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

by Evans, Karin

  In historic perspective and hindsight, families like ours realize that we adopted during a golden era. Among our extended family of people with children from China are many, many single mothers and some single fathers. There are older parents and two-mom and two-dad families, and adoptive parents with chronic illnesses as well as physical limitations. All the children appear to be thriving, and the parents are most grateful toward China. But China had other ideas. “The purpose of the undertaking of adoption is to find families for children instead of finding children for families,” the ministry said in its letter.

  Probably never again would the process be so widespread, so liberal, so relatively quick. Our own agency sent out a letter, explaining that the combination of increased adoption applications from all over the world, the liberalization of the one-child policy, and the increase in domestic adoptions in China now meant that adoption in China “has become an impractical choice. Current groups are now waiting two years and more for referrals, and the fear is it may become three years and more. Only ‘priority’ Chinese families are deciding to adopt in China now.”

  “Clearly,” one adoption facilitator wrote, “China has spoiled all of us in the adoption community, as never before in history were adoptions of healthy infants so easy, so inexpensive, and so fast and fun to do.” Now everyone needed to “readjust to a new world of adoption.” Agencies at the time began turning their attention toward such countries as Vietnam, Ethiopia, India, Taiwan, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Nepal. In April 2008, the Vietnam adoption program was halted, following reports of corruption.

  In 1996, caught in a reorganization of the CCAA, our own wait for Kelly extended to nearly two years. But in 2007, we knew people who were entering their third year of waiting for a child from China.

  Critical Mass

  Even with the slowdown, the China movement remains the biggest in U.S. adoptions. It is also probably the most organized, with the networks of Families with Children from China (FCC) groups, as well as the informal communities of people whose children had come from the same orphanage, had been adopted through the same agency, or were in the same Mandarin class or some other Chinese cultural activity. Hanni Beyer Lee, mother of three daughters from different parts of China, compiled a beautiful yearbook for children adopted from Yunnan, the province from which one of her daughters came; other groups from numerous other provinces and institutions kept in touch, creating directories and scrapbooks, sharing stories, bouncing things off one another.

  From a broader perspective, adoption, both domestic and international, has been steadily transforming the American family during the past decades. By 2007, the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute estimated that some sixty percent of Americans had a personal connection to adoption. The landmark book Adoption Nation, by Donaldson’s executive director Adam Pert-man, explored the phenomenon from a variety of angles. Each year, more and more people in the adoption triad—adopted children and adults who were adopted as children, birth parents who relinquished children, and adoptive parents—stepped forward to tell their stories in articles, books, poems, and films. For Adoption Month in November 2007, the New York Times developed an impressive website devoted to the subject, with stories from all perspectives—those of children and adults adopted domestically and internationally from diverse countries, stories from birth parents, stories from adoptive families.

  The largest populations of children adopted from China are concentrated in New York and California; it follows that the largest FCC chapters are also located in these areas. Roughly 20 percent of the U.S. families who have adopted from China are FCC members. Though some children, particularly in smaller out-of-the-way areas, may be growing up without any consistent connection to other children adopted from China, it is possible to find other families and plenty of information on the Internet.

  An industry has, in fact, developed around these families. At gatherings of the Families with Children from China groups, tables are laden with Chinese-language tapes, CDs, and books. Catalogs are available with everything from adoption-themed storybooks to cheongsams to Chinese brush painting kits to red lanterns and silk slippers. At the 2008 Year of the Rat Between the Two New Years celebration in San Francisco, there was a brisk trade in outgrown traditional silk outfits, with profits going to orphanage charities. Early on, the Mattel corporation had come up with “Going Home” Barbie, a blond mommy doll holding a dark-haired, dark-eyed baby, a gift presented to adopting families who stayed at the fancy White Swan Hotel on Shamian Island in Guangzhou.

  Dozens of books for children as well as parents have been released for this audience, from memoirs to storybooks to poetry to adoptive psychology books to how-to adoption manuals. Websites and magazines are devoted to the adoption experience, including the excellent magazine Adoptive Families, run by Susan Caughman, the adoptive mother of a Chinese daughter. There is a magazine, Mei, especially for the girls. The Internet continues to hum with group discussions on just about every subject, from skin conditions to attachment issues to suggestions on where to find kid-friendly chopsticks.

  For the subculture of children adopted from China, numerous Mandarin tutors are at work, teaching the girls as well as their families. The large cohort has also created a demand for Mandarin-speaking nannies. In areas lucky enough to have large Chinese American populations, and even in places where the numbers are fewer, Chinese dance programs and classes in Chinese music now cater to the adoptive community. Our daughter Kelly tried the gu zheng—a beautiful stringed instrument distantly related to the Western zither—and Franny briefly took up the noisy Chinese gourd pipe. Both girls were taught by a young pair of incredibly patient and good-humored Chinese American musicians. Still, there is no pigeonholing this group. There are some dedicated gu zheng players, horn blowers, and Chinese dancers in our local community, but not our kids. Eventually Kelly opted for the flute, and was playing Gershwin in her room. Franny turned to the guitar and West African dance.

  Many enterprises have sprung up to serve this group of families. One offers to search out the “finding ad”—the newspaper photo and information aimed at locating any birth family before a child was declared an orphan—for an adopted child. By 2008, it was also possible to commission an investigation into what else might be known about a particular child’s history— a search for the person who found the child, perhaps—to seek out any additional papers, such as notes from birth parents or a police report, that hadn’t made their way into the adoptive parents’ hands. There are now people known as “searchers,” who will conduct such investigations and even attempt to track down a birth parent. Groups have formed to explore the possibility of DNA banks for future searches for birth families, including lost siblings. Some of this searching has become controversial. While some birth families might welcome contact, others may not want to be found, fearing repercussions with their families, the neighbors, the government.

  A producer of the film Whale Rider has been at work on a documentary about older girls adopted from China. The filmmaker, Linda Goldstein Knowlton, mother to a three-year-old from China, said that as her own daughter’s adoption group gathered for reunions, she became more and more interested about what these girls were going to be like as they grew up. “I know so many fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, and I thought, ‘What’s it like being a transracial adoptee in the United States at fourteen years old? I had all these questions. I couldn’t put myself in their shoes, though. I knew the film had to be from the girls’ point of view.”

  The filmmaker began following three teenage adopted girls and interviewing younger girls as well, to fill in some of the formative experiences. “What I am finding,” she said, “is that every girl has had a different experience, and has different feelings. When I asked the girls how they identified themselves, one said, ‘I’m American,’ another said, ‘I’m Chinese American,’ and another said, ‘It depends who I am talking to.’ One girl said she hadn’t thought much about her birth mother, then wondered
if she should feel guilty and asked, ‘Am I supposed to?’”

  Knowlton says she had been stunned by how thoughtful and articulate this group is. One of the girls was planning to go to China this summer to work in an orphanage. “It’s really one amazing kid after another,” the filmmaker told me. And yet, she says, she was saddened to hear the extent of the mean-spirited comments some of the girls have had to endure. “I met one girl who lived in Iowa, in the middle of farm country. She was the only person of color at her high school and she was miserable. You’d expect some of the negative comments in a situation like that,” said the filmmaker, “but they happened elsewhere, too. I was so disappointed.” The documentary by Knowlton will be released sometime in 2009. The working title is The Sisterhood.

  Other films and books are also in the works. Korean adoptees, too, have continued to make films and publish books about their experiences. Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home by Kim Sunee, is among the newest memoirs. Found in a South Korean marketplace at the age of three, adopted into an American family, and raised in New Orleans, Sunee has written a candid account of her lifelong search for a sense of self. Deann Borshay Liem, whose fine autobiographical film First Person Plural told of coming to terms with her adoption and her trip back to visit her birth family in Korea, is following up with a new film about other Korean adoptees.

  With the books, films, merchandise, and services have come experts and programs and groups—psychologists specializing in adoption issues for parents, seminars on transracial adoption, programs aimed at helping the children themselves explore their feelings about adoption and race. There are workshops for adoptive parents who want to put together “lifebooks”—artistic photo albums with narrative accounts of what is known about a child’s life before and after adoption. In urban areas, there are frequent conferences for parents of adopted children. Among other blessings, I think it’s safe to say that this group of adoptive parents has had more information at its disposal than any other such group in history.

  Under the Magnifying Glass

  This adoption movement, the largest single-gender diaspora in history, is also likely to be the most studied group of international adoptees. At this writing, at least two dozen research projects are under way, completed, or just starting. The children from China were being evaluated for language development, social adjustment, bonding, and health, while their families are being studied for the effects of cross-cultural influences and the ways that transnational adoption might be reshaping the way people in the United States think about family. Various studies are being conducted by graduate students, social scientists, psychologists, research doctors, and interested adoptive parents.

  Caucasian adopting parents are the subjects of one piece of research; Asian American of another. The University of Minnesota International Adoption Clinic is looking into the expectations and experiences of the parents of internationally adopted children, while the University of Connecticut is studying the children’s behavior, attachment, and well-being. A study of adopted people who are Asian American and Jewish is being conducted. A nurse at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, herself an adoptive mother of a Chinese child, launched a study to see how internationally adopted children began developing an attachment to their adoptive mothers in the first six months after adoption. A study funded by the Kellogg Foundation aimed to evaluate the experience of adults who had been internationally adopted and raised in transracial families.

  A study by Dr. Tony Xing Tan showed that adopted children from China fared just as well when raised in the United States by a single woman as they did when raised by a married couple, countering claims by Beijing that single parenting was less adequate for Chinese children. Tan’s China Adoption Research Program, begun in 2002 at the University of South Florida, is the largest study to date of adopted children’s social and emotional adjustment in their U.S. families. Overall, reported Tan, “I’ve found that these adopted children, especially the preschoolers, are doing better than their U.S. non-adopted peers. Because adopted children have commonly been reported to have more academic, behavioral, social, and emotional problems, these findings came as a surprise.”

  On the China side, people such as professors Huang Banghan and Wang Liyao, of the Anhui Academy of Social Sciences in Hefei, whose studies of adoptive families in the United States had filled in the picture of international adoption for China’s people, continued their good work. Their book has now been published in China. As part of their research, both came to the United States more than once to meet with American adoptive families. At a dinner for Professor Wang, it was touching to see him talking with all the girls from China, conversing with some of the older ones in both English and Mandarin.

  Sociologist Richard Tessler, whose research is mentioned earlier in this book, collaborated with a Chinese sociologist, Yu Ning, to look at attitudes among Chinese people concerning the adoption of Chinese children by Americans. The researchers found mixed reactions. Younger, better educated residents of the larger towns were more accepting, while older and less educated people in small rural villages expressed more negative reactions, partly attributable to China’s historic difficulties with the West. Some had not heard of foreign adoption at all. Other respondents worried whether the girls would “feel isolated and alone in America.” Tessler and Yu concluded that attitudes in China toward foreign adoption would gradually become more positive as more was learned. “Contact with adoptive parents from America and other western countries will also help to break down cultural stereotypes and allay anxieties about how the children will be treated,” they wrote. “International adoption is one venue, among others, for transcending the age-old dichotomy between West and East and fostering mutual understanding and respect.”

  A woman who has contributed a tremendous amount of research and perspective to this adoptive group is New York City psychologist Amanda Baden. Adopted herself from Hong Kong and raised in a Caucasian adoptive family, Baden has specialized in working with the issues that come with transracial adoption.

  The China group of adoptees she’s worked with, says Baden, an associate professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, tend to have access to plenty of other children who share their histories. These are girls, she points out, who have grown up in the New York City area or other places with a high concentration of adoptees and who’ve also grown up with parents who are involved in Chinese adoption organizations. Other girls in other places may be more isolated. And even within the same city and region of the country, there’s a wide range of experience. Girls in diverse settings still struggle with the challenges many people of color face, says Baden, regardless of adoption status—the internalization of racism and oppression. “The girls are able to observe some of these issues when they are in groups and discuss these issues, but there is much more work to do.

  “Another unique aspect of the experiences of adopted Chinese girls is the fairly widespread knowledge that their gender was likely one of the primary reasons for their relinquishment,” Baden says. “Although they have the ability to explain the ‘onechild policy,’ they, like most adoptees, continue to wonder about the degree to which gender, poverty, culture, and life circumstances influenced their birth parents’ decisions to relinquish them. Some of the girls have spoken directly about these issues, but none seem to dwell or have excessive concerns.”

  One thirteen-year-old said, “Throughout my life as an adoptee, I haven’t had too many ‘issues.’ I am not very worried about many things.” But one issue that had come up, she said, was having people make fun of her eyes. “For me it isn’t an issue that I am adopted. It actually makes me happy to know that people cared enough for me to put me up for adoption, knowing they couldn’t raise me, and [to know] there are others who care enough to help children who are and were in orphanages like me. One thing that concerns me a little sometimes is the reaction peopple may have when they figure out that I’m adopted, which I don’t
mind, sometimes, but pretty rarely, it is a negative effect. I do not feel uncomfortable talking about adoption and my ‘story’ specifically.”

  Baden’s website offers a teen Q&A section, where adopted children can e-mail questions to a team of other adopted twelve-year-olds (TeenQuestions@transracialadoption.net). The identities of the girls fielding the questions are protected, but their brief bios—“What people should know about me”—provide a spirited micro-sketch of preteens adopted from China:

  “I’m smart, funny, creative, nice. A lot of my friends trust me. I’ve been back to China.”

  “I am proud of who I am, not ashamed at all. I have a really fun personality and love meeting new people.”

  “I am relatively good at solving problems and I try to help in any way I can.”

  “I love to read. I am small and Chinese.”

  “I like pie. I am awesome!”

  And yet the surrounding culture still has such huge blind spots. At every stage, every transition, it is clear: Adopted children have more to deal with, and those children growing up with parents of another ethnicity have an added challenge. In the media, in films, in the schoolyard, insensitive remarks and negative assumptions about adoption continue to fly. A supposedly witty remark in the 2008 Oscar-nominated film Juno about the easy availability of babies in China caused a great deal of irritation and unhappiness in the adoption community. Though heard by fewer people than was true of Juno, the recent David Mamet play November contained a viciously offensive bit of dialogue about girls adopted from China.