left the baby at 2 days old in the orphanage garden. The garden was one of the safest places to leave a child because she was sure to be found. But it was also dangerous for parents: If seen, they could be arrested.

Yuan Yuan, the caretakers called her -- “Garden Gate.”

Schirn and Horak had already decided to name the baby Gianna, after his mother, and Mei Li, Chinese for “beautiful.”

There was a knock at the hotel room door. On the other side, a woman stood holding their baby. Gianna was 8 1/2 months old and weighed just shy of 9 pounds. A week and a half later, Schirn and Horak left for the U.S. with their new daughter.

Gianna was 12 and rehearsing with the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus to perform “Grendel” with the L.A. Opera when she first told her choir friends the story of her origins.

In a practice room in the basement of Pasadena Presbyterian Church, their choir director explained that Grendel was a monster from the heroic poem “Beowulf,” an outsider rejected as a child by his playmates.

As the children started talking about what it felt like to be an outsider, Gianna raised her hand.

“I was adopted,” she said in a soft voice.

The other children listened as she explained about the Chinese orphanage and her parents and adoption day.

Gianna, a wispy girl with long dark hair flowing down her back, told them that sometimes she felt like an outsider because other kids would see her with her parents, who are white, and not understand why they were together. But, she said, she had come to appreciate being adopted. It meant that she was a survivor.

That year, on adoption day, Gianna stopped sending the letter to her birth parents.

“I wasn’t sure who I was writing it to,” she said.

Her parents said they understood. Writing the letter had been their idea. When Gianna decided it was time to write again, or to visit the orphanage in China, they said they would help.

Gianna’s earliest memory of music was as much of a hybrid as she is: a Chinese soprano singing a classical Italian aria. She remembers singing along with Ying Huang to “Musetta’s Waltz” from Puccini’s “La Boheme,” a mournful opera about a beautiful girl doomed to die.

Gianna had thought about visiting China many times -- to see where she was born. She was learning Mandarin, studying Chinese dance. But she knew she would seem American, taking big, heavy strides, smiling wide. She worried people would expect her to speak fluently, to immediately understand and act like them.

Now she was excited for the chance to go as part of an arts festival leading up to the opening of the Olympic Summer Games in Beijing on Aug. 8. If she went, she would sing in Chinese and English for audiences in Beijing and Shanghai, tour historic sites and eat dinner at the Great Wall.

Maybe it was time to visit the orphanage.

In her mind, Gianna imagined the orphanage where she spent her first months as vividly as a photograph: 8-foot ceilings, bare lightbulbs illuminating dirty white blinds, blue-gray carpeting and immaculate white cribs. Caretakers with close-cropped hair and bare faces supervise two babies lying in the center of the room, foot to foot. Caretakers murmur. Somewhere, a baby cries.

Her parents agreed she was ready. They would meet her after the tour and take her to the garden in Tongling where she had been abandoned.

When Gianna told the choir that she would go with them, some of her friends had questions. About a dozen other members of the choir are ethnically Chinese. A few plan to visit relatives in Hong Kong after the tour. But only Gianna was adopted from China.

One member asked Gianna if she wanted to find her birth parents. No, she said -- abandoning a child in China is illegal, so the arrival of an adopted daughter might endanger them.

She had other reasons for not wanting to find her biological parents.

For years, despite the carefree letters she had sent on adoption day, Gianna was angry at her birth mother and at China for giving her up. Later, she imagined all the reasons her biological mother might have let her go: Maybe she was pressured by her family, sick or dead.

Now, Gianna says she feels indifferent about her birth parents. But she is afraid that if she found them in China, they might want her to stay.

“I love my ‘now’ parents,” she said.

Gianna said she hopes that when she finally reaches the orphanage, caretakers allow her inside. She wants to hold the babies, to feed and play with them. “La Boheme” is no longer her favorite opera. Too dark. Gianna has grown up to be an optimist. She may have started out a “worthless baby girl,” she said, but her future is bright. Now, she prefers Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

“Because no one dies in it,” she said. “And that’s rare in opera.”

Her favorite song for the tour is a contemporary piece by American folk singer Malcolm Dalglish, “Sail Away”:

“Dark clouds hide the sun. Rain comes down and the rivers run. Rivers run down to the sea, And when you’ve got your liberty, Don’t you want to sail away?”

The song tells the story of her life, she said: dark clouds, then sun. Abandoned in an orphanage garden, adopted by America. She arrived this week in the place of her birth to make her own music.

--

molly.hennnessy-fiske@latimes.com