Reclaiming Lily (44 page)

After collecting Faith’s things, they boarded the bus and posed for pictures with the Powell family. Their family . . . and Faith’s godparents. They would eat, then rest before the next leg of their journey. It was a long trip to the village. What would the Changs think of Faith? Her husband? Would they see her changed heart?

Be still and wait,
whispered the Spirit.

Kai leaned against the bus seat, woozy from the miracles that had unfolded. A woman with a disastrous medical history approved for adoption. Arrangements allowing them to travel to the Chang village before that final stop at Shamian Island in Guangzhou. It was enough that all four sisters would breathe the same air. Dear Father would meet his first granddaughter and reunite with two daughters.
Be still. Wait.

Feeling like packhorses, they exited the bus and entered the hotel. They said good-bye to the Powells and found a table in the dining room. Suddenly the high chairs lining the dining room wall, ready steeds for young charges, made perfect sense. Like the tourists and love-crazed parents they were, they took turns snapping photographs. When Faith began to fuss, Kai took her from the high chair and held her close.

“It’s okay, Faith Lily.” While rubbing their baby’s sweet little back, her husband hummed a lullaby, off-key and with a Boston accent.

She had learned to love his voice.

“You okay?”

She nodded, unable to speak.

He outlined her lips with his finger and then kissed her long and hard, right in front of their waiter. So un-Chinese. But she did not care.

“Welcome to China, dear Paul.” They both kissed Faith as the obliging waiter snapped a photo. “I cannot wait till you meet the rest of our family.”

Author’s Note

At age eleven, a brave young girl promised her two sisters that she would become a doctor and restore health to their parents, whose imprisonment during China’s Cultural Revolution led to horrific mental and physical abuse. Eventually Harvard Medical School allowed that promise-maker to pass through their ivy-covered gates and obtain several degrees, including her M.D.

Over forty years later, the story of the woman I will call Dr. Chang trickled down to me after my mother, Ann Qualls, was treated by Dr. Chang. The story took a poignant turn when Dr. Chang learned that my mother, along with my father, had served as missionaries in the late 1980s in part of China; an even more poignant turn when Dr. Chang diagnosed my mother with cancer.

Story pieces for
Reclaiming Lily
continued to interlock when friends Shereen and Hossein Rastigar shared their personal battle with polycystic kidney disease (PKD). Friends Tom and Amy Koranek opened their homes, hearts, and file folders bulging with information about their China adoption experience to finish the puzzle.

Though these three sources and more than twenty-five research books comprise the inspiration for
Reclaiming Lily
, this book is fiction. I pray
Reclaiming Lily
honors those struggling with PKD, those with a passion for the magnificent land of China and its people, where millions are on fire for the Lord, and most of all, those who long to experience, and ultimately celebrate, the quintessential sacrifice: that of Christ on the cross in His unimaginable and most perfect gift of salvation through grace by faith.

Discussion Questions

1. According to Rita Soronen, executive director of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, “nearly 50 percent of Americans either have adopted or have family or close friends who have.” How has adoption touched your family?
   
2. In the prologue, God transports a naïve Gloria Powell from her native state of Texas to the exotic countryside of China. Have you experienced international travel? If so, compare and contrast your “adventure” with that of Gloria.
   
3. Has your community been blessed with the arrival of immigrants from other cultures? Discuss the impact and changes that have resulted from such inflow.
   
4. This novel immediately throws two women with vastly different personalities and passions into the “fighting ring” over which one has the right to decide what’s best for a seventeen-year-old teenager. Did you find yourself rooting for Kai or Gloria? Why?
   
5. How does a Texas tornado provide the catalyst for emotional cleansing and a fresh start for Lily, Gloria, and Kai?
   
6. Trace the development of a heartfelt and genuine relationship between Gloria and her daughter. What do you think had created the disconnect that existed in the Powell household before Kai’s arrival?
   
7. Does this novel change your perception of the Chinese Cultural Revolution?
   
8. Though
   Reclaiming Lily
   centers on the actions of Gloria, Joy, and Kai, there are also three male characters: Andrew, David, and Paul. Discuss how the men promote or delay the women reaching their goals.
   
9. When to sacrifice for others and when to allow others to sacrifice for you recurs as a consistent theme. Discuss any application to your own life.
   
10. Do the novel’s settings—China, Fort Worth, and Boston—heighten your sensory experience in reading the novel? Give examples.
    
11. Compare and contrast the faith journeys of Kai, Gloria, and Joy.
    

Acknowledgments

Again, a village—Boston horticulturists and park rangers, prison officials, medical aides, Chinese nationalists, and interested readers—teamed to help this novelist. However, I couldn’t have written
Reclaiming Lily
without Trina Scott and Barry Slotky, medical doctors who went “on call” for a writer. Amy Koranek opened her heart and her files to demonstrate the roller-coaster ride called international adoption. Hossein and Shereen Rastigar fielded questions to help me understand PKD. Bless y’all!

Thanks to Dana of Barnes Jewish Hospital’s Transplant Unit (where Shereen received her brother’s kidney) for outlining donor-recipient procedures; J.R., a health-care professional, who outlined signs, causes, and pathophysiology of self-mutilation. Meteorologist Jeff Desnoyers, you weathered a storm of writer’s questions. Thank you.

Dave Warner, lieutenant at Normal Police Department and honorary novelist, you’ve cowritten three books! Nicole McCall, also of the NPD, you unraveled the complexities of station adjustments with passion and patience. Thank you!

Special thanks to soulmates Cammie Quinn and Sara Richardson, who pored over rough drafts and labored to help me find the voices of Kai, Gloria, and Joy.

Sue Wang, how can I thank someone who for seventeen days was tour guide, translator, banker, and fellow adventurer as China unfolded? Thank you, Mama and Papa Wang, for five blessed days in your courtyard, reading and sipping green tea; for five splendid nights, letting China breezes and the kang’s comfort soothe my weary bones.

Natasha Kern and David Long, thanks for believing in this story.

A thousand hugs to my family, who with the birth of dear Lily, put up with even more writer histrionics than usual. Love y’all—Alan, Thomas, Sarah, Josh, and Laura!

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for sharing your stories, especially those about China, your life, your love.

Thank you, Spirit, for whispering this story.

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