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

by Evans, Karin

  And whatever a child embraces today, tomorrow she may change her mind. Individual responses will vary, and time will tell. A few summers ago an American mother I talked with returned to Jiangmen with her ten-year-old adopted daughter. The girl studied Cantonese and had a great time, but as much as she enjoyed China, she was eager to get back home to her friends in Ohio. “She feels totally American,” said her mother. Maybe the girl will have an urge to return to China at some point in her life, maybe not. As an old Chinese proverb has it, “Human beings are like falling water. Tip them East and they flow East. Tip them West and they flow West.”

  Probably the majority of China-born children who grow up in America will flow along in the cultural mainstream, tipping—at least initially—far more toward the West than to the East, no matter how much Chinese culture is offered. Even Asian American children who’ve grown up with Asian American parents in this country say they’ve largely ignored their roots—until suddenly, in their teens or twenties, perhaps, has come an intense interest in finding out about their background.

  There’s also a possibility these days that Chinese children raised in America by parents conscientious about including Chinese culture in their upbringing may end up more conversant in some of those traditions than will children growing up today in China’s urban areas, children who are at this moment wearing Mickey Mouse watches, watching Da Niao (Big Bird) on television, eating at Pizza Hut, and getting their first introduction to the old Chinese folktale of Fa Mulan by seeing the according-to-Disney, made-in-Hollywood movie.

  Our family, plus three other families from this area who traveled with us to China, form a small melting pot all our own, a bit of middle America, with parents of European as well as Japanese and Chinese backgrounds represented. We get together every other month or so, giving the girls a chance to play with one another, while the adults compare notes. Whatever the mix of cultural influences, what seems most important is the fact that the girls are growing up together. At every event, we end the day with our traditional photo—all the kids lined up on the sofa, once again.

  Early on, in our own household, Kelly and I read Chinese fairy tales and folk rhymes (skipping that one about the worthless daughter), as well as Dr. Seuss and A. A. Milne. We played CDs of Chinese folk music along with Kelly’s favorite children’s recording, “Use a Napkin (Not Your Mom!).”4 When Mark put on the tape of Chinese lullabies that Jeffrey had given us at the farewell dinner in Guangzhou, there was some Chinese instrumental music and songs sung in Cantonese, but then things started to sound vaguely familiar. Soon Kelly was singing along to “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Happy Birthday,” and “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”

  Whatever our notions of Chinese culture, or just about anything else, I suppose, it’s a fact of life that the world often seems to be spinning faster than our ability to catch up with it.

  Korean children who were adopted into American homes in a wave that began in the 1950s have blazed an important trail for the current generation of Chinese daughters, as have children adopted earlier from Taiwan. Adoption in general, and transracial adoption in particular, was handled very differently a few decades ago, and the lessons that emerge from those experiences offer a valuable perspective for the current generation of adopted Chinese children.

  For almost all adoptive children, not just those adopted internationally, the period from the 1950s well into the 1970s were days of secrecy and sealed files. Caucasian parents who adopted Asian children did so without the benefit of the widespread discussion and group support that families with children from China have today. There were other differences. Adopted children from Korea included a substantial number of boys as well as girls, and few parents traveled to Korea to pick up their children, meeting them instead at an airport in the United States. Parents therefore had less firsthand experience of a child’s native culture to pass along, and less inclination, in general, to do so. The emphasis was on assimilation. Joyce Maguire Pavao, a Boston therapist and trainer specializing in adoption issues, comments, “Families with Korean children said, ‘What do you mean “Asian” child? This is just our family.’”

  Around the time we adopted Kelly, the story of one particular young Chinese American woman was much discussed among the parents of young girls from China. In an article in the Boston Globe, reporter Dick Lehr interviewed a college student named Julia Ming Gale, adopted from Taiwan, who’d grown up in a Caucasian family surrounded by a white, upper-middle-class world.5

  “I think I was always hoping I would become white,” the young woman told the reporter. When she looked in the mirror, she said, she didn’t see herself, but someone with curly red hair, green eyes, and a few freckles. When she went to college and encountered other Asian young people, she didn’t know how to relate to them. Even though her parents had studied Chinese and had Chinese friends, the young girl hadn’t experienced the company of children her own age in a similar position. In the year she was adopted (1976), there were fewer than a hundred other adopted Chinese babies brought to America. Gale told the reporter that she had decided to become a counselor, to help other young people raised in similar circumstances come to terms with their lives.

  Although nationwide there are more than a hundred thousand people who were adopted from Korea as children, many now in their forties and older, it has taken decades for the kind of open discussion to evolve for this group that has existed almost from the beginning for adopted children from China. In the past few years, organizations have been formed to bring Korean adoptees together and act as support groups, including the Association of Korean Adoptees/San Francisco, begun in 1997.6 There are now many organizations and networks to support adult adoptees as they explore their bicultural struggles or try to find their birth parents or come to terms with the fact that they can’t or don’t want to. Many of these adults are now writing books, producing films, and speaking out about their experiences. Parents of children from China may listen closely to the stories that Korean adoptees have to tell.

  Rebecca Hurdis was adopted from Korea when she was six months old. Twenty-six when I first met her, she was working toward a Ph.D. in ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley. I met her at a book signing one night, when she asked me a series of pressing questions: How did the adoptive parents of girls from China intend to help their daughters be comfortable with their ethnicity? How were we going to deal with the difficult questions? Did we plan to have mentors? As someone who’d been adopted from Korea as a child, she’d given the subject lots of thought. She also had written an eloquent paper about her own quest for identity.

  “One of our first moves for an identity is breaking the silences of our childhood,” she wrote. “One of the hardest reasons for us to speak is [that] we fear that we are betraying our [adoptive] parents.”

  She told me of the pain she’d felt as a child. “I don’t know how many times teachers asked me to write a family history. What was the point?” A social studies teacher once asked Hurdis to prepare a Korean meal, even though she’d grown up in an American family and never had any practice. “I was six months old when I was adopted,” she told her teacher. “Why would I know how to cook Korean food? Did you know how to flip burgers when you were six months old?”

  Hurdis described the sadness she’d carried, and the pain of not being able to see her reflection in a parent’s face. She spoke of what it was like as a Korean adoptee growing up in Connecticut, where there were few people of color, and no one she knew who shared her experience. The hardest part was the racism, she said. Even the best-intentioned parents who can talk about racism and be opposed to it may have no idea about how it feels to be on the receiving end.

  And that’s what the Korean adoptees have to offer our daughters, Hurdis said. “We’ve had an experience that’s as close as you can get. And healing can come.”

  As an adoptive mother listening to this eloquent young woman, it was difficult to hear the pain. But Hurdis also suggested something
hopeful, how sharing the burden can lighten it, and how our daughters and other young people who’ve had a similar experience may be able to help one another through.

  “Ethnicity matters,” says Claire S. Chow, author of Leaving Deep Water: The Lives of Asian American Women at the Crossroads of Two Cultures. Chow, a northern California family therapist who specializes in cross-cultural issues, has explored in depth the conflicts that can be experienced by women of a minority ethnicity growing up in the wider context of American society. “Parents should realize that they aren’t adopting just a child but an ethnically different child,” she told me. “Adoption itself carries a primal kind of loss. Add the loss of original country and culture, and you can see the magnitude of the problem.”

  A person of Chinese descent raised in a predominantly white world, Chow said she spent the first part of her own life trying to become “as white as I could; to disguise myself as a white American,” while she has spent the second half trying to reclaim her Chinese heritage. In her book, she summed up the identity struggle this way: “To me it means living in a place where I don’t look much like anyone else but in most respects act like them, knowing all the time that halfway across the globe is a densely populated region full of people who look just like me but don’t particularly act like me. It means forever holding the contradiction of belonging and not belonging, of feeling ‘at home’ and wondering where home is.”

  “Have you noticed that our children don’t look Asian anymore?” said one of the women Mark and I traveled to China with. It was a sunny summer day and we were sitting on the grass, three Caucasian mothers and three adopted Chinese daughters. It took me a moment to realize what she meant. “They just look like themselves,” said my friend. “They just look like our kids.” What she said was true. When I looked into Kelly’s face, it was just Kelly’s beloved face. Whatever physical distinctions there are between us had blurred with familiarity. Yet other people—including my daughter at some point—would perceive our differences, and therein lay a challenge for us all.

  At first, I have to admit, I thought love could bridge all the gaps, but that was the view from my perspective, not my daughter’s, nor that of the world surrounding us. My first brush with this reality came in a San Francisco coffee shop when Kelly was just two and a half. I was sipping tea and Kelly was drawing with crayons, when a little girl about five wandered over to our table and started coloring with us. Soon the girl looked intently at Kelly and then at me and said, “Are you her mom?” “I am,” I said, and smiled. The girl looked me in the eye. “She doesn’t look like you,” she said. “I’m her mom,” I said, trying to figure out what level of detail was appropriate to this particular age level. The girl shrugged and went on coloring. I was glad I didn’t have to get into all this quite yet, but I felt a certain loss of innocence. Almost equally disconcerting, though, was this remark from a maître d’ in a Berkeley, California, restaurant. He asked whether Kelly was my daughter, and then said, “I thought so. You two look alike.”

  I often have been asked, “Is she yours?” To which I have answered simply, “Yes.” One man in a post office line put it very gently when he said, “Your daughter is beautiful. What is her ethnicity?” Would that all curious strangers were so sensitive!

  Other Caucasian parents of Chinese children have reported more serious challenges. They have been peppered with nosy queries and offended by insensitive observations. How to handle rude questions is an ongoing topic of discussion among adoptive parents.

  There’s the all-too-common remark, for instance, that these children are “lucky” to have been “rescued” by their American parents, an observation that no parent wants her child to have to hear. It’s not the worst thing someone can say, of course, but it’s not something I want my daughter to have to contend with. It’s easy to assume that life in the United States will offer our daughter a richer life than she had in the orphanage, but who knows what might otherwise have become of her? She’s a resilient child, open to the world and all its possibilities, and contrary to all the negative accounts, there is also ample goodwill toward children in China. I’d never want my child to feel she had to consider herself lucky for her adoption or to think of us as her rescuers. Whatever she’s gained, she’s also left something behind. She needs freedom to feel whatever she feels, which may be a mix of happiness and loss.

  If responding to the remarks of strangers takes special skill, we can sometimes be too on edge. As I wheeled Kelly around a store one day in her stroller, the saleswoman sighed and said, “These kids don’t know how lucky they are.” I was just about to bristle, when she went on. “I’d love someone to push me around in a stroller all day. My feet ache.”

  The current Chinese American adoptive movement can be seen from any number of perspectives, depending on the experience and points of view of the observer. In transracial adoption as a whole, it’s a fact of global reality that most adopting parents are white and most adopted children are children of color. In the past, for some people on the far edges, transracial adoption has been viewed as a kind of cultural genocide.7 For people on the other end of the spectrum, including the late Pearl S. Buck, finding homes for children, even if it takes crossing racial and cultural lines—as well as the Pacific Ocean—is a good, if sometimes complex, endeavor. There are other thoughtful points of view that lie somewhere in between, including those of enlightened contemporary advocates who ardently support international adoption, but who caution adopting parents to keep their minds and hearts open to any and all questions and conflicts, not just those of adoption in general, but those of cross-cultural adoption in particular.

  Writes psychologist Mary Pipher, author of the best-seller Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls: “In particular, teenagers, who are focused on identity issues, struggle with the meaning of adoption in their lives. When adoption involves mixing races, the issues become even more formidable. Racial issues are difficult for Americans to discuss. We have so few examples of good discussions about ethnic differences that even to acknowledge differences makes most of us feel guilty.”

  It’s also a mistake to confuse ethnicity with cultural leanings of any sort. Just because people have certain identifying features says nothing about the culture from which they have come or about the culture they embrace—or how they themselves might wish the world to see them. Writer Pang-Mei Natasha Chang writes of her own ambivalence and frustration, of being put off when a Chinese waiter automatically speaks Chinese to her, and equally put off when one doesn’t. “The dilemma of the person of two cultures,” she calls it.8 In a television documentary about growing up Asian in America, a teenaged girl said plaintively, “I don’t want to be ethnic this or that or Chinese-American or hyphenated anything else. I just want to be a person.”

  Sometimes, I admit, I also wish that all the differences would just go away and that my daughter’s childhood could be protected and easy. Yet not addressing the issues directly is the biggest mistake adoptive parents can make, says therapist Claire Chow. “Parents have to think about what’s going to happen when these kids encounter prejudice that the parents haven’t had in their own lives.”

  I often think back to my early, simpler ideas about life with my daughter from China. As has widely been pointed out, it’s far easier to be blind to prejudice when one hasn’t grown up as a minority in this culture. To cite a rather mild example: The year Kelly was born, Michelle Kwan, the much-admired young figure skater from California, placed second to Tara Lipinski (also of the U.S.) in the Olympics competition held in Nagano, Japan. A television headline announced the results this way: “American beats out Kwan.” Chine Hui, a Chinese-American restaurant manager in San Francisco, was disturbed enough by the error to write a thoughtful piece for a local newspaper.9 “What does it take to be American?” she asked, noting how the TV report casually cast the young Kwan as the “other” when it came to comparisons with a Caucasian skater.

  When Abby Scott, adopted from Ch
ina, watched the TV coverage of that event, and heard the announcer bellow, “The American won!” she was so furious she threw a pillow at the TV. “I guess you don’t think I’m American, either!” she yelled at the announcer.

  Such thoughtless assumptions cause pain, even before they evolve into more damaging statements. And it’s that kind of thoughtlessness that ethnic minorities face all the time. Unfortunately, it can get worse. Hate crimes against Asians have, in fact, increased in the United States in the past few years.

  “We heard about you in China and flew all the way there to get you,” Mark was saying to Kelly at bedtime. “We love you, sweetie.” Then he looked troubled. “I don’t know what else to tell her,” he said. “What can we say?”

  Kelly’s life story begins, by necessity, a bit later than “On the night you were born . . .” But one flaw in its telling—“we went to China to find you”—is that adopted children, hearing how they were “chosen” or “found,” may assume they came into this world in a different manner than other children. As Betty Jean Lifton writes in Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience : “Where do you connect with the human condition when you are chosen and everyone else is born?”

  To point out some minor possibilities for confusion: One of Kelly’s playmates, another adopted daughter from China, just past her second birthday, was sitting in the bathtub one day, exploring her body. “What’s this?” she asked her mother, and her mother decided it was time for the preliminary facts of life. “That’s your vagina,” she said. The little girl looked expectant, so her mother went on. “Someday,” she said, “a baby may come from there.”