Two Voices, One Story

Introduction (1)

My name is Amy Tong Fang Masters, and I am seventeen years old. I don’t need to make up a story, to be honest, as my own life has been exciting enough for anyone.

You only have to look at my family to see that we are a bit unusual. I am Chinese, but my Mum is English, my step-dad is Maltese by origin and we live in Wales with two dogs and a couple of ferrets. My Mum and Dad are divorced, and most people think that my Dad must be Chinese, but he’s English too, and lives in Birmingham. My step-mum is Chinese, though; but she’s no real relation, other than by marrying my Dad.

So how can I be Chinese? Easy really – I was adopted as a baby from mainland China, and I have no idea who my Chinese mum and dad are.

The story is mine and my English Mum’s – first our separate stories, then how we became mother and daughter, and finally what happened to us after that.

Some of the story is sad, some of it’s funny, and some of it’s nice. But all of it is true…

Introduction (2)

My name is Elaine Rizzo, also known as Elaine Masters, and I am Amy’s English Mum. I am a bit older than seventeen years old, but I’ve always thought that the two things a woman should be secretive about are her age and her weight. So I’m not prepared to disclose either.

Adopting Amy WAS unquestionably the best thing I’ve ever done with my life. I’ve worried about her very often over the last seventeen years, but I don’t think ninety plus per cent of my fussing has anything to do with her being from a different culture to me, or to her having been adopted. I think it’s because mothers worry about their children. Full stop.

When Amy came to be adopted in 1999, there was a well-publicised one-child policy in China, which was relaxed two or three years ago in certain areas, but which has given rise to a generation of missing girls in that country. Our story is in no way a political one; it is the story of how one of those missing girls came to be adopted by a British couple and what happened afterwards, because the adoption itself was only the beginning in many ways.

In telling this story, I have deliberately left out very much detail concerning either my ex or my current husband. One of the reasons is because neither of them has a direct voice in the narrative, so all thoughts and feelings attributed to them would, therefore, be speculative. It is, however, mainly because we wanted the story to be predominately mine and Amy’s, our very own mother and daughter drama.

I think Amy and I have both had fairly dramatic lives, if you compare us to a lot of other people. In fact, the very way we became mother and daughter was not without drama for each of us.

I strongly believe that it’s not so much what happens to any of us in life that counts, but how we deal with it; this is what happened to both of us and how we dealt with it, individually and together.

I am also old enough to comprehend and appreciate Nietzsche’s philosophy, which propounds the view what doesn’t kill me makes me strong.

Amy and I have each become a strong person. Or perhaps we are simply survivors…

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

My story begins before Amy was even born.

Over the years I’ve learned to deal with being infertile, but it has taken me almost half my life to work through the various feelings and issues. I think what’s finally left now is a factual rather than an emotive response to my condition.

My maternal grandmother’s first child died as a baby, and the way she spoke about her deceased daughter was in a very matter-of-fact way. I didn’t really understand this as a child; it took me years to realise the depth of feelings my Grandma must have worked through to be able to discuss her little girl in this way.

One reaction I’ve never been able to come to terms with completely, though, relates to the issue of femininity. I’ve never liked shopping, my interest in the house has always been sporadic at best, I’ve always worked in a profession which is almost entirely male dominated and the time I’m prepared to spent on clothes, hair and make-up is strictly limited. I’ve never been sure whether I really believe that I’m infertile because I’m unfeminine or whether I’m unfeminine because I’m infertile. Possibly each is a pre-requisite of the other.

Femininity is something which most women take for granted, but over which I have huge uncertainty with regards to myself. For years, I’ve studied others and found myself wondering what it’s like to be a real woman. I’ve never reached a definite conclusion over what this really means, only a hunch that it somehow doesn’t apply to me.

My way to deal with this part of the story is to list the main facts for each of the most painful episodes.

In the far back year of 1995:

I was married to a barrister who was attempting to establish his career.

I had just passed my exams to qualify as a Licensed Insolvency Practitioner.

I really enjoyed my job, and I was hoping to have a successful career.

We jointly owned a four-bedroomed house, with two bathrooms, and a secluded garden, which we believed would be perfect for a family.

I was then over thirty years old.

I was the second child of a happily married, middle class couple and had been educated at a private girls’ school.

I came from a family where everyone was almost shockingly fertile (aunts, cousins, second cousins – my mother was one of eight children).

No one else in my family, including my more remote family, was childless other than through their own choice at that time.

I had never obtained any explanation over why I had apparently been unable to conceive for over the last six years.

I had wasted at least the cost of one IVF treatment (without NHS funding) on ovulation predictor kits and pregnancy tests from various chemists and supermarkets.

I was Auntie to three boys – two belonging to my elder sister, and one belonging to my younger brother.

I managed to (almost) convince myself that between my nephews, my professional life, my marriage with our social life and holidays abroad, being childless did not much matter. I wouldn’t allow it to.

I no longer expected to become a parent.

And then, when I was least expecting it, the unthinkable actually happened and I actually was pregnant.

I really thought I had everything then – husband, career, home, family and a baby on the way. Does pride come before a fall? I don’t know, but I do know this much: self-satisfaction most certainly does.

Because in 1995, I got pregnant and it changed my life, but not in a way that I could possibly ever have imagined.

Okay, so my Mum’s right. I wasn’t yet born when all this was going on.

BUT, she’s not the only one who can list out difficult/painful facts.

In 1995, when my Mum was living in England, in mainland China:

There was a one-child policy in place, so it was almost impossible to bring up more than one child due to being fined for having more children. The fines were so large that most families just wouldn’t have been able to pay them.

Especially in the countryside, everyone wanted a boy. Because there were no state benefits in China, when you were old, you would be looked after by a son and his family.

You would not live with a daughter, because she would have to help look after her husband’s parents. So you might starve or have nowhere to live or no one to look after you if you were ill.

Baby girls were left in various places, sometimes just to die.

To abandon a child in China is a crime. The punishment is to go to prison.

The children’s homes in the countryside were full of girls, although there were some boys with disabilities.

There was not much chance of surviving the conditions of the children’s homes, as there was hardly any money to spend on the things babies need. They were also dark and cramped, although some of them didn’t look so bad from the outside. You just wouldn’t want to live there for very long.

People from the West and sometimes from within China were allowed to adopt these girls, but there were loads of them for every one personor family wanting to do this. The chances of getting adopted from here were not all that high.

At that time, babies living in the children’s homes belonged to the state in China and they had no chance of having a loving home unless they were adopted.

This means that there was no provision ever made for them to go to school, or to marry or to have their own child or even to earn any money. If they lived long enough.

In any case, after a childhood living in an enclosed home, by the time that they became grown up, these babies had become institutionalised, resulting in all kinds of disabilities, including mental health issues.

The homes had hardly any money, so the children had no toys, hardly any food, and often had to wear clothes that were almost in rags.

You’ve only got to watch the documentary made in the same year my Mum is writing about (1995) once and you will never forget it. It’s called The Dying Rooms.

So there I was, finally pregnant, after six years of trying (a terrible expression, if ever there was one, which conjures up quite a multitude of thoughts). My first reaction was one of shock and to tell the truth, it took me a few weeks to get used to the idea. I literally couldn’t believe it at all to start with.

My GP confirmed the early stages of pregnancy, and arranged for me to see the practice mid-wife. After the first twelve weeks, we both told our families and work colleagues.

I had no morning sickness, and continued to commute to work every day, still doing the same fairly demanding job. My job consisted of working on liquidations, receiverships, bankruptcies, compositions with creditors – attempting to create some kind of order out of the financial chaos caused by others, absorbing some of their stress whilst trying to reach a workable solution and working to strict legal deadlines.

I don’t remember all that much about being pregnant, apart from how numbingly tired I was all the time. I felt like I had been drained of all energy and I would sleep at the weekends for between twelve to fourteen hours at a time. Dreamless sleeps, drifting on and on like a dead man’s float.

The first sign I had that anything might be wrong was when I began to feel ill. Whenever I ate anything, I began to feel really sick, but right in the pit of my stomach, like I had swallowed something poisonous.

The day it happened, when I was about sixteen weeks pregnant, I went to work, just as usual. I remember having stomach