Angela Tung Oversharing on the internet since 2005.

The other night I caught an old episode of National Geographic Explorer, China’s Lost Girls.

I’ve only known one person who was adopted (at least that I was aware of). Jennifer Harris was one of my best friends from the first through the third grade. She had long brown braids, like Laura Ingalls, and told me right off that she was Jewish. I was 6 and had never heard of such a thing.

“Say something in Jewish,” I said to her. I was Chinese and spoke Chinese at home, so this made perfect sense.

“Hey how ya doin!” Jennifer replied.

No one would have been able to tell that Jennifer was adopted. She and her parents were all white. Her mom had brown hair like hers, and her dad had similar freckles.

College was the first place I encountered Asians who had been adopted by white families. I was president of the Asian Women’s Coalition, and one girl came to a meeting and talked about how she felt she didn’t fit in anywhere. She had a scratchy voice and serious nature, and I felt bad for her. I wanted to help her feel she fit in somewhere, but she never came to another meeting.

Since then of course I’ve seen lots of white couples with Asian babies. In Boston, in New York, at the mall in New Jersey. When I was living in China more than 10 years ago, white couples with Chinese girls swarmed the American embassy area. I’d look at these couples and think, I’m your daughter grown up. Well, sort of.

Lisa Ling, a Chinese American, hosted the show, and said of one of the adopted girls, “Quite frankly [she] looks more like me than her parents.” While in China, Ling speaks a little Chinese – setting off a group of countryside kids giggling – sprinkled with a healthy dose of Chinglish. “Ni hao, wo shi Lisa,” she introduces herself. Direct translation, “Hi, I’m Lisa,” which in Chinese should actually be, “Wo jiao Lisa,” or I’m called Lisa.

The hour long show touches on a variety of issues. The long and arduous adoption process for one. Some couples wait years for a baby, and adoption costs upwards of $18,000 (and this was back in 2004). Once the couples – who were all white, except for one white man-Asian woman couple – got to China, they had to wait around in Beijing for a few days before being transported to some top secret area, where they finally picked up their babies. In a room decked out with festive red lanterns and other good luck symbols, each couple waited with bated breath for their names to be called and to be handed over their new child.

While I couldn’t help but think the whole process was like shopping for the latest Louis Vuitton bag or Apple gadget (“I want one now!” Ling cries at one point), as I watched each little girl, bawling in terror, being handed over to their overjoyed new parents, I cried too.

So why are there so many girls up for adoption in China? The “one-child policy” was instated in 1979 “to alleviate social, economic, and environmental problems in China.” One unintended result is the huge population gap between girls and boys. Because Chinese culture favors boys, who carry on the family name and are seen as caretakers and providers for their parents while girls marry out and leave their families, as of this year, there are “32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls.” Although a doctor on the show said it was illegal for her to tell the mother the sex of the baby before it’s born, obviously women have been able to find out.

So what does a man do when he wants a wife but can’t find one in his village? Kidnap one from elsewhere of course. Ling interviewed one woman who had been kidnapped and sold to someone as a wife in inner Mongolia. With help she managed to escape but not before enduring years of rape and bearing a son she was forced to leave behind.

I remember in China on a road trip, the bus stopped in a small dusty village. Huang Lei’s friend’s 12-year old daughter had joined us, and as she ran off to play, my cousin warned her to stay in sight.

“They kidnap girls here,” she told me.

I thought she was being paranoid. Guess not.

Ling visited an orphanage in the countryside, full of not just girls, but some boys and special needs children. Some of these children are raised by foster parents till they’re adopted. On the show one American mother brought her five-year old adopted daughter (complete with southern accent) to see her foster mother again.

It was pretty emotional. The foster mother was disappointed that the girl knew no Chinese, aside from ni hao, and hugged and kissed her and wanted to bring her home. Another foster couple thought one of the adoptive mothers was going to bring the baby she had just met, but for whatever reason she hadn’t. The foster mother cried and cried while the father stood off to the side, looking distraught. I felt so bad for them, but how hard would that have been for the baby girl – here are the people you thought of as parents again! Tricked ya, now they’re going away!

Another effect of the one-child policy has been the advent of an entire generation of little emperors. I experienced this myself: the freshman and other younger students at the school where I taught were far less self-sufficient than the older students. Of course you might be less independent when you’re younger, but one girl didn’t even know how to do her laundry. Her mom schelpped in to do it for her. And once at a holiday dinner honoring us English teachers, the younger students hogged all the food before we could get to it, normally a HUGE breach in politeness in Chinese culture. Elders and respected figures always get served first.

Which leads to another problem: the increase in obesity in China. Wikipedia cites “[e]conomic expansion and the increase in living standards” as a possible cause, resulting in increased food intake while “the growth of automization and transport has seen less physical labor.” But another cause, one could argue, is that these recent generations are only children getting spoiled rotten with food. As I’ve written, Chinese people like to show they care through food and forced feeding. Imagine you’re the only child – and a boy on top of that – in an extended Chinese family. Not only do you have your parents filling your plate every two seconds, you have grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins doing the same.

Of course another result is the point of this post and the point of the whole episode: the multitude of adopted Chinese girls in America. Interspersed throughout the show were interviews with adopted Chinese girls. They were all 8 or 9, and most seemed happy, telling the story of how they were born in China, given up by mothers who couldn’t care for them, then basically rescued by their adoptive families. “If I wasn’t adopted,” one girl said, “I’d still be living in an orphnage.”

Only one girl had mixed feelings. “Sometimes being adopted is annoying,” she said. “Sometimes you don’t feel like you fit in. You’re not like anyone else.”

I wonder if Chinese girls adopted by Chinese American or mixed race couples would have an easier time, if those babies would have been less terrified by a Chinese face (though I’m sure the terror stemmed from being suddenly handed over to strangers). But as the girls – and now, increasingly, boys too – grow up, would having at least one Chinese parent alleviate at least some issues about fitting in?

But I doubt the new parents were thinking about any of these things as they gathered up their new daughters in their arms. I wasn’t thinking about them either. All I thought was now I want one too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under TV. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.