(Will You Be
Almost instantly we began to notice what we hadn't noticed before: there were (obviously) adopted Oriental children almost everywhere we looked in our provincial midwestern city. We quickly found a monthly support group - The Chinese Culture Group - which meets for the purposes of helping parents who have adopted Chinese girls find others in the same boat, to help parents-to-be find others to help them through the process, and - this is the touching part - to put the children themselves in regular contact with a Chinese-language teacher, to show them at least a bit of the culture they were born with. We've been going to meetings for a year now, and wouldn't miss the little nippers for the world! (Thank you, Craig & Carol!)
Well, none of us knew much about China when we got into this - a situation we decided to change immediately. Since Barb is accustomed to walking out of our hometown Library every Saturday morning with about two dozen books, it was a simple matter to change her browsing habits to include a few volumes with "China" in the title. It is truly a strange and fascinating country! One little knows, when speaking offhandedly about "Chinese history", or "Chinese society", how COMPLETELY different it is from our long Judaeo/Christian/Greco/Roman - well, WESTERN! - historical civilization; how many assumptions we take for granted every day, that simply never enter into the head of a Chinese, because he/she has never been raised with the assumptions that we have.
Starting from the undeniable fact that this is a country so different from ours that we cannot hope to understand it in the year or two before we travel there to adopt Rebecca Jade, we have armed ourselves with a working set of facts that will at least help us to prepare for what we three will encounter when we go there.
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The country is FULL of orphanages - estimated to be over a thousand - each with hundreds of abandoned little girls. They're well enough cared for - no scenes of children caged in cribs, as we saw on Dateline's show on the orphanages of Romania. (In fact, if you want to see some orphanage pictures...) They're warm, fed & clothed; and the Chinese employ hundreds of "aunties", or "nannies", to feed, clothe, clean & look after these girls. By orphanage standards, they're OK.
Except for having no future.
You will have noted that all our discussion of Chinese orphans so far has repeatedly referred to "girls". That's because, as near as can be estimated, the Chinese orphanage population is over 98% female. The Chinese will only put up girls from their orphanages for international adoption - this is because, in China, there's no shortage of Chinese families who would dearly love to adopt a boy; no one is interested in adopting a girl.
You see, the Communist government has long had a one-child policy; all that's changed over the years is the strictness of enforcement. About the time we set ourselves on this road to adoption, "Atlantic Monthly" hosted an article by an American who had visited a Chinese orphanage. For her take on the problem, along with some VERY useful insights on what was, until not too long ago, a similar problem right here in the good old US of A, read this.) (For a recent update on China's "one-child" policy, there is a new (Nov. 1997) article in the "Atlantic Monthly" on Our Real China Problem - it's mostly about industrial pollution, but right in the middle, there's a big section on one-child. Find it online, here.)
(Latest update on the subject! - here.)
But the Chinese preference for boys over girls is cultural - it predated the Communist regime by centuries, if not eons. In Chinese families, it is the son, and ONLY the son, who inherits; the daughter who marries goes to live with her in-laws, and becomes a member of THEIR family, no longer her parents'. So when his parents grow old and infirm, she must tend them; when hers grow old, they must fend for themselves, or beg charity from their son-in-law. To say the deck is stacked in China in favor of boys is a gross understatement.
A girl who grows up in China in one of the hundreds of thousands of rural villages has no great prospects, if she cannot marry well. Such women are flocking by the thousands to China's "free-trade zones", to accept work as seamstresses, or assembly workers, or factory hands. Alone and unprotected, and without even the rudiments of sex education (Chinese culture does not promote sex education, whether in school or at home - that is supposed to be the bridegroom's job!), these women frequently fall prey to unscrupulous males. And what then?
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China has no welfare system, as we know it in the United States. If the baby comes, the girl must still work to eat - and also to feed her baby. Such babies, too, are sometimes "disappeared".
I don't want to leave you with the impression that ALL little Chinese girls are doomed from birth. But China is so vast, with SO many people... Consider this: thr current population is one and a quarter billion, give or take. Say their population-control method (one child/family) has worked, and the birthrate is down to something sustainable, like 1:10; that means 125,000,000 babies per year. Human Rights Watch says the ratio of boy to girl-births in China is now about 116 to 100; that means almost 58 million girls born per year. With millions of them named something like Chow Di: "Bring a Son Next Time", or Lai Di: "Gain A Son", or Yin Di: "Win Me A Son", or Bao Di: "A Son - Guaranteed (Next)" - suddenly, one million orphan baby girls doesn't seem so outlandish, does it?
Is it any wonder that some orphanages, in the largest cities, take in as many as ten baby girls PER WEEK?! And if a girl's chief qualification as marriage material in China is the status of her family, what sort of a future can these orphan girls look forward to? Our hearts were truly touched by these children's plight. We said, If one family, adopting one little girl, can make a difference, then let that family be ours.
Since writing the above lines, I have come across one of the BEST summations of China Adoption I have ever seen, written by Mary Chamberlain, an adoption professional, for Adoptive Families magazine (PLEASE subscribe - you'll never regret it!). With the author's permission, I have transcribed the article, and you may read it here.