by Sarah Kilby

When I was almost nine months old, I was adopted from China by my mother, and when I was five, my family and I went back to China to get my sister, Emma. The process of adopting a child from China is very extensive. The first step is to choose an adoption agency, which often depends on where a family lives and where they are adopting from. For example, my family used Adoptions Together because my mother liked that the agency was near where she lived at the time, and they had experience with adoptions in China. The agency provides guidance through the process, which includes:

1. Completion of a home study which includes interviews with a social worker and completing a number of forms. For example, a fire safety check by the fire department, medical forms from doctors to show the parents are healthy, tax forms, employment verification, and FBI background check. This process takes about six months and is valid for one year. If the adoption takes longer than one year, another shorter home study is done.
2. There’s an application to complete for the Chinese government and then the application and home study are sent to the central agency for adoption in China. They review everything and choose a child to match to the parents.
3. Parents are notified of the match, and an application to the US Immigration Services (USCIS) is made for the baby to get a green card.
4. Travel to China and complete the adoption in China. Go to US embassy/ consulate and get a visa for baby in their Chinese passport.

There is more that happens on the Chinese side that the orphanage and central adoption agency does to protect children and ensure that the children are legitimate orphans and no one is profiting from the process. That’s not an issue in China, but it is in other countries. It’s a problem in other countries because the government doesn’t have control, whereas the Chinese government is centralized and very strong. In other countries, women may have babies and then sell them to “orphanages” or agencies. In China, it’s illegal to relinquish a child, so the babies are relinquished secretly and no one gets any money in the deal. Oversight of orphanages was centralized in the latter 1990s which made it more likely that the babies are not sold and it provides a safer, better funded, orphanage. The fee my parents paid ($3,500) went directly to the orphanage and they use it to improve the orphanage. The central government agency assigns the child to the parents, so they know about the monetary transaction and can audit the orphanage to guard against corruption. Several countries, including the U.S. and China, have signed an agreement which certifies that they follow a set of standards and processes in adoptions. Some countries can’t guarantee those standards are followed and so there are no adoptions out of those countries to the US or other countries that have signed the agreement.

My family did the entire process, and in April of 2005, and my family traveled with several other families to get to Beijing, China. I remember being super excited when I was told that I was getting a new sister and was going to go with my parents to get her.

My parents recorded everything on the day we got Emma and thanks to the video, I’m able to connect what happened to what I remember feeling at the time. There was a particular part where we visited the orphanage and got a small tour. The facility was called Kunming Children’s Welfare Center and was really big and had white walls in the hallways, but had lots of different colors in the different rooms that I assume were for the older kids to play in. We later learned that it was one of the top orphanages in China, in terms of management and other things. When we went into one of their courtyards, we saw the outside of where we assumed the older kids lived. They were little dorm-like rooms, and there were clotheslines filled with sheets hanging from terrace to terrace. During this visit, my father told me that I was really quiet and reserved, which was pretty worrying because, at that point, I was five years old and wasn’t officially diagnosed with ADHD yet. My father told me that he watched me and thought that I was really freaked out by the experience and was at least partially worried my parents were going to leave me there. This is true, those thoughts did pass through my mind, but I was really worried for two main reasons, the first was because I didn’t want to be separated from my parents, the second reason was that I wouldn’t understand anything anyone was saying if I were left there all alone. My parents reassured to me that I won’t be left or forgotten there and after, we went back to our hotel to relax. The time we had in China after getting Emma felt much more rushed than before, we stayed in Kunming and the Yunnan province for a few days, then we flew to Guangzhou for more paperwork things, then we flew home.

Emma was a very calm baby and according to my mother, she didn’t have problems with separation anxiety like I did at that age. The reason is not clear but my mother and I theorized that by 2004, the orphanage we were from had adopted some new practices between the times my sister and I were there. The healthy babies would sometimes be fostered by nearby, able families to get them used to leave the orphanage, to new people handling them, and to get them to be able to recognize what a family was. I spoke with my mother about the differences between myself and my sister as babies and she said, “You were very clingy and my sense was that you were used to having two or three women caretakers and I wondered if it was frightening for you when it was just me and you.”

Cristie, who was my mother’s childhood best friend, was with us in China, so there were two women taking care of me. Then my grandmother was with us for the first week back home. Two weeks later, it was the holidays and we visited everyone. My mother went back to work on January second and I went to daycare. It was just my mother and I. All the differences in caretakers and locations was stressful for me. My sister faired better than I in our experiences of adjusting to a new situation. In November 2013, the Chinese government decided to relax their one-child policy to being able to have two children if one of the parents is an only child or, if they have any siblings born before 1976. The policy was introduced in 1979 but there was planning for population control during the previous decade. Other than adoption, there was also the possibility of abortions due to having a girl and female infanticide. There had been some exemptions to the rule in the past as well, like in the 1980s rural families were allowed to have two children if the first was a girl, and there were also some lax in the rules for ethnic minorities and some other groups. It was common to leave baby girls on the side of roads or by police stations with no papers. I was found on a doorstep on Dianchi Road in the Guandu district of Kunming on March 12, 2000. Emma was found on the doorstep of the police hut at the Iron Bridge over a canal, and we were told by the tour guide that it was a very dangerous place that you shouldn’t go to at night. The bridge may be gone now due to the rebuilding of that poor section of town. Since then, the entire development there has been torn down for new construction projects. China had really changed just from 2005 to 2015, the economy there had greatly expanded so, traveling became more common but pollution in the big cities like Beijing had gotten really bad. The number of children needing to be adopted has dropped since 2005, but it is still common to give up babies who are girls or have some developmental issues. This is because of inability to adequately care for them or the social stigma of having a special needs child. The number of female infants being abandoned has dropped a bit though due to a massive shortage of marrying-age women in China.

The entire rule was made to help stop the expanding population because of overpopulation, and since a few years before the rule was implemented, 400 million births have been prevented. Adoption is infinitely preferable for most people when talking about how to deal with the policy. It is not often that a boy is put up for adoption unless they cannot care for any child at the time or if they have some physical or mental problem. This is because Chinese men are traditionally the ones to take care of their parents when they get married and become adults. When a woman is married, she joins her husband’s family and they take care of his parents, but if she has no brothers, the parents won’t have anyone to take care of them in their old age. This is the main reason behind the shortage of women in China.

When the topic of Chinese adoption and the policies that made it necessary, it brings up a lot of conflicting feelings. My mother told me, “One of my greatest “conundrums” was standing in Tiananmen Square and looking at Mao’s portrait. Here was a man whose politics I didn’t agree with, whose one-child policy I thought was inhumane, but that same policy gave me the blessing of you and Emma.”

Other conflicting thoughts are that I’m so glad that the orphanage I came from was as well funded as it was like they were able to put in a playground and made the rooms for the older orphans nicer, but I also wish that other orphanages in poorer areas got more funding. I also sometimes think that it’s really great for all the babies that the orphanages keep on advancing in making sure the orphans develop healthily but I can’t deny that I feel like I really could have benefitted from a lot of the newer policies had they been thought up and used earlier. One of the policies that were put in place in between my time and my sister’s time there was the fostering of the healthy babies I mentioned earlier. I have always suffered from pretty bad separation anxiety and that had really helped stifle my own social development. One of the things I did as a baby that was caused by my separation anxiety was that I would scream and cry when my mother left the room I was in. Separation anxiety is something my sister and I don’t share, whether that is due to the fostering system the orphanage started to do in between our times there, or if it’s caused by other factors, is unknown. “It was very clear the Emma knew what a family was and she related to you right away since you were just a child. She would notice when one of us left the hotel room but she wasn’t as clingy and didn’t have separation anxiety like you,” my mother told me.

There are many things that connect Chinese adoptees other than the country they were born in. For example, though it isn’t all of them, it’s common for Chinese adoptees to feel very isolated and different from their peers because they don’t completely relate to other Asian American kids and they don’t relate to the white kids completely either. Also, the level of isolation greatly depends on the general Asian population where they live, like comparing living around Washington D.C., where there is a ton of diversity, to living in Minnesota, where most people are white. I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is super diverse, o I didn’t feel the same kind of racial isolation that one of the girls that I was adopted with did, given that she grew up in Indiana.

It is common with most teenagers to have questions for themselves like who they really are, but it is especially common with Chinese adoptees. The lack of knowing where they came from culturally or lack of knowledge in terms of birth parents really bothers some of them, which usually results in taking Chinese classes and/or traveling to China when they are old enough to. Even though many people want to know their birth parents, not many have been able to, this is because the government doesn’t keep track of the parents and the babies aren’t left with any papers usually. There have been some cases of people finding their biological family, like at least one of the girls in the 2011 movie, Somewhere Between, found hers, but that is partially due to her working really hard, and mostly because it was just dumb luck. I have never really wanted to search for my biological family. This is because I don’t know the language, and the city I was found in had a population of 6.6 million people as of 2014, but still is considered small and largely unknown to most outside of that general provincial area. Finding any biological connections is extremely rare so most adoptees try to at least learn more of their culture or search through their memories to find out more about them. One woman whom I have met was adopted from Hong Kong and she was adopted in the early 1960s. She was around the age of four and was one of the first Chinese adoptees to come to the U.S. and the first to live in Baltimore, Maryland. I met her because she had married into my father’s step-father’s side of the family. It was just a crazy coincidence that we met and she also shared the desire for knowing where she came from culturally and even had some vague memories of where she lived before being adopted. I remember nothing from when I was adopted, but I remember small bits and pieces of when my family adopted my little sister, Emma. My clearest memories of China though are from when my family went in 2015, and in the summer of 2016 because my best friend and I studied Chinese in Kunming for five weeks. I fit more into the side that wants to know more about where I come from in a cultural sense rather than a biological one.

There are so many people who have been adopted from China and I have met a few, and the most common similarity between most of us has been the gratefulness of being placed with the families we have been put in. I think that the urge to know more about where we came from and our gratefulness are two of the few things my sister and I have in common.

 

 

 

Works Cited

https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/chinese-adoptees-at-home-in-america/

“1 mln Chinese couples apply to have second child”

“Population, Policy, and Politics: How Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?”

Somewhere Between- 2011 movie