Ten Thousand Things

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Asian Orphan Diasporas – 55,000 little girls, born in China, growing up in North America

Posted March 27, 2006 by Jean Miyake Downey


Recently I went to a heart-rending talk by Fern Schumer Chapman, author of Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Daughter's Journey to Reclaim the Past, about her relationship with her mother and their journey to reconnect with their family history in Germany. Her mother was a Holocaust orphan, one of thousands of Jewish children sent away by their parents, who were unable to also immigrate themselves because very few countries (count out the United States and Australia – the latter cited not anti-Semitism, but the fear of anti-Semitism developing in Australia as the reason for rejecting Jews) would accept Jews. The children on the "Kindertransport," organized by the British Jewish Refugee Committee, now adults in their 70's and 80's, ended up in any country that would accept them. Many passed the trauma of family and cultural separation down to their own children. Later, attempting to help heal themselves and each other, they formed ongoing support groups that are still documenting collective and individual histories.

Chapman's memoir doesn't only resonate with descendants of European Holocaust orphans, but with international adoptees throughout the world. They are turning to the stories of each other's geographical and psychological journeys, to make sense of the emotions that accompany separation from their "motherlands," and many other related issues, submerged during childhood, that come up later, often in layers over time, calling out for attention, integration, and healing.
International adoption, especially in the United States, is one of the smaller engines in global multicultural social change. And most of this migratory movement is from Asia to North America.

150-200,000 Korean-American adoptees, many whom are now adults of diverse ages making up a vibrant subculture supported by organizations, such as the Adopted Korean (AK) Connection .
We’re now hearing about the lives of these Korean-Americans from their points-of-view, in memoirs such as Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood: A Memoir . AK Connection has a great interview with Trenka, in which she comments upon the racism she had to deal with in emotional isolation, because her white adoptive parents were unable to empathize with a racism they never experienced, and her journey to discover her Korean history. Trenka says she feels more connections with other "trans-racial" adoptees than with Korean nationals:

"My parents never bothered to go to my country," Trenka says. "They never bothered to go further than North Dakota. They don't know what it's like to be a minority. They don't think racism is real, because they've never experienced it."...

Trenka's book describes her white, middle-class small town as a unified, insular culture, influenced by German roots, rich in ritual, thick with emotional repression: "What were my parents to know of the inescapable voice of generational memory, or racial memory, of landscape--if they had never been separated from their own people?"...

"I've become friends with [transracial adoptees] from Sweden, Australia, London, Africa," Trenka continues, half enthusiastic, half wry. "The one thing they most have in common is that they were raised by white, middle-class parents. It's like there's a new class of people. I have more in common with an African-American woman in California who was transracially adopted than I do with a Korean national."

In 1975, American, Canadian, European, and Australian families adopted four thousand Vietnamese children, now young adults, during Operation Babylift. Their stories are also now being published. Aimee Phan's notable 2004 fictionalized account based on her social worker mother's encounters with Operation Babylift children, We Should Never Meet: Stories, beautifully interlinks several narratives.

Currently, more than 140 million children with no available caregivers live all over our planet. 65 million live in Asia (34 million in Africa; 8 million in Latin America and the Caribbean), according to the Child Welfare League of America. Last year, the horrific situation of traffickers preying on tsunami orphans and Pakistan earthquake orphans made headlines.

Around 40,000 orphans are adopted between countries each year. However, most children do not come from the poorest countries and most are not really orphaned, leaving behind birth parents and families. Many of the adoptive parents look for their children on the internet, choosing potential adoptees from photos.

In the 1980's, around 18,00 children were adopted across borders each year. Now it's forty thousand children a year. The United States leads the world with over 19,000 adoptions (5,000 from China) in 2001. Canada's rate is steady at about overseas 2,000 adoptions a year, with almost 800 adoptees from China in 2002. Australians adopted 434 overseas children in 2004-2005, (32% were from China, 22% were from South Korea, 14% from Ethiopia and 11% from the Philippines).

China, followed by Russia, is the leading source of cross-border adoptive children by Americans.
“The preference for baby girls and the stereotype of the petite, smiling and helpful Asian girl has contributed to China’s popularity. Also it was possible for Western adoptive parents to come back from China with a healthy baby girl just 6-12 months after starting the adoption process,” says Riitta Högbacka, a researcher at the University of Helsinki Sociology Department, quoted in "Six Degrees," an excellent English-language multicultural newspaper and website published in Finland.

Since the early 1990's, 55,000 little Chinese girls have been adopted by American families. Lynette Clemetson's story, "Adopted as children, Chinese in America" in the New York Times touches upon the Chinese-American adoptee subculture, one of the newest multicultural subcultures of adoption, growing in the U.S. and demonstrate much more awareness compared to the past lack of regard of of the complex cultural issues involved in the psychological development of international adoptees. These little girls (most under the age of ten), while embraced by their adoptive families, need help in negotiating the racism, ostracism, and cultural projection that unfortunately still make up nativist American attitudes and behavior, as well as in making sense of their separation from their birth countries.

Since 1991, when China loosened its adoption laws to address a growing number of children abandoned because of its national one-child policy, American families have adopted more than 55,000 Chinese children, almost all girls. Most of the children are younger than 10, and an organized subculture has developed around them, complete with play groups, tours of China and online support groups.

Molly and Qiu Meng represent the leading edge of this coming-of-age population, adopted just after the laws changed and long before such placements became popular, even fashionable.
Molly was among 61 Chinese children adopted by Americans in 1991, and Qiu Meng was one of 206 adopted the next year, when the law was fully implemented. Last year, more than 7,900 children were adopted from China.

As the oldest of the adopted children move through their teenage years, they are beginning - independently and with a mix of enthusiasm and trepidation - to explore their identities. Their experiences offer hints at journeys yet to come for thousands of Chinese orphans who are now becoming part of American families each year.

With more sophisticated support systems, hopefully this current wave of little girls coming from Asia into North America, will not have to feel isolated and without personal historical bearings while growing up.

There are even more difficult issues that accompany cross-border adoptions, including the illegal trafficking of babies for adoption and the rights of the children being affected by these movements. For a discussion of these larger and interrelated political, legal, moral, and cultural issues, the website of the International Reference Centre for the Rights of Children Deprived of Their Family (ISS/IRC), a program created by the General Secretariat of the International Social Service (ISS), has an excellent overview.

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