The Lost Daughters of China: Adopted Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past by Evans Karin

Author:Evans, Karin [Evans, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2008-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Kelly observed her second Halloween dressed as a pumpkin. When we marked the Autumn Moon Festival the same month, she wore her Chinese jacket from Guangzhou. In December we gathered with our adoption group and the girls drew names for Christmas gifts. By Chinese New Year’s, Kelly and her cousins were exchanging traditional Chinese red envelopes. In our small way, we were a living example of what sociologists call bicultural socialization.

Richard Tessler, a University of Massachusetts sociology professor and father of two adopted daughters from China, became interested in how adopted Chinese girls were being exposed to various aspects of their birth culture. The author of West Meets East: Americans Adopt Chinese Children, Tessler put together a questionnaire in 1996 for a national survey, the start of what he hoped would be a continuing longitudinal study.2 Parents, he knew, had choices about whether and how to help their children become comfortable and competent in two worlds, to construct what he termed “a bicultural identity.” He also saw an opportunity to gauge how the wider world viewed these East-West families.

Here’s what Tessler found, having surveyed more than five hundred people, a voluntary representation he admits was probably skewed in favor of parents already interested in bicultural issues: Parents felt it was most important that their children be proud of their Chinese heritage. Next, they valued exposure to Chinese culture, then a child’s awareness of looking like other persons of Chinese descent; learning about the area of China from which their children came; having their child become friends with other Chinese children; and learning about modern Chinese history. Lower on the list of importance were visits to China with their child or being able to communicate in Chinese at home. Interestingly, parents who were very committed to the Chinese socialization of their children often reported prejudice or negative social reactions toward their unusual families.

The parents Tessler interviewed said overwhelmingly they’d had few problems in their own neighborhoods, but two-thirds said they’d had problems with strangers, ranging from nosy inquiries to serious affronts. Some had been asked intrusive questions, even in the presence of the child, queries such as “How much did she cost?” and “Why didn’t her mother want her?” Some Caucasian mothers said they’d been asked, “Is her father Chinese?” The most important source of social support for such families turned out to be friendships with other adoptive families in the same boat.

Tessler was planning to return to China, to live for a while in the city where both his daughters began their lives. There, he hoped to learn what Chinese people think about bicultural socialization. Ultimately, he hoped to survey the adopted girls themselves. He was just waiting for most of them to get old enough.

Other, scattered research has looked at the adjustments made by children adopted internationally, and the overall picture seems mixed but generally positive. Such are the shiftings of world affairs that twenty-five hundred Japanese children, left as orphans in China at the end of World War II, were adopted by Chinese families.

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