Christina, Adoptive Mother: Transracial, Transnational Adoption

Orphanage, Shutterstock photo

I hadn’t really ever thought about adoption, but I was having trouble getting pregnant. So I tried fertility treatments but that didn’t work either. After pummeling my thighs with lots of syringes and going through surgery, I asked myself, “Do you really want to be a parent?” The answer was yes. And my husband wanted very much to be a parent as well.

Next, I attended a seminar at an adoption agency about foreign adoptions because my husband had read up on adoption, and it seemed like open adoption was the only route in the United States, and that did not appeal to him. He said, "I'm either going to be the parent or I'm not going to be the parent. I don't want to co-parent with a family that can't be bothered to be more responsible." Of course, that's a huge generalization on his part, but I decided a foreign adoption might be the way to go.

When I got home from the seminar, I showed him the packet of adoption materials, knowing that with his interest in Asia and Asian history he would choose China, which he did. So we went about learning more about the Chinese adoption process. We went through our home study and the unbelievable amount of paperwork that was required, and finally we were approved. But right at that point, the attacks of 9/11 occurred, and my husband, who is an airline pilot, lost his job. So then we weren’t sure we could afford to adopt from China because it is not cheap, but we decided we really were going to make it a priority in our lives.

I had joined Families with Children from China (FCC) and a book club in which all the books that we read revolved around the foreign adoption process, people's experiences, and the history of China. I read a great book called The White Swans, about what it was like growing up in China under Mao's regime. It was utterly fascinating and gave me great insight into how different the Chinese are from the Americans with their mindset.

Ultimately, two years after we started the process, we got information about the child we would adopt and some pictures of her. Then, because SARS was just getting started at the time, everything slowed down and we had to wait four more months before we were given a date to go to China. With Chinese adoptions, you travel as a group, and a certain number of children from a given orphanage are all meted out to families. We chose to go to China ahead of our travel group because we wanted to see Beijing and to get a sense of where our child was coming from.

When you go through a Chinese adoption, the process is that the youngest mother is the first to get her baby. It proceeds in terms of the mother's age, unless you already have children, then you go to the back of the line. And if you are a single woman (single men could not adopt) you fell in behind the people who already had children.

So that made us family number seven. We were very excited. The morning after the group arrived, we went to a hotel, and all the babies were brought there. I was just jumping out of my hide, I was so excited. So here I am jumping up and down, and I'm trying to look in the room where the babies are, and there is the nine month old baby whose photo I have been staring at for months, and I cried out "Jin Jin!"—that was her Chinese name. And she looked up at me. And I said, "Jin Jin, I'm your new Mama. I'll be there soon."

Well, the poor facilitator didn't know what to do with me, and the women who were holding the babies didn't know what to do either. Finally, the facilitator said, "Alright, family number seven." And a woman brought her out and told me that Jin’s foster mother was so sad that she couldn’t hand Jin over herself. We were told that she had stayed in the orphanage during the day, and then at night, she went home with this family.

We were also told that there was a note left with her when she was surrendered. In China, you don't just put your child up for adoption, and it's illegal to abandon them. So the mothers wrote a note, attached it to their child's clothing, and put their child in front of a public building such as a police department, which is where our daughter was found. We never got the note, so we don't know her true birth date.

From there we went down to Guangzhou where the US Embassy is, to start the process of getting her American citizenship, and to complete all of the paperwork. When we took a train to Hong Kong, we all caught SARS. I was really really sick, and our daughter was up all night crying. But before we went to China, we had gotten a prescription filled for Amoxicillin because the Chinese medical facilities are not up to American standards, and you never know what quality of drug you're going to get. I gave Jin the amoxicillin, not knowing if she needed it or not, but figuring if she did, she needed it immediately. We spent the night, then traveled back to JFK, all of us so sick. Then we got her and ourselves to the doctor, and started figuring out our new life together.

In Chinese, "Wǒ ài nǐ" means I love you, so every night, I made sure the last thing I said to her was "Wǒ ài nǐ." It hadn't dawned on me that she might not know what that meant; she would say it back to me. Finally, when she was about three years old, I asked her, "Do you know what 'Wǒ ài nǐ' means?" She said "Yes, it means good night." All that time I thought I was telling her I love her and boosting how she felt about herself and wanting her to know how desperately we loved her, but she didn't know what it meant.

She has always known she is adopted. I heard stories about people who were adopted, and their parents didn't tell them the whole time that they were growing up, and they really resented it. In doing my research to prepare for this journey, I read what adopted people had written about their feelings, their fears, and how being adopted affected them so I could try to avoid our daughter going through the pain that many of them expressed.

We tried putting her in Chinese language classes. Nothing, no interest. We went to Families with Children from China group meetings and parties for Halloween, Christmas, what have you. And it didn't really seem to make any impression on her at all.

We put a tremendous amount of thought into the type of parenting we wanted to provide. We threw everything at her: she took sailing lessons and cooking lessons, and went to a variety of different camps, but none of it stuck. She has ADHD, and she just doesn't get passionate about anything. Except for shopping. As a result of everything that we went through learning about her ADHD, I learned a great deal about how it can exhibit itself, and shopping is very common behavior.

One thing she really hated is that when Chinese people see foreigners with a Chinese baby, they think the baby is very lucky, so they touch the baby hoping that the baby's luck will rub off on them. Whenever we went to a Chinese restaurant with her, all the women would want to touch her, and to this day, she is loath to have a Chinese person touch her.

As an adoptive parent, you hear so many absurd statements from people. And we've gotten some pretty rude questions sometimes. But one of the questions that kind of knocked me out was when somebody asked me if we would have adopted her if we knew we would have to deal with her ADHD. But there's no guarantee when you get pregnant yourself, that your child is going to be physically and mentally healthy. That's just the reality of being a parent, and it doesn't make any difference to me–she's just as much my child as if she had come out of my body.

I love my child just as much as I would have loved my biological child. Sometimes I think I love her more. She has been such a joy. She's brought so much into our lives.

When you really have to work at becoming a parent, you give it a great deal more thought: "What kind of parent do I want to be? Why do I want to be a parent– for me or is it for the child?" In that respect, adopting has really made me appreciate being a parent, perhaps more so than someone who didn't go through that process. That's why I say maybe I love her more than I would love a biological child, if that's possible. I feel like I’m the lucky one, which is hard for some people to understand; they say "Oh, that's lovely of you to have given a child at home." But my opinion is it was lucky for us that we were able to have her as our child. It's taken a long time for people to come around to not thinking of adoptees as less-than. We always wanted our daughter to know that she was adopted, so it wouldn’t be a surprise to her and she would know that there is no shame in it, no stigma. If there's been any prejudice, it's because our daughter is Asian. Right now, Asians are being attacked across the country. And most of it is happening in Chinatowns–New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco. That scares me. We always made a point to find diverse schools for her, so that she would grow up not only among kids who would learn to respect who she is, being Asian, but she would learn to respect Blacks, Latinos, and so forth, and get to know them as people so that racism and bigotry would hopefully not seep into her mind process.

I am hopeful that if she develops an interest in knowing who her biological parents are, perhaps she will be able to find out at some point with DNA testing. She is 19 now and has never expressed any interest in knowing anything about where she came from. The fact that she is adopted also means that we don't have any genetic information on her.

She loves being an American. And she makes it very clear that she is not Chinese, she is American. And knowing that she is adopted doesn't seem to faze her at all. Which I'm glad of, although I'm certainly prepared to be there for her. In the past when I've asked her questions, trying to glean what she thought about being Asian in a Caucasian family, I haven't gotten anywhere--it just doesn't seem to be in her thought process. But that could change. My husband and I both try to make ourselves open to her–any thoughts she might have and want to talk to someone about, we're here. And we’ve also told her that if she ever wanted to talk to a professional, we could make that happen. But she hasn’t expressed any interest in that. I’ve prioritized getting her into a very positive space about herself, now and for the future.