Raising a kid is a tough task for any parent. And when adoption is involved, things might be more complicated. In the worst case, what if the adopted kids’ birth parents are still looking for them and have been doing so since the day they were taken away? For some US parents who adopted Chinese children, this is now a scenario that keeps them up at night.
Earlier in the summer, media in China and across the world broke the news that some local governments in remote areas in China had been found to have confiscated babies from families that violated family-planning policy and to have sold them to orphanages for adoption to foreigners. The reports unnerved many in the adoptive community in the US.
Of course, not all adoptive families in the US got their children from China. But in the past 20 years or so, China, with its vast reservoir of relatively healthy abandoned babies, has been the No.1 source country for adoptive children in the US. There are more than 60,000 Chinese adoptees in the country.
The majority of those adoptive parents should have no reason to worry – after all it may only be a couple of dozen kids abducted from their families. But even the possibility that their kids may have been forced out of the hands of their birth parents presents many parents with a horrible moral dilemma.
In a recent story, the New York Times caught a snapshot of this struggle. Some parents started digging into the adoption documents for assurances even though they know the authenticity of the papers could be in question.
And when asked for comments, most parents decline to discuss the topic. Some even publicly suggested the community keep silent to protect the children from being teased.
The birth parents’ situation has not changed. They were certainly forced against their will if their babies were taken away by local officials. But even if they abandoned their babies on their own, most likely they were not doing so willingly. These parents who lost their babies in different ways are probably victims of everything from the one-child policy to poverty and intolerance.
The kids’ situation has not changed. American adoptive parents, especially those who adopted children with different racial backgrounds, have been religiously following the rule of open adoption and few hide their status from the kids. So most adopted children and their friends know they are adoptees from the beginning. Whether they were abandoned by or stolen from the birth parents does not likely affect how they view themselves and how others view them.
Chinese parents often love their children not by keeping them by their side but by allowing them to go a long way away in pursuit of prosperity and happiness. When the birth parents know their kids are happy in the US, it’s unlikely they’d insist on taking them back to the mud huts from which some of these babies were taken away.
They may want to keep contact with the adoptive family and their children. But that shouldn’t be a problem. US adoptive parents usually encourage the children to study Chinese, maintain their own cultural heritage and seek out their roots. Part of the effort is to help the children search for their birth parents to fill any void in their hearts. The existence of the birth parents has never been a taboo.
Many of the attempts have failed because the adoption system in China doesn’t keep documentation about birth parents as many other countries do. Though disappointed, many kids found a greater sense of identity by traveling back to China and being greeted and hugged by strangers who looked like them.
Take Xiu Xiu, a teenager from Hawaii whom I interviewed a couple of years ago. Xiu Xiu and her adoptive mother love each other very much. But her mother knew her daughter never stops missing her birth parents. She took Xiu Xiu to China several times to look for them. Xiu Xiu is still searching. Meanwhile, she has fallen in love with China.
She keeps going back, helps to raise money for charities to help undeserved Chinese children. And her adoptive mother is proud of her.
Xiu Xiu is only one of them. The birth parents have never really lost these kids and the American adoptive parents won’t either. Their hearts are big enough to accommodate two kinds of love.
The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com