Red Couch comparison photos

This is a photo of five of the Guangxi girls from Travel Group 862, taken in Chattanooga this past July at our reunion. It mirrors the traditional "Red Couch" photo that is customarily taken of the girls in your travel group when you are at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou. We found a red couch at our hotel and decided that was the perfect place to take another photo of them all. They are (from left to right): Tahlia, Katie, Mia, Hannah, and Piper.


For comparison purposes, here is one of our original Red Couch photos from Guangzhou, taken of all ten girls in November 2005:




As you can see, some of the girls needed encouragement from Mama to stay on the couch! They are (first row, left to right): Amanda, Lydia, Tahlia, Jane and mom; (second row): Mia, Piper and mom, Hannah and mom (me), Gianna, Sydney, Katie. By the way, there is no special significance to the Red Couch at the White Swan. It's just a pretty couch in the lobby that's big enough to get a lot of people on it, so people started taking photos on it. Red is also traditionally a very positive, celebratory color in China.

It's amazing to me to look at these two pictures side by side. To me Hannah looks much the same as she did the day we met her. But it's so obvious that she is growing, especially when I see her next to all the other girls, who are also getting bigger.

Here's a photo of the whole Travel Group 862 on the Red Couch at the White Swan:


I am hoping that more of the group can come to the reunions every year, because it will be good to see them all together again. Some of the girls (Katie, Tahlia, Mia, and I think Jane and Gianna) came from the same orphanage in Ping Nan, and all were given the last name Gong. So they are called "The Gong Girls". They all lived together and knew each other before their parents knew them. Since we don't know anything about their bio families, this is really the closest these girls will get to knowing their birth families.