I’m tired of writing about the paper chase, so I’m taking a break. I’ll finish recounting our paper-chasing adventures later.
In writing this blog, I’ve come to realize that this isn’t strictly for our future daughter. For one, the audience I have in mind as I’m writing this is definitely an adult. I’m really dealing with concepts that are far too abstract and advanced for anyone younger. So maybe I’m writing this for her in her late teens or early twenties.
Maybe not, though. Sometimes, my mental audience is clearly the people who are reading this today, June 25, 2006.
The plan I’m toying with now is to continue working on this blog in a more traditional manuscript form over the course of several years. I can flesh parts out, change my emphasis, and write and rewrite history to my heart’s content. Someday, maybe I’ll give her that manuscript. Or part of it. Or maybe not any of it.
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
We also needed to get police background checks. After getting our fingerprints taken, we stopped by the Hall County Sheriff’s Office to request them.
Unfortunately, we had to go back to pick them up, so I went in the next Monday to get them.
But they weren’t right. We’d been told that the people who certify the notaries are very picky about the wording used in the notarization, and they hadn’t used the seal imprint. Getting it redone wasn’t a problem, but the notary wasn’t in right then, so I had to go back again.
Naturally, I had to go out of town for a few days, so Jackie ended up stopping by the Sheriff’s Office.
Oh, and we did not have a criminal record.
Filed under: Uncategorized
In looking over the stats that WordPress provides for this blog, I notice that I’m getting a fair number of hits. All right, a minuscule number, really, but far more than I’d anticipated, considering that I’ve told almost no one about it. (Except Google, of course, and Google tends to blab.)
I am a little curious about who has found this and who is reading it. Are you reading it regularly, or have you only come here once?
So to everyone who’s reading this, “Hi.” And feel free to leave a message.
Last night was the second waiting families potluck. (See here for my post about the first.)
Today, Debra talked to us about packing. This is a subject near and dear to Jackie’s heart. Debra recommended packing everything in one carry-on and a personal bag. Whenever I travel for business, I do this, and a few years ago, when Jackie and I spent some time in Oxford (a month for her, six weeks for me), we took a carry-on bag and a personal bag each. If you plan right, it works out very well, and being able to breeze past baggage claim is great. You just want to laugh at everyone standing around waiting for their luggage.
After the presentation, we sat around and talked. Besides ourselves, there were three other waiting families. There were also six other families, who had all previously adopted. It was another very nice evening, and we had a lot of fun.
Next, we went to get our fingerprints taken. This is done by USCIS as part of their approval process. I’m assuming that there’s a background check somewhere tied to this. Otherwise, I just don’t see the point.
We basically took a number and waited with everyone trying to work their way through various immigration paperwork. That means we were there with a good number of Hispanics, a few Asians, and a few blacks (maybe islanders, maybe Africans). Then, there were about four families of Caucasians. Guess what we were all there for? Yep, all of us were adopting from China. One or two of the other families were using our agency, too.
Boy, has fingerprint technology changed since my last fingerprinting! Just kidding: I’ve never been fingerprinted before. Jackie has. There was no ink or messy fingers, though. They rubbed something on your fingers to get the oil off, and they’re very picky that you not have any cuts or other “defects” on the pads of your fingers; otherwise, you have to make another appointment. Then they scan your fingers with some kind of optical scanner. They check the image on the screen to make sure the prints are readable, and you’re done. Very painless.
The fingerprints are good for fifteen months, which is usually sufficient to get you to China and back. Wait times have been increasing dramatically, though, so we’ll probably need to get ours redone. There is a move to get Congress to extend the expiration period for these, however, so we have our fingers crossed. I’ll probably write more about the move to petition Congress later.
Afterward
One of the families we met was the family who later hosted our first waiting families potluck. When I knocked on the door, I was startled to think, “Wait! I know this person.” She was thinking the same thing. It’s a small world.
The rest of our home study went easily. Of course, having someone go over your life with white gloves is stressful, but we had a very nice social worker, Kathy, who made the process as painless as possible. According to Kathy, the only real “pass or fail” part of the home study was whether or not our fire detector worked (it did). And even though she told us not to worry about it, we still did a thorough cleaning and a little bit of landscaping before she came. She told us that everyone’s house is squeaky clean for the home study, but for the post-placement report, 6 months after the adoption, it’s a wreak, just like any house with a toddler.Before she came, we each had to write an autobiography. This covered our family lives growing up, the education we’ve had, the jobs we’ve held, and our marriage and theories about parenting, which must be a laugh considering how many children we have. We also had to discuss why we’re adopting and how we feel about it.
Georgia requires four home study visits. The orientation counted as the first.
For the second, the came to our home. We gave her our biographies and some other documentation she needed to write our home studies. Next, she talked to Jackie and I together. We discussed why we’re adopting and how we think we’ll handle some situations, such as if someone comes up and makes unthinking and rude comments. I showed her around our home. The highlight of the tour, however, was on the back porch.
In cleaning up for Kathy’s visit, we had rinsed out our garbage can and left it propped up on the back porch to dry. The next morning, the day Kathy was coming, I went out to pick up the garbage can, raised it upright, and was surprised by the possum in the bottom. It was playing dead pretty well. I left the trash can tilted so it could crawl out and let it be.
Later that day, Kathy came out on the back porch, and I explained why the trash can was back there. She didn’t want to look in, though. Go figure.
For the third meeting, I went to her office. She talked with me about my family, and she had a few questions concerning my autobiography.
Finally, for the fourth meeting, she came back to our home again. She first talked with Jackie by herself. Later, she talked with us both together again. Primarily, this was so she could answer any remaining questions we had, but I don't remember our having any.
She then had to write up a report. It was sent to USCIS as part of the paper work needed for the I-171H, which says that US Immigration will allow us to adopt internationally. A shortened version of her report is sent with our dossier to China.
BTW, the possum cleared out the next night, but we had to clean the garbage can again: the possum had used it as both a bedroom and a bathroom.
A long time ago, I said that my next post would talk about getting our paperwork in order. That was six posts ago, but here it is. Actually, here is the first of a series of postings about paperwork.
This stage of the process is called the “paper chase,” in the adoption community. This involves having a social worker do a home study, in which she writes up a description of our lives; having a physical; having criminal background checks; ordering recent copies of our birth certificates and marriage certificate; taking pictures; and getting permission to adopt internationally from the US government. Most of these documents then have to be notarized; then, the county’s superior court clerk must certify that the notary is authorized to notarize documents, and the state secretary must certify that the superior court clerk is the superior court clerk; and finally the Chinese consulate must authenticate that the state secretary is the state secretary.
Before we were accepted by our agency, Jackie went ahead and ordered our birth certificates. She was born in Maryland, and I was born in North Carolina. So by the time we were officially in the adoption process, we’d already started the paper chase.
Now, to get the ball rolling, we started on the home study. Hall County, Georgia, where we live, requires us to have our septic tank pumped and inspected. I went to pay for the inspector to come out, and he walked around the backyard, made sure we don’t have raw sewage percolating up to the surface, and OK’ed us, contingent upon our getting the septic tank pumped. I was able to get someone out to that pretty quickly. Unfortunately, he had to tear up part of our rose garden to get to the lid of the septic tank. Plus, once he started pumping, the smell was absolutely lovely, as I’m sure you can imagine. I think that it may have run our neighbors off for the afternoon.
But we were on our way.
As a side note, what’s the deal with adoption and insects? Mulberry insects, wasps, ladybugs? It just seems kind of odd.
At one point in Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son, Kay Ann Johnson talks about some of the factors of Chinese culture working for and against adoption. On the one hand, Confucian philosophy emphasizes bloodline and patrilineal descent, and this belief inhibits adoption across surname lines.
However, there is also a competing belief that bloodlines don’t matter and that an adopted child is just as much a part of the family as a biological child. Johnson says that this belief is symbolized by the term, mingling zi, which she describes this way:
The literal meaning of ming-ling tzu (pinyin: mingling zi) is “mulberry insect children,” but the term is used to refer to adopted children, in particular children adopted outside a close circle of patrilineal relatives. This usage derived from the belief that a certain type of wasp took the young of the mulberry insect and transformed them into young wasps, making them “its own” children. According to folk belief, the wasp raps and taps outside its nest, in which it has put the mulberry insect’s young, and prays, “Be like me, be like me.” After a while, young wasps emerge. Thus, one who becomes the child of someone other than his or her birthparents is known as a mingling zi. (page 98)
Johnson goes on to point out how clearly this belief ignores any influence of nature on the child and completely emphasizes nurture. In a sense, the child loses all trace of her birth family.
I found this description interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s a fascinating and evocative folk tale, made poignant because of the longing and need that the parents have in order to believe this or to want to believe it.
And I can relate to this need. I want our daughter so much, so deeply, and I want her to be ours, completely, wholly, and irrevocably. But there’s a lurking insecurity that somehow I’ll lose this miracle child. Intellectually, I realize how silly this is, but the fear is there, if I want to give in to it.
Plus, even without being afraid of losing her and without the added complications of adoption, there’s always the natural desire to be over-protective.
On the other side, tempering my fear, is my vision of the woman I hope she’ll become: I want her to be courageous and free.
But even without my becoming smothering, there’s also the temptation of the mingling zi: that I will ignore the very real difference between us—that she’s a person of color and that we are, well, not—and that I will try, through wishful thinking and sheer force of will, to make her like us in ways that can never be.
Instead, we have to teach her to be proud of who she is. Partially, this will involve allowing her to be who she is, not super-imposing our assumptions and desires on her. We will have to listen and watch carefully, so that we can know when our expectations don’t match with the reality she’s wants to create for herself. We need to encourage her to be as Chinese as she wants to be—and sometimes maybe more than she wants to be—and we can’t be praying, “Be like me, be like me.”
We also have to trust: first, that she will be like us in amazing ways we won't expect or guess; second, that the journey of her life will always include us and that losing her is something we don’t need to fear.
Most of all I have to remember: she will never be courageous or free unless she is proud of who she is and of the differences between her and us and between her and everyone else.
Right now, I’m reading Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son by Kay Ann Johnson, and edited by Amy Klaztkin (amazon). Johnson is a professor in Asian studies at Hampshire College. Motivated partially by her own adoption of a child from China, she has done a number of studies on adoption in China and of the effect the population control policies have had on Chinese families. She and Klaztkin have updated these studies somewhat and anthologized them. They are particularly making this information available to the Chinese adoption community, so they can have a better understanding of the social and political dynamics at work that have combined to permit international adoptions from China.
I still have a lot of this book yet to read, but I've also learned a lot from it. Here are the impressions I have from this book so far:
China is a Big Country
This seems obvious, but it's easy to forget. After all, the whole thing is just “China.” But because it’s so big, you really can’t generalize about the whole nation. For example, it’s easy to talk about a Chinese abandoning babies, and even about their having a “tradition” of doing so. However, that really only applies to some areas, such as Hunan and Hubei, and it’s less evident in other areas (pg. 52).
China is Changing Fast
This studies in this book directly cover a period of almost fifteen years (1989–2003), and it talks about the history of China from much before then. Things change rapidly everywhere, and just as China is too big geographically to make generalizations about, so changes in Chinese culture over time makes generalizations difficult.
For example, even in the two provinces mentioned above, which some said had a “tradition” of abandoning babies, the number of healthy abandoned babies declined from the 1950s until the 1970s. But in the late 1970s, the population control program popularly known as the “one-child policy” started, and the number of abandoned babies rose sharply (pg. 53). Even then, the rates rose and fell depending on how strictly the policy was enforced at that place and time.
Much is Sad
Sad is not quite the word I want. Negative, angry, and needs-to-be-changed were all contenders.
In reading this book, there was much that was sad. The fragile place of women in the traditionally patrilineal Chinese society. Communism and the social reforms it introduced had helped ameliorate that, but in times of economic downturn or when under other pressures, this reasserted itself. The population control policy, lack of social welfare programs for the elderly, and other factors combined to create a hard situation for women, and particularly for second- and third-daughters.
Another thing that struck me was the harsh and legalistic way in which the population control policy was often enforced. This aspect of its enforcement ranged from the comical—sterilizing a 65-year-old man who had adopted—to the horrific—forced abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy.
Much is Positive
But much is also positive, and much of this rarely gets mentioned in discussions of Chinese infant abandonment and population control policies.
China has a strong tradition of adoption, mostly informal. Until the population control policies were introduced in the late 1970s, this tradition was enough to find homes for all the healthy abandoned children. Unless there was a famine or other extenuating circumstances, orphanages were just for children who required more medical care than the parents were able to afford.
Also, Chinese do value their daughters. Most of the families Johnson talks about said that their preferred family would have both a son and a daughter. The reality that these parents live under, however, is reflected in the book’s title: Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son.
Looking at the page references I’ve given, you’d think I hadn’t made it past page 55. Actually, I’m on page 135. Just to set the record straight.
I’ll keep posting on this book as I read more of, and I’ll keep you up-to-date on other adoption-related reading I’m doing.
