Regeneration: Made in China: A Meditative Memoir

By Effie Piliouni Albrecht

Regeneration: Made in China is about loss and about the human ability to survive and give meaning and substance to the unjustifiable and irremissible workings of chance. It is also a tribute to those Chinese women forced, by tradition or government, to give up their daughters. It is my gift to them for defying unpardonable rules and laws and giving their girls the potential to be found, rescued, protected and cherished. This book is also a memorial to my daughter Irma, who planted and cultivated the idea of adoption in our minds months before she was killed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483684161

Effie Piliouni Albrecht

Effie Piliouni Albrecht was born in Athens, Greece. She studied English Literature at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and Linguistics at Cambridge University, England. She also speaks French and German. In 1981, she moved to the United States, to Auburn, Alabama, where she received a Master’s in Comparative Drama and a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from Auburn University. She has taught writing, English, American and world literatures, Women’s Studies and ESL at the same university for more than twenty-five years. She lives in Auburn with her husband and her two daughters. Regeneration: Made in China is her first book.

Book preview

REGENERATION:

MADE IN CHINA

A MEDITATIVE MEMOIR

EFFIE PILIOUNI ALBRECHT

Copyright © 2013 by Effie Piliouni Albrecht.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 08/23/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

134560

Contents

Pearl

Loss

The Solemnest Of Industries

Humanity

Hope

The Journey

China Bound

Beijing

Changsha

Bureaucracy

The Hospital

Wang Ming a.k.a., Veronica

Beauty

Shopping

Farewell to Changsha

Guangzhou

Thanksgiving

Guangzhou Sightseeing

Return

Ozymandias

Going Home

Wang Wren a.k.a. Melina

Afterword

In Memory:

For Irma and my Father

PEARL

Pleasing pearl for a prince’s pleasure,

For a splendid setting in gold so bright,

Out of the Orient, I certainly say,

I never discovered her precious equal.

So round, so elegant in each array,

So small, so smooth her sides were.

Wherever I judged magnificent gems,

I set her apart as unique.

Alas I lost her in a garden;

It slipped from me through grass into earth.

I lament, grief-stricken by frustrated love,

For that special pearl without a spot.

Since it sprang from me in that spot,

I have often pondered, desiring that splendid pearl

That previously was accustomed to dispel my distress,

And increase my joy and all my well-being.

It does yet oppress my heart grievously,

Yet swell and burn my heart with anguish.

Nevertheless, I never was aware of so lovely a melody

As the silent hour let slip to me.

Truly, there floated to me many

To remind me of her complexion so covered with clay.

O earth, you mar a beautiful jewel,

My special pearl without spot.

Pearl by Anon, fourteenth century England

Irma slipped into our lives late, out of a fairy tale. My husband and I felt like the royal couple in Sleeping Beauty, who had wished for a child all their lives and to whom the fates finally granted one. However, it seems that the joy of our daughter’s arrival and the excitement of starting our family caused us to forget to invite the thirteenth wise woman to the christening, and there would be consequences.

Irma was born under the shadow of death. While she was taking shape inside my body, my father’s body was losing its own shape, waning, shriveling, and diminishing into a pale, shrunk figure reduced to gauntness by cancer. One body was preparing to leave the silence of the unknown, and the other was getting ready to reenter it. Father was measuring away his life in puffs of oxygen out of a tank as I was practicing the special Lamaze breathing, getting ready to usher my child into the light. The stork and the dark specter crossed each other’s path. In 1992, the reaper was flying toward Athens, Greece, while the white bird was coming to our house in Auburn, Alabama. The specter raised its bony index toward the stork in a warning fashion as they passed each other. I will catch up with you, and it almost did.

Our daughter was not willing to enter life. She was comfortable in her amniotic oblivion inside me, still protected from the decree Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos (the three Ancient Greek daughters of Night and Darkness who spin, allot, and cut life’s thread) had deemed for her. While I was semiconsciously laboring for thirty-eight hours, the doctors decided I needed a C-section, or both Irma and I would soon be dead. Our baby was born into a world she was not destined to know on June 23, 1992. My father passed away on November 12 of the same year. The chief executive officer of the three Fates had accomplished one mission on the other side of the Atlantic and turned around.

Our daughter was growing into a beautiful, happy, and gifted girl. Her skin was transparent, almost letting sunbeams pass through it. Her aunt called her a fairy, a sprite, or a human with otherworldly beauty. Our friends referred to her as a porcelain doll. Her eyes had the color of the Athenian sky. Her hair was shiny, light brown, long, and thick. When she started talking, she kept telling us that she did not want to grow up because it was so fun to be a child. She was learning everything we were teaching her without difficulty and was constantly singing, sprinkling our lives with joy. But she was sick quite often. She caught every germ in preschool and was feverish more often than she was healthy. Every time she became ill, I became uncontrollably anxious as her color turned from transparent to yellowish wax. I was a first-time mother, and my intuition that something bad was going to happen to her would not let my mind rest. When she was less than a year old, she had an operation to unclog one of her tear ducts. Before she was three, she had another operation to straighten a tendon in her thumb. Every time she was in the operating room, I became physically sick from fear. However, during most of the summertime, she was healthy enough for us to take her on trips to visit our families and friends in Greece, Germany, and other parts of Europe, accumulating experiences and enjoying them in the unadulterated way only children can. Irma saw more of the world in five years than some people see in a lifetime. We visited medieval castles in Germany, descended into dungeons and oubliettes in the Czech Republic, went into forest-hidden palaces in Bohemia, saw the crown jewels in London, and went on the London Bridge, which had kept forever falling down during Irma’s baby years. Then, as she turned four, her strange behavior started.

She began asking my husband and me to promise her that we were not going to forget her. I was confused and terrified every time and asked her to explain. Though she was very eloquent, she would not say anything else but kept repeating, Promise you will not forget me. Ulrich and I tried to explain that when the parents go one day, the children would hopefully remember them, not the other way around. I know, I know, she repeated, but do you promise?

Then she started returning to us the gifts we had given her. On some days, she would collect her hair stays, decorative bands, fancy ponytail holders, and colorful bobby pins and bring them to me. Every time she came with a handful, she would tell me, I will not need them anymore, Mommy. You can use them on your own hair. Then she started obsessing with the idea of adoption. One of her friends had been adopted, and the little girl’s parents were ready to adopt another daughter from India. Irma had also asked how babies are made, and I had given her some general information, enough for her four-year-old brain to process and understand. Part of this information was the detail that birthing involves pain. She started pleading with us to adopt a sister for her so that I would not have to experience pain again. It became a daily topic of conversation among us, and we decided to get some initial information about the process from Irma’s friend’s parents. We were seriously considering adopting a little girl after our return from our annual trip to the grandparents in Europe.

LOSS

The loss of the daughter to a mother, the mother to a daughter,

is the essential female tragedy.

—Adrienne Rich

On June 20, 1997, on a fun outing to Montgomery, Alabama, an unexpected storm and Mr. F of Columbus, Georgia, killed our only child, our only daughter, Irma, our only chance at biological immortality and our hope for the future. Mr. F’s white pickup truck landed on top of half of our car because, in spite of the rain and the total lack of visibility, he had not slowed down, nor had he stopped talking on his cell phone. The noise of the crash was something I will never forget. I turned left and to the back from the passenger’s seat. No whisper, no sigh, no voice, or scream. Blood was dripping from Irma’s motionless body onto the Pocahontas doll that she used to take everywhere she went. I felt people dragging me out of the passenger window, which they had broken, as none of the doors would open. My husband’s head was smashed on the steering wheel, and blood was everywhere. People pulled him out too. He could walk, and he was asking where Irma was. His injuries looked dangerous, so I was screaming for an ambulance, which was not coming because of the storm and the blocked traffic. I knew there was no hope for Irma. Soon, the rain stopped. The clouds dissolved and took our daughter’s soul with them. It had floated away like one of those colorful helium balloons that she so often liked to let go. Her lifeless body had been broken and trapped in the back of our car—the safest seat for children. Highway crews would not be able to remove it for hours to take it to the coroner’s office in Montgomery, Alabama. I looked at her in the backseat and saw Pocahontas’s white bridal dress drenched in blood. Irma loved the story of Pocahontas, and she adored her Pocahontas Barbie doll. She had dressed her