by Evans, Karin
While she was in China, Wong tried to immerse herself as much as possible in the local culture, though it wasn’t always easy. “As Americans, we were identifiable,” she said. “There’s something about the way we carry ourselves, about the backpacks we wear, about our glasses.”
The exploration of her roots gave Wong, a math teacher in a San Francisco private school, the urge to return to China, perhaps to live there and teach for a while. “Though I’d never been there before, it felt so familiar and so comfortable,” she said. “And it’s good just to be surrounded by people who look like you.” Another intern from a past year had reported that the trip back made him realize, even though he didn’t know the traditions or customs of his culture, and though he might not speak a word of his native tongue, that he was and always would be Chinese.
These observations reminded me of something Bette Bao Lord wrote in her book Legacies. Lord, who left Shanghai at the age of eight, returned to China decades later with her husband, Winston Lord, when he was the U.S. ambassador to that country. Going back to China as an adult, Lord said, she was struck by strong feelings of kinship. She described going to her grandfather’s grave, bowing three times, and leaving chrysanthemums. She realized that the gravestone would endure “for my grandfather, for us, for my Chinese roots, so when one day the children of my children and their children, who won’t speak Chinese, look Chinese, or know China, visit this lone ancestor, they will feel as Chinese as I did that afternoon at his grave.”
Author Amy Tan, born in Oakland, California, once said that as soon as her feet touched China, she became Chinese.
When Kelly and I walk through San Francisco’s Chinatown, I find myself looking into the faces we pass—grandmothers bent over with bags of oranges; mothers pushing babies in strollers or carrying them on their backs in fabric slings the old-fashioned way; teenagers sitting in a restaurant window eating noodles. I know that most of the people along Grant Avenue or Stockton Street or in Portsmouth Square are Cantonese, from Guangdong province, where Kelly comes from, and that a considerable number are, in fact, from the Pearl River Delta area, where she was born. One of the travel brochures for Jiangmen City notes that the area is known as a destination for overseas Chinese in search of their ancestral roots.
So many people have immigrated over the years that I know my daughter is as likely to have relatives, however distant, right here in Chinatown as back in China. The sad catch remains:
How can she find them with no name to trace, no known place of birth to refer to? Psychiatrists even have a term for what a child in this position may feel: genealogical bewilderment.
In the community of adopted Korean children there is now a move to find some of the birthplaces and birth parents who were once considered lost forever. Years ago, when American parents were adopting from Korea, they, too, heard stories of how their children had been discovered. Alone, under a tree, in a field. “Very often,” said Linda Grillo, who has worked with Korean American families seeking to find their children’s birth mothers and fathers, “parents were told that children had been abandoned, that there was no information available about the parents and that there was no way to communicate.”
But one family found out otherwise when they helped their adopted Korean daughter search for her birth family. As it turned out, the girl hadn’t been left anonymously as her American family had been told, but placed for adoption by her birth parents. “They found out way too late what the truth was,” said Grillo. “It took a Korean going there and asking the right questions. The shock was that the family in Korea wondered why they had never heard from the adoptive family.”
It wasn’t long before similar searches began to be undertaken for children adopted from China. Journeys back to China would be the next trend in this story, predicted Val Free, of Heartsent Adoptions in Orinda, California. How right she was! Free traveled to China frequently with groups of adoptive parents and early on had taken all three of her adopted children (two from China and one from Thailand) back to their countries of origin.
It can be a wonderful experience, she said, yet a return trip required plenty of emotional work, before and after, particularly if looking for further information about birth families is part of the trip. Whether a child reacts with silence or nonstop questions, it is a deeply important passage, and it will be different for every child, depending on age, temperament, and numerous other factors, some predictable, some not. What are the returning family’s expectations—particularly about further information on a birth family, or about a return visit to the institution? Some former caretakers may shower a child with enthusiasm; others may not remember, or may pretend to recall details that don’t fit. “Some parents romanticize China and the whole experience to the point that children may expect foster parents to remember more than they do, or for birth parents to even appear,” cautioned Free. “And other families may paint stories that are so traumatic as to make China seem scary.” Some children will be eager to go, some reluctant.
Over time, though, especially for families traveling back to China, some additional information was bound to emerge. “People live very closely together in China,” said a woman from Beijing, who works closely with rural women in poverty. “There aren’t many secrets.” Writer Ha Jin, author of, among others, the acclaimed novel Waiting, had made a similar observation, that the Chinese language contains no word for “solitude.” “The birth parents know where they left the children,” said adoption therapist Joyce Maguire Pavao. “With DNA testing, these girls may be able to find something.” By 2008, in fact, a number of birth families and biological siblings had been located.
Not every child will have an urge to search out her roots or return to China for a visit. These impulses are very individual. But as the girls adopted from China grow up, many may want to take a trip like May Wong’s, to come as close as they can to the place of their birth.
One of Kelly’s “cousins,” Miranda (Mandy) Wirt, who came from the same orphanage, and whose family is part of our adoption group, wrote this when she was eleven: I was born in Jiangmen, China. It makes me feel kind of lucky that I get to have more than one pair of parents in my life, but it makes me sad to not know who my birth parents are. It’s also nice to know the girls who you are adopted with, and to have other friends who are adopted, because you can talk about how you feel. When I get older I want to find my birth parents. I might like to visit China.
“Someday, when these girls are twelve or thirteen, maybe we can all travel back to China together for a reunion,” Max told us when Kelly and her cousins were five. He was taking some rare time off, visiting families across the country into whose hands he had placed a daughter. There were by then hundreds and hundreds of them. A group of us had gathered for a potluck in his honor. A dozen daughters of China were talking, playing, and sticking their fingers in cake frosting. They were placed one by one in Max’s arms for a photograph. The littlest girl there had just come home from China a few months before, the second adopted daughter in her family. Jeffrey, our guide on the China trip, was along on this visit, too, and late in the evening he was persuaded to sing the “Little Swallow” song that he’d sung on that tour bus long ago in China.
Maybe we’d all sing that song again someday on a bus rolling through the south China countryside. Though our daughters may have no ancestral home to return to, no place that may feel as familiar to them as it did to May Wong or Bette Bao Lord, there were compelling reasons to keep the connection with China alive and to help our daughters make a journey back if and when they feel it’s time.
I knew we’d have to prepare ourselves thoughtfully. For one thing, even a few years after Kelly had come home, much had changed in Jiangmen. The director of Kelly’s institution was retired now, though some families had still stayed in touch. We saw her on one of our earlier trips back to China and have photos of her hugging Kelly, as well as a little sun hat she gave our daughter that day. Not long ago, she wrote a letter to another family in
our group. “We never forget any child’s face or their love,” she wrote.
Still, for children who do make the trip, to return to some parts of China in ten years or so may be to return to a China that is almost unrecognizable. Even assuming that someone might know which village to look for, the village might be gone. If Mark and I could find our way to Kelly’s particular marketplace, the market might be just a memory, the heavy foot of a sky-scraper, or a Starbucks coffeeshop, resting where piles of pole beans used to be. In the ten years since our life-altering bus ride to Jiangmen, the population of that city had more than doubled. Both the social welfare institutions our daughters lived in might still be there, although as I write this I find myself hoping, in a way, that eventually they will be gone, or at least used for something else. Not so my daughters couldn’t see them, but as affirmation that things by then will have changed enough that orphanages full of little girls will no longer be a fact of life in China.
Mark, Kelly, and I frequently leaf through the memory books of our trips to China, looking through photos of Kelly’s orphanage and the Pearl River Delta area and Guangzhou, and Franny’s book with its photos of Changzhou and Nanjing. With each girl, we always come back to that page labeled “questions with no answers.” And with each discussion, we seem to take on another little piece of the puzzle. Whatever our plans for handling all this, I’ve learned that the subject is going to pop up when we least expect it, and that the girls will shed their own special light on whatever we could present.
When she was small, Kelly saw the film version of E. B. White’s Stuart Little, in which a pair of “real” mouse parents show up to take Stuart away from his adoptive family. The next day, she began asking us, “When are my parents coming? Are they going to take me away?” We spent a long time assuring her that we were her parents (a word she’d not used before), that we’d never let her go, that no one else was going to come for her. “We’re your parents, forever and ever,” we told her again and again. She listened quietly, and then went to bed. The next morning she came running into our bedroom. “Parents!” she announced in a loud, booming voice. “Wake up! I’m hungry!”
As for the future of our daughters’ birthplaces, just two things seem certain: first, that conditions in China will remain fluid and unpredictable; and second, that China will continue to keep some secrets. It’s hard enough to take in the reality of present-day China, much less forecast the future. At least one anthropologist has said that it’s no longer feasible even to look at China as an entity, so varied are the traditions, economies, people, politics in different regions. Then, on top of an already complex picture is a constant rumbling of tumultuous, galloping change. Says Jeanette Chu, an American who has lived and worked in Guangzhou, speaks several Chinese dialects, and is the adoptive mother of a Chinese daughter, “I live here and see real people and real life on a daily basis. I have been in the homes of the affluent and the very poor, observed everything from centuries-old rural life to high-tech boomtowns. I still know nothing about China.”
My father spent his last days working on his family tree, filling in some twigs, adding some branches. This was before he knew, officially at least, that he was dying. It seems as if humans are programmed to do these kinds of things, as birds are driven to build nests. We examine pictures of our forebears and wonder about their lives; we try to understand where they’ve been as a way of knowing where we are going. The urge seems to accelerate as people get closer to the end. So Dad filled in an actual family tree, with apples for all the members of his family. My little apple dangles from one of the branches as solidly as any of the other apples. No distinction has been made for my adoptive status, and I know that’s how he saw it in life as we lived it, too. We’d made our way through the questions and come to a lasting attachment.
When Kelly was first home, a card came from Dad’s cousin, a wonderfully sweet man in his late eighties. “Welcome to the clan,” he wrote to Kelly. No requirements for admission here. A bunch of Welsh immigrants were ecstatic to have a small Chinese girl in the family. So was Mark’s French German Ohio clan, the English and Scottish contingents, and the Japanese American Florida branch. Family members on my sister-in-law’s Mexican Chinese twig kept inquiring about “La Chinita.” I was, and am, exceedingly grateful for our mixed and loving group. What my daughters will make of all this, I don’t know.
More than thirty years after Alex Haley’s best-selling book Roots came out, Time magazine ran a cover story on family history in the computer age: “Genealogy is America’s latest obsession. And thanks to the computer, it’s as easy as one, two, three.”2 Well, not for everybody, at least not yet. For most of the adopted daughters of China at the time, the search links to China stopped at the orphanage. Tomorrow, who knew?
In the meantime, Kelly was continuing to bless and amaze us. Early on, she seemed to evince a Zen-like approach to life. Sitting back in her car seat when she was four, she said, “Mom? Some things come and some things go.”
“That sounds right to me,” I told her.
“Mom? Some people have homes and some people don’t, and that’s not okay.
“Mom? Sometimes kids are sad.”
And one day, she said, “My grandfather with the three broken teeth told me some things.”
Kelly occasionally talked about things that seem to have no links to our life together in northern California. Where the image of this grandfather with three broken teeth comes from, I haven’t a clue, but she had been telling me stories about the old gentleman for some time now.
“Who is this grandfather with three broken teeth?” I asked her after she’d quoted him again on some subject. “He lived in China,” she answered. “He was my Baba. When I got him he was new, but then he died.” She shook her head sadly. “He wanted to have more life with me.”
Memory? Imagination? Pieces of something she has seen or overheard? I don’t know, and probably never will. But living with mysteries and vaguely understood pieces of the past is part of our work together.
When one of Kelly’s four-year-old cousins adopted from China, Amy Komatsu, heard that her preschool teacher was about to have a baby, she confronted her teacher with what, for her, was the obvious question: “When are you going to China?” It’s no wonder our children think this way.
In my daughter’s small preschool there were five girls from China. They were a spirited group, with their own particular worldview. Two of them were sitting in the playground one day, talking about their origins, when another little girl joined the conversation. Blond and blue-eyed, she told them that she, too, was adopted, and that she came from North Carolina. “No,” they chorused, “you’re from China.”
At a bar mitzvah we attended when Kelly was five, at one point in the ceremony the parents spoke to their son in front of the assembled guests, telling him how proud they were of him and how much they loved him. They told him what a good teacher he was for his younger brother. I got tears in my eyes listening, and Kelly leaned over and said softly, “Mom, why are you crying?”
“They’re telling Jeremy how much they love him,” I said, “and it’s so sweet.”
“Oh,” she whispered, “they’re celebrating becoming a family.”
“Yes,” was all I could manage at the time, but it struck me later, once again, how much our kids struggle to make sense of their lives, try to understand their own story in the context of what they see and hear around them. The hardest questions were yet to come. It made me appreciate anew one of my favorite quotations from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”3
And with help, I think we can do that.
If families created through transcultural adoption offer particular challenges, they also offer a new way of looking at the world. Evan Eisenberg, the adoptive father of a girl from China named Sara Xing, wrote a thoughtful essay on how adop
tion seems to fit into the human scheme, in which he made this observation: “Adoption urges us toward a more fluid sense of family, a broader sense of community. . . . We move into a richer environment than the nuclear family can provide. Although modern adoption remains firmly within the nuclear orbit, it is inherently a part of this richer notion of child raising, this soup of relations that may be thicker, even, than blood.”4
The larger the family, the better. For one thing, there are always those on the road ahead, to help us through. Nona Mock Wyman, an orphan raised in northern California (see chapter 7), for instance, tells the story of how each year on Mother’s Day, all the girls in her orphanage were given roses to wear. Red roses for girls whose mothers were alive, white roses for those whose mothers had died. And a pink rose for Nona, who didn’t know whether her mother was alive or dead.
Later, Wyman wrote to say that one night when she was doing a book reading, an old friend of hers, Reynold Lum (who had himself grown up in an orphanage for Chinese boys, in El Cerrito, California), appeared to wish her a happy birthday. “He surprised me with two beautiful long-stemmed roses,” she wrote, “and yes, one was pink and one was red.” And then he presented her with a poem he had written for her:
And a child asked,
“Is my mother still living?”
And someone answered, “Your mother lives in you.”5
Among the many blessings of adoption is the possibility of healing in the wake of loss, a re-weaving of family and an expansion of the idea of kinship. The family of young Daniel Mauser, killed in the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, went on to adopt a Chinese baby girl, Madeline HaiXing.6 When the twenty-fifth anniversary of the airlift of Vietnamese orphans came around, on April 5, 2000, it turned out that one of the children who’d been brought from Vietnam to this country had become a schoolteacher, and now, among her students, was a young girl adopted from China. As the world continues to mix in such amazing and intimate ways, weaving sorrowful events into joyous reunions, I am struck more and more by the extraordinary sense of community and generosity and willingness—on both sides of the globe.
