Adoption is a miracle. I don’t mean just that it’s amazing, terrific, and a wonderful thing to do. I mean that it is, as the dictionary says, “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of divine agency.” My wife and I, not having had children in the traditional, Abraham-and-Sarah-begat manner, have learned to make jokes about the way we’ve had our family. (“Pregnant! Why would you do that? Those clothes! And you can’t drink for months!”) Jokes are sometimes the only sensible answer to some of the astoundingly impertinent questions people can ask, right in your children’s faces. “How much did they cost? Are they healthy? You know, you hear stories. So why did you go overseas? Not enough kids here?” But we cannot imagine anything more remarkable and marvelous than having a stranger put into your arms who becomes, in minutes, your flesh, your blood: your life. There are times when the adoption process is exhausting and painful and makes you want to scream. But, I am told, so does childbirth. We also know that the hardest parts are still ahead. Raindrops rattled the roof of our small bus, seeped through the windows, and pitted the windshield with great wet gobs. “A sad day,” sighed Julie from Utah, while the cityscape of Nanchang, China, slabs of brown and gray with wet laundry flapping, rolled by our windows. Five sets of strangers were together on the bus, about to share one of the most intimate moments of our lives. We had Cheerios, wipes, and diapers in our hands. “A happy day,” Julie added, “but also sad,” and then we just listened to the ping of raindrops. A month before, this moment couldn’t have happened fast enough. Now it was here; and we weren’t ready. We had endured three days of what we had come to call “adopto-tourism” together (“You will now visit the Pearl Museum and Gift Shop! Then the Great Wall and Gift Shop! Tomorrow, the Silk Museum—and Gift Shop!”), during which we talked about the sundry things strangers do to be companionable. “And what do you do? What kind of crib did you get? Aren’t they impossible? Do you know that little Indian place just off Thirty-second?” Over careful conversation between stops, we began to make some fair assumptions about the meandering paths of hope, frustration, and paperwork that all of us had navigated to get here. Most of us had probably tried to start families in the traditional manner. For one reason or another, the traditional result was not achieved. There are all kinds of wizardly things that can be done in laboratories these days; most of us had tried one or two. But wizardry does not always deliver. At some point, after all the intimate injections and intrusions, and the hopes that rise and deflate, many spouses look at each other across a field of figures scratched on the back of an envelope and ask, “Why are we doing this? There are already children in this world who need us right now. We sure need them.” A few weeks before, we had received a few photos in an envelope: a small girl with rosebud lips, quizzical eyebrows, and astonished eyes. She was about six months old at the time of the picture. A dossier prepared by Chinese adoption officials told us that she was