by Evans, Karin
If I tell you that I was born in the western United States and you somewhere in China, those bits of geography merely narrow our landing spots on the globe. It’s my conviction that life’s great plan is bigger than any of us can imagine, and that you, wherever you are, and we, your future mother and father, are meant for each other, and that we will be inexplicably and finally joined. That’s the light by which this “birth” story can be told.
We humans tend to place much importance upon our own particular threads of genetic inheritance. The urge for family continuity and inherited ties is a fine desire, of course, but I know that just as much love and devotion is possible among strangers who choose each other. I know it because I grew up with a father who adopted me.
If we each follow our strands back through time, they weave together—as Thomas Wolfe wrote in one of my favorite books, Look Homeward, Angel: “Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”
I, too, believe that we each come with a common human heritage, and that this inheritance is every bit as full when the facts of birth are a mystery, as when they are better known. We’re all intermingled at some distant point, and our capacity for love means we can all intermingle by choice. So many of the deepest ties are formed not biologically, but through longings of the heart.
You, from this moment on, are a child of the heart.
The adoption process was something else. The road between us and the baby I held in my heart quickly became littered with forms and demands for more forms. Unlike the vast majority of the population, who require no one’s permission to conceive a new life (at least not in this country; in China at the time it was an entirely different matter), parents who are matched with their children through adoption must first prove themselves worthy—according to private agencies, state laws, foreign governments, and U.S. immigration law. Their motivations are scrutinized, their backgrounds checked, their bank balances added up, their living quarters surveyed, their psyches probed. There can be additional obstacles: Some foreign governments, as well as some domestic agencies, allow single mothers to adopt but not single fathers. Age can be a factor. The laws of nature, plus a boost from modern technology, may allow people to reproduce into their forties and beyond, but adoption agencies can set a ceiling of forty or forty-five. And there are other stumbling blocks that can be tossed onto the path by particular agencies, social workers, state and federal bureaucracies, and the sudden whims of foreign governments.
China, however, had so far welcomed applications from foreigners of a different ethnicity—the vast majority of people adopting Chinese children were, after all, Caucasians—and was at the time accepting the applications of single parents of both sexes, and of people well into their forties, even into their fifties and sixties (although the adoption ministry balked when one American agency presented a candidate who was seventy. “We’re looking for parents for these children, not grandparents,” said an official). A sufficient number of single mothers had adopted from China that they had their own national organization.9 (Please note again that the information for our first adoption reflects the guidelines that existed at the time.)
Most people began naively, as we did, and waded through as best they could, opening their doors and lives to strangers, worrying that any misstep—Is the staircase too treacherous? Does the family dog look unkempt or untrustworthy? Is that student protest arrest still on my record?—might disqualify them. People who’d been through all this before assured Mark and me that, whatever hoops we had to jump through, it would be worth it. Once the child is in your arms, they told us, the ordeal dims. Just like labor and delivery. If you had to do it all over again, they told us, you would.
It was all unknown emotional territory, nonetheless, fraught with anxiety and confusion. But whatever we went through, it was nothing compared to the governmental intrusions into people’s family lives that were going on in China just then.
Having had the optimism and the resources to make our way through the labyrinth, pay the fees, wait it out, and fly to China, Mark and I were living examples of the options open to people like us, whether we availed ourselves of high-tech medicine, domestic adoption, or travel to a foreign country. Adopting from China is a relatively expensive proposition, and though it takes considerable sacrifice for many families to come up with the money, and rules out many otherwise eligible but less prosperous people, the point is that thousands of Americans had been able to do it.
Americans who went to China in search of a child tended to be well-educated, financially secure professionals in their late thirties and forties. The average Chinese adoption cost between $10,000 and $20,000 in various agency fees in the United States and government fees and travel expenses in the People’s Republic. A donation to the orphanage of $3,000 was required of all adoptive parents by the Chinese officials. In Guangdong province, the richest in China, that $3,000 could be equal to a couple years’ worth of wages for a factory worker.
Mark and I, and others like us, had unprecedented freedom to go after something we deeply wanted, to push the boundaries a bit and reshape our lives, to tell our stories afterward. We could choose to have children rather late in life, and—if we could afford it—eventually return to China to adopt a sibling for our daughter. We could share the frustrations of the long wait with each other and travel in relative comfort.
In contrast, at the time, at least seventy million people in China, by the government’s own admission, were so poor they lacked sufficient food and clothing. While some new American parents could stay in a four- or five-star hotel during their adoptive sojourn to China, the baby they took home may have come from a rural area where her parents lived in a one-room shelter with dirt floors and no electricity and where the price of a single night in a luxury hotel might constitute the family’s yearly income.
While adoptive mothers like me may have gone through a couple of careers before they tried to have a family, women in China had limited opportunities, and those who landed any kind of paying job were not likely to leave it. But perhaps the starkest contrast of all was this one: At the time we began thinking about a baby in China, Chinese women’s reproductive lives were largely controlled by the state. Permission from the government was required in order to have a child; women who became pregnant without consent were often forced to have abortions, even late in their pregnancies. A woman who lacked official permission to bear the child she was carrying could quickly end up on the street—or worse. She could be hounded and heavily fined and her relatives harassed. If that baby was a girl, her husband and his family could disown her for giving birth to a child of the wrong gender. She could lose her job and her home.
While women in the United States could make an adoption plan for a child they weren’t able to care for, Chinese mothers were caught in a cruel bind. “It’s a crime to give up a child,” a Chinese American adoption agency worker told me, “even if the family is so poor they cannot help the child. People will say the mother is very cruel and will not forgive her. Most of the women who abandon children do it in secret, hide somewhere, maybe move to another city. It’s not a good thing to talk about in China.”
Paradoxically, such hardships in China were the very factors that would eventually allow people like me to cross the Pacific when they dreamed of having a child.
Almost everywhere we went now—the fingerprint bureau, picnics in the park—Mark and I met people who were in the same process or who had already been through it or who knew someone else who’d adopted from China. A student in my art class told me about a friend of hers, a fifty-one-year-old single woman who had just brought back a toddler from China. The little girl had been in an orphanage until she was two years old, and apparently had learned to help with the laundry there. Home in America, this tiny person began pulling napkins and dish towels out of the laundry basket, smoothing them with her small hands into neat squares, and
handing them to her new mother with an expectant smile.
At a party, I met another friend’s adopted Chinese daughter for the first time. The little one was beautiful, eight months old, with bright dark eyes, shiny black hair with straight bangs, a sweet smile, and great interest in everything. Her eyes followed her new mother everywhere, even though the mother and daughter had been with each other only a month.
“You two look as if you have been together forever,” I said, and it was true. The baby’s new father said she still responded to her Chinese name, though they had given her a new first name. He thought that the sounds of her native language might soothe her, so sometimes he put her down in front of the television and turned on the Mandarin news channel.
I looked at these three—mother, father, and child—drawn together across thousands of miles, across culture and time, and I thought, What a happy ending. Not without its complications, I knew, including whatever had happened to the parents back in China. But if a little child can’t be kept and cared for, how wonderful it was that she could end up in the arms of people who wanted her so much.
Within a month or so, having rounded up volumes of documents to verify just who we thought we were on this planet, Mark and I jumped the first big hurdle and sent off our application to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to seek their clearance. We were told to sit tight; it would take the INS six months or so to process our paperwork. No matter, I supposed, because we had more than enough to do in the meantime.
When Valentine’s Day rolled around, my dear friend Frances, who was studying Chinese brush painting, sent a handmade card. With two elegant brush marks—a pair of red swooshes leaning toward each other, just touching—she formed a heart. A perfect symbol of adoption. I tucked the valentine into my notebook of letters to my daughter.
I was still writing almost daily letters to this unknown daughter of mine, but my picture of her kept changing each time we talked with the agency. At first they said we’d be assigned a toddler, most likely, because China preferred to give older children to older parents. We said we’d be open to a toddler. But then they checked again and said (according to the guidelines at the time) that since our combined ages added up to less than one hundred, we’d be eligible for an infant. Over time the answers continued to shift around, depending on when we called and to whom we talked. We tried to develop a more flexible picture of the child who might be waiting for us.
The majority of parents who apply to China, it seemed, requested a healthy infant. Those requests were usually honored, on the basis of some general guidelines that seemed to vary according to different times and different interpretations. At the time we applied, we were told that applicants who were over thirty-five with no children of their own were eligible to adopt an infant. Couples whose ages added up to less than one hundred years could adopt an infant, as long as one member of the couple was under fifty. Older parents were sometimes asked to take older children, though anyone of any age was free to request an older child.
As the weeks went by, I struggled to figure out where we were in the process. Although there were several major checkpoints on the route to approval—completion of an official home study, approval granted by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and finally, dossiers sent off to China for clearance by the Chinese ministry concerned with foreign adoption—nothing seemed predictable. Time appeared to shrink or expand according to unexplained forces. An astonishing sea of paperwork, confusing regulations, slippery time-lines, overworked bureaucrats having a bad day—all this stood between a baby, lying in a crib in an orphanage somewhere in China, and us, biding our time in San Francisco. We had lots of company, though. As more and more Americans had heard about babies in China, more and more had applied.
Was our daughter even born yet?
Two months into the process, we were probably at least eight months or so away from getting our papers sent off to China, where the adoption ministry could look us over and, if all went well, match us with a waiting child. So, I surmised, our daughter might just be coming into the world. Or, if we were eventually given an older child, she might be a year and a half now, with months to wait until we showed up. If she was already two or older, she might be folding laundry. It was hard to envision her. Every so often, Mark and I talked briefly about names, but each time we decided to hold off, to wait until we met her. If she was a toddler, she’d probably already have a Chinese name she was used to.
One night I woke from a dream, having seen a tiny face, and I felt as if I had caught a glimpse of her, whoever and wherever she might be. That vision, those dark wondering eyes, kept me going through all the paperwork and waiting. Eventually the social worker interviewed us several times, paid us a visit at home, took lots of notes, and said we’d hear back in a month or two.
While we were waiting for the social worker to render an opinion and for the FBI to clear our fingerprints, a British documentary called The Dying Rooms aired on American television, showing terrible scenes in Chinese orphanages.10 A trio of British filmmakers had posed as charity workers, carrying a concealed camera, and gone into Chinese orphanages to investigate rumors of high death rates in China’s institutions for lost children.
The scenes they filmed—of tiny girls tied, splay-legged, in bamboo potty chairs and of one little girl near death—captured the attention of human rights activists, raised the hackles of the Chinese government, and caused considerable argument among the community of Americans who had previously adopted children from China.
It was hard to know what to make of such information. The images were horribly disturbing, yet elsewhere were numerous accounts of healthy, happy children who had emerged from China’s orphanages. What was going on?
Across the distance, I could only pray that our daughter (if we were to get one) was cared for and that she had the basics of food and warmth and someone to talk to her and touch her. The great feelings of attachment I had without anyone yet to attach to were agonizing. How could I shelter my tiny hoped-for daughter from disease or pain or sorrow if I couldn’t get my hands on her?
Finally, one day in May, Mark and I came home from work to find a big white envelope in the mailbox. The social worker’s verdict! We carried it gingerly into the house and sat down before we opened it. Following pages of description about our families of origin, our hobbies and careers, our character traits and parental aptitude, were the magical words: “I recommend without reservation that this couple be allowed to adopt a child.” A major obstacle cleared. I realized how much tension and fear I had been carrying around, wondering if we would pass muster. We celebrated. And we went on waiting.
I went down to San Francisco’s new main library to begin some serious reading about China. There were groups of grade-school children working on the computers—blond kids, African American children, Asian boys and girls. It was good to see such a multicultural mix; I could imagine my own little daughter there someday, puzzling over some question on her homework. A display case held books and artifacts from China. I thought about the bare information I remembered from my own early schooling, which boiled down to vague recollections about the Yellow River, the Great Wall, silkworms, and mulberry trees. And, of course, the almost universal parental reminder about China’s starving children who’d be happy to have the food I was leaving on my dinner plate. (In an interview I heard with one of the student leaders from the Tiananmen Square movement, he said his parents had told him about the starving children in America.)
I left the library with an armload of books on China, works by Jonathan Spence and Orville Schell and Bette Bao Lord and John Fairbank and Harry Wu, several collections of Chinese poetry, a book on calligraphy, and a volume by Lu Hsun, one of the most important writers in twentieth-century Chinese literature. Nothing at all about mulberry trees—or so I thought. Later in my reading, I learned that Lu Hsun told a tale about mulberry trees that concerned adoption, actually a kind of abduction-adoption. According to an old folktale,
slender-waisted wasps were said to steal baby bollworms off the mulberry trees, take them to their own nests, and raise them as wasps. Thus, children in China who are adopted are sometimes called “children of the mulberry bug.”11
The accounts I read of the lives of Chinese women, whether contemporary or historical, offered pictures of unrelenting hardship. Bound feet, bound lives. Girls bought and sold. Infanticide. Lives of powerlessness and melancholy, reaching far back into history. “How sad to be a woman! Nothing on earth is held so cheap,” wrote poet Fu Hsüan in the third century.12 “Girls were a cheap commodity in China,” wrote Adeline Yen Mah in her contemporary memoir Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter.
By summer, six months had passed with no word at all from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and our anxiety was building again. After days of calling and getting no answer, I finally had some luck. The sole employee of the San Francisco division concerned with international adoption answered the phone. She looked up our papers and said pleasantly that they were being held up because there was a problem.
“A problem?” I croaked.
“I’ll have to talk to your agency.” That’s all she’d say.
I felt a deep sense of fear and dread plant itself in my gut. Was this it—the U.S. immigration service would rule us unfit to be parents? I walked the short distance from my office down to the waterfront and sat and watched the seagulls. I was just itching to find out what was wrong, to fix things and get our papers moving. But what could I do? I sat and watched a huge container ship sail under the Golden Gate Bridge. It moved very slowly, led by a harbor pilot tug, and when it got into full view I could read the name: China Moon. My spirits were buoyed.
On the way back to the office I walked through an urban farmers’ market and saw a Chinese man selling jewelry. On his folding table was a smiling sea-green “jade” Buddha on a rope, and when the man saw me looking at it, he put it around my neck. “It’s good luck,” he said. I went back to the office wearing my Buddha, my fighting spirit restoked. Just a few days later, the agency cleared up the problem—a minor bit of miscommunication, as it turned out—and before long the immigration service clearance came through.