Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other

by Scott Simon

  But like so many millions of others these days, our family has become a mixture. Race is singular and immutable, but it’s also merely one feature of our human makeup. I have covered too many wars all over the world to view ethnicity as “a viable, sensitive, meaningful and legitimate societal construct.”

  I don’t believe that having an African American president and cabinet members, or having Hispanic, Jewish, and Asian judges, Nobel laureates, cabinet secretaries, movie stars and CEOs, absolves America of all racism or resolves for our children all the problems of bigotry and deprivation. But it is hard to say, straight-faced, “Our society is distinctly black or white and characterized by white racism at every level,” when someone of Luo descent becomes president of the United States while ethnic strife makes that unthinkable in Kenya. Or when America is so plainly not just black and white but Hispanic, Asian, and all mixed up, too.

  After years of controversy and refusal to change, today’s National Association of Black Social Workers says that while they would prefer that African American youngsters be adopted by African American parents, they would rather see a child adopted into a loving home—of any race—than left to languish in a succession of foster homes. I don’t know how many thousands of children might not have been adopted during the years when the NABSW policy was taken as definitive by many adoption officials. But I have a hard time believing that the place African Americans have gained in American and, for that matter, the world’s culture would have been endangered if a few thousand African American youngsters had found families in transracial adoptions.

  I want our daughters to remember that the first Chinese immigrants into the United States weren’t doctors, engineers, Nobel laureates, or babysitting grad students, but indentured laborers who laid tracks and carved out mines in depths where no white man would deign to go. I want them to know that in 1882, after the United States had fought a civil war to end slavery, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the burgeoning U.S. labor movement fighting for (white) workers’ rights supported it (and that Canada, so often lauded for being more enlightened, passed their own obnoxious anti-Chinese law in 1923). And I want our daughters to know that there are still slave laborers today—in China. Probably not too far from where they were born or found. Kids that they used to eat congee with … well, it’s too terrible to contemplate. But I also want them to know how history moves on.

  ON THE TRIP on which we brought Elise home, there was another man in our hotel whom we never met but who earned our hatred. The same local adoption officials escorted him. They told us that a baby had been selected for his family, but the man had come over alone because his wife was at home caring for their two other young children, who had also been adopted from China.

  But when a new baby was put into his arms, he was appalled. “She’s too dark,” the agency said he had insisted. “She wouldn’t fit in with our other children.” He refused to keep the child. The agency briefly tried to persuade him that the baby they had selected was truly quite beautiful. But at some point, it became unwise to try to persuade a man to keep a baby he had rejected for the most heinous possible reason.

  The adoption bureau kept all of his money (those are the terms, and everyone knows it). That baby, they assured us, would go to the next possible family—a better family. And that man and his wife would never be permitted to adopt a child again. We got the briefest glimpse of him being hustled into a car, to be driven to the airport and flown away. With our good riddance.

  My wife and I eventually concluded that there was something suspicious about the man’s story. His reasoning sounded dated, like Nellie Forbush’s in South Pacific before she realized that her attitudes were uncool, even in the forties. Could a family that had already adopted two Chinese daughters be alarmed, much less surprised, at the complexion of a third? Some other reason must be at work. Had that man decided to leave his wife and children, and did he suddenly shrink from bringing home a child not to a whole family but one about to come apart?

  We came to believe that for some reason we couldn’t fathom, the man was so desperate not to adopt another child that he simply had to come up with the most hideous thing he could say to offend Chinese officials so they would send him away with no further appeals to decency. I wonder what he could possibly have said to his daughters who waited at home for him that wouldn’t, in a decent world, get him sent to rot in hell.

  EVERY STUDY seems to agree that children adopted internationally will have increasingly pointed questions about their origins as they grow up. That’s not trauma. It’s maturity.

  The most extensive information right now seems to be about the several thousands of youngsters from Korea (KADs, short for “Korean adoptees,” has become the term) who were adopted by American and European families, most of them white, from the early 1950s. One point the studies make is that the youngsters grew up as minorities not only in their communities but within their own families. They say that their parents surely loved them, but they didn’t know what it was to be a minority. The Korean population in the United States was then relatively small; there were no workshops or culture classes for parents, children, or their blended families.

  But when curiosity and the tug of discovery led some of the KADs to visit South Korea as adults, they discovered that many Koreans were chagrined to see them. Some people felt unvarnished shame that Korea had not cared for its own children. President Kim Dae Jung held a public meeting with thirty KADs from eight countries in 1998, to apologize. Many of the KADs matched stories about growing up hearing racial slurs in the West even as they went off to blue-ribbon colleges and rewarding careers. They recollected that their parents could console but not counsel them. What would they know about bigotry?

  But then, South Koreans reminded KADs that one reason so many mixed-race children (typically an American GI father and Korean mother) had been sent overseas is that even in the time of Strom Thurmond, much of the United States was considered friendlier territory than Korea for a racially mixed child.

  Caroline and I have always known that we have received our daughters because of a hairline crack in the great wall of Chinese history. On our first visit to Beijing, an art student took us to her studio (and gift shop!) and told us that she and her girlfriends sometimes wished that they could shrink into little balls the size of infants and go to the United States in the arms of adoring parents. In a few years, I think that students like her will more likely ask, “We spent billions of dollars to put on the Olympics, win gold medals, and dangle thousands of dancers from a fiery golden globe—why can’t we care for our own children?”

  There are people who believe I am a little starry-eyed about the multicultural society that North America and a few other places have become. Perhaps; I have two daughters whom I would like to see grow up without ever, ever being hurt. But I think my skeptics may forget the real, larger world in which we live.

  Joan Petit, a librarian at the American University in Cairo, and her husband adopted two boys from Ethiopia. She says they are “strong and beautiful and athletic and artistic—all gifts from their Ethiopian families.” Joan and her husband found jobs in Egypt so that at least for a few years, their sons could live on the African continent, just two countries over from the land where they were born.

  “And here again I was quite naïve,” says Joan. She discovered that many Egyptians despise Ethiopians, ranting that they’re taking their jobs and ruining their country. The active discrimination that an Ethiopian faces in Egypt makes any prejudice they might confront in America look literally pale. As, for that matter, does the bigotry that an Ethiopian who is from the Oromo, Sidamo, or Gurage people might face in his or her own country.

  Joan and her family have recently moved to Portland, Oregon.

  Is there a nation in the world without ethnic prejudice? I’m told that Iceland and Botswana make fair bids. But in China, our daughters might have faced bigotry for being Hui, Miao, Manchu, Yi, Mongol, or any of China’s fif
ty-five other nationalities that they could be. A thousand outrages being noted, when it comes to living with the risk of bigotry, I feel blessed to be able take my chances—even more crucially, my children’s chances—in the United States.

  YET I DON’T WANT mere hopefulness to let me neglect our daughters’ need for identity. My wife and I know that we have responsibilities. Wherever we land in the world, we have vowed to live in cosmopolitan communities where our girls can see Chinese people as part of their everyday lives. They will be able to learn the language. They will know that they are girls from the Jiangxi province (famous for delicate porcelain and beautiful women), and as they grow older, and scientific advances might make it possible, we will move heaven and earth to find the mothers who gave them life. We want to know and thank their birth mothers, too, for giving us our lives.

  Our assumptions might already be outdated. It’s not just big cities that have become cosmopolitan. There are small towns in southern Illinois, Utah, and Mississippi, prairie towns in Alberta, and hamlets in Cumbria with families from China, India, and Korea (and Somalia, Honduras, and Iran).

  For a time, we tried to have only Chinese babysitters for our daughters. The idea was that our sitter might teach a little functional Mandarin while reminding our daughters that more than a billion people around the globe look like them (what’s this “minority” nonsense?). My wife found several charming Chinese grad students. But given the busy schedule of their studies, we weren’t getting out much. One day Caroline came home from a rare errand without our daughters in tow to find one of our Chinese scholars telling Elise to put away her Thomas the Tank Engine toys—in English. And why not? Telling her in Mandarin would draw only a blank stare. So why had we surveyed a three-state area for Chinese babysitters who were supposed to impart precious cultural insights in the language of their birth?

  “Darling,” I suggested, “I think we should stop racially profiling our babysitters.”

  And then we met Don-Don, a funny and effervescent young student from Shanghai who began to care for our daughters on rare movie nights. One night Elise asked her about her brothers and sisters. Don-Don told her gently that she had none.

  “Most of us are single children,” she said. “Our mothers can have only one child. You are so lucky to have a sister.”

  Don-Don said Elise reached for her hand.

  “Maybe if you ask your parents,” she told her, “they’ll adopt a little sister for you.”

  Don-Don told us of the conversation that night. Elise told us the next day: for at least a moment, she was inspired to view her sister as an envied and valued gift, not a rival. And my wife—all right, I admit it, she was right—pointed out that Don-Don’s observation would mean more to Elise for being uttered by someone who shared her birthplace. We may have missed a few nights out. But Don-Don gave Elise something enduring.

  A FAMILY FRIEND once asked Caroline, “Do you feel guilty for taking your daughters away from their native culture?”

  My wife responded courteously. I would have had a harder time. I occasionally feel rueful (“guilty” hardly applies) for ordering too much food for our daughters that goes to waste. Or buying them too much forgettable nonsense (that’s a kind word, not the one that my wife uses) like souvenir key chains, odd candies (brown “moose turd” chocolate raisins from airport shops in the Northwest, pink “piggie pellets” candies from Iowa), and dancing hula girl pens from all over that I wind up crunching underfoot in our hallways in the middle of the night. I am personally embarrassed that I say I want our daughters to grow up to be happy and strong but, like a lot of fathers, I don’t really want them to grow up at all. I regret, without guilt, that the mothers who gave birth to and loved our daughters, and risked punishment to leave them where they knew they would be found and cared for, could not keep them.

  But we have adopted two real, modern little girls, not mere vessels of a culture. No doubt growing up with us will expose our daughters to all kinds of insidious influences of modern Western life, from coarse music to vulgar materialism. But have you taken a look at China recently? Every Chinese child in China is gung-ho crazy to acquire those insidious Western influences.

  Our daughters will be able to be as Chinese as they choose. Depending on their choices, that could take occasional special effort, including classes and trips. But my wife and I remember a young man we met while standing in the international security screening line at O’Hare to take the flight to China to bring Elise home. A Chinese American family from Kansas were there to see their son off for his junior year abroad.

  “What part of China are you going to?” we asked.

  “It’s my year of foreign missionary work,” he explained. He was a religious student. “Actually, I’m going to Kenya.”

  We were about to bring home a child from China who we prayed would never be victimized by assumptions made about the color of her skin—and we had already made assumptions about a young man based on the color of his. I was glad that our paperwork had already been stamped.

  CHINESE PEOPLE—like Jews; like Indians; like Italians; like so many people who are moving around the globe now—have been growing up all over the world for centuries, from Aberdeen to Zanzibar. Our girls are part of that group, too. Chinese, yes, but also a whole lot of things. Our Chinese children sit at the Passover table and scrounge for Easter eggs. They light candles in a menorah and write emails to Santa Claus. They march in Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day parade on a blustery March day with green scarves around their necks that proclaim “South Side Irish.” They speak French, like their mother, English, like their father, and phrases of Spanish and Yiddish that are the conversational buzz of urban America. My wife and I sing the Carrot Harvest song in Mandarin. It’s all in the family. I think that transracial adoptions, like mixed marriages, don’t shrink or starve a culture. They nourish it with newcomers.

  Brown Eggs, White Eggs

  ANNE, ED, AND TRAVIS BURKE are—all of them—prominent Chicagoans. Edward Burke is considered the most powerful member of the city council, a bred-in-the-bone, patronage-loving Chicago Democrat. Anne Burke is on the Illinois Supreme Court. But she did not become an attorney and judge (appointed, it is interesting to point out, by two Republican governors) until she had had the incomparable juridical preparation of being the mother of five children, four of them adopted.

  Travis was born to a mother who was a drug addict. He came into the Burkes’ lives after their other children were grown and Ed and Anne, who had been special counsel to the governor for Child Welfare Services, took children from troubled circumstances into their homes as emergency foster parents. Travis was eight days old. Years went by. Travis’s birth mother struggled and never quite got hold of her life. He grew comfortable and happy in the Burke household because, as Anne says, “Every child in our family has different parents. And the same parents.”

  The Burkes undertook a long, bitter, public court battle to become Travis’s legal guardians. A lot of people who didn’t know Travis, his birth mother, or the kind of parents the Burkes are tried to score political points with the life of a real little boy who needed and deserved steadfast, dependable love more than bombast and rhetoric.

  Travis is African American. If, outside of Chicago, you thought you knew that before reading the previous sentence, I’d gently suggest that many open-minded people who believe that they don’t harbor biases do, and that the people whose thinking they assume to know may surprise them with who they actually are.

  The Burkes took Travis to Africa so he could see where the ancestors on his mother’s side came from in Cameroon. They have been to Birmingham and Selma, to march in memorial procession across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, so that Travis could see some of the hallowed grounds of the American civil rights movement and know it’s part of his story as well as history. I cherish an image of the silvery alderman Edward M. Burke, who had (and enjoyed) so many blistering and colorful quarrels with Mayor Harold Washington, reddening in the searing sun
of Cameroon and Alabama so that his son, Travis Burke, could know and esteem his African heritage. It is not a place or a role in which I would have ever envisaged Ed Burke—which shows both how little I really knew him, and how children totally rearrange our hearts.

  Adoptions don’t cut off children from learning about their culture (or, in our family’s case, and millions more, cultures), lineage, or heritage. They widen the human stream that sustains heritage.

  ANNE BURKE tells a nice little story. She had returned from a store with a dozen assorted brown and white eggs and brought Travis over to their kitchen counter to crack one of each into a bowl.

  “See?” she said. “Brown eggs, white eggs, it doesn’t matter. They’re all the same inside.” Then she held her son’s hand against her own. “Just like people. Just like us. Brown skin, white skin, it doesn’t matter. We’re all the same inside.”

  Travis looked impatient, as if she were telling him something he had known all his life. Maybe he had.

  “I know,” he told her. “Arthur’s father”—Arthur the PBS cartoon aardvark, whose father is a chef—“uses brown and white eggs all the time. It’s no big deal.”

  We try metaphors on our children to make the truth into some more palatable parable of life. The man in the moon is there to watch over us in the dark of night. The Tooth Fairy rewards us for leaving pearls behind as we grow up. White eggs, brown eggs, yellow, red, blue, or green eggs, it doesn’t matter—they all make a good omelet. You can even mix and match, like our family.

  But children think in actualities, not metaphors. They lack subtlety and they lack pretense. They know that there are differences between them, and they show them off like their wiggly teeth. People come in different colors and it’s no big deal.