Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other

by Scott Simon

  Our daughters will know that race is a part of their identity. But it is only a part. A person’s identity is established not just by what they are on the day they are born, but by what they become as they learn, try, and grow. Over the years, it’s not just bigots who have disdained and distrusted racial progress, but people who have invested their careers and identities in race, too. I am glad that our daughters have come to live in a place in which experience and ability, not just ethnicity, can steer their lives.

  Besides, I know that there is a much harder matter ahead for us to explain. Someday our girls will be at a picnic or swim party when we get together for a reunion with the other families who were with us when we got our daughters in China. Elise, Lina, Clara June, Jasmine, Polly, and Elizabeth will be at play, and we will tell them, for the millionth time, “Oh, I remember when you all were so small. I remember you all sitting on that same red couch when we got you.”

  What will we answer when one of our daughters asks, “How come almost all of us are girls?”

  “How Come Almost All of Us Are Girls?”

  MY WIFE, CAROLINE, should take over this section:

  “Young children sometimes ask me what adoption means, and I find that I struggle to explain it. Because despite the reams of paperwork, obstacles worthy of a horse show, and a wait that can rival an elephant’s gestation, adoption feels no different on the inside. I remember the first times the girls called ‘Mama’ in the dark of night when they were hungry, cold, or frightened. As I made my way to the crib, so touched by that word after the long, improbable wait, I thought, that’s it. She is my baby, I am her mother, and it will always be so, no matter the complicating factors brought on by our unusual beginnings.

  “To be a parent, according to Confucius, is to act like one.

  “I AM GRATEFUL to my daughters for giving me the joy and responsibility of being a parent. And for reminding me how fragile the status of women is around the world. Our agency prepared us for all kinds of questions, like ‘Why didn’t you adopt domestically?’ But the only indiscreet question I’ve been asked—several times—has been in small grocery stores by women who came from other parts of the world. ‘Is this your daughter? Why doesn’t she look like you?’ When I replied, they said: ‘Your husband allowed you?’

  “There are many places in the world where a woman’s role is to bear children: in fact, sons. In many places still, women who don’t produce sons are thrown out of families, young girls undergo female genital mutilation so they will procreate for duty and not pleasure, and girl fetuses are aborted (the lucky ones, who end up in orphanages, are lucky only when they are adopted).

  “In China, the imbalance in gender births due to the one-child policy is the highest in the world. This deficit in girls will cause further hardship for women in China, a country in which a significant number of women and children are already trafficked internally for forced marriage.

  “It is difficult to track the number of women within countries who are victims of kidnapping, forced labor, and prostitution (though worldwide, victims are believed to be in the millions). Across borders, the U.S. State Department estimates that approximately 800,000 people are trafficked annually. Among those, about 80 percent are women and girls and up to half are minors. The majority of these victims are females trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.

  “It is one of the contradictions of our daughters’ lives: given up by families who preferred to try again for sons and by a country who could do no better by them, they end up in loving families who wait years for the privilege of adopting them and in a country where they can be anything they want (except president, but that is due to their foreign birth, not their gender). There are no accidental adoptions, so no matter the early difficulties, these children know they are wanted and deeply desired. And in their adopted country, they can one day choose their careers, and they can have as many children as they want, or none, without being devalued as people.

  “That is the other contradiction of our time. As women become prime ministers, secretaries of state, judges, senators, and surgeons, a staggering number are enslaved around the world, treated as property, or aborted before they have a chance at life. According to 2005 census data, 90 million women were estimated to be missing in seven Asian countries alone as a result of sex-selective abortion.

  “We all know abstractly that our lives could have been different. In the case of adopted children and their parents, it is less an act of imagination to contemplate a different, less fortunate life. We believe our daughters’ lives will be richer for understanding this.

  “Today, there are tens of thousands of girls from China growing up in the West. The fullness of their lives will be a tribute not only to the too often underestimated value of girls, but also to the efforts of those who work in adoptions in China (including people in the government there) to ensure these children grow up in a place where they can fulfill their human potential. And bring great joy to all those who love them.”

  ALL OF WHICH is why I blubbered as we carried Elise over that line in Chicago’s immigration port of entry and into the United States. I may never be able to do anything else for her as important as that.

  I am permanently grateful to China for the gift of our little girls. They will learn about Chinese history and genius, and know it is their own.

  But it is impossible—it is irresponsible—to forget that our daughters are blessings that began with a crime when frightened mothers gave up the babies they loved because of Chinese policies that cause young girls to be cast away.

  It is hard for us not to imagine young mothers who, in what should be a moment of sublime delight, sneak out to leave their infants (clean, warm, and well-fed) someplace where they know they will be quickly found. They hide across the street to wait and watch for strangers to take their child. When their baby cries, they must hold themselves back from rushing to them. Imagine the torture—really, no other word applies—of mothers who must watch their babies being swept out of their lives.

  When you adopt a child from China, you face the fact that “a woman’s right to choose” means abortion rights in North America and Western Europe. For a billion and a half people in China, there is no right for a woman to choose to have her baby. My wife and I didn’t adopt daughters from China to make any kind of point. But the two people we cherish most are survivors of China’s mass crime. That obliges us to speak out.

  No matter the provocation of population, China’s one-child policy is one of the great crimes of history. Over the last thirty years, the number of young women and babies who have been abused, abandoned, enslaved, or killed outright easily equals the millions murdered in other historic atrocities.

  (The Chinese government has recently permitted certain minority groups—about 9 percent of the population—and farm families in which the firstborn is a daughter to apply to have a second child. I don’t consider this a significant revision of a villainous program.)

  The muted opposition among people, governments, groups, and international assemblies that consider themselves champions of human rights is shameful. Their silence has been purchased by China’s economic power, and by a twisted political view that values sovereignty over humanity. Democracies flash an official frown at the Chinese government about human rights, then beg them for investments and loans.

  The number of international adoptions the Chinese permit is tiny: eight thousand children a year, and getting smaller as the Chinese impose new restrictions on adoptions by people who are over fifty, single, gay, or being treated for an anxiety disorder (will this end all adoptions of Chinese children in Manhattan?). Yet an estimated 15 million children in China are left to neglect in orphanages—or worse.

  I wish our daughters could grow up without knowing this. But that’s irresponsible. My wife and I cannot read reports about children in China being dragooned into factory work or the sex trade and not think about what life might hold for two baby girls cast aside there. Someday, no do
ubt sooner than we would like, those thoughts will confound our daughters, too.

  So we want them to know how much we admire the young Chinese mothers who chose to bear their babies even though they knew they couldn’t keep them. My wife and I hope to give our daughters lives that are worthy of that sacrifice.

  “Hang On to the Vine”

  THOMAS LAUDERDALE says he’s glad he was adopted. Not just grateful, though surely he is, to have been adopted by Kerby and Linda Lauderdale, but glad because being adopted just seems to fit.

  “It suits who I am,” he says. “I enjoy being some kind of ‘mystery Asian’ that fell out of the sky.”

  Thomas, in fact, is the adorable little boy giggling as his father thrusts him into the sky on the cover of his group Pink Martini’s groundbreaking 2004 album, Hang On Little Tomato. The long, strong arms of the adult and the energetic unmuffled smile of the child all attest that it’s a caring father lifting his carefree son above his head. I saw that cover for years before quite realizing that the child looks Asian, while the father looks white.

  Thomas Lauderdale was born in Oakland, California, on July 14, 1970. He likes to refer to himself as a “mystery Asian” and supposes that at least one of his birth parents was Japanese. His mother and father suggest that Thomas’s origins are a little less mysterious (and less Japanese) than their son chooses to believe, but say they respect their son’s right to know as much or as little as he decides. Kerby Lauderdale is quick—and proud—to note, “We just set Thomas on his feet, and have followed ever since.”

  When Thomas was two, his family moved to Indiana. His father was a Church of the Brethren minister, and Thomas would slide behind the church piano after services and find that he could pick out the melody of hymns that he had heard. His parents took that as a sign that they should buy an old upright piano, and Thomas has made music ever since. Kerby and Linda Sue Lauderdale adopted three more children in rapid succession after Thomas: Aaron, who is of mixed Iranian ancestry, and Jesse, who is African American, and Jennie, of mixed African American heritage.

  The Church of the Brethren is a peace church, and it was an intense political time. But Kerby says that he and his wife weren’t trying to make their convictions visible in the colors of their children. “We just didn’t get Gerber babies,” explains Linda. “And we had no problem with what they termed ‘hard to place’ kids. In fact, we welcomed that.”

  Kerby and Linda divorced in 1980, but they remain friends and committed parents. They moved to Portland, Oregon, together. Kerby came out of the closet and began to share his life with a man (Jeff Devore, who died in 1996). Aaron and Jesse lived with Kerby and Jeff, and Thomas and Jennie with Linda, but only blocks away from one another, with the children running freely between the two homes. When Linda remarried, Kerby performed the ceremony. The Lauderdale family may have appeared unconventional, if not incomprehensible, to many outsiders. But Thomas, Linda, and Kerby say it all felt normal and whole inside, even though, as Kerby puts it somewhat elliptically, even for a minister, “the children were asked to do an awful lot of transitioning.”

  Thomas believes that his mother liked the idea of making a difference in children’s lives more than she cared for the actual mundane mommy business of diapers, puke, and sippycups in the middle of the night. “She really wanted to be a cowgirl-adventurer-rodeo queen,” he says. “That was perfect for me. I didn’t want a lot of mothering. But my brothers and sister maybe needed more structure.” Linda says, “Well, I did grow up on a farm,” but is otherwise mystified and amused by the remark. “That’s just the kind of entertaining thing Thomas likes to say.”

  Even Wynton Marsalis or Rahm Emanuel would find Thomas Lauderdale a hard sibling to follow. Thomas was always the smartest, funniest, most imaginative kid in town. He played several instruments, composed music, wrote poems, won symphony prizes, organized political events, and was a brilliant, entertaining speaker. Thomas was student body president and editorial director of his high school newspaper. He went on to Harvard, where graduating cum laude with a degree in history and literature did not distract from his commitments as a party giver at Adams House, where he managed to slip in live orchestras, ice sculptures, and cross-dressing midnight swims (and where he met China Forbes, the dazzling singer with whom he formed the Pink Martini orchestra).

  Kerby says that Thomas’s multiple accomplishments may have fooled him and Linda into believing how much sheer love and care could steer the lives of their children.

  “When you’re handed an infant,” he says slowly and painfully, “you think that you and your wife will have primary influence over that infant, that the child will be a product of your home. That turned out to be a dramatic misconception. I wonder now at our naïveté,” he says.

  “I grew up adored and beloved,” Thomas explains, “with a whole group of adults paying attention to me. My sister didn’t fare nearly as well. She never really found out what she was great at.”

  When Jennie entered her midteens, Thomas was already considered a civic treasure. His talent was his identity. But his sister felt that more of her identity might reside with her birth parents. Kerby and Linda discovered where they were living in the Midwest. They knew that Jennie’s mother had a history of drug abuse and suffered from mental problems.

  “But it was Jennie’s right to see her,” said Linda. “Her right to get to know them. It’s every person’s right.” Jennie’s birth mother, for that matter, welcomed the chance to meet her daughter.

  “That bond between mother and child is important in both lives,” Kerby says a little distantly. “There was always the question of why it was broken. And always a feeling with Jennie that maybe she could put it back together again.”

  Jennie told Thomas that for the first time, she could look at people and see reflections of herself, though she also told Thomas that she was startled to discover that her birth mother was white, with long, fair hair. Jennie’s own self-image was African American.

  Jennie became convinced that her background was a key to her identity in a way that Thomas’s never was. Her birth mother was a real, frail, vulnerable human being who lacked a key to her own life, much less Jennie’s; yet Jennie said that it made her aware of who she was. It filled something that was missing. Jennie began to spend several weeks a year with her birth parents. It was also about this time that Jennie began to use drugs. It is hard not to blame her birth parents, who had a history in that world. But youngsters scarcely need a family history of drug use to begin their own.

  Jennie began to enter a spiral of drugs and depression. Kerby and Linda sought help and found support for Jennie. But she died in 2006 from mixing antidepressants and methadone. The details belong to her family. Linda says she’s certain that the overdose was accidental. But she also knows it was the mistake of a daughter who seemed bent on self-destruction. It is the deepest, most grievous wound that a parent can suffer: a child who dies by her own hand. As parents, we are determined to protect our children from hunger, hurts, fires, and dragons. How can they harm themselves without our holding ourselves to blame?

  “IF WE HAD had just one child, Linda and I would have felt we were much better parents than we were,” says Kerby. “There is a human tendency to look for cause and effect. A lot of our sadness about Jennie turned into anger, and then we turned it on ourselves.

  “Thomas always traced a lot of his success to the fact that he felt adored,” he continues. “I think he would have been the same person in any family. Jennie was no less adored. But other things just overwhelmed her. Life is more complex than cause and effect. There are genetic, sociological, cultural things that just keep mixing up …” His voice trails off.

  The pain of the loss that Kerby and Linda suffered may be sharper yet because it seems to upend the implied bargain of adoption: that we can give our children better, kinder lives than the ones they might have had without us.

  I think that Jennie had such a life. The Lauderdales gave their daughter loving,
reliable parents, a stable home, interesting siblings, and opportunities to break free from addiction. But as Kerby notes, life is not always cause and effect. There are always other factors and influences to infiltrate, frustrate, confuse, and distract. Drugs and self-destruction come into the best families despite the direct shots from goodness to happiness that we try to arrange.

  At some point as you hear Jennie’s story, you want to reach out to her with words Thomas wrote to the title song of Hang On Little Tomato:

  Just hang on, hang on to the vine

  Stay on, soon you’ll be divine

  If you start to cry, look up to the sky

  Something’s coming up ahead

  To turn your tears to dew instead

  “In the end,” says Kerby Lauderdale, “Linda and I tell ourselves that we don’t deserve half the praise for Thomas that people give us. And we probably don’t deserve half of the blame that we heaped on ourselves for what happened to Jennie.”

  Thomas despairs that his sister “never really found something she was great at.” But Thomas Lauderdale didn’t discover his identity: he devised it. He composes and performs songs in English, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Italian, Arabic, and Portuguese, a repertoire Thomas calls “urban symphonic crossed with Cuban/Brazilian street Carnival parade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s United Nations kind of thing.”

  “It’s a relief” to have no knowledge about his birth or birth parents. “It’s more interesting,” Thomas insists, “not to have any biological ties to the rest of the world. It’s very liberating. I can be anything I want to be. I can be all the things I want to be.” While workshops and therapies urge children who have been adopted to discover their identities, Thomas Lauderdale has created his own out of talent, ambition, dreams, and experience. I’m inclined to think that’s what becoming an adult really means.