One in a Billion : Her deepest desire was to mother a child. The dream was fulfilled the day a Chinese toddler came into her life.

My daughter and I met on a muggy June afternoon at the Xuanwu Hotel.

For me, it was love at first sight. For her, it was cause for wailing.

“Here’s your mama, your new mama,” an orphanage worker said as she thrust the unwilling Tai Xiu into my eager arms.

With all the strength she could muster, this sturdy 15-month-old straightened out like a board and shrieked. After all, she had never known a “mama,” especially one with blond hair, blue eyes and pale skin.

She matched the tiny snapshot the orphanage director had handed me the night before--short, dark hair; huge brown eyes; a nasty rash on her chin, and a half-moon frown that nearly melted my heart. Despite the oppressive heat and humidity of a bustling industrial city, she was dressed in a long-sleeved suit with hand-painted polka dots and a flouncy collar trimmed in sparkly lace. On her feet were pink-and-blue-striped acrylic knee socks and red plastic sandals. She brought to mind circus clowns and Munchkins.

Dabbing at her tears--and my own--I was ever so fleetingly reminded of that oft-quoted Chinese proverb, the one about being careful what you wish for.

Around us was a cacophony of crying babies and cooing adults. Along with Nora Tai-Xiu (I chose to name her for my late grandmother while preserving her orphanage name), the workers delivered six other little girls named Tai, after Taizhou, the obscure city they were from. They were intended for my traveling companions--four couples and two other single women, all of us from the Bay Area.

Within hours, and after years of anticipation, we would suddenly be parents. It seemed surreal.

My journey to China had begun the year before, in the spring of 1993, when I read a San Francisco newspaper story about private Bay Area agencies that helped facilitate overseas adoptions. Single and 42, I had yearned for a child for many years. A hysterectomy in 1986 had cured my cervical cancer but left me unable to conceive and carry a baby.

Having heard the usual horror stories about the difficulty, cost and uncertainty of domestic adoptions, and aware that California law gives a birth mother six months to change her mind after surrendering a child for adoption, I was drawn to the prospect of seeking a baby in another land.

China appealed to me for several reasons: I wanted a girl, and orphanages in that nation of 1.2 billion--with its strict one-baby-per-family rule and age-old preference for boys--teem with girls abandoned soon after birth. China also would not mind that I was older and single; under government policy, prospective parents must be at least 35 and, with rare exceptions, childless.

Other countries had strikes against them. Many required that adoptive parents be married; a few, notably Russia and Brazil, seemed in constant danger of shutting off the flow of children because of political instability.

China seemed my best shot.

Unfortunately, in February, 1993, China had temporarily suspended international adoptions so that it could implement new regulations and tighter controls. So, after attending an informational meeting for Bay Area Adoption Services, a Mountain View agency better known as BAAS, I promptly put my efforts on hold and did several more months of soul-searching. Could I really afford child care? How would I balance motherhood with an unpredictable reporting job? What if the child had hidden health problems? What if we didn’t “bond”? Would a trans-racial adoption spell trouble down the road?

*

In September, I spent 12 days driving solo through the deserts of Utah and the Tetons. By the time I returned to San Francisco, I was firmly convinced that I had the emotional and financial resources to make this leap of faith.

Hoping that China would soon reopen, I began plunking down what would seem like an endless stream of money. (The tally, including travel to China, eventually came to between $15,000 and $20,000, but who’s counting?)

The first step was to take three classes, sponsored by BAAS, in which parents who had completed adoptions outlined the procedures and potential pitfalls. At the first session, in early December, my jaw dropped when I was handed a four-inch-thick binder loaded with questionnaires and lists of documents to gather.

Determined to plow quickly through the paperwork, I enlisted friends to write letters of reference. I composed personal essays, summarized my finances, gathered birth certificates and proof of employment, got myself examined by a doctor and fingerprinted at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and collected letters from doctors and psychotherapists who had treated me during my bout with cancer. Later, I took photos of myself and my San Francisco flat, and got the San Francisco police to affirm that I had never been arrested--at least by them.

I also began a series of three meetings with a county social worker who would compose my all-important “home study,” a ubiquitous requirement that summarizes one’s background and circumstances and basically assesses one’s worthiness to be a parent. By the time all this was finished, I would have the equivalent of a “license” to adopt.

Like other adoptive parents, I learned that the process of qualifying represented an unsettling intrusion into my personal life. I had to reveal details of past romances, my finances, my physical and mental health, my thoughts about children and my relationships with my parents, other family members and my roommate. Had I not been so firm in my conviction, the whole experience might have proved intolerable. Instead, I opened myself willingly to scrutiny, desperate to avoid any snag that might spoil my mission.

Needing a crash course in things Chinese, I began immersing myself in the culture--not difficult in a city like San Francisco. I took walking and culinary tours in Chinatown, read newspaper stories, devoured books by Chinese and Chinese American authors, and watched the recent crop of Chinese-language movies about political upheaval and the Cultural Revolution. And I bought an intricate map of China the size of a small wall.

In the vast body of literature about China, I was sobered by routine references to the traditional Asian bias toward boys. Slave, I learned, is one meaning of a Chinese word for female. Chinese consider girls to be a “small happiness,” while boys are called “big happiness.”

The national obsession with having male heirs has its roots in centuries of tradition: In rural villages, boys could do more work in the fields and were responsible for the care of elderly parents. Once married, girls joined their husbands’ families and were effectively lost to their parents.

When the one-baby rule was imposed in the late 1970s as a dramatic attempt to defuse a population time bomb, the pressure to have boys grew. Reports of infanticide persist. But, as parents hold out for males, thousands of baby girls are abandoned each year. The hope is that they will be adopted.

Knowing all this, I fought to beat down the notion that by adopting a Chinese “orphan” girl, I might be rescuing her from some bleak fate. I wondered: Would I really be doing her a favor by wresting her from her homeland and culture, or would she resent me later?

The inner conflict eventually dissolved when I realized that I was adopting for a simple, selfish reason--I urgently wanted a child to love and nurture.

*

In March, as the necessary approvals trickled in, I made preliminary contacts with Charles Chen, an ambitious entrepreneur in the commercial center of Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong. Charles, who supported an infant daughter as well as an extended family of 13, supplemented his income from an office-supply business with a sideline in adoption, and had helped find children for other BAAS clients.

I had to prepare yet another set of documents, all to be notarized, certified and authenticated, specifically for China. Each step, of course, came with a not-inconsequential fee. I hurried through the documents, Fed-Exed them to Charles and settled back to wait.

Throughout the process, I made it clear that I was seeking a healthy child, preferably one just a few months old. Knowing that my funds would stretch to cover just one adoption, I wanted the whole experience--from infancy on up.

In the meantime, I set about trying to win over my parents, who had this old-fashioned--if arguably correct--notion that every kid deserves a mother and a father. I reminded them that countless children in this country live with single parents or in otherwise untraditional circumstances. One parent was better than none, I told them. My parents came around (and are now quite the doting grandparents).

One day in April, 1994, Charles explained that China was implementing new rules. He was no longer allowed to find babies in orphanages and arrange the adoptions. Beijing was taking charge of identifying children for prospective parents. He also mentioned that ahead of me were 200 sets of would-be parents from around the world and that only a couple of bureaucrats were processing the paperwork. Even optimistic Charles acknowledged that it could be a long haul.

Then on the morning of May 25, I got an unexpected call from BAAS. “Beijing has assigned you a baby girl!” the woman said. Her name was Tai Xiu (pronounced more or less like Tie Shoe ), and she lived at the Social Welfare Institution in Taizhou, a city northwest of Shanghai in Jiangsu province. If all went smoothly, I could pick her up in June.

I began to quiver with joy and excitement. But there was hesitation in the woman’s voice. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “Is she healthy?”

“Yes, but she’s older than you wanted. She was born March 18, 1993.”

Calculating quickly, I realized that Tai Xiu would be 15 months when I met her. My visions of rocking a tiny, helpless bundle to sleep evaporated, and I burst into tears. Certainly, I pleaded, with all the babies in China, there must be a way to get a younger one. Couldn’t Charles do something? “No,” she said firmly. “Beijing says there’s no negotiating. If you don’t take this one, I’m afraid you can forget about China.” The agency, she added, needed to know my decision in four hours.

I was panic-stricken, not wanting to give up my one chance with China but crushed at the prospect of getting an older child. After quick consultations with parents, friends and Charles, I decided that this was meant to be, that in all the world this was the child for me--I would feel somehow disloyal if I “rejected” her. Two hours before the deadline, I called the agency back to gratefully accept.

The next day’s mail brought a photo and some medical documents--all in Chinese and remarkably unreliable, as it turned out. The photo showed a little moon face, perched over a puffy yellow-and-white snowsuit and topped by a pink snow hat. She looked adorable, but I fretted over a rash on her chin.

As I scrambled to prepare to welcome this small person into my life, the BAAS group got together once before the trip to show off our little ones’ photos and exchange tips about what and what not to take.

*

On June 20, with my adventurous mother, Faye, in tow as a spare pair of hands, I left for Shanghai to hook up with the rest of the group and Charles, who would travel with us as interpreter and red-tape cutter.

Although we heeded the agency’s suggestion to pack as lightly as possible, the addition of 120 diapers, a big box of graham crackers, some energy bars, a few toys, and a couple of dozen jars of toddler food and juice meant that we were loaded down like Sherpas. Between us, we also carried about $10,000 in cash--a cause for somewhat high anxiety--earmarked for Charles (who requested “crispy $100 bills”), the Taizhou orphanage, various government agencies, document fees and two weeks’ worth of expenses.

After a night in Shanghai, we clambered into taxis for a mad dash to the train station, dodging bicycles and jampacked buses. For some reason, never adequately explained, officials had decided that we could not visit the Taizhou orphanage--or the city itself, for that matter. I pestered Charles mercilessly, maintaining that it was our right to see the place that had been our children’s home for so many months. After offering excuses about torn-up highways and inconvenient train schedules, he finally said: “I don’t think they want you to see it.” That, naturally, only added to my apprehension about the deprivation in Tai Xiu’s life.

Instead, our destination was Nanjing, an ancient city of 4.6 million northwest of Shanghai, where the girls would be delivered to us at our Western-style hotel. As we approached Nanjing, where the oppressive heat that week lived up to the city’s reputation as one of the “three furnaces” of China, flooded rice patties and flat farmland gave way to lush hillsides covered with tea bushes.

That evening in the hotel restaurant, our group discussed logistics, bracing for the orphanage workers’ arrival the next day and the bureaucratic maze that lay ahead. The orphanage director asked us to sign some papers and gave us updated photos of the girls.

Tai Xiu’s picture left me enormously relieved. Except for looking profoundly sad, she was bright-eyed, alert and adorable.

The next morning, we piled into a hotel van to go to the Jiangsu Civil Administration Building, where officials interviewed us about our desire to adopt in China. After lunch, my mother and I settled into our room for what we thought would be several hours of waiting. Hearing a commotion in the hallway, I peered out on a scene of utter pandemonium. With absolutely no ceremony, the orphanage nurses had arrived to parcel out a gaggle of dolled-up babies, most of them in tears.

I easily recognized Tai Xiu. Much as I wanted to snatch her up, I walked toward her gingerly. When the orphanage director tried to hand her to me, she resisted with all her might. I backed away, hurt but aware that this was appropriate for a child flummoxed by these strange goings-on.

A nurse held Tai Xiu for a few minutes, quieting her and urging her to go to her “new mama.” She would still have none of it. Finally, the nurses motioned to me to take her, and they wandered a few steps away. As Tai Xiu sobbed, I tenderly stroked her hair and, my heart bursting, fell madly and instantly in love.

The seven girls ranged in age from 10 to 15 months, and all arrived with a halo of pungent white powder in their hair to combat an ugly heat rash. (The eruptions that I had spotted in Tai Xiu’s photos proved to be impetigo, quickly cured at home with antibiotics.)

I spent much of the next hour clutching her as I roamed the hallway, trying to coax a smile from her doleful face. At first, she seemed dreadfully unhappy--especially with her new mama--but would not tolerate being put down. My left arm ached from the unaccustomed, 19-pound weight. When one of the young hotel maids encouraged Tai Xiu to come to her, she clung to me.

*

Photographs from that day show me smiling beatifically through Tai Xiu’s tears. After so many years of craving a child, I was delighted that the reality was as wonderful as I had dreamed. I slipped comfortably into my new role.

I’d like to say that all was perfect, but such was not the case. One of the babies was sound asleep and could not be roused. Another child had trouble lifting her head.

(The next morning, after some frantic overnight phone calls to doctors back in the States, Charles and the worried parents took both children to a Nanjing hospital. There, a Yale-trained doctor reassured them that the babies were simply in need of nurturing and possibly were younger than the orphanage officials had believed. Such is the imprecise science of adoption in China. Happily, both girls are thriving today.)

After we had all spent an hour with our girls that first afternoon, we hopped once again into the van for a drive to the notarial office and a second round of interviews; these were the bureaucrats who would issue the girls’ Chinese passports.

At some point in this hectic day, the adoptions became final. Each of us turned over to the orphanage director a cash donation of about $3,000. In return, we got some official-looking pamphlets that made us parents.

That evening, the nurses came by to answer questions, with Charles translating, about the girls’ orphanage routine. I learned that Tai Xiu drank water, tended to sleep from 9 to 6 and should not be fed creamed fish soup. Not much to go on.

That night, I piled pillows on my twin bed to create a nest for Nora. I curled up at her feet, barely sleeping, feeling the weight of this new responsibility. I listened for any hitch in her measured breathing and tried to stay clear of her small, fast-flying feet whenever she shifted position.

By the next morning, Nora was laughing, thanks to a game involving Cheerios with Nana, the nickname by which the group called my mother. Soon after, Nora was strutting through our 15th-floor hallway, delighting the maids by blowing kisses and waving bye-bye. I was relieved, having been secretly troubled by the prospect of parenting a perpetually sad child. Far from heavy-hearted, Nora emerged as a cheerful, outgoing, fun-loving girl. When she called me “Mama” the first time, it made me giddy.

*

For the next week, we new parents prowled the hall at all hours, playing with our tykes and dining on room-service meals of rice, sauteed greens, steamed dumplings and Tsing Tao beer. The days were punctuated by occasional power outages, the nights by lots of crying. I was the subject of envy because Nora slept through most nights and took two good naps daily.

After the girls had been with us a few days, the orphanage workers returned to see how things were going. Nora greeted them with enthusiasm, somewhat to my chagrin. When they began to leave the hotel lobby, she and a couple of the other older girls howled uncontrollably, as if they had hoped for a reprieve from a painful interlude with us unusual-looking baby-sitters. Traumatized, hurt and embarrassed, I began to cry too. Fortunately, the crisis soon passed, and Nora and I were well on the way to forming a genuine mother-daughter bond.

Our eventful week in Nanjing over, we flew to the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, formerly Canton, where the U.S. Consulate would prepare the exit visas needed to qualify the girls as legal immigrants into the United States.

The afternoon spent at the consulate was grueling. After several hours, a young Stanford graduate named Jonathan Fritz called me to his counter to process my paperwork. He and the Chinese assistants made the appropriate “oohs” and “aahs” over Nora. Charles, meanwhile, worked on the papers needed to secure his own visa; he’s now studying business at a Tennessee university.

Suddenly, just 10 days after we started our odyssey--and less than seven months after I began the process--it was all over. The rest of the group, weary from frequent nighttime interruptions, booked early return flights. Nana, Nora and I stayed on to sightsee, then headed for a weekend of shopping and touring in hot and humid Hong Kong. I felt both exhilarated and exhausted.

We arrived in San Francisco in a chilly fog early on the Fourth of July. Nora’s eyes widened when she saw the toys and crib waiting for her in her very own room. Considering that she hadn’t slept for 12 hours on the flight from Hong Kong, she had amazing staying power as she got acquainted with stuffed animals and building blocks.

That evening, with Nora nestled in her crib for the first time, I read her the children’s classic “Goodnight Moon,” a book I had often bought, wistfully, for the newborns of my friends. At long last, I was sharing it with my own daughter. Worn out from the trip and pinching myself that we had pulled it off, I wept. She slept.

Later that night, my roommate and I climbed to the deck of our flat to watch the fireworks. The house trembled occasionally from the explosions, but Nora slumbered peacefully. In the cool air, I had trouble recalling the dense streets and the mugginess of Nanjing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and I marveled at how utterly different Nora’s life would be.

As the pyrotechnics flared overhead, I imagined that a couple of the more spectacular starbursts were intended to welcome one special little immigrant from China, who happened to make her way to America on Independence Day.