July 6 – Farewell to the Qu Family

In the morning Mrs. Qu cooked another lovely meal with fresh fruit and vegetables from her garden. Eliza was feeling a bit sad this morning and Mrs. Qu smothered her with hugs and kisses and told her how beautiful she was. We showed Mrs. Qu pictures of our family on our computer, including pictures of skiing and Tortolla, which she and her husband admired. We learned a bit about the community from our tour guide, and it appears that so much of the wealth of the village is due to Mrs. Pan, the original folk artist who’s trained many farmers in ‘peasant painting’ – we bought several of these prints in Guangzhou in 1999 and they’ve become very famous, even appearing on postage stamps. Mrs. Qu and several of her friends accompanied us to the town square with our tour guide and when the tour guide asked if any of us had questions for the others, Mrs. Qu asked that the tour guide tell us how much they appreciate us adopting our daughters, and that it is clear (from our pictures) that we treat our daughters even better than our biological children…which made most of the mothers cry – which then subsequently led to Mrs. Qu crying and hugging everyone again! We toured Mrs. Pan’s art studio and I bought 2 of her original (small!) prints for Eliza. After a quick (very hot!) game of basketball with some of the local children, we returned to Mrs. Qu’s house for a tour of her lovely vegetable/fruit garden and another delicious lunch – much better than the restaurants we’ve been visiting. We also learned that our pillows were made of the husks of buckwheat seeds – everything here is reused and made into other things –Mrs. Pan had even created some beautiful art from corn stalks that were dried in the sun and flattened with irons. We were sad when it was time to leave the village – this was definitely a highlight of the trip.





Moving 34 people anywhere quickly is nearly impossible, so we began our trek to the airport for the flight to Chengdu shortly after leaving the village in Xi’an. Chengdu was less than an hour away by plane, and also one of the cities that is farthest West in China. The flight was fast and we were soon off to the Tianfu Sunshine Hotel – where Zhang Qing and Chen Hui were waiting for us in the lobby.

No words can express how welcoming Hui and Qing are, and how good it is to see them so far away. They literally showered us with beautiful gifts and had great plans to show us the Szechuan opera and have a lavish dinner (at 9:30 PM) – but I apologized that I needed Eliza to get to sleep and that I needed to stay with her. We agreed to meet in the morning…stay tuned.