The Weather in Chongqing.

Today, the weather in Chongqing is much like it is here, only about 10 degrees colder. 63 and rainy. It’s around midnight there now. During the day, it’s about like it is here: mid-70s, humid.

On Wednesday, June 15, 2005, though, it was hot and close, with fog but no rain. The haze lifted twice, around 10:00 AM and 8:00 PM. But the rest of the day was cloaked in clouds and mist. And a woman I don’t know was giving birth to a baby she wasn’t supposed to have.

It was a boy. Under different circumstances, this would have been an occasion for joy and pride, but the world is a complicated place.

It may have been in the evening. The moon would have been a perfect semi-circle behind the clouds, halfway to full. Sailors on the river may have been celebrating the second anniversary of the locks being opened, and service economists from around the world were just winding down the Second IEEE International Conference on Services Systems and Services Management (IEEEICSSSM) in the big city.

A couple mornings later, a man named Huang discovered the baby outside a government building in Yunyang, a part of the Chongqing Municipal District that’s home to ceramics, cement and building material factories, and officials there brought him to the Yunyang Chengxiang Social Welfare Institute. He was named, apparently, after the man who found him.

And somewhere, something happened (fate? chaos? Hand of God? the notorious Red Thread?), and that baby’s photograph got stapled into a folder my family had mailed to the Chinese government. And in eight days, we should be meeting him and taking him home.

The Mandarin word for “family” is jiaren. This is a compound word made from the two components jia, or “house,” and ren, meaning “people” or “citizen.” I am Meiguoren, one of the ren (people) from America, the mei (pretty) guo (country). And we’re making this young man one of the citizens of our house.

I can’t wait to welcome him to the family.

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