I'm riding in the back of a creaky bus, staring out at the endless expanse of marshy rice paddies that border the outskirts of Changsha.

The fields are terraced so that each one stands just above or below its neighbor, the stems the color of imperial jade, a green so intense they seem to vibrate. The flat reach to the horizon is broken only by the occasional spike of a brick smokestack, marking a kiln where red clay is dug from the earth and baked into hard blocks.

Black smoke pours from the top of the pipes, turning the blue summer sky a pale shade of turquoise.

I'm trying hard to memorize my surroundings, knowing that later I will be called upon to recite the details again and again. My wife sits beside me, the two of us grouped with 25 other Americans whose names we can't remember, strangers with whom we're fated to share the most important day of our lives.

Changsha is the capital of Hunan Province, sunken among the mountains that guard the middle lengths of the Yangtze River. The first settlers arrived here long before the birth of Christ, clearing the forests to grow wheat and rice. The fertile fields drew more and more people, and by the 1850s Hunan was badly overcrowded. In the early 1900s, landlords began forcing farmers off the land, causing not just riots but famine. In 1927, the peasants fought back, with guns, led by a rebellious Hunan native named Mao Tse-tung. Today, Mao's birthplace is a pilgrimage site, and his home province is known across China for its fiery cuisine, elegant embroidery, and extensive collections of Han Dynasty artifacts.

I imagine she will want to know all this. And that, for all the changes across long centuries, Hunan remains what it has always been: a rice bowl, a top rice producer in a land where everyone produces rice. Most of its people are still

The bus slows to a stutter in downtown traffic, and the Americans immediately attract the attention of nearby motorists and pedestrians, people who may never in their lives have seen wai guo ren - a foreigner. Laborers in dirty blue jeans wave from the mud-streaked beds of pickup trucks. I search their weary faces, seeking any trace of resemblance to the tiny face in the picture in my pocket.

I'm exhausted but exhilarated, at once hesitant and impatient. I haven't come halfway around the world to roam Hunan's museums, sample its chile-pepper delicacies, or even visit the brown adobe shrine of Mao's birthplace. My purpose is far more personal and ultimately much more selfish: At the invitation of officials in the Chinese government, I've come to collect the child they have selected to be my daughter.

Imagine a rocket streaking up into the night, its flaming red and yellow tail vanquishing all other light from the sky. In the world of international adoption, that rocket is China.

During the last decade, the Middle Kingdom has sent a torrent of dark-eyed, dark-haired children to the United States, nearly 33,, almost all of them girls. That diaspora has helped change the perception of what exactly constitutes a family, making a frequent sight of small Asian children trailing behind their Anglo, and often graying, parents. It has created new, biracial communities across the United States, and spurred the formation of more than 100 chapters of Families With Children From China, at least one in nearly every state. (The Delaware Valley branch has about 200 families, South Jersey about 150.) And it has fueled the growth of a veritable industry in Chinese adoption, one that spends considerable time and money advertising all that can go right, but little of either explaining what can go wrong.

Until a few years ago, when I thought about adoption, if I thought of it at all, my notion was of children living in modern-day Boys Towns. Doubtless those institutions were out there somewhere, perhaps in the Midwest. For my generation, born at the tail of the baby boom, children were a choice, something you had once you were ready. For me and my wife, Christine, that day of readiness lay in the future, where it stayed through our 20s and then our 30s, until the moment we realized the future had come and gone and our biological clocks had run out.

We figured adoption would be quick and easy. We were naive.

In this country, there aren't nearly as many healthy newborn babies as there are people who want them. The number of domestic adoptions peaked 30 years ago at a scant 89,. Today, the National Council for Adoption estimates that only about 20, infants are placed for adoption each year. The competition for those babies is fierce, sometimes even traumatic. Christine and I found that some couples who successfully adopted a baby had also endured the anguish of having a previous child yanked from their arms, reclaimed by the birth family.

We knew we couldn't handle that. So we began looking around the world. And we didn't like what we saw.

Vietnam's program was lurching toward shutdown. Romania the same. Cambodia was a mess, Guatemala awash in baby-trafficking allegations. Russia required two trips overseas.

In China, the process was long and exacting, but stable, with all applicants required to complete the same three phases: the paper chase, in which would-be parents must document everything from the place of their birth to the worth of their car to the swirl of their fingerprints. The wait, the interminable 12 to 14 months while the Chinese government goes about matching child and parent. And last, the two-week journey to China to be united with your baby.

In May 2001, we sent a fat dossier to the China Center for Adoption Affairs in Beijing, then set about trying to fill the time - reading everything we could find on China, practicing our Ni Hao's and our Xie Xie's (hellos and thank-yous), painting the nursery, fitting the car seat, trying not to go mad as we imagined, hour by distracted hour, the curl of our daughter's fingers and the curve of her smile.

After 13 months of purgatory, a flat FedEx envelope arrived at our house. Inside were three pictures of a 2-year-old girl with a mouth shaped like an upside-down valentine heart. A letter said her name was Jin Yu She, and she was living in an orphanage in Xiangtan, an industrial city about 40 miles south of Changsha. If we would promise to love and care for this child, the government wrote, she could be ours.

Americans first began adopting from overseas after World War II, responding to tear-jerk newsreel footage of European orphans in rubble-strewn cities. Greek children came here during their country's civil war in the late 1940s, and in the 1950s the Korean War initiated a wave of adoptions that made the peninsula this country's leading provider of children for four decades.

In 1992 South Korea sent 1,840 children to the United States; China ranked a distant 10th with 206. The next year China moved to eighth place, and then to third, even as countries such as Russia and Guatemala expanded their programs. In 1995, China became America's top source for foreign adoptions, and it has placed first or second every year since.

Why? Many reasons, evolving over many years, but mainly this: In 1980, desperate to slow the growth of a population that had just topped one billion, the Chinese government launched its one-child policy. The demographic objective collided with cultural tradition.

Then as now, most Chinese live in the countryside, where parents depend on children to help farm. Those parents want sons, and not just for the boys' strong backs. In China it is the son who inherits property, continues the family lineage, and cares for the parents in their old age. For centuries, the birth of a boy has been considered "a big happiness," a girl "a small happiness."

With couples limited to just one child, the demand for male heirs became overwhelming. Sometimes girls were put to death at birth. Or aborted. By the mid-1980s, thousands of baby girls were being abandoned, their numbers threatening to swamp China's understaffed orphanages. In 1992, to give the orphanages some relief, China permitted foreigners to adopt.

Today the one-child policy has become more elastic, more of a one-son-or-two-child policy. That's had little effect on its major consequence, abandonment. And for Americans yearning for a child, the cruelties of the one-child policy hold real-world advantages:

The abandoned children are almost uniformly healthy - Chinese farmers can't afford drugs or alcohol. Amid scary stories of kidnappings and baby-selling in countries such as Cambodia, new parents can be reasonably sure why their child was available for adoption. Last, there's no chance someone will show up at their door in a year, or 10 years, and demand the return of "her" child, China having made it illegal to have extra children and to place children for adoption.

Often, China scholar and researcher Kay Johnson has found, the abandoned girls are second daughters, born to families still hoping for sons. Usually the babies are left where they'll be quickly discovered, at a train station or public market. Some are hastily, unofficially adopted by Chinese families. Others enter the country's vast network of Social Welfare Institutes, the government homes that care for the aged, the mentally ill, and the forsaken.

How many children are living in Chinese orphanages? About 20,. Or 100,. Or a million. Nobody really knows. What's certain is that only a small fraction find new homes. And that those who do come with big blank spots in their backgrounds.

The Chinese officials told us that our daughter-to-be, Jin Yu She, was discovered soon after her birth at a place called Guangxin Alley in Xiangtan. They had no information about the person who found her. Or whether it was morning or night. Or sunny or raining. There was no description of the street itself.

As Christine and I waited to travel to China, I visualized Guangxin Alley, conjuring its environs in my mind. Sometimes it was an open space near a boisterous public market, where merchants were busy chopping vegetables and shoppers called greetings to one another. Other times, I saw Guangxin Alley as a narrow, brick-walled walkway, dank and lonely. A place where even a baby's cry could go unheard.

You read about the moments when parents see their newborn children for the first time, how their baby's burbly laughter renders them speechless and teary-eyed.

This was not one of those moments.

In front of us was a frightened and confused little girl, a child who awoke that morning in familiar surroundings and now was being handed to strangers who didn't look, smell or talk like her. A child who, at 2, was old enough to understand that something was seriously amiss in the order of her world.

We knelt down, telling Jin Yu in our fractured, half-learned Chinese that we were her mommy and daddy.

She seemed doubtful.

She was sweaty, her coal-black hair stuck to her forehead. She kneaded her hands, nervously rocking from foot to foot in shoes two sizes too big.

We tried to put ourselves in her place - it felt awful. At the same time, Christine and I were elated - in the nether reaches of southern China, here was our little girl.

The three of us moved into the hallway, out of the Xiangquan Hotel room of our adoption-agency guide, clearing the way for the next set of new parents. One child after another began to wail as they were given over - and that was good. Experts say the tears show the child formed an attachment to her orphanage care-givers, and thus can form a new attachment to her adoptive parents.

But Jin Yu didn't cry. In fact, she didn't make a sound. We'd been told she could talk, but she spoke not a word. We'd been told she could walk, but she was unsteady on her feet.

We took her to our hotel room and sat her on the bed, where, beyond a vague shrugging of her shoulders, she made no effort to move on her own. For an hour Christine sat beside Jin Yu, stroking her hair and softly telling her that everything was OK.

"Jeff," Christine said, her voice suddenly tense, "she has a scar on her head."

I brushed Jin Yu's hair aside to look: A ragged, four-inch scar traversed upward from her earlobe to her temple. It looked as if someone had decided to perform a little brain surgery using a Swiss Army Knife.

I got down on my knees and peered into her eyes.

"Are you OK, Jin Yu?" I asked, trying not to let the panic bleed into my voice, forgetting that she couldn't understand me. "Did something happen to your head?"

She stared blankly at me.

Several realities began to sink in: Our family doctor was on the other side of the Earth. In a country of 1.3 billion people, we knew not a soul. We didn't speak the language well enough even to ask for help.

Christine, who has a doctorate in school psychology, put Jin Yu through several basic skills tests - despite our baby's lethargy, her motor functions seemed sound. We ran our hands through her hair, detecting no damage to the skull beneath her scalp.

We took Jin Yu to our agency guide, a smart young woman from the city of Xian who, like many modern Chinese, had taken an American first name, Mary. She moved us under a bathroom lamp, where we could see that Jin Yu's scar was longer than we'd realized.

Still, I clung to a hope that Mary would scold us - for overreacting, for being naive first-time parents, for bothering her with something so minor. I hoped she would say she had seen this a thousand times, that it was typical among kids in this region and nothing to worry about.

Mary did not say any of those things. She said, "We need a doctor."

She took out her cell phone and called the Xiangtan orphanage, where an administrator came on the line. I could only hear one side of the conversation, and that was in Chinese, so I don't know what was said. I know that when Mary hung up, she wasn't looking at us.

"What did he say?" I asked.

She paused a long moment before answering.

"He says it's a scratch."

I realized I had sat down on the edge of her bathtub.

"It's not a scratch," I said.

"No," Mary answered, shaking her head. "It's not a scratch."

I could see the worry in Mary's eyes. She knew almost nothing about this child, and Christine and I knew less.

We didn't know whether Jin Yu's condition was temporary or permanent. We didn't know whether she'd been like this for a couple of hours, a few days, or from the moment of her birth. We didn't know whether she'd rouse herself quickly or remain listless the rest of her life. The only thing we knew for sure, and we clung to this single fact, was that she was our baby, and she was going home with us.

The Xiangtan Social Welfare Institute stands on the edge of the city at 3 Ban Ma Rd., its children's section a three-story white-shingle structure with two balconies. At any given moment it's home to about 100 children.

Usually the orphanages are off-limits to Westerners, so no one among our group was sure why we were permitted to visit. Perhaps because the orphanage is new, built in the 1990s. Perhaps because we were the first group of Americans to adopt from there in more than a year. Maybe the staff just wanted to get a look at us, to see the people who were taking 13 of the "older girls" - all of them about 2, all of them friends, all of them leaving friends behind.

We wanted to see the care-takers, too, to search out some implicit proof that our girls were loved and nurtured, dreading any sign of indifference. Institutions can be cold places.

Christine and I hoped that, at most, the visit would offer some crucial insight into our daughter's grogginess. At the least, we wanted her to have a last look around and a chance to say goodbye.

When we stepped off the bus, we saw half a dozen toddlers romping across the second-floor balcony, trailed by nannies in white lab coats. Older children, several of them boys with obvious handicaps, rushed to greet us, talking animatedly to the sluggish little girl in Christine's arms.

The building was sparse, without luxuries. But it was clean, and brightened by personal touches, such as a string of colored flags stretched across a children's room. The kids were thin. It appeared they had enough to eat and not a serving more.

The nannies knew each child by name, and they seemed to have their favorites, calling out in their distinctive dialect. A few of the women were in street clothes, coming in on their day off to say goodbye to girls they had raised nearly from birth.

One woman held out her arms to us, motioning to hold Jin Yu one last time.

"Should I let her go?" Christine asked.

"No," I said, fearful of surrendering whatever loose bond we'd established with our baby.

The nanny pushed close. We held Jin Yu tighter. I showed the woman a card written in Chinese, a promise that we would always love and provide for the child who was now our daughter. At that she paused and took a step back, then put her hands together, beseeching us as if in prayer.

Jin Yu is strapped into her high chair, waving a stubby plastic sippy cup full of Strawberry Nesquik.

"Ah Dai," she says.

Or at least that's what it sounds like.

She wants something. What, I have no idea. She repeats herself, louder.

"Ah Dai!"

I tell her I'm sorry, I can't understand.

Jin Yu shakes her head, as if to say, "This guy is such an idiot."

The adage is that the girls from Hunan are as spicy as the food. When Jin Yu gets frustrated - because I won't let her handle a steaming cup of coffee or a steak knife - she'll slam down her hand and shout, "Bop!" Or maybe it's "Bok!" I can't tell. The precise translation hardly matters. I know it's the Chinese equivalent of, "Up yours, pal!"

We are home now. Safe. Happy. Still sorting out the barrage of experience and emotion that is China. Confident that our daughter is healthy, that the scar on her head is cause for sorrow but not alarm.

In Changsha, Mary worked her cell phone and her contacts, locating a doctor who treated children in the Hunan orphanages. The physician thought Jin Yu's scar the result of a skin infection, not an injury. She thought that it could, in the broadest sense, have begun as "a scratch" that festered in the heat and grime of the searing Hunan summer.

But it was our daughter herself who ultimately convinced us of her vitality.

The night we returned from the orphanage, the girl who had refused to make a sound woke up sobbing. For an hour she was inconsolable, not so much crying as keening, a wail so loud and deep it seemed to emanate from her soul. It was as if Jin Yu had been storing her grief and anger, waiting to see if this latest of life's tumbles was temporary or permanent, then purged herself in a single storm of emotion.

The next day, she was fine, as if awakened from a trance.

Today Jin Yu is unrecognizable as the scared, awkward child we met in Changsha. In six months she has grown five inches, gained five pounds, and developed the strength to wrap two full-sized adults around her little finger. At 2 1/2 she loves Corn Pops, frozen peas, and Jay Jay the Jet Plane. She's fascinated by the magnetic click of the refrigerator door and the disappearing ink of her Etch A Sketch. Watching her is like watching a forest waterfall: The view doesn't change much, but you just can't take your eyes away.

Day by day she's shedding the remnants of institutional routine. It used to be, when she finished eating, Jin Yu would thrust her arms into the air, palms out, like the villain in a western when the sheriff shouted, "Reach!" Now she must be reminded to wipe her hands.

She's slowly learning English - "Fries please" and "All done" - though when she's tired she'll babble in Chinese. Sometimes she'll hum little melodies, snippets of tunes I don't recognize. It comforts us both, calming her and telling me that in the daily bustle of a busy orphanage, someone took time to sing to my baby.

Wherever we traveled in China, tramping the dirty, wrapper-strewn streets of Changsha or ambling the fragrant, manicured gardens of Guangzhou, people approached us and stroked Jin Yu's big cheeks.

"Lucky baby, lucky baby," they'd say.

We've heard the same sentiment from people here in the States.

It is hard for me to understand what they mean.

It's true that by dint of landing in a middle-class American home, Jin Yu's diet and health care will improve. It's true she now has two parents who are wild about her, and that where she once was one child among many she is now the center of a large circle of family and friends.

But lucky? Jin Yu was found in an alley, wrapped in clothes that even a cash-strapped orphanage decided were too dirty and torn to save. She has lost her biological parents. She probably has lost an older sister, and, if the desires of her birth parents came true, she has lost a brother as well.

The only thing Jin Yu carried out of China was her name.

That does not strike me as great good luck.

For me, Chinese adoption is a realm where happiness sits beside regret, elation the bookend to heartache.

The longer we have Jin Yu and the more she blossoms, the angrier I get: The Beijing authorities allowed Jin Yu to languish for 13 months after our application landed in their office. Why? To satisfy a need for paperwork? Or governmental order? To prove that they are powerful and I am not?

She could have died.

If I knew whom to blame, where to find the bureaucrat who sentenced my daughter to an additional year's scrape for survival, I would choke the life out of him. And I would do it with a song in my heart.

At the same time, perhaps illogically, my gratitude to China borders on the infinite. The basic truth is the People's Republic did not have to allow me to have Jin Yu. They could have kept her. Or granted her wonders to someone else. If I knew who in the massive bureaucracy determined that we alone should receive the gift of this miraculous child, I would bow at his feet.

For a long time, before Jin Yu arrived, I was comforted by the knowledge that no birth mother could ever come looking for her. It seemed a benefit, offering needed finality to circumstances that promised only confusion and doubt. Now I see I was wrong. Now I know this eternal, enforced anonymity will do nothing to diminish the tug at Jin Yu's heart, nothing to answer her questions about how she came to be. Now I would give anything for them to be able to meet.

I imagine her face, this woman. I see her faint outline in my daughter's reflection, her natural beauty and her fearsome determination. I think about what she must have endured, first to carry this baby to term, then to set her down where she might gain a foothold on a better life.

In the end I am forced to acknowledge that my life's greatest happiness springs directly from another person's most terrible heartbreak. Somewhere in China there is a woman who lies down at night wondering about the fate of this child, and who will go on wondering until the day she dies.

Sometimes, lying in my own bed, I think, Could I find her? If I could somehow overcome distance and language and place an ad in a Xiangtan newspaper, would she see it? And if she did, could she dare risk discovery and punishment by answering?

I only want to tell her: Your baby is safe. She is loved. She is exquisite. I know you will always hurt, but you do not need to worry.

The worries of parenthood now fall to me, and to Christine. It becomes our responsibility to help Jin Yu understand the circumstances surrounding her journey to this country.

The official record offers us the barest outline:

On Aug. 5, 2, a weak, 3-day-old girl was discovered in Guangxin Alley in the Yuhu District of Xiangtan. No note had been left with her. She was taken to the Yuntang Police Station and, later that day, to the orphanage.

There she was given the same last name as all of the other children, She, pronounced "Shuh," which means, "Of society." For her first name the administrators chose Jin Yu, meaning "Gold Jade," in hopes she would bring great fortune to her new family, a mission she has already accomplished.

I know that as she grows, my daughter will ask the hard questions, and I wonder how to answer. How can I possibly explain the complexities of China's one-child policy, and the awful choices it forces upon innocent people? How will I tell Jin Yu that the Chinese government and I, like small gods in our power, decided she should forever surrender the sights and sounds of her homeland?

On the other hand, some things I can explain.

I will tell Jin Yu that I met her nannies, and I am certain they loved and cared for her as best they could. I will tell her she was so important to Christine and me that we flew halfway around the globe to get her. I will tell her that the strangers with whom we shared a bus to Changsha have become dear friends, and that their daughters are her friends - more, her sisters.

I will tell her I do not know if Guangxin Alley is short and compact, like Elfreth's Alley, or if its name is a misnomer, and Guangxin Alley is in fact as long and wide as Broad Street. I will promise her that, when she is older, we will go there together and find out.