by Evans, Karin
In New York, in the fall of 2008, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) opened an exhibition on the Chinese American experience, a new permanent exhibition in a stunning skylit space designed by Maya Lin. It includes a section on children adopted from China and how families of such children have attempted to create a sense of cultural heritage and history for their children.
In San Francisco, the Chinese Historical Society of America was contemplating a party featuring storytelling and celebration for all the local adopted girls from China. Each year in San Francisco, too, the local Chinese Consulate has hosted a party for adoptive families of Chinese children.
This past year, the Organization of Chinese Americans (www.ocanational.org) invited representatives of Families with Children from China to meet with them to discuss common interests. Reported northern California FCC president Peggy Scott, “A tremendous feeling of fellowship and support was present in the room. . . . It was great to be . . . with so many Chinese American political activists, especially those who have been at it for such a long time. They are great role models for our kids. Many observed that while overt racism might be somewhat rare and easy to spot, subtle discrimination still infuses our society in insidious ways that, in the end, can be even more damaging for our children to encounter.”
China, too, has been part of the move to reach out, organizing summer camps through the Chinese ministry in charge of adoption, for instance. One program, called About China, About Beijing, is intended to acquaint adopted children, twelve to sixteen years old, with China’s culture, history, and people. The trips came about partly through Kenneth Yeung, a Chinese American from California who adopted his daughter Melissa, now thirteen, from China. So far, about one hundred children have gone back to China as part of this program, coordinated with Bay Area Adoption Services. Yeung said it all began because he wanted to give China the opportunity to show an interest in the kids. “Otherwise they may have a bitter feeling: ‘My own country gave me away.’”
Just how this substantial wave of adoptive immigrants from China will fit into the broader historical context of Chinese immigration in the United States is a subject attracting the interest of any number of scholars, including writer Ruthanne Lum McCunn and others active in the Chinese Historical Society of America.
Ronald Takaki, a retired professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a prominent writer on the subject of multicultural America, told me recently, “These children are entering America at a time when the Asian American population is the fastest-growing ethnic population in the U.S. In terms of the whole nation, we’re about five percent, and are projected to become ten percent in the lifetime of your daughters. When you think about Chinese immigration during the Gold Rush—the oppression, the discrimination, the Exclusion Acts—you realize that these young Chinese Americans face a much brighter future. It’s a different world they are growing up in and maturing in. I think it’s a hopeful world.”
What’s our daughters’ place in this world? “That’s a choice they and their parents will have to make,” said Takaki, the author of nearly a dozen books on multicultural issues, including Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, which is being made into a TV series. “It’s important for parents to be aware of the roots in America, and not just connecting to the roots in China. China is no longer their country. It’s important to connect to their roots in America as Chinese Americans. Their roots reach back to the Gold Rush. In terms of ancestry, the Chinese were here earlier than a lot of others.”
“The problem with connecting only with China is that it continues to foreignize the children,” Takaki said. “We have parents who want to make sure their children understand Chinese culture and maybe even a Chinese language, but that is shortchanging their children. The children are also Chinese American.”
Takaki helped establish UC Berkeley’s requirement that all undergraduates take a course aimed at broadening their grasp of racial and ethnic diversity within this country. “When I was growing up there were no books on Asian American history,” he told me. “I had to write them. I didn’t learn about my Asian roots in courses in elementary school or college. Your daughters will have that opportunity, especially if parents insist on Asian American history in the curriculum.”
“We’re all immigrants except for Native Americans,” says adoptive mother and FCC-Northern California president Peggy Scott. “My grandparents were from the old country. They made it through the Depression in West Virginia and they felt like they owned America. My daughter Abby should get to feel the same way. I don’t want Abby to ever think she is any less American or should have any fewer rights to her citizenship than any of the other immigrants in our family.
“But if the truth be known,” Scott added, “Abby feels closer to the pandas in Chengdu than she does to the miners of the Gold Rush.”
Emotional Geography
Some of the people who best understand what it feels like to grow up an ocean away from one’s birthplace, often in a transracial family, remain the older Korean adoptees, who in the past decades have formed groups to explore their experiences and their issues of identity. Many from this community, and others who have experienced a similar adoptive journey, are now offering to mentor the girls adopted from China. The Korean Americans—with their national organizations, their many books and films on the subject—paved the way, but others have come forward to help.
Two University of California at Berkeley students, Andrea Lu and Leslie Sheu, studied in Beijing one summer. “We became rather concerned with the plight of orphans in China,” said Sheu, and so they started a China Care chapter at Berkeley, along the lines of similar chapters at colleges such as Harvard, Duke, UCLA, and Brown, aimed at raising funds for orphanages and mentoring local children adopted from China. The two young women began meeting with other students and organizing guest lecturers to talk about such issues as the one-child policy and international adoption. They teamed up with Jennifer Jue-Steuck, who was born in Taiwan and adopted by “a transracial and multicultural family,” who was also trying to start a group to mentor girls adopted from China.
Together, they formed the G2-China Care teen group in Berkeley. “We wanted to work with teens because we believe that this is a crucial time as children are growing up,” said Sheu. “Identity issues start coming up and some might begin struggling with their often dual identities as Asian Americans.” She said the teen group was a way for girls to get together, have fun, and bond with older Asian American girls. Rather than dig into the issues directly, said Sheu, “The idea is more to provide them role models or people to look up to or ask for advice as they start forming ideas about college and what they want to be.”
The girls have also become involved in numerous fund-raising efforts—selling red bracelets, holding bake sales and raffles aimed at sponsoring school fees for children in Chinese institutions. During Christmas 2007, the teen club worked at the local Barnes & Noble, wrapping gifts, and the bookstore donated a percentage of sales to China Care. The teens raised $1,000, then conferred on how to spend it. They chose to donate the money to provide surgeries for two specific orphaned children. Said one mother of a teen, “It shows how the girls see themselves as world citizens.”
Jue-Steuck, a Harvard graduate in gender studies and now a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has described her own adoptive experience as “floating down like a feather to an unmapped country between ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Americanness. ’” She has traveled around the world meeting with adoptive families groups, and also founded a group called Chinese Adoptee Links International (www.chineseadopteelinks.org) as well as a pen pal network, so that adoptees in different countries can correspond with one another. It’s her belief that when girls hit the teen years, there are some things more comfortably discussed not with parents, but among th
emselves and with other young people who have shared a similar experience.
Ana Tanner, a bright, self-possessed eighth-grader, is one of the girls who joined the Berkeley teen club. Tanner, adopted as an infant from Jiujiang, Jiangxi province—the first child from her orphanage to come to the United States—had a number of interesting observations about life as a child from China. “As I grow older, people with similar experiences become more important,” she said. When she was younger, she and her family often got together with other adoptive families, gathering in playgroups or gymnastics classes. “We didn’t talk about adoption,” she said, “We just played.”
Now, when Tanner faces a comment at school or elsewhere that’s racist or otherwise upsetting, she turns to other adopted girls to talk it over. “I’ll think something is offensive, but I’m not sure if I am overreacting. There are things I notice that other people don’t notice. The other kids in my class go, ‘Huh?’ These are things I talk to my adopted friends about.
“Racism is hard to deal with,” she said. “It’s a lot different when you’re thinking about racism in theory than when you meet it in practice. I am always shocked when people say things that are not the nicest.”
When we talked, she was applying to high schools, leaning toward those with diverse student bodies and Mandarin-language programs. Earlier in her schooling, she said, “The [Chinese] language thing kind of fell apart for me.” Now she wanted to pursue it. She’d written an application essay on a turning point in her life—her adoption. “I have been thinking about that time when my life shifted, and could have gone either way,” she said. She’s been back to China a number of times with her family, including three visits to her orphanage. Now, during the summer before she started high school, she was hoping to travel to England and Ireland with Jennifer Jue-Steuck as a sort of ambassador, making contact with other families and talking to other girls adopted from China.
At the teen club, Tanner said she enjoyed just hanging out with other girls, and getting involved in fund-raising activities for the kids in China’s orphanages. The teen group had just had a chocolate fondue party. Through the pen pal program, Tanner also corresponds with an adopted girl in England. Her pen pal’s circumstances are very different from Tanner’s—“she goes to a high school where she is one of the only Asian children.” Yet while their experiences may have been different, said Tanner, “our outlooks are very similar.”
For Ana Tanner, the link to other adopted girls has been a comfort. “I have enough opportunity to be around people with my same experience, but not pushed to the point where that’s all I do,” she said.
The Red Thread Winds Along
“In order to know who you are, you need to know something about where you came from; in order to move into the future, you have to be able to claim your past.”
—Micky Duxbury
Who could have imagined a decade ago where we’d be at this point? Who can possibly predict what our daughters will be doing and thinking in another ten years?
How the time has flown. I looked out our window one day not long ago to see a mirror image of Kelly toddling down the sidewalk. Of course I rushed out the door. Our neighbors had come home with a child from China. To see little Olivia, with her light-up-the-world smile and her short dark hair, her gleeful and determined spirit, was to see Kelly all over again—and I was shocked by the lightning-quick passage of time. Where had the years gone? Kelly, an eleven-year-old on the verge of becoming a teenager, was upstairs hanging out with her pet gecko, while Franny had gone off to school just that morning to share her life story and photo book with her third-grade class for Valentine’s Day. “It’s all about love and opening your heart,” her teacher told the class. “That’s why Franny’s story is important.” Franny showed a great deal of presence and courage. And she got the inevitable question from a little boy: “What happened to your ‘real’ parents?”
“I don’t know,” said Franny. “I don’t want to talk about that.” Our daughters were growing up so quickly. At every stage, they have just become more interesting, more fully themselves. It has been an indescribable blessing and a privilege to share our lives with them, to watch them change and take on more of the world and come into their own. Every time I see another leap of growth, hear another unexpected question or fresh observation from one of them, I know that our family has reached another way station on the journey. And yet another. I have finally come to peace—I think—with the realization that we’ll never catch up, that we’ll always be figuring it out as we go.
It didn’t take long after I wrote this book to figure out what the sequel should be—not another book by a parent, but a story told by the adopted children themselves. The next chapter, clearly, belongs to our daughters (and sons), and our role as adoptive parents will be to listen. Just to listen. The unfolding of the emotions and the stories involved in this adoptive movement may not be orderly or predictable or always to our liking. It may not be easy to hear the feelings that some of our children may have kept under wraps. It may be uncomfortable to hear the whole notion of transnational, interracial adoption questioned. And it may break through some of our illusions to realize that what we assumed was true for our daughters may in fact not have been. We may find that our efforts, no matter how well intended they’ve been, are up for review. Maybe, as one girl recently told me, some of us parents have “made way too much of this adoption stuff.” At the very least there will always be more learning, more work ahead.
Soon the search for further answers will be Kelly’s and Franny’s to undertake, with all the help that we can give them. I hope the truth of whatever they find comes to them gently. I also hope that every birth family back in China will realize someday what a gift they have given to a family like ours; that they can know that their daughters are greatly loved and well cared for. I hope that changes within China help all its lost girls and all their lost family members. I hope the orphanages—if they must exist at all—get all the help they need. I hope the aunties and foster parents in China are numerous and good-hearted. I hope every little girl discovered on a bench, left in a field, found wandering alone, can be nourished, touched, smiled at, and given a home—if not in the land of her birth, then in another place where she’ll be happy.
Two of my favorite writers on the subject, Betty Jean Lifton and Nancy Newton Verrier (The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child), both emphasize the necessary extra work that comes with the blessings of adoption, work that is a lifelong journey for everyone involved, children and adults alike.
Micky Duxbury, another wise voice on the subject, and the author of Making Room in Our Hearts, writes, “Adoption is often about stories, stories of how birth and adoptive families find one another; stories of loss and stories of reunion. Stories often make sense of what is not sensible; they give meaning to life events that are sometimes chaotic, and they plant us firmly in the realm of other humans that share our stories.”
And, as a famous jazz musician once said, “We owe each other the truth of our journeys.”
There are some hundred thousand stories out there, waiting to be told.
Girls, sharpen your pencils, start your computers.
World, hang on to your hats.
New sisters, Kelly and Franny, in Nanjing, China, 2001.
For All the Little
Girls from China
Whenever I see one
I know there will someday be
this incredible sorority
of women brought here
as babies from China.
And their Great Wall
will always go all the
way through them to split
what happened in China/
what’s happened here.
But they will help each other
over this wall all their lives
until those walls at their
centers are merely their
strong and flexible spines.
Maybe on the basis of
>
collective cultural hybrid
strength which they’ll
find many ways to cultivate
(the strength of their stories!)
these women of the world’s
first international
female diaspora
will inherit the earth.
And do something good with it.
—Penny Callan Partridge
You Would Be Proud
I have returned
I looked for you
You were hiding in my heart
deep in my soul.
I am you and
you are me.
I am your grain of rice you’ve labored for.
I am your blueberry from Maine.
Mama.
Mum.
You would be proud
Proud to know that I am able to love
Proud to know that I have people who love me
and whom I love back
You would be proud to know that I journey alone
Proud to know
I would climb mountains just to glimpse your rice paddies
Proud to know
I would do anything to bring joy into your life.
