For Chinese adoptees, a cross-cultural embrace
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For Chinese adoptees, a cross-cultural embrace
Chinese girls in U.S. families are encouraged to hold on to their
heritage. That could be a blessing - or a trap.
By Jeff Gammage
Inquirer Staff Writer
Sixth grader Nicole Surman doesn't look like a pioneer, a leader among
a new generation of Americans.
She's small and serious - a thinker. She plays the piano and violin,
loves Nancy Drew mysteries, writes short stories about heroines who
possess magical powers.
Typical stuff for a middle-class American kid.
Except that the 11-year-old also speaks pretty good Mandarin.
She's taking up the erhu, the two-stringed Chinese violin, and spends
hours perfecting her brush stroke in Chinese watercolor. On Saturdays
she attends the Ding Hao school in Radnor, where she catches up with
her friends, many of whom, like her, were adopted from China as babies.
"I like to do the watercolor because I'm interested in art," says
Nicole, who started life in a Xinyu city orphanage and now lives with
her parents in Bridgeport.
The United States is home to nearly 50,000 Chinese adoptees - almost
all of them girls, abandoned by parents barred from having more than
one child. Nicole stands at the vanguard, an early arrival among the
children who began trickling into this country during the early 1990s
and whose numbers now constitute a growing wave.
Today the older girls are poised in the doorway of adolescence, and the
parents of Chinese children across this country are watching nervously.
Unlike an earlier tide of Korean adoptees, many of the Chinese children
are being raised by mothers and fathers determined to connect them to
the land of their birth. These families celebrate Christmas and
Hanukkah, but also the Autumn Harvest and Lunar New Year. Some have
moved to bigger towns so their children can grow up around Asians. One
dad even bought property in China so that his kids can visit.
Today this league of parents is wondering and worrying: Will this grand
experiment in child-rearing enable these lost daughters of China to
move comfortably between two cultures? Or will it trap them in between?
·
Every parent faces the identical, crucial question: How do I raise my
child to be happy? The query is the same whether the baby was born in a
hospital halfway across town or in a hut halfway around the world.
So why are the China parents jittery?
In a word: Korea.
Before China's emergence, it was Korea that sent Asian children to this
shore, starting in the 1950s. Many of those adoptive parents, following
the advice of the times, ignored their children's foreign birth. The
belief was that a color-blind, all-American immersion was best for the
child.
As a result, many of the Korean children grew up with a profound sense
of loss, a hollow feeling of being denied their ancestry. Some didn't
realize they were Korean, so fully did they inhabit a white persona.
"When I looked in the mirror, I didn't see an Asian," says author Katy
Robinson, who arrived here as 7-year-old Kim Ji-yun. "The whole idea,
even in 1977, was for adopted kids to be assimilated into the
families."
Robinson, now 34, recounts her isolation in her memoir, A Single Square
Picture: A Korean Adoptee's Search for Her Roots, among a body of
literature that documents the struggle of the Korean Americans. She
grew up as the only Asian in an all-white family, living in an
all-white neighborhood in nearly all-white Utah. In college, she
suffered a wrenching identity crisis.
Today, with 7,000 Chinese children coming into the country each year,
the parents are still overwhelmingly white. But the grief of early
Korean adoptees - and more modern attitudes toward race and adoption -
helps push them toward the opposite pole.
"We can learn something from their experience," says Carter Lee, who
with her husband is raising two Chinese daughters in Haddonfield. "And
hopefully not repeat it."
·
Ask these preteen girls whether they are Chinese or American, and they
tend to answer: both.
Like their friends at school, they're busy with sports, music, the
Internet. Yet China orbits their world like a distant moon, exerting
its steady gravitational pull.
Take 12-year-old Lindsey Levine.
In 1992, she was a 4-month-old baby named Hai Le, handed to her new
mother in the lobby of the Guangzhou Holiday Inn.
Today, she lives in Doylestown, a nearly straight-A student at Unami
Middle School, devoted to classical and jazz piano. But when Lindsey
lies down at night her thoughts sometimes turn to a country - and a
woman - she can't remember.
"I wonder if my mom is thinking of me," she says.
It's that sort of pang that has parents and researchers edgy as these
girls tumble toward their teenage years.
The main function of adolescence is identity formation, achieved
through a rush of physical and psychological change. For parents it can
be scary - a time when many kids experiment with drinking, drugs and
sex, and hormonal changes can put them at risk for depression or even
suicide.
No one knows what adolescence will bring to the Chinese girls, the few
now perched on its doorstep and the thousands following behind.
"I'm bracing myself," says University of Massachusetts sociologist
Richard Tessler, the father of 11- and 12-year-old Chinese daughters
and the co-author of West Meets East: Americans Adopt Chinese Children.
Start with the hard fact of abandonment. Left in bus depots, flower
markets and train stations, these girls had their lives put at risk by
the very people who were supposed to care for them forever: their
parents.
They spent the next months or years living in understaffed state-run
orphanages where deprivation was long the norm.
Almost all were abandoned for the same reason: They were female.
Because of China's one-child policy and its societal preference for
sons, girls make up 90 percent of the children in orphanages.
And because having "extra" children is a crime, the girls are abandoned
in secret. Many adoptees aren't even sure of their birthdays. Many have
brothers or sisters in China - but no way to find them.
"Our kids can look us in the eye and say, 'You have no idea what this
feels like.' And they're right," says Amy Klatzkin, who is the mother
of a Chinese daughter and has written widely on Chinese adoption. "It's
going to be bumpy."
Some issues will be monumental: How will these girls interpret the loss
of their first family? Will they accept it and move on? Or will it
carve a deep vein of distrust into all their relationships?
Some issues will be intriguing: Whom will they date? Will they find
beauty in faces that more resemble their parents' or their own?
Will they pursue careers that carry them back to China? Might they even
be drawn - once they're ready to have children - to claim girls from
among that nation's vast network of orphanages?"
Right now, some of the older children don't even care to visit.
"I wouldn't want to go," says 10-year-old Qian Qian Collins, whose
journey to Philadelphia began in a Yingtan city orphanage. "I'd miss my
friends... . I was born in China, and I came here, but I don't really
remember it."
It's a lot to handle: adoption, race, abandonment, identity, culture.
Some scholars worry that the parents are veering off-track, toiling to
connect their children to a China that doesn't exist: a filtered, white
version of an age-old Middle Kingdom. That the girls would gain more
from friendships with second- and third-generation Chinese Americans
who could tell them how to navigate America with an Asian face.
"Knowing the ancient culture is not going to help them deal with racial
prejudice," says Hollee McGinnis, adopted from Korea in 1975 and now
policy director at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New
York. "You need to talk about it before she comes home crying because
someone called her 'Chink.' "
Still, McGinnis and others say, these girls are nothing if not
resilient. Today they have comfortable homes, good schools - and
parents eager to prove that China and America can coexist in a single
family.
"Our whole life is about meshing these things together," says Mindy
Coath, president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Families with
Children from China and mother of two young Chinese daughters. "I want
them to feel confident and strong in who they are."
Confident and strong define seventh grader Lindsey Levine. Still, her
mother frets. Most Chinese children at least know when and where they
were found. Lindsey doesn't. All she knows is the name of her
orphanage.
"I fully expect that, at some point in her life, she'll be angry about
not knowing anything," says Marty Levine.
Lindsey says she wants to live in China when she grows up, at least for
a while. She wants to meet the people who cared for her in the
orphanage. And she wants to find her birth parents.
"I'd ask them a whole bunch of questions," she says. " 'Why did you not
keep me? Do you love me?' I'd probably cry if I saw them, which I never
do. I'd probably tell them I love them a million times."
·
Last summer, Nicole Surman journeyed back to China, her first visit
since she left Xinyu as a baby.
She and her mother joined a tour group of adoptive families, the
children inspecting the famous terra-cotta warriors and counting the
steps as they marched up the Great Wall.
Nicole's Mandarin skills enabled her to chat with people on the street
and order meals in restaurants, though by the end of the trip the
children were eating at Pizza Hut. "We were sick of Chinese food,"
Nicole says.
Before the trip, Nicole says, her friends worried: "What if somebody
came up and said, 'I'm your mom, and you come with me'?"
Nicole decided that probably wouldn't happen. Her American parents are
her parents. Besides, she says, how would her Chinese parents recognize
her?
"I never met them," she says, her eyes drifting away. "I don't think
about it a lot."
ONLINE EXTRA
For resources on adopting children from China, and a story on the
adjustment problems faced by Korean children who were among the first
foreign adoptees into the United States, go to go.philly.com/adopt.