Eli Zheng Behr Hall
©Christine Shields, 2022.
Eli’s stuffed panda toy from Chongqing’s Hilton Hotel, 2004, now on his skateboard “altar.” Courtesy of Eli Hall and Alex Behr, 2022.
Eli is a smart, curious, and very funny 18-year-old college freshman in Oregon, majoring in business. He didn’t want to be interviewed for this project, but has given me permission to reprint an essay (below), written when he was about 11, which includes quotes from him (the portrait is of Eli at nine years old). He’s a self-taught filmmaker, skateboarder, and golfer: a future entrepreneur and frat pledge. He wants to return to China one day.
“I want to be rich to find my mom.”
Raising Yu Zheng, Raising Eli
(reprinted essay, written around 2010)
By Alex Behr
At four years old, my son Eli amused himself by muttering nonsense words. He walked down the street of our Portland, Oregon, neighborhood with a stick, banging on trees or dragging it along the yards, saying, “Chink, chink, chink.” I didn’t say anything. He didn’t hear that derogatory term from anyone. It was nonsense to him—for now. I didn’t think anyone we passed noticed him speaking, but I did. He was Chinese to the core. Chinese blood, Chinese skin, Chinese everything, but given an American passport with no choice of his own. Given the name Yu Zheng at his orphanage, we gave him a new name when we adopted him at ten months old: Eli Zheng.
After bedtime stories, Eli often asked me to make a nest. I spread my legs out like a diamond under the quilt. He rested on top of the quilt, cradled by me, his head on my thigh. I was the mommy bird and he was the baby. I pretended to feed him like the mother birds fed their babies in books. Through accepting this basic need, whether a sweet cracker when he was in my arms in the orphanage or a pretend worm in bed, he claimed me as his mother.
He named my breasts Little and Cutie, or Mom and Dad. He told me I could cut them off with scissors since I wasn’t having any more babies. “I’ll be your baby forever,” he said, “Even when I get big.”
One night, Eli asked if Chinese people gave him to the orphanage. He knew, in a simplified way, that Chinese “workers” used his baby photo to pick him for us. “Workers,” to him, also operated concrete mixers and cranes. They were his heroes.
Courtesy of Eli Hall.
“Your Chinese mommy gave you to the orphanage,” I answered.
“What’s her name?” he asked. I wasn’t sure what to say.
“We don’t know,” I said. “Should we name her?”
“No,” he said. “I want to make her a paper-plate flower with one eye, like a daisy, and a long paper stem.” This came from a sweet boy who picked flowers for me—dandelions half crushed in his palm. I hugged him, but I hid my tears.
I wondered what ghosts were in him. I asked him if he missed his Chinese mommy. “I love her,” he said, “but I don’t miss her anymore.”
On our mantel is a pale-gray rock, the size of a small fist. My dad brought back this rock from the orphanage’s gate. It may be from the last place my son’s birth mother saw him. He must have wailed. His cries can pierce. She probably leaked milk. I like to imagine she breastfed him for those first seventeen or so days and whispered all her joy and pain to him.
Eli often panicked and became hysterical when I dropped him off at daycare, weeping, crying, clinging, arching away from caretakers toward me—wanting, desiring, and craving me. I often got teary and short of breath, walking to the car or the bike or just pushing my legs forward on a long walk home. People who like labels have one for me: “adoptive mom,” as I have one for his original mother: “birth mother.” But the truth was that he didn’t call me the “adoptive mom.” He knew he was from an orphanage and had three moms (including his nanny) in his short life. He was proud of having three. I was mama as he learned English. Then I became mom.
I sent photos, letters, and money to his orphanage. I pined for his birth mother, only because he turned to me when he was sad, wiping long strands of snot across me, dripping blood, wanting me to wipe his butt, buying me the sappiest cards from Fred Meyer’s. I heard him hum before his toys killed each other. I monitored his contented engine of life.
Yet he was so prone to tantrums, said to come from the initial “disruptions”—the cataclysm of adoption. All systems were set for him to bond with his mother. After two and half weeks or so that ended. Then a room full of babies. No wonder he was jealous for years of other babies. Even his adoption records said he pushed other babies away from his primary nanny. It was a survival technique to protect scarce resources. Scarce love, shared love, limited amount of undivided attention.
Eli Hall. ©Bellen Drake, 2010.
In 2009, Eli had been with us for four years. He was five and starting formal education in a predominantly Caucasian city, raised by Caucasian parents. His skin was dark brown, with a few freckles, with perfect, smooth muscles. His skin was soft, but tough at the knees. His feet stank.
He was told in kindergarten: don’t touch other children. But he couldn’t help it. To touch was to learn, to be in this world and the magic world of Santa, the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny. We blew nighttime kisses into the air to his first mothers in China.
If he’d had a tantrum every day with us that lasted at least 15 minutes, then, compressed, over four years that equaled about 365 solid hours of screaming, crying, throwing, kicking, biting, running away, hitting, slamming doors, ripping up paper, spitting, and yelling.
In 2009 I wrote in my journal, “This week has been about the hardest psychologically in a long time. Last night, Eli got riled up and ran away from me, throwing popcorn around. Later, he bit Matt (his dad). It was so hot that I got weird rashes on my neck. I got nothing done and got upset at Matt.” I was nearing the end of grad school at Portland State, trying to finish my thesis, a short story collection.
I took Eli to an adoption specialist. I begged Matt to come with me, and he agreed. But over the course of the appointments, I often went by myself with Eli. The offices were in the Hollywood District of Portland, across from a café. After the sessions, which often brought me to tears, I’d get a latte from the café and a steamed milk for Eli. It was like we had cafés as our grounding point. I’d taken him in the stroller to cafés since coming back from China, watching his head loll to the side, in his dream land, while I sipped the foamy milk and bitter espresso.
Mary, the therapist, wrote: “I am not surprised that he has meltdowns. They come from deep in his unconscious in the form of anxiety. Holding and rocking him, predicting when you see the signs before the actual eruption, and then if he does completely fall apart, to teach him that he pays back the time he has used for the meltdown.
“Putting on a ‘brain coaching hat,’ you can work with him when things are going well, to supply information to his left cortex on handling his feelings, speaking clearly and slowly, giving him reminders and practicing with him on calming his body, being aware of his body and where the feelings are felt, breathing slowly and deeply through his nose and out of his mouth, slowly, so he doesn’t blow out the imaginary candle.”
During one tantrum I tried to take her advice, I said, “Let the volcano out, Eli. Don’t let the volcano control you.”
He stood, out of his mind, and yelled, “You’re a liar! There is no volcano inside me!”
At one appointment, Mary showed Eli a large Valentine’s heart. She said, “This is your birth mother. This is how big her heart was when she had you. She loved you more than anyone.” Then she took scissors and cut the heart in half. It was hard to tell if Eli was paying attention.
He walked to the sand table to arrange helicopters and plastic animals in a battle. Mary said, “Eli, listen.”
I sat on the couch, listening to the bubbling of a fountain that was supposed to soothe. The room was always chilly.
Mary held the pieces apart and said, “Now your birth mother’s heart is broken.” Eli looked at me. He got down on his knees and crawled across the room—something he hadn’t done since he was little. When he reached a plastic baby doll in a basket, he picked it up, along with a plastic doll bottle filled with white liquid.
He carried the doll and the bottle over to me. Still not speaking, he handed the baby doll and bottle to me so I could cradle and feed her. We didn’t get tape to secure the parts of the Chinese mother’s heart. We left the pieces, and laid a heart representing him, and one for me, on top of it.
We savored his youth, we wasted it, we ignored it, we bathed it, and we fed it. We lay with him as he fell asleep, singing and relaxing into his beauty. It was like being drunk before the spins, utter peace and loss of time. We stole time, knowing how quickly it went, whereas to him, he was eager for the future, to get more things. He was always acquisitive, waiting to play outside, run, climb, laugh, smash sticks against trees, dig bridges, tunnels, read, and make sushi with “invitation” crab.
Eli before high school graduation, spring 2022. Courtesy of Alex Behr.
When he was a baby he often took off my sunglasses so he could see my eyes.
He sang, soothing himself, “Mommy, Mommy, Mom.”
I wrote on a Post-it our words: “I was left at a gate?” “That’s what it says.” “Hmmm. Maybe that’s why I want to be with you. Always.”
One night when he was nine, we lay on his bed, my mahogany sleigh bed from the 1860s, a bed he didn’t like because he still wanted to sleep in our room: the orphanage of his infant days, close breathing, brain electricity humming.
“I want to be rich to find my mom.”
I asked, “Do you want to go to China?”
“No,” he paused. “I want to find my mom ... Well, you’re my mom?”
“For right now?” I asked like a journalist, but I was curious. How far would he push the truth? I knew when he got mad at me, he sometimes felt I was a stranger, like a babysitter.
“No, for my life.”
Then he asked, “Why do moms not tell what their babies’ names are before they’re given away?” He talked in the dark, with me itching his back, along the curves of his spinal cord. His bed was covered with handmade quilts. Dream protectors.
“I don’t know.”
“Why not mine?” He wanted to know his name, his pure identity. “Why did they give me away? I’m not a little toy to be given away. I’m a person! Why didn’t she run away with me in a car?”
“She might not have owned a car. She might have been poor and not known what to do.”
“Why didn’t she run away with me in a wagon?” All logical extensions of his practical mind.
“I think she loved you very much.”
“Well, why wouldn’t she? Is that a question or what?”
I had to laugh. Of course she would love him.
On his eleventh birthday he asked, “Has she forgotten me?”
I said, “No, never.”
Yu Zheng (Eli Hall) looking at baby book sent by his adoptive parents. Photo taken on disposable camera, 2004. Courtesy of Alex Behr.
Update
In 2004, Matt (Eli’s dad) and I chose an adoption agency in Portland, OR, that had multiple programs, including domestic open adoptions. And we weighed all options. Although Caucasian, we had personal ties to Chinese Americans and Chinese culture. We chose to adopt a child from China’s system because it didn’t seem as corrupt as programs in other countries. We were told by our agency and Families with Children from China (FCC), which led meetings for prospective adoptive parents, that 90% of institutionalized children would stay there until they were 16, then they’d be out in the workforce with no prospect of higher ed. We were eager to bring a child into our lives and grow our family.
After we adopted Eli in May 2005, heartrending controversies emerged about the Chinese adoption system, which contradicted what we were told from our adoption agency and FCC, much less the Chinese government. I contacted Half the Sky, an NGO that partnered with Eli’s orphanage, to ask them what they knew about how babies arrived at Chongqing Children’s Welfare Institute (CWI). I am grateful they trained nannies in supporting attachment with infants and helping them make baby books for babies destined for adoption. But Half the Sky refused to give me any useful information. I’m sure they knew the truth of where the babies arrived from. China invented bureaucracy. Women’s reproductive freedom, especially, is highly controlled.
I contacted Brian Stuy, an expert on Chinese adoption, and purchased a reprint of Eli’s finding ad (mandatory after a child is found) and his statistical research about the likelihood of child trafficking in Chongqing (he stated it was low). A child trafficking scandal led to arrests in Hunan Province in November 2005. However, I now believe that the finding place, outside the orphanage gate, was a lie. After watching One Child Nation and reading more articles, I believe that Eli’s mother, at the very least, was pressured into relinquishing him by family planning officials. Our guide in China had said his mother might have been unmarried, in which case she would have had to pay a fine equal to a year’s worth or more of salary, and not be able to register him as a legal entity (our equivalent of no social security card). As of 2019, children of unwed mothers may be barred from public health care resources and an education.
In our desire to be parents of a child from China, we were naively complicit in a corrupt system, yet at the time we believed his life with us, as a family, would be better than an orphanage life. We enrolled Eli in a Mandarin immersion preschool, but he dropped out at age four. He later studied Mandarin in high school, but he’s been acculturated into a mostly white world.
We are not the sum of our labels or stereotypes. The adoption world is fraught with criticism and hierarchies of what are “good” adoptions or not. Some criticism is justified, some not, and most is usually cruel to those who had no say in their earliest destiny. I’ve raised Eli as best I could, with all my faults, and with his mom spiritually around me. If I’m accountable to anyone, it’s Eli, then her. I induced milk while waiting to go to China and breastfed him until he was one years old. He’s grown up feeling he had three moms love him: his Chinese mom, his orphanage nanny, and me.
His goal in life: Touch a panda and hug his mom.
Projects
Eli, Iowa City, 2019. Photo by Mari Roseman.
Eli’s Films
Skateboarding videos filmed and edited by Eli Hall using his vintage Sony VX camera.