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.
