This week marked two major milestones along a journey fairly littered with them. On Thursday, we completed the years-long process of the adoption of our daughter in the city of Guangzhou, where all Chinese adoptions become official. At the U. S. Consulate there, together with about 50 other families, we took an oath and received a final piece of documentation: the famous "brown envelope" containing our children's immigration papers. We are to present ours, unopened, to the immigration officer at our first point of entry into the United States. Upon inspection and approval of this paperwork, our daughter will become an American citizen.

The ceremony, which lasted less than half an hour, felt like nothing so much as a graduation. Our education in adoption has been long and sometimes grueling, but in the end the emotions were similar to high school commencement: happiness, expectation, apprehension, and pride. After it was over a small cheer erupted, followed by families hugging, laughing and weeping. The week in Guangzhou was our senior year — dozens of adoptive families thrown together at a pivotal time in their lives, sharing the same experience in different ways. There were cliques, joiners, rebels, back-of-the-bus kids and front-of-the-bus people. And then we all parted ways, most of us likely never to meet again.

The setting for our week was the White Swan hotel. For as long as I've been contemplating this China adoption thing (which is six years, BTW), I've read on the blogs about the White Swan Hotel. A five-star on Guangzhou's Shamian Island, it's a refuge for families exhausted from their sojourns to pick up their children in China's various provinces, where English is scarce, air conditioning and Internet access can be hard to come by, and all the potties are of the squatty variety.

"We made it to the White Swan!" is their refrain, and they praise the buffet breakfast, which has both Chinese options for their new children, and American choices galore for those who are "done" experimenting with food. So when we rolled into breakfast this morning, and saw the sea of adoptive families tucking into their meals, it felt a little bit like meeting a celebrity.

A foreign lady and her adopted Chinese girl in China.

After a week at the White Swan, we left our travel group of other adoptive families behind for good and headed for Hong Kong. It marked the beginning of our journey home to Texas — and the end of having a Chinese guide and translator available to us at all times. We are now the parents of a six-year-old girl with whom we don't share a common language, with no one near at hand to help us communicate. This has been at once easier than some might suspect, and harder than I thought it would be. Usually urgent needs can be negotiated via pantomime, but the saddest part for me is when she speaks to me at length, telling me things — what things? — that I will probably never know.

JuenJuen is still being incredibly brave, and starting to let more of herself and her feelings show, we hope because she is beginning to trust us. The 24-7 charm and perfectionism are no more, and we consider that progress. She tests us, rejects me at times, and has the most heartbreaking meltdowns if we prevent her from doing something she really wants to (like running away from us on the Great Wall).

Through it all she is outgoing, fun-loving, smart, and unbelievably resilient. She has much in common with my boys, including confidence with strangers and a love of photography and air travel. But now major changes are coming. The move to Hong Kong marked our transition to a majority English-speaking environment. The Chinese cartoons that my boys have been consuming for weeks have now been replaced with their all-time favorites, The Pink Panther and Tom and Jerry. It's an apt transition place: part English and part Chinese. We have told JuenJuen through our guide what will happen next, but I don't imagine her six-year-old brain can really have any idea: tomorrow evening, after 24 hours or so of travel, we will arrive at home, where a mob of loving family and friends anxiously waits to meet her. Just about a month from now she will start public kindergarten (with ESL assistance) at our neighborhood school. And sometime after that, she will have surgery to correct her scoliosis.

For us, it will be a happy Houston homecoming, returning at last to the familiar life we have been creating in our 10 years there. But we realize that for our daughter it is just the beginning, with absolutely everything being brand new. We will do our best to help her navigate these uncharted waters, while realizing we can only do so much, and she will have to bear some burdens of the adjustment on her own. Houston is a very international city, much more so than most people would guess, and we have access to Chinese-speaking friends, colleagues, and cultural resources that will help our daughter make sense of her new life. We look forward to this process as a chance for all of us to explore new worlds. Because we took this adoption journey together, all five of us have already seen so much more of the world than we would have otherwise.