The Lost Daughters of China: Adopted Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past

by Evans, Karin

  The foster couple told us how fortunate they felt to be raising this second family. The foster village plan allows children who are not considered adoptable by the Chinese government, because of severe special needs, to grow up cherished in families. They get the support services they need from the welfare institution and can attend Half the Sky preschools before going on to schools in their communities. These children are not lost to China. Foster care linked to orphanages is the trend now, ensuring children the ongoing support and secure love of a family.

  In the Big Sisters program, older girls were learning to play the violin, taking painting and English lessons, learning computer science, or going off to vocational school. A substantial number had applied to universities and gained acceptance. One girl who’d grown up in an institution was now working for Half the Sky.

  But the biggest news came on Children’s Day in 2007 when the Chinese government asked Half the Sky to become a partner in China’s Blue Sky Initiative, a program aimed at improving the life of every orphaned child in China. Half the Sky was invited to spread its programs to orphanages in every province. The goals were huge—to touch the lives of more than one hundred thousand children in three hundred institutions over the next five years. The Bowens, who had adopted a second daughter, Anya, in 2000, had by then moved to China to be closer to the work they wanted to do.

  In 2008, when Half the Sky celebrated its tenth anniversary of working in China, Amy Tan was the featured speaker, once again lending her support to Chinese homeless children.

  Meanwhile, an ocean away from the institutions where they spent most of their first year, it took no time for Kelly’s little group of adopted girls to thrive. Gathered together at a birthday party or a Chinese New Year’s celebration, kicking through the fall leaves in Maine, going to baseball games in San Diego, they were strikingly beautiful, resilient, and by every indication happy, normal kids. And yet, laughing, running, shouting, in their new homes, they were also reminders of the backdrop of troubles from which they had emerged, reminders of how many other sweet young lives had been lost. Had any one of the babies placed in our arms in that orphanage waiting room been born to a parent less willing—or able—to get her to safety; had any one of these little girls been left farther away, or in weaker health, or for just a little longer; had any one been taken into a poorer institution, handed to a less compassionate caretaker, or not found at all, she too might have faded to a statistic.

  7

  East-West Lives

  In the beginning

  all human nature is the same.

  But as people are exposed

  to varied educations

  and different circumstances,

  they grow

  ever more different.

  —Confucius1

  Two little girls with shiny dark bobbed hair sat at a table having whiskers painted on their faces. A toddler toddled around eating an almond cookie, trailing a tiger tail tied around her waist. Amid shrieks of excitement from the children and the heavy drone of shouted conversation from their parents, a troupe of dancers appeared, holding a huge lion’s head—jowls shaking, eyes rolling—high over the crowd. To furious drum-beating, the gaudy lion leapt about—one young dancer shaking the huge white head, another wagging the tail. Thus 1998 and the Year of the Tiger on the Chinese calendar were ushered in. Mark, Kelly, and I were at our very first Between the Two New Years event, hosted by the local northern California members of Families with Children from China (FCC). Gathered in a circle, staring at the spectacle, were the little daughters of China, some in Chinese silk outfits, the majority in average American kid clothes, many in shades of red, the traditional color for Chinese New Year.

  The event was held at Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill district—an appropriate venue for such a multicultural spectacle. It’s a rather free-form institution as Episcopal groups go, in both body and spirit. The church’s impressive shingled exterior is modeled partly on the castle from Kurosawa’s epic Ran; the interior space on a Jewish synagogue. The sanctuary is decorated with murals of otherwise overlooked saints, including the boy who led a revolt against the exploitation of children in Pakistan’s carpet industry. A rubbing from China’s ancient city of Xian graces one area, and where an altar would usually stand, there’s a carved elephant seat from Thailand.

  On this day, Saint Gregory’s was overrun by dozens of small girls born in China, most about thigh-high to their parents. According to the children’s name tags, almost all had first names that were indistinguishable from any other group of children in an average American city, names like Grace and Kimberly and Maggie and Jessica. There was also one perfect East-West name, Mali McGuire. Kelly was wandering around happily, dragging her striped tail, segments of mandarin orange clutched in each hand. Several other little girls who’d lived in the same orphanage she’d come from were there that day. “Isn’t it wonderful,” said a grandmother on the sidelines, “a whole generation growing up together.”

  Ten years later, when the Year of the Pig was celebrated by the girls from China at the Between the Two New Years event, Rosemary Gong was autographing her book Good Luck Life, and Kelly was having a great time with Rosemary, helping her make change for the book buyers.

  If, on Shamian Island, Mark, Kelly, and I became part of that month’s crowd of several hundred immigrating daughters of China and their brand-new parents, upon our return we became part of a larger subculture of tens of thousands of children and their parents. All home now, leading American lives, a good percentage of us continued to be drawn together, for mutual support and in the attempt to keep one foot in the culture of our children’s birth.

  Families with Children from China, a group that now has ninety-plus chapters including one in every major U.S. city, was started in 1993 by adoptive parents in New York City, who saw it as a way to build a community for their daughters. In the United States, approximately one-fifth of the families who’ve adopted children from China belong to local chapters. There are also groups in Norway, Canada, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and other countries with sizable populations of children from China. The organizations are an important link and resource, bringing together parents and children with a shared history and common issues (see www.fwcc.org for more information).

  In the United States, families who have children from China live everywhere from Alaska to Texas, Hawaii to Maine, and points in between, and are astonishingly diverse in just about any other way you could name—professional, political, and religious leanings; family makeup, family history, age, lifestyle, hobbies, or ethnicity. The children have come from areas in China even farther apart than, say, Oregon and Alabama. They come from numerous ethnic strains within China, and their origins may range from a high-rise in Beijing to a hut in Yunnan; from a peasant family in Sichuan province to an unwed teenage mother in Guangdong. In terms of geography alone, the notion of extended family in this group is stretched about as far as it can go.

  If, as Hillary Clinton has noted, it takes a village to raise a child, this East-West group of parents and children has become its own global village. Families with Children from China chapters do a conscientious job of trying to provide a sense of enlightened community for the adopted daughters of China. In spirit, it is an unprecedented attempt by thousands of parents to honor their children’s origins. Events such as the Between the Two New Years celebration bring families together and encourage appreciation of Chinese culture. Gatherings and regional newsletters offer background on Chinese holidays and traditions, and provide a forum for such relevant issues as transracial adoption, self-esteem among adopted children, the experience of older adoptees, how to talk to children about their birth parents, and ways to handle being a cross-cultural family when confronted with intolerance or ignorance.

  In addition to FCC groups, adoptive parents can turn to smaller, informal networks of people whose daughters have all come from the same orphanage, sa
y, or of people who worked with the same agency or traveled to China together or who all now live in the same community. There’s a national organization called Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, composed of single mothers as well as a few single fathers (www.ocdf.org). Thousands of American parents, whether merely contemplating adoption from China, slogging through paperwork, or just home with a child, are hooked up to one another via the Internet.

  Most of the little girls from China have no enduring ties to their homeland in place, only attempts by their adoptive parents to keep the link to China alive for them, which raises some interesting questions. For adults and older children who can remember the past, the loss of native language, culture, and familiar sights, sounds, smells, and tastes may echo through one’s life. But for children adopted as infants, it’s hard to know what soaked in, what they might miss, and on what level they might miss it. Eventually, though, these children may long for information about their families of origin and attempt to renew a connection with the country of their birth. Cultivating respect for that culture and imparting as much information as possible during childhood is a way to keep the doors open should the girls someday wish to step through.

  When and how to talk to children about the circumstances of their birth and why they came to be growing up an ocean away from where they began is, not surprisingly, one of the perennial topics of conversation among adoptive parents of Chinese children. Most acknowledge that no matter how much love or sensitivity they bring to the parent-daughter relationship, their children will have some crises of identity, or at least some difficult questions to face, as they grow up. One possible solution is to offer these children the companionship of one another, plus the resources to feel as comfortable as possible in both worlds—East and West—by incorporating Chinese art, music, celebrations, fairy tales, and food into their lives and even making sure that they learn to speak some Mandarin or Cantonese.

  A good number of parents on the West Coast who’ve adopted Chinese children are themselves Chinese American, and for those who’ve grown up with some traditional culture, keeping it alive for their children may come naturally. For other families, people like Mark and me, to impart Chinese culture to our daughters is to impart a culture in translation, with the pitfalls attendant to any translation. In the San Francisco Bay Area or other places with substantial Chinese populations, it’s relatively easy to offer children exposure to the Chinese community and the culture into which they were born, even if they have no recollections of it and their parents have to learn from scratch. But introducing children to a dragon dance or Mandarin in a small town in the South or deep in the heart of Amish country, say, may be somewhat challenging.

  Nonetheless, there’s an effort under way by many adoptive parents to do the best they can, spoon-feeding their daughters bits of the culture left behind. In Boulder, Colorado, parents have formed a cross-cultural Saturday-morning get-together called Little Treasures. “At some point, I know my daughter is going to realize that all these kids she knows who are adopted from China are all little girls and she is going to come to some realization about why that is,” says one mother. “This is an attempt to balance out the negative feelings. We’re trying to give her some exposure to the positive aspects of the culture.” One pair of adoptive mothers in northern California pledged to take their daughter often to Chinatown where she could experience the feeling of being in the majority.

  Across the United States, there are also a number of special camps—Chinese heritage camps, Mandarin summer camps—for adopted youngsters and their families. One, an event sponsored by the Seattle-area FCC chapter, had the children painting dragons and playing in wading pools filled with grains of rice while their parents discussed adoptive family life. By 2008, many families and groups were going straight to China for their cultural experiences, and there were a growing number of programs to introduce children to their heritage.

  On the Internet, there were numerous links where children adopted from China could learn about their places of origin and hook up with other children from the same area. Pen pal programs were being put in place so adopted children could communicate with one another across the country or with adopted children in other nations. The Ties Program, a Wisconsin-based heritage organization that serves families in the United States who have children from other lands, was soon gearing up for China’s daughters, as were other organizations. In the past Ties had organized trips to Korea, Chile, Peru, and Paraguay, taking adoptive families on excursions that include visits with foster homes and orphanages, schools, and private homes—plus explorations of the cultural conditions that influence adoption decisions.

  Kelly observed her second Halloween dressed as a pumpkin. When we marked the Autumn Moon Festival the same month, she wore her Chinese jacket from Guangzhou. In December we gathered with our adoption group and the girls drew names for Christmas gifts. By Chinese New Year’s, Kelly and her cousins were exchanging traditional Chinese red envelopes. In our small way, we were a living example of what sociologists call bicultural socialization.

  Richard Tessler, a University of Massachusetts sociology professor and father of two adopted daughters from China, became interested in how adopted Chinese girls were being exposed to various aspects of their birth culture. The author of West Meets East: Americans Adopt Chinese Children, Tessler put together a questionnaire in 1996 for a national survey, the start of what he hoped would be a continuing longitudinal study.2 Parents, he knew, had choices about whether and how to help their children become comfortable and competent in two worlds, to construct what he termed “a bicultural identity.” He also saw an opportunity to gauge how the wider world viewed these East-West families.

  Here’s what Tessler found, having surveyed more than five hundred people, a voluntary representation he admits was probably skewed in favor of parents already interested in bicultural issues: Parents felt it was most important that their children be proud of their Chinese heritage. Next, they valued exposure to Chinese culture, then a child’s awareness of looking like other persons of Chinese descent; learning about the area of China from which their children came; having their child become friends with other Chinese children; and learning about modern Chinese history. Lower on the list of importance were visits to China with their child or being able to communicate in Chinese at home. Interestingly, parents who were very committed to the Chinese socialization of their children often reported prejudice or negative social reactions toward their unusual families.

  The parents Tessler interviewed said overwhelmingly they’d had few problems in their own neighborhoods, but two-thirds said they’d had problems with strangers, ranging from nosy inquiries to serious affronts. Some had been asked intrusive questions, even in the presence of the child, queries such as “How much did she cost?” and “Why didn’t her mother want her?” Some Caucasian mothers said they’d been asked, “Is her father Chinese?” The most important source of social support for such families turned out to be friendships with other adoptive families in the same boat.

  Tessler was planning to return to China, to live for a while in the city where both his daughters began their lives. There, he hoped to learn what Chinese people think about bicultural socialization. Ultimately, he hoped to survey the adopted girls themselves. He was just waiting for most of them to get old enough.

  Other, scattered research has looked at the adjustments made by children adopted internationally, and the overall picture seems mixed but generally positive. Such are the shiftings of world affairs that twenty-five hundred Japanese children, left as orphans in China at the end of World War II, were adopted by Chinese families. Two researchers interviewed a sampling of these people and reported that “those who were separated from their Japanese parents before the age of three were less likely to retain characteristic Japanese social or interpersonal behavior. In lifestyle and social-adjustments respects they were indistinguishable from Chinese people.”3

  Chinese officials from the China Center
of Adoption Affairs had also come to the United States on several occasions, to visit many of the official entities involved in adoption and to spend some time with adoptive families around the country. It was clear, said Susan Soon-Keum Cox of Holt International Children’s Services, that the officials were “reassured by how well the adopted children are thriving in their adopted families and communities.”

  Potstickers or pizza? Mulan paper dolls or American Girl dolls? Mandarin opera or Hannah Montana? Choices, whether superficial or deep-seated, await. Ultimately, it is the children themselves who will decide. Depending on any number of factors, including family attitudes, the immediate environment, and individual predilection, some children may take up Chinese traditions with great enthusiasm, while others may not want to differentiate themselves from their classmates by learning Cantonese or Mandarin or going to Chinese New Year’s events. Nor are all parents equally committed and equally able to explore and honor Chinese culture.

  I remember hearing the story about one girl adopted from Korea who turned to her adoptive parents, who’d taken great pains to collect artifacts and decorations from her homeland, and said, “How come we have all this Korean stuff, and what’s it doing in my room?” Other adoptees have longed to go back to their country of birth and immerse themselves in the culture there.

  These are delicate and complex matters. Children everywhere experience a great desire to fit into the world around them. If parents of children adopted from China push the China connection too hard, some fear they may run the risk of emphasizing differences rather than similarities, of suggesting to their daughters that they somehow stand outside the family and community around them, or that they belong somewhere else. Ignore the links to their homeland, on the other hand, and parents may deny their children the resources they’ll need to feel good about themselves and to explore their origins. A level of comfort in both worlds, complete with some facility in Mandarin or Cantonese, may be the best scenario of all—but it takes special resources, opportunities, and parenting.