Tense Times for Adoptive Parents

Over dinner one night, Kay Johnson told her family she was worried about Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born nuclear scientist accused of spying for China. He had lived in the U.S. for 36 years and was a naturalized citizen.

Johnson felt the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist had been unfairly targeted for prosecution because he was born in an ethnic Chinese country, had traveled frequently to China and had many Chinese friends. What she didn’t say: Those same things are true of her 9-year-old daughter Lili, who was adopted from China.

“It was touchy,” recalls the professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. “I wanted to talk about the case, but I didn’t want to turn around and say [to Lili], ‘You’d better watch out when you grow up.’ I didn’t want her to feel insecure.”

For Johnson, who was among the first Americans to adopt after the Communist government relaxed its restrictions on foreign adoptions in the late 1980s, that discussion was just another sobering reminder of the emotional battlefield her family entered by tying its future to a country whose government is viewed with mixed emotions by many Americans.

Alleged espionage, religious repression, worker exploitation. At a time when the United States is lurching from one tense moment to the next in its complex and often contentious relationship with China, that country has also become one of this country’s leading sources of foreign adoptions.

Caught in the middle are 20,000 Chinese adoptees and their families who are just beginning to discover what it means to have the most personal and joyous of experiences--the creation of a family--ensnared in one of America’s most challenging post-Cold War relationships.

Even for Johnson, a China scholar with a deep understanding of this complex geopolitical dance, watching these tensions reverberate through her daughter’s life has been an eye-opening, occasionally painful, experience. Most of these adoptees are girls, a legacy of China’s one-child population control policy.

“Right now, she’s proud of being Chinese,” Johnson says of her strong-willed daughter, who prefers using Lili to Helen, her American name. “But that’s going to have a double-edged meaning. She will always carry a foreign face, and as long as U.S.-China issues are tense, there’s always the slight possibility that will become a problem.”

Spurred by this concern, Johnson and other adoptive parents--the majority of whom are white, middle to upper-middle class and well-educated--are quietly forging their own unique role in U.S.-China relations.

While China’s critics have dominated headlines with images of the Asian giant as a military foe and economic competitor, adoptive parents have begun building humanitarian bridges back to their children’s homeland.

In times of tension, they have offered Chinese officials a more conciliatory view of American public opinion. And in their search for greater understanding of the challenges facing their children, they are reaching across America’s own racial divide to the Chinese American community.

“To an extraordinary degree, these parents have really wanted their children to be fully aware and to have positive feelings about where they came from,” says David Youtz, head of the Asia desk in the New York office of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and the father of an adopted Chinese daughter, Sophie Ming, 5.

Uncomfortable With Politics

Politics is uncomfortable terrain for these adoptive parents, whose members include Tibetan activists and strident anti-Communists as well as China scholars and longtime Sinophiles.

U.S. members of Families With Children From China, an adoptive-parents coalition based in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., have rallied their members on issues directly related to adoption, such as a U.S. law signed this year that gives instant citizenship to children adopted abroad.

But they have steered clear of emotionally charged trade or human-rights issues, fearful of anything that might torpedo the Chinese adoption process.

One extremely sensitive topic is homosexuality, which is officially prohibited by the Chinese government. During the Sydney Olympics, adoptive American parents persuaded John Hancock Financial Services Inc. to change a television ad depicting a lesbian couple holding an Asian baby at the airport. The parents feared the Chinese government, which has banned adoptions to gay parents, might take umbrage at the ad.

There is reason to worry. On several occasions, the Chinese government has expressed its anger by temporarily suspending or slowing adoption procedures. That happened in 1996, after Human Rights Watch Asia triggered global condemnation of China and anguish in the adoption community when it published a report that accused China’s government-run orphanages of committing widespread infanticide.

Adoptive parents argued that the Human Rights Watch report was badly flawed because it implied the entire Chinese orphanage system was riddled with cases of malnutrition and abuse. They flooded the Chinese government with fax and e-mail messages of support and offered congressional critics in Washington their personal, and more positive, view of the Chinese adoption process.

Human Rights Watch officials defended their report, calling the parents’ criticism misguided.

After the May 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade triggered anti-U.S. rallies across China, adoptive parents again sent hundreds of e-mails and letters to Chinese adoption officials expressing their “deep regret,” according to Charles Bouldin, a scientist and father of two Chinese girls.

“I think they now understand pretty clearly that when the U.S. government says one thing, or any given group says one thing, that’s not necessarily what the adoptive community thinks,” he says.

Don’t assume, however, that these Americans are giving their blanket approval to everything the Chinese government says or does.

Joe Kelly, a New York writer-producer and father of Kerong, a 6-year-old Chinese girl, says his “close” feelings for China and concern about anti-Asian sentiments in this country do not make him an apologist for the Chinese government.

“I will not bring my daughter up to think she needs to somehow censor her ideas about political rights and economic rights to preserve the adoption system,” he explains. “She’ll make that decision for herself.”

Some parents are expressing their gratitude to China more directly, through programs such as the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages and the Half the Sky Foundation. The Berkeley-based Half the Sky Foundation raises money to fund educational programs in orphanages in China.

When Joe Spano and his wife, Joan, went to China to pick up their daughter, Meili Qing, now 2, they visited the Half the Sky Foundation’s first preschool program. The Spanos, who are on the foundation’s board, also have an older adopted child, 5-year-old Liana Clare Xiaohe.

“Our joy was so great we had to give something back to the girls who wouldn’t have a chance to live anywhere except the welfare institutions,” says Spano, the Emmy award-winning actor best known for his work in the popular “Hill Street Blues” television series.

Carving out a comfortable place in America’s multicultural milieu for their children isn’t easy, particularly for parents who are not ethnically Chinese. But Spano, who was raised in a San Francisco Italian family, believes adoptive families need to “jump into” the culture in whatever way they are comfortable, whether it is cooking moo shu pork or learning about Confucianism.

“If you come from European stock, you’re never going to be an Asian Pacific Islander,” he says. But the cultural divide doesn’t apply to these new hybrid families. “In our case, we’re a Chinese American family. There’s no denying it.”

Marcia Jindal, a foreign-adoption counselor at Vista del Mar Child and Family Services in L.A., says most adoptive parents of Chinese children share Spano’s feelings about incorporating China into their lives.

This contrasts sharply with the experiences of some Korean adoptees, who began arriving in large numbers in the United States in the 1950s, a time when adoptions were not publicly discussed and parents were advised to mainstream their foreign-born children.

“One Korean adoptee told me when he was taken off the plane and given to his family, he was told [by his escort] to be good or he would bring shame on Korea,” Jindal says. “These families had no support groups. They were really pioneers.”

Jindal still occasionally encounters adoptive parents who insist their Chinese-born children will not face any identity issues or discrimination because they are being raised as “Americans.” Some, usually in cases where at least one parent is Asian, have decided to keep the adoption secret.

“I tell them, you’re going to be a Chinese family,” she says. “Society is going to look at you that way . . . You can’t hide this adoption.”

A Bicultural Environment

Creating a bicultural environment is much easier today, when ethnic minorities are fast on their way to becoming the majority in many parts of America. In cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, which have large ethnic Chinese communities, parents hire Chinese nannies and Mandarin tutors, organize Chinese New Year’s celebrations and have even, in recent years, marched in the annual Chinatown New Year’s parades.

Rachel Levin, a Pomona College biology professor, has worked hard to give her daughter, Abigail Wenfei, a sense of pride in her birthplace. There are Chinese characters of welcome decorating the door of their Upland home, Chinese puppets on the piano and titles such as “When You Were Born in China” tucked away on the bookshelf. The calendar from November to February is a blur of events: Hanukkah, Christmas, Chinese New Year and birthdays for mother and child.

Levin, 46, a single mother, doles out information when her daughter appears ready. Abby, who is nearly 3, knows she was born in China, a special place with important traditions, such as lion dances. She has been told about her mother’s journey to China and the joyful meeting that created their family.

Abby has yet to learn about China’s population crisis, its one-child policy and the cultural preference for boys that has led to widespread abandonment of baby girls. The time for that sensitive piece of her life story will come later.

“I think the Chinese people have made a very generous gift and a very difficult one, and I want to honor that,” Levin says. “I think that China will always be a very significant and important part of who Abby is.”

Expanding the Family’s Ties

Before adopting their daughter seven years ago, Amy Klatzkin, 44, and her husband, Terry Fry, 46, made a decision to create an extended family of “aunties and uncles” that bridged the Pacific. They got an enthusiastic blessing from their old Mandarin teacher in Xian, China, where they had taught English for several years in the 1980s.

In addition to maintaining ties with their friends in China, the couple has also gotten heavily involved in the Chinese American community in San Francisco. Ying Ying, now 7, attends the Chinese American International School, which is 40% Asian ethnicity.

“It’s hard for many parents to recognize that their child is a different kind of American than they are,” says Klatzkin. “They were born in China and are Chinese American. That’s a whole different history, and it doesn’t include me or my husband.”

Maintaining a bicultural world was far more difficult for Debbie and David Hennage, who brought their daughter Grace Xiaoping home to a small town in northern Virginia in February 1996.

Though the 300 residents of Montross have treated the now 5-year-old Grace like a “homecoming queen” since her arrival, the Hennages have made efforts to broaden their daughter’s rural, largely white world.

At least once a month, they drive more than an hour to adoptive-parent gatherings in Fredericksburg and Richmond. Their daughter is friends with other Chinese adoptees around Virginia and attends a Chinese culture camp during the summer.

Debbie Hennage didn’t think her “all-American girl,” a lover of Barbies, tea parties and horses, had ever felt unwelcome. But at Camp China in North Carolina last summer, Grace and her friends told a counselor they had all experienced schoolyard taunts about being “chinks” or having “Chinese eyes.”

“None of them had gone to their parents and talked about it because they didn’t want to upset their parents,” says Hennage, who learned of the painful disclosure from someone who overheard the conversation. “If and when something like that happens again, we’ve told Grace her eyes are China’s beauty.”

Since Grace joined the family, Hennage has grown more sensitive to the negative perceptions of China in this country, whether it is newspaper headlines about alleged Chinese spying or disparaging colloquialisms such as “Chinese overtime,” which refers to the underpayment of employees and appeared in a company newsletter.

Though she finds it uncomfortable, Hennage has found herself publicly challenging racial stereotypes, even at family gatherings or her office. She recently chastised a political pollster who insisted she select an ethnic identity for her family.

“I explained we were ethnically French, German American and Chinese,” she says. “I told him, ‘You don’t get it, we’re all part of the human race.’ ”

Avoiding Racial Identification

In a study of this transracial adoptive parent community, Richard Tessler, a University of Massachusetts sociology professor and parent of two adopted Chinese girls, discovered that many of them did not identify their children as Chinese American because they didn’t fit the traditional definition of someone raised in an ethnically Chinese household.

Tessler, the author of a book on Chinese adoption titled “West Meets East,” uses the label “American&Chinese; families” to indicate that these families are more likely to be influenced by mainstream American beliefs--such as Judaism or Christianity--than culture imported from China, such as Confucianism.

He also found a large “gulf in understanding” between these adoptive parents, whose interest in China is primarily cultural or historic, and Chinese Americans, whose views of the world are shaped by their experiences as an ethnic minority.

“One source of the distance between these two groups is [that] the Chinese Americans looked at these FCC [Families of Children From China] parents and thought, ‘Where were you before the adoption, or even after the adoption, when it comes to political issues that affect the Chinese American community?’ ” says Tessler, who is now studying Chinese attitudes toward foreign adoptions and recently returned from a semester with his family in China.

Daphne Kwok, executive director of the Washington-based Organization of Chinese Americans, a civil rights group, believes these two communities will grow closer as young adoptees grow up and their interests converge. Already, many Families of Children From China chapters distribute the organization’s newsletters to their members.

“They are still babies,” Kwok says. “I think it [the Chinese adoptees’ community] will be an interesting component to Chinese America, but we’re just starting that relationship.”

When the Organization of Chinese Americans held its national convention in Chicago two years ago, Toni Farley, a 54-year-old adoptive parent from Chicago, helped organize a panel on the identity issues of Chinese American youth. The following year, she paid for a group of adoptive parents to attend the organization’s convention in Washington.

Through the organization, Farley hopes to get a jump on some of the issues that Elizabeth, 5, will face as she grows older. That was brought home earlier this year when Chinese American activists accused the Clinton administration of racial profiling in the Lee espionage case.

After the U.S. government’s case began to unravel earlier this year, Lee agreed to plead guilty to one count of improperly handling classified secrets, and the government dropped the remaining 58 charges. Lee has filed a civil lawsuit against the U.S. government.

Until the Organization for Chinese Americans got involved in the Lee case, Farley said she had never seriously considered that someone with Asian features and a foreign birthplace might be vulnerable to charges of disloyalty, at least in modern times.

“I think the biggest commitment we can make to our children is to think through what life will be like when they’re not cute little toddlers,” she says.

Heritage Day at the Museum

Last month, the Southern California chapter of Families With Children From China held its first annual Chinese American Heritage Day at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, which was showing the exhibit, “On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience.”

Hearing John Chiang, a member of the State Board of Equalization, discuss the racism he had encountered growing up in America was a “consciousness-raising” experience for Diana Chambers, a Westside writer and mother of 6-year-old Lili Lilan.

“I don’t like it when people think of Chinese women or girls as China dolls or sexy,” Chambers says. “I hate to think that someone might think of [Lili] as a cute little doll. But she’s a pretty strong personality, so maybe she can overcome that.”

Jeri Okamoto Floyd, president of the Southern California chapter of Families of Children From China, hopes the Heritage Day helped adoptive parents such as Chambers gain a better understanding of how their “daughters fit into a long line of Chinese American history.” She is talking to other FCC chapters about holding similar events.

As a Japanese American married to a white man, with two adopted Chinese daughters, Okamoto Floyd doesn’t pretend to know what exactly lies ahead for her transcultural family. But when in doubt, she falls back on the wisdom of a friend’s 4-year-old son, who had this to say about his adopted Chinese sister. “My little sister is American now, and we are also a little bit Chinese.”