Touching wishes to become reality

Our family’s New Year’s wish
We wish for our girls to visit Guangxi and see their birthplaces. -- Paula & Paul King

THE Zhuhai Daily is soliciting 2008 New Year’s wishes citywide. The 20 most touching wishes will be realized with the help of envoys sought from the public. The selection will be made in the weeks after the collection of wishes ends on February 8. The wishes are to be realized one after the other beginning in March.

The story of one couple’s wish follows:

Paul King is a former senior electrician in the US, and his wife, Paula, is a former teacher at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St Louis, Missouri. They moved to Zhuhai early last year with their two adopted Chinese girls -- Esther, 10, and Abigail, 8. Blessed with their two lovely Chinese daughters, who have brought them utmost happiness, they were determined to “give back” to China by serving those who would accept their aid and by helping people in need, Paula once noted. At the same time, they wanted their girls to gain a thorough understanding of their own culture and people, she added.

Paula said, “We decided that our girls would be able to visit where they came from in Guangxi Province.”
After a year of complicated procedures such as filling in application forms, providing financial proof, getting references from colleagues and friends, FBI fingerprint and police checks and receiving home-study visits from the agency, the Kings were called to pick up their daughter in 1997.

“It’s just the period of bearing a child,” Paula once said. They adopted Esther from the Wuzhou Social Welfare Institute in 1997. A note from the orphanage said that she was from the nearby village of Cangwu, a county in Wuzhou, Paula said.

“We adopted Abigail from the Nanning Social Welfare Institute in 2000. She was found by a large tree across from the Nanning Machinery Factory,” said Paula. Esther is from the Miao minority in Cangwu County, Wuzhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Abigail is Maonan, a minority living in Huanjiang County, Hechi City. Both girls know their adoption stories and where they came from.

After living in the city for a few months, the family returned home late last year and shared their stories and pictures with families and friends. They returned to Zhuhai late last month. Paul now works for a trading company in Hong Kong and Paula tutors the two girls who study in a local elementary school in the morning.

“We want to return to the social welfare institutes in the cities of Wuzhou and Nanning to show the wonderful caring staff how well the girls are doing. We also wish to visit the areas where they were found so that girls can know all they can about their lives as babies,” Paula explained.

Miao minority people have 130 varieties of apparel and have a way with singing, especially love and wine songs. Miao has their own spoken language but most of them use Chinese characters for writing. Living on farming and hunting, Miao people are skilled in hand-stitching, embroidery, brocade, wax printing, paper-cutting and making accessories. Their wax printing is more than 1,000 years old.

Maonan minority people also have their own spoken language and share Chinese for writing. Maonans worship animals and plants. Each village has a large tree serving as guardian of the village, and cows, pigs, chicks, birds and other animals are regarded as holy. Of the population of 313,000, Maonan accounts for 16.2 per cent.

“We further desire to visit these minority villages to learn the cultures that our daughters came from. We hope to purchase artwork from the villages and teach people in America about the wonderful mosaic of minorities in China,” said Paula.

Will Paul and Paula’s New Year wish come true? We will wait and see.

You can also report your New Year’s wish to weeklybetty@yahoo.com.cn and see if we can help you realize it.