Suspended

The plane was stalled; it was sitting there on the tarmac, engines running, air circulating, fortunately. I had a window seat, so I'd been gazing out the window at luggage cars coming and going, and now I could see a group of police cars, flashing lights, and other emergency-type vehicles converged on a plane nearby, maybe two planes down the tarmac from ours. This always made me think of my family, although my family was back at home, while I was on this plane, going to a conference. My family couldn’t be in those emergency vehicles. Somebody's family was, but it wasn't mine.

Behind me, a Vietnamese lady was talking to a lawyer; they didn’t know each other before they got on the plane. She was young, and pretty with perfect English, yet still clearly Vietnamese. She did research on legal custody disputes left over from Operation Babylift, which involved the removal of Vietnamese orphans from Vietnam right at the end of the war. What happened, the best I can figure from eavesdropping, was that mothers gave up their babies as helicopters were leaving Vietnam, very dramatically; they didn’t know if they’d ever see these babies again; in some cases they signed away their rights, and in others, they didn’t. Years later, when they had the means, they came looking to be reunited with their children. The lawyer on the plane tended to side with the adoptive families, and their rights, not so much because he was an adoption lawyer, but just because he saw both sides of everything, and he could see the pain, and the legal violation, involved in taking on a young child as your own, and then having the mother come back around looking for him.

Did I say we were just standing here on the tarmac? Yes, according to the pilot, it was because of a generator for the right engine, a maintenance issue, which they would deal with as soon as possible. Who knew what was happening nearby? But there were the police, and a few other sets of flashing lights. Now the plane between us in our stalled-out plane, and the one with the emergency, was backing up, and the view was blocked. But there was a fire truck over there, red and blue lights flashing, and the police, and a few other kinds of emergency trucks. It was a gathering of important people.

Kinship is an odd thing, said the lawyer, and he seemed to be getting at the idea that an adoptive family can create it out of thin air, and have it, and this can be extremely important and worth fighting for. And if they had a good lawyer, of course that lawyer was going to attack the mother. That was his job. He had to jab and find weaknesses in her position, which was that the child was hers all along, and only taken from her by the vagaries of fate and war. “Why did you give up the child?” he would ask. “You knew that child would now be brought up by somebody else!” For a while they discussed the pressure of the situation: the helicopters waiting, the certainty of a bad fate for children who were half American, or whose parents were on the wrong side of the war, anyone who was left behind. Those circumstances, it seemed, were public knowledge; even the lawyer knew them, and he hadn’t come anywhere close to any of these cases. The woman looked at him with a kind of alienation. To her, kinship was biological; what the adoptive families had was conjured up, created, illusory, and couldn't even be compared. Much as she checked, and most Americans agreed with the lawyer, i'd say she was getting disappointed.

It was a large plane, with a large center aisle, though I had a window seat. I should mention that though I was eavesdropping, I think they knew it; they talked as if I were listening, and I nodded every once in a while. Next to me was a woman who was also going to a conference, but hers was more about storytelling, or oral tradition, or some such thing, though she was reading stories on a small computer with headphones on. Going up the middle aisle, every four or five seats or so, there was a television above the seats, mounted on the frame of the airplane, and these televisions had a continuous loop of famous and gorgeous world tourist sites. There was crashing waves on a wide beach, a mountain scene, sunset over the ocean, a wide landscape of desert canyons, a mountain scape of a Himalaya Range, and then back to the beginning, same sights as we already saw not five minutes ago. It made me mad, because it made me feel stuck, suspended. I’d be absolutely claustrophobic if it weren’t for the window.

Word came again from the cabin: they were almost done checking this generator and dealing with it. The woman next to me had now fallen asleep. Most of us, as far as I could tell, felt that if the airline was going to have a generator problem, they should go ahead and find it now. Go right ahead and check, I felt like saying. Whatever you do, it’ll probably be better than the alternative.

The woman and the man behind me were now talking about a particular case, a case that the woman had researched, one in which a young girl was involved. This young girl was the last of three siblings, and the desperate mother had come after her as her last hope, having lost the older brothers in similar tragic circumstances. The mother had never signed away custody of the daughter. The woman behind me described a meeting, set up by the legal authorities, in which the mother was allowed to meet the daughter, but the meeting was highly controlled, and the adoptive parents, as well as the lawyer, were right on the site, to help the young girl interpret everything the mother tried to communicate. There were transcripts of everything that had happened, and the woman had studied them closely. Just bringing gifts to the daughter didn’t seem to make it any easier for the mother; although they had a birth bond, it was hard for the young girl to understand the mother's idea that that bond should be more important than everything else she had experienced up to that point.

The lawyer took sides here, and objected to her idea that the birth bond was an overarching concern. It wasn't more important, he said. When the judge tries to figure out what’s best for the child, how can it be best to start all over?

The televisions in the cabin now switched to the safety message, because our plane was about to take off. Most of the cabin had to be quiet as the television marched through all the things one was supposed to do in an emergency. On some flights I tune this out altogether, as I cannot imagine anything going wrong, and don't even want to try to imagine it. But on this flight, remember that I’d just been watching at least a half-dozen emergency vehicles fussing around the underbelly of some enormous jumbo jet, and I was ready to contemplate all the various possibilities. When I listened to these safety messages, I always listened for what we call, in our household, the stewardess rule, which put simply, is that one should put one's own oxygen mask on before trying to help others. When I come home from an outing with a few very starving kids, and everyone is about to keel over from starvation, I sometimes feed myself in the process of feeding them, and I use the stewardess rule as justification. Make sure you can survive before you reach out to save others. My wife, however, considers this just selfishness, but what does she know about how close I am to keeling over? And, if I can't function myself, there's absolutely no sense talking about fixing food for anyone!

The very nature of airports, to me, was that I was suspended, away from my family; the household was functioning without me. Ordinarily I took family life for granted; I couldn't imagine not having a family, or being torn from my family as a child, or being forced to choose. But something told me that the situation the woman described was very personal; that, perhaps, she had been the girl in the story. She was unable to reconcile what had happened, and so, years later, here she was, still studying it. I got this idea from the fact that she seemed to be getting upset, right there in front of us, as if the lawyer had said something that struck her to the bone. He hadn't, as far as I could tell, but he too recognized this sensitivity, and backed off a little, as the plane took off, and this gave her a little time to recover.

Once the plane got above the clouds there was a surprise waiting for us: It was very sunny up there. There was a huge blue sky. The clouds, which were below us now, made a huge soft white blanket, and, from the window where I was sitting, it looked like the Arctic, really, miles and miles of nothing but white with a huge blue sky.

It seemed like there wasn't much left to say; she had expressed what she'd found through her research, which was that the mother would stop at nothing to be reunited with her child, yet she had found this massive wall of legal procedures, meant to prevent that, and protect the adoptive family. We, of the western culture, couldn't fathom how that appeared to the mother, how cruel and heartless that was. The mother was shattered, once again, losing her daughter as she had lost everything else, once again a war victim.

The woman, drained from relating the tale, and having gotten us to understand the mother's pain, now fell asleep. She too was going to a conference, to talk about her findings; the lawyer was going yet somewhere else. We were all suspended up there, high in the air, as the flight attendants brought their cart, and served drinks from it, and skipped the poor woman, who was now sound asleep.

3-28-2015