by Jeff Gammage
I don’t know if Jin Yu would want to see Guangxin Alley or not. During the last few months she has started asking Christine and me to take her to visit China. Other adopted Chinese girls, older, are beginning to make their first exploratory trips to their homeland. In a few years the eldest among them will begin to tell us what they think of their own experience, not just in conversation, but in essay, memoir, and film, in painting and sculpture. I am eager to hear what they will have to say. It is a pale conceit—one frequently expressed in this country—to believe that in all that these girls were forced to leave behind, they somehow traded up.
When Jin Yu asks to visit China, I tell her we will try to go in a few years, when she is old enough to carry some of her luggage, or at least keep track of her backpack, and when Zhao Gu doesn’t require quite so much attention.
But even as I promise I wonder: who will welcome her back to China?
On that future day when Jin Yu returns, stepping off the plane and walking bleary-eyed into the arrival lounge in Beijing or Shanghai, who will be there to greet her? In America, Jin Yu’s appearance was celebrated with balloons and ribbons and rainbow-colored banners that stretched the length of a room, proclaiming, WELCOME HOME. She was pulled into the arms of friends and family, smothered by their hugs and kisses, dampened by their tears.
Who will be there to meet her when she returns to China? Who will be there to say, Welcome. Welcome to the land of your birth, to the place of your ancestors, to the people who gave you your tastes, your looks, your first language?
No one.
The answer is, no one.
DURING OUR second trip to China, we renewed old friendships and forged new ones.
Inside the Forbidden City, its thick red walls the very emblem of governmental authority, a group of gangly, stubble-chinned teenagers timidly edged their way into our family picture. We wrapped our arms around their shoulders and welcomed them as distant cousins.
At a noodle house in Gansu, I forced down a bowl of yak-meat soup and thanked the waitress when she brought me more. It was that or go hungry. And she had no way of knowing I wasn’t partial to yak.
On a lost, misguided trek to a Lanzhou art gallery, I met a young Tibetan who walked far out of his way to lead me back to a main road. And at a small restaurant near the ancient Drum and Bell Towers in Beijing, I sat with a friend, a Chinese woman who knows well her nation’s complicated interactions with its daughters. She told me that I am a good man and my daughter is lucky. I told her it is the opposite. My daughter is good and I am lucky.
From this shore, relations with friends in China are carried forward by e-mail, letter, and phone call, by cards and packages that are sent there or arrive here. In this country, Christine and I make friends with Chinese expatriates based, at least initially, on nothing more than the fact that they and our children come from the same place.
These interactions no longer surprise me.
For you see, I have a relationship with China.
I have opinions about its leaders, its courts, its news media, and its military, about its governmental policies on everything from energy to flood relief. I feel that China and I are in touch, that we share common aims and interests, that what began as an obligatory exchange of paperwork has developed into a bona fide and ongoing rapport.
There’s only one problem.
China has no relationship with me.
China doesn’t know I exist. Or if it knows—the fact of my existence noted somewhere in a state file—it certainly doesn’t care. For more than four years, I have been planning to travel to China, traveling in China, or returning from traveling in China. Yet I have passed through that land leaving no more trace, in the words of Pearl Buck, than a finger drawn through water.
I hold no stronger opinion about China than on the malevolence of its one-child policy, an evil from which I have most certainly and greatly benefited. To me, it’s an outrage that a government—any government—would seek to dictate the size of its citizens’ families. I think it’s scandalous that a government would coerce women into mandatory abortion and sterilization, and a crime that a national network of orphanages teeming with little girls could somehow be regarded as normal.
I think the government needs to change its policy. I think it needs to encourage its citizens to keep, raise, and honor their daughters. I think it needs to create a plan—and set a deadline—for emptying the orphanages and finding homes with foster or adoptive parents for all the children who live there.
And I know China doesn’t care what I think. Or what other people like me think.
But it may not enjoy that luxury much longer.
The United States is now home to nearly 62,000 adopted Chinese children, and that figure is increasing at a rate of more than 6,000 a year. In essence these girls have left the countryside for the city, shedding the confines and limitations of state orphanages for homes that, by American standards, are solidly middle-class and even upper-class. The eldest girls are now entering adolescence. They are smart, confident, assertive, fully Chinese by birth, fully American in their concepts of fairness and justice.
Here’s one possible future:
That these girls, as they grow into their twenties and thirties, will turn toward China, not with open arms, but with raised fists. That they will demand answers—about their births and blood families, about the governmental regulations that drove them to America and across the world in this Asian diaspora. That they’ll be abetted at every step by a second, larger army composed of their American parents, siblings, and friends.
American mothers and fathers know of their daughters what I know of my own: these girls are fierce. Determination is their common trait, intelligence their shared asset.
I wonder if the ruling party thinks about that. If it ever considers that, by allowing us our girls, it may actually be building a monster, lugging each part to service, tightening each bolt into place.
What might these girls want from China?
Much.
Maybe the creation of a DNA database, where their birth mothers and birth fathers could register without fear of reprisal. Where Chinese parents who have abandoned a child would be encouraged to register. The construction of a databank, a common area where children and parents could look for one another, would be complicated but hardly impossible. In the six months surrounding the date when Jin Yu was found in Guangxin Alley, at least twenty-six other babies were abandoned in the same area. That’s too many. But not too many to check.
DNA already is being used in this country to locate the blood siblings of Chinese daughters—girls born into the same family in China, abandoned, then adopted into different homes in the United States. Even without the aid of a central registry, several sets of matches have been made.
What else might these girls want? Perhaps an end to the one-child policy, or at the least, an end to the life-altering punishments meted out to its violators. They may want reparations paid to the families who have been torn asunder. Real changes in the way China treats women. A dismantling of the orphanage system that holds untold thousands of their peers. At a minimum, or more likely as a starting point, they may want an apology—to the women and men who were compelled to surrender children of their own flesh and blood, to the thousands of girls taken from their homeland and spirited across the seas.
For the Chinese government to congratulate itself that these girls are better off in foreign homes than in state orphanages—and for American parents to do the same—misses the point.
These girls could be aided by internal pressures within China. Today, ultrasound technology is being used, not to check the health of fetuses but to identify females, who are then aborted. So many girls have been lost that China now suffers from a “gender gap” in which births of boys far outnumber those of girls—by 117 to 100, when the natural ratio should be about 106 to 100. That means many men in many parts of the country can forget about getting married. There just won’t be enough women.
Of course, none of these changes, even if sought, would come easily. The government insists the restraints of its birth-planning policy have prevented disastrous famine, and famine is a powerful word in China, a land where death by starvation dwells within living memory.
Trying to introduce lasting changes in the way Chinese society values women could be, if anything, more difficult.
It’s also possible the adopted girls will have no interest in any of this. It’s possible they will grow to regard China as an evening moon—pretty to look at from a distance. I think of my own life: my paternal grandmother spoke Gaelic to her children. But a mere two generations later, only a few members of her family can speak more than a few words, and those as a curiosity. For my grandmother’s grandchildren, myself included, Ireland is not the great mother country, missed and longed for, but just another place we might someday like to visit, like Wales.
But China is not Ireland. These girls are pulled toward China by more than tourism. These children are big in number—one out of three international adoptions now comes from China. And they’re already more organized and unified than previous groups of adoptees, brought together under the umbrella of Families with Children from China, a national support-and-education organization with a chapter or chapters in nearly every state.
In the Philadelphia area, FCC–Delaware Valley has grown from a handful of people gathered around a kitchen table to an active nonprofit organization of more than two hundred families. Across the Delaware River in New Jersey is another chapter with another two hundred families. FCC-sponsored speakers, seminars, discussion groups, and banquets help bring China into the children’s lives.
My local chapter, like others elsewhere, finds itself struggling to hold the interest of the older girls. As they hit ten, eleven, twelve, school events and sports begin to take precedence. The girls have friends outside of FCC and want to spend time with them. But there’s no reason to think they won’t regroup later, as they examine and explore their own experience. Perhaps they’ll even organize under their own banner, separate from that of their parents. Maybe CFC? Children with Families in China?
SOME PARENTS have it all planned out: their daughter will go to Harvard, earn a degree in Asian studies, then get a high-paying job in international finance that allows her to work in Beijing for six months of the year.
Me, I try to resist the urge to chart Jin Yu’s life. Doubtless she will have a plan of her own. And it probably will be different from anything I might have selected.
It’s true that I hold out for China more than she does, that I consciously try to connect her to a sense of the place and its people. I resist the Americanization of my daughter. But Jin Yu lives in the present and the future, not the past. She told me the other night that she wants to be a lifeguard, “because I like blowing the whistle.” So she’ll have that to fall back on, in case the job as a princess doesn’t work out.
Some parents also think it’s wrong to share the story of an adoption, wrong to share any details at all, that the story belongs to the child. That’s fair enough—this is Jin Yu’s story. But it is my story too. As her life has been altered, so has mine, in ways I never could have anticipated and, where she is directly concerned, all for the better.
Having a daughter from China makes you more a citizen of the world. It makes you live in several places at once. News of a flood that kills dozens in southern Hunan is no longer a far-off event, an item to be skimmed in the world-roundup column of the newspaper, but a real and proximate disaster.
When you’re young and single, or half of a young married couple, you wish for things: a bigger apartment, a better car, concert tickets. When you are an older parent, like me, the thing you want most is the one that money can’t buy: time. Time to see your children grow, to see the arc of their lives take direction. Jin Yu is already six, and Zhao Gu has grown from one to three in what seems like the space of a day. When my youngest is twenty, in the middle of college, I’ll be past retirement age. When she turns thirty-five, the point at which many people first begin to understand some of what their parents went through and how it shaped their lives, I’ll be close on eighty, if I’m here at all.
I don’t want Harvard. I want time.
When I was younger, and vaguely considering some future day when children might arrive, I thought, Give me a son and I will know how to raise him. Give me a son, because I will know how to take him to ball games, how to wrestle and roughhouse, when to leave him alone with his thoughts, and when to come down hard before he does something stupid. I never lost touch with my inner sixteen-year-old, and that is a useful tool in raising a child of the same gender.
But it turns out that having a daughter is easier in so many ways. Fathers and sons, they’re too much alike. Even in the best relationships—and I’d put that of my father and me in that category—it can be hard to state what you need and say how you feel. I can remember the day my dad dropped me off at college, six hours from home. I knew what he wanted to say: “You’ll be fine. I’m proud of you. I love you.” Instead, he looked off into the distance and said softly, “Well, kick you out of the nest…”
It’s not that I didn’t know how he felt. I knew. He didn’t have to say it. If he had, I’d probably have been embarrassed.
But now, as a father myself, I don’t leave my feelings for my daughters to their intuition. They hear that I love them at breakfast and at dinner and all through the day. They are probably bored to death of hearing it.
I can remember the precise moment when Jin Yu first spoke the word love. It was nearly a year after she’d left China. She was still learning English, figuring out what these new words meant and how they fit together. The three of us were in a rental car in Texas, cruising along an interstate on the outskirts of downtown Austin, heading to dinner at a restaurant called Manuel’s. It was near the end of the first Hunan reunion, and most of the other families were already heading back to homes across the state and country.
Our friends Jim and Nina were traveling in the car ahead of us with their daughter, Eliza, who like Jin Yu had spent her first two years in Xiangtan. Without preamble, Jin Yu, then three, reached out her arms and hollered, “Eliza! Eliza!” She yelled so loud it was as if she were trying to shout through the windshield. Then she wrapped her arms around her shoulders, gave herself a big hug, and said, “Love Eliza!”
Christine and I had been waiting to see when Jin Yu would employ this word, how she would measure its meaning. If she would view the phrase “I love you” as a rare gift to be bestowed or nothing more than a common expression, the three words she heard every night at bedtime.
Plainly, she understood. And how appropriate that in staking her claim to love she would name one of her Xiangtan sisters. After all, at that point she had known them twice as long as she’d known us.
I think about what I will tell Jin Yu about her time in Xiangtan, now that she’s getting older and asking questions. Most kids in America come to their families from hospitals, not orphanages. She’s different from her friends in that way. At some point they’ll ask her about it. On the other hand, in our home orphanage is not a scary word, a synonym for desertion. I’m fortunate to be able to tell Jin Yu that her mom and I met the orphanage director, Peng Liang, and he seemed to be a man of infinite patience. That he knew each of the children by name, and that he appeared happiest when one or another of them was climbing in or out of his lap. I can honestly tell Jin Yu that Peng and his staff seemed to be doing the best they could under difficult conditions.
In the summer of 2006, our family journeyed to Austin for the annual Hunan travel-group reunion. The eldest among our girls is now nearly seven. Five of the families have welcomed new sisters from China. We parents are no longer busy adopting children, we are busy raising them. And busy doesn’t begin to describe it. These days the conversation is more about lost teeth than lost cultures. We talk less about what the girls remember of China and more about their impressions of kindergarten and first
grade.
Nine of the fourteen families attended the first reunion. Five made it this time. I suppose that for some, as China recedes, the allure of flying across the country for a few days of what amounts to an elaborate playdate may lose its appeal. Already some have fallen to once-a-year contact with a Christmas card, others less than that. I understand. Our girls demand a lot of attention.
Their lives are constantly changing. Jin Yu’s life is changing. And not always for the better. In the brief time she has been with us, she has lost a grandmother she knew and loved. She has suffered other, lesser losses as well—her dog Mersey, and Bela, the one cat that would tolerate her affections. Our beloved pediatrician, Leslie Sude, has moved from the area.
Chinese adoption is changing too, in ways big and small.
Since the time when Christine and I first began the process to adopt a daughter, the Chinese government has established, and then eliminated, a cap on the total permissible number of foreign adoptions. It instituted a quota on adoptions by single parents, a group that previously constituted about 30 percent of the total. In early 2007, new regulations barred all adoptions by single parents—and by people who were over fifty, obese, or taking medication for anxiety or depression.
The process continues to require a healthy dose of pre-parental humiliation, like being fingerprinted, and having to ask friends to write letters attesting to your fitness. The waiting period, near a peak of fifteen months when Christine and I adopted Jin Yu, dropped to a relatively speedy seven months, then crept back up to a year and, as of this writing, stands at fourteen months. The facilities and care provided in many Chinese orphanages have improved dramatically, assisted by new initiatives from within the People’s Republic and by money, staff, and resources delivered from outside by charitable organizations like Half the Sky. The fact of child abandonment endures.
In Guangzhou, the final stop and point of departure for new American parents, the section of the U.S. consulate that handles adoptions has moved off of Shamian Island and into new offices in the Tian He District. People still love to stay at the White Swan, though.
