by Evans, Karin
Sometimes the discovery of separated siblings unfolds when an adoptive parent happens to see pictures online of another child who looks remarkably like his or her child. Or perhaps two children who are related wind up in a room together and someone notices the resemblance. Eventually, the parents order a DNA test. In at least two curious cases, a set of twins was separated, adopted by two different families, and each of the twins given the same new first name by their adoptive families, who later found each other. Two Merediths, two Meis.
There have been other surprises. In one case in China, a set of triplets was kept together and taken to the same orphanage, and one American family was allowed to adopt all three. The tiny trio had been discovered with a note explaining that they were the eighth, ninth, and tenth daughters of one Chinese clan, and that the birth parents were unable to care for them. They hoped “an honorable person” could raise the girls to adulthood and someday bring them back to China for a visit.6
Bonnie Ward of New Hampshire asked for twins when she filed her papers to adopt from China. She wound up with just one referral, though, and soon set out to meet a fourteen-month-old in Changde, Hunan province. A single mother, Ward named her little daughter Creighton. Life was good, she said. “But I could never get it out of my heart that I wanted another baby,” she said. “In large part because I am a single mom, I felt it was really important for my child to have a sibling.” Plus Ward herself had grown up with a beloved sister, who had died, and Ward still missed her a great deal.
“It was always in the back of my mind that there was another child waiting. So, I started the paperwork to adopt again,” said Ward. The day she signed and dated the final papers turned out to be the birthday of her late sister. “I took that as a sign,” she told me. Ward asked for a child from her first daughter’s orphanage, but the agency told her there were no such guarantees, that she had to be open. “I know,” replied Ward. “I’m open, but I just have a feeling my daughter is waiting there in Changde.”
Ward got the news of a referral in August 2001. “‘You’re a mom again,’ the agency told me, and I said, ‘Where is she?’ and when the woman said, ‘Changde,’ I started jumping up and down!”
Ward and her daughter traveled to China to bring home the little sister Creighton had been waiting for. They named her Reilly. After they got home, they went to Tennessee for a family reunion. By then several people, including Ward’s mother, had observed a more than strong resemblance between Creighton and Reilly. Ward was also getting the “grocery store questions” all adoptive parents know too well. “Are they siblings? Are they biological siblings?” After Ward went to a spiritualist who told her there was an “extraordinary” connection between her two daughters, and that Ward’s late sister had had a hand in the relationship, Ward decided to get the girls’ DNA tested. When the news came back, she learned that her daughters were full siblings.
Later, at a reunion for adoptive families, the agency director said to Ward, “I don’t know how this happened.” Ward replied, “I don’t think we’re supposed to understand.”
When Ward took her two girls back to China for a trip, among their stops was a visit to the China Center of Adoption Affairs. “I asked to see the matching room,” said Ward. “It was nothing like I expected. It could have been any insurance office anywhere in America. There were a bunch of women sitting in cubicles. They had all these file folders, and they took a stack from here and put it there. But then, miracles are extraordinary things that happen in ordinary places.” During the visit, she added, a group of young workers gathered around her daughters and began talking animatedly in Chinese. “What are they saying?” Ward asked. “The interpreter said, ‘They’re saying you should have saved the money you spent on a DNA test. Anyone can see these two are sisters.’”
Of course the obvious question is, how many other lost siblings are as yet undiscovered, growing up in separate adoptive homes? Or one child living abroad and the other back in China? Kay Johnson’s research, showing that daughters relinquished by Chinese families were often the second born, had already pointed to the widespread possibility that many adopted children had siblings in China.
Jim and Susan Rittenhouse, whose own daughter turned out to have a twin living in another state, have formed a website, Sister Far, for families who have found similar, surprising connections (www.sisterfar.com). Such events, as well as the medical needs of a child like Kailee Wells, have heightened the discussions and attempts to form DNA registries for adopted children.7
Many children from China, more as time goes on, live with Chinese foster families before they are adopted. The partings for these families are often not easy. There are so many accounts of foster mothers crying inconsolably as a child leaves her care. Newly adopted babies have come with notes tucked in their diapers or pockets, put there by the foster families, containing good wishes—plus their addresses and phone numbers. A number of adoptive families have stayed in touch, sending notes and photos to the foster families and telling them of the child’s progress in the United States. For many families with young children, the links to China—for now—are often with the staff at orphanages or the foster families who cared for their children.
Many families who make a return trip to China seek out those foster families. Nancy Simmons (her name has been changed to protect the foster family) has three girls adopted from China. Her third daughter was four when Simmons went to meet her in southern China. Simmons wasn’t allowed to travel to the orphanage, and so her new daughter came to the Civil Affairs Office by car, carrying a little backpack, on Christmas Day. In the backpack was a red good-luck envelope. Inside the envelope, said Simmons, was lucky money—twenty yuan—but also a note from the foster mother, including her street and e-mail addresses. Simmons also found that her new daughter, whom she named Carolina, had memorized the foster family’s phone number.
Since then, Simmons and her daughter have spoken with the foster mother by phone and exchanged letters. The foster mother sent a package of fancy dresses for Carolina’s birthday; Simmons sent the foster mother a video of the birthday party and of other family activities. The foster father sent a heartwrenching letter describing how it felt to say good-bye. The foster father’s sister had also fostered two children, twin boys; Simmons’s daughter had played with the boys and called them her didis—little brothers. The boys subsequently were adopted by a family in South Carolina and Simmons and that family are in touch. The old red thread, winding along.
Simmons, a child development professor at a southern university, said she planned to take her three daughters back to China for a visit with the foster family when Carolina turns six and her older sisters are nine and eight. When she brought her middle daughter home, says Simmons, at bedtime the girl kept calling Mama, mama, mama. “I knew that she didn’t mean me. And then it dawned on me that I was actually her sixth mother. She’d had a birth mother, then been in the orphanage, then been put in foster care, then taken back to the orphanage, then cared for by a second foster family, and now I came along. I realized how hard the transition was.”
Unfortunately, Simmons says, her oldest daughter didn’t have foster care at all, and contact information about her middle daughter’s foster family isn’t known. For some children, though, such ties—when they are known—may be the next best thing to a birth family. For many adopted children it offers a chance to know that at least one specific person, or a family, in China did indeed care for them. Ongoing contacts with caretakers in the institutions can offer similar comfort.
When adoptive families return to China, some travel on their own, some travel in groups with other kids for company. Found in China, a film made by Carolyn Stanek, follows a group of families from the United States as they return to China with their daughters, who were preteens at the time. With thoughtful background commentary provided by Canadian sociologist, author, and adoptive mother Sara Dorow, the film is a quiet, clear, insightful look at the emotional content of such journeys. Sever
al of the girls are filmed as they visit the places where they were found. One is able to talk to the man who found her. The girls themselves and their adoptive parents offer reflections on the journey back to China, the hopes, the fears, the realities. (See www.foundinchinathedocumentary.com.)
In 2006, when their daughter Phoebe Zhilan was five years old, Lura Dolas and Darryl Brock took her back to China on an Our Chinese Daughters Foundation Homeland Tour. “We traveled with friends in our local adoptive community and others with whom we quickly bonded,” said Dolas, who is on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley. “Phoebe Zhilan was the youngest girl among us and was immediately taken under the wings of the eleven- and twelve-year-olds. She returned to China with us, but saw most of the sights holding hands with one or two of her older Chinese sisters. Her father and I followed at a cautious but respectful distance.
“Perhaps especially because Phoebe is an only child, her ‘China sisters’ are extremely important to her,” Dolas said. “They are role models and constant reminders to her that she is not alone in her journey toward understanding all that it is to be adopted from China.” Jane Liedtke, who arranges such tours, says that traveling together on a tour bus is a great experience for the girls. “They gather in the back of the bus, and they are their own therapy group!”
With such trips come new challenges, and the trips can assume a different significance, depending on the age and inclinations of the children traveling back. Though such trips can be healing and enriching, they can also awaken fears, anger, and sorrow—or end in confusion.
One American family on a trip back to China visited their child’s orphanage and were given the name and village of the man who’d found their daughter. With the help of the orphanage director, they went looking for this man, which resulted in a warm meeting. The finder, a middle-aged man, was delighted to see their daughter, the baby he’d found ten years earlier. He took her by the hand and led her to the exact spot where he’d discovered her, lying near the village bulletin board.
During the visit, the family’s Chinese guide talked to the man at length, and on the ride back from the village he told the family that the finder also knew the birth parents. Apparently the family had had two daughters, and when the third was born, they could not care for her. The adopted child visiting from the United States was quite pleased to learn that she had two sisters in China.
After the adoptive family returned home, they wrote letters to the birth parents, sent in care of the orphanage, but never received a reply. Eventually they planned a visit back and let the orphanage director know they were coming, only to be told that it had been a big misunderstanding. The birth parents weren’t known, after all; the finder had in fact found two baby girls over time, the director explained, and the birth parents he knew about were connected to the other child he’d found, not the young girl who had come to visit.
“It’s hard to know what’s what,” said the American adoptive mother. She said the family planned to return to China again at some point and at least visit the man who’d found their daughter. “He was a part of her life, and obviously a warm and caring man.” Beyond that, who knew what the true facts were?
Although this family came to China with no such expectations, some families return to China with the hope of locating the birth family, a hope that comes complete with the most optimistic scenario. But who can predict what will happen? And whatever the situation, an encounter, even a near-encounter, with a birth family can be an emotionally fraught undertaking for all concerned, say those who’ve dealt with such matters.
Hollee McGinnis, who has been there, cautions against expectations and advises families to think through all their motivations. Well aware of the fantasies that can be spun out about birth families, McGinnis asks, “Are you ready to confront the knowledge about your past? Are you prepared to meet strangers?”
Katy Robinson, another Korean adoptee and the author of A Single Square Picture, whose thoughts were included in a New York Times online discussion about adoption, reported, “It took twenty years to muster the courage to confront the most basic of questions: Who am I? Where did I come from?” She described her own trip back to Korea not as any final destination, but as a complex journey, “a picture in constant motion.” She reestablished contact with her seventy-year-old birth father, who told her not a day had gone by that he didn’t think of her.
After that, says Robinson, she settled into her dual history with more peace. “Today when I look in the mirror, I no longer see an image I want to change. I see a face with features I got from my Korean family, and expressions I got from my American one. At times, I feel deeply Korean; other times I feel all American. It’s no longer important to be fully one or the other. I have the privilege to move between these two halves and still feel whole.”
For McGinnis, it was a journey to self-acceptance, a journey of rejecting the labels and expectations placed on her by the outside world. McGinnis has strong feelings that such searches, if they are undertaken by older girls, should belong to the girls themselves, and not to the adoptive parents. “As adoptees we did not get to choose our adoptions,” she writes. “We did not choose to be relinquished. We did not choose to be adopted. The decision to search is one of the few things adoptees get to choose. It is part of our adoption journey; it is not our adoptive parents’ journey.”
Ultimately, whether birth families are part of the journey or not, perhaps the most interesting trips of all will be those that the girls take on their own. Some have already occurred.
The Lee family of Albany, California, is unusual in several respects. Hanni Lee is Caucasian and speaks Mandarin well. Her husband, Alan, is Chinese American and speaks no Chinese. The Lees have three daughters adopted from China—Jiawen, age sixteen; Fang, age fifteen; and Qing Qing, aged eleven. All were adopted as older children, and all have kept up their Chinese. Hanni and her daughters have traveled back to China together half a dozen times. Jiawen has located some family members in China and visited them often.
In the summer of 2007, Fang, who was then fourteen, traveled to China for three weeks on her own, but supported by a network of family friends in China. She kept a blog, an enthusiastic account of her travels back to her home province of Yunnan, as well as other destinations. Completely bilingual, she worked for a week at her former orphanage and foster villages, translating for a team of physical therapists working with disabled children.
She went on to Hefei, the former home of her little sister, Qing Qing, where she visited the child Fang’s family calls Little Yi, or sometimes, “Little Girl in Pink.” Fang posted photos of herself holding the smiling child, who cried when she left.
As so often happens, once one life is touched by the red thread, others are drawn into the loop. The link to Little Yi had come about on an earlier trip to China, when Hanni Lee had taken Qing Qing back to visit the foster family who had cared for her. In the countryside near the foster care family’s village, they saw a little girl sitting quietly in a chair. They learned that the child did not speak and had cerebral palsy. After they came home, they couldn’t get her out of their minds. Hanni approached the charity Love Without Boundaries to see if they could help her, and they agreed. Lee herself raised some money from friends and family, and Little Yi started receiving treatments at a rehabilitation hospital. The child gradually learned to stand and began to speak. Though she still could not walk when Fang visited her, Little Yi was receiving further therapy to strengthen her legs. Eventually, the child’s paperwork was submitted so that she could be eligible for adoption.
Traveling alone offered a very different experience from traveling with her adoptive mother, Fang said. “When we are together people always come up and ask, ‘Who is this woman? Can you speak Chinese?’ And it’s ridiculous, but they always charge us extra.”
“If you’re not there,” she told her mother, “it completely changes the nature of our experience. It changes how people see us.” Fang especially love
d going to the countryside. “That’s where the real China is,” she said. “I love the bird and flower market. If you just go to department stores, you could be anywhere. You can get a very American experience and stay very protected.
“Seeing China is kind of like seeing the other half of me,” Fang told me. “I’m indulged in American culture all day long. To be in China is a nice feeling.
“Going back to see my orphanage every year has made me feel really lucky,” she added. “Not that it’s a bad place. But especially this time, visiting made me feel like I really have it made.” At one orphanage she visited, Fang took packages of rice crackers, and when the children saw the treats, they swarmed over her. “Like ants on a sugar cube! They attacked me,” she said, laughing. “They were pulling at me and pushing each other. It shows how little they have.
“Any adopted kid, no matter how old, should definitely go back to China,” said Fang. “Taking a child back allows kids to see part of their past and their roots. But also, a child should be ready.” And, she emphasized, “going back with your parents at age twelve is a very different experience than traveling on your own.”
Fang was at the moment tutoring another adopted girl in Mandarin to help her get ready for a trip back to China. “One big thing we’re working on is what to say when people ask her if she’s Chinese. I told her it’s better to say you’re American. Otherwise, they’ll expect you to speak Chinese.”
“I say I’m American,” said Fang. “But I also say I’m adopted from China. They say, ‘So you’re Chinese.’ I say, ‘I’m Chinese American.’”
After her solo journey, Fang had mixed feelings about leaving China. “Though it is nice to be home, I wish I could be in my two homes all at once. I think my sister Jiawen feels the same way. She would like to be in both places. We both have such a love for China,” Fang told me. “But this is home. This is where my adoptive family is. I don’t know where my Chinese family is.”
