It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Work keeps getting in the way.
To get back in the rhythm of posting every day or three, I’m going to report on another chapter of Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: “The Politics of International and Domestic Adoption in China, 2001.”
Johnson found that the Chinese have a strong tradition of adoption. Interestingly, she found that this applied particularly to girls, partially because they are more available, but also because the blood-line politics are less complex. (If you adopt a boy because you are unable to have a son, and later are able to have one, what happens to the original, adopted son?) Johnson speculated that China should be able to handle its adoptable population domestically (i.e., infants without special needs).
So what’s happened?
In a nutshell, China’s population control policies have made domestic adopt difficult.
First, adoption is viewed suspiciously by the population control officials. People have “adopted” a daughter out temporarily to childless relatives or friends. They are then free to try again to have a son, and reclaim the daughter when they do so successfully. Because of this and other factors, adopted children are given the same status in population control policies, and adopting an over-quota child can carry the same penalties as giving birth to an over-quota child (more on this in another entry).
Furthermore, in 1991, China legislated to control its adoption program. Domestically, this law restricted the population of those who wished to adopt to people over 35 with no other children. This placed a greater strain on the orphanages, or social welfare institutes (SWIs). This also created the international adoption program in China, which helped to decrease the over-crowding found in many SWIs.
A 1999 law relaxed the restrictions on potential adoptive parents, but as of 2001, this was not well publicized, Johnson says.
So what are the politics of the domestic and international adoption programs? First, IA (international adoption) has brought in a lot of money. It’s easy to over-state this, however, and the media almost always does. It does not bring in enough money to contribute to the economy as a whole. And while there have been a few cases of corruption tied to IA, the money seems to go where it’s supposed to: the SWIs, where it has made a great difference, by all accounts.
In many ways, the IA program and the foster care program—preferred by many APs (adoptive parents) and population control officials because it provides care without officially creating larger families—undermine the domestic adoption program. This happens because of the IA program in institutionally entrenched. The program is handled by the Chinese government at the federal level, not by the provincial governments, and also because an “industry” of agencies and charities have grown up that cater to IA, but completely ignore domestic adoption. This probably isn’t driven by intentional greed, but by ease and the easy money it provides for a good cause. In a sense, IA has worked too well, allowing everyone to become complacent and not to stretch for the harder, but better, solution of domestic adoption.
This puts the Chinese adoption program in violation of the Hague Convention, which says that IA should only be a last resort and that domestic adoption is always preferable.
And for a future AP like me, this also raises some interesting questions: Particularly, to what extent are we contributing to a suboptimal program? On the other hand, this is the system that exists today. We can criticize it all day long, and we should certainly speak up, but that doesn’t help the children in the SWIs right now. Practically, one thing we can do is make a difference in one child’s life.
(Of course, she’s also going to make a difference in ours. We aren’t doing this to “save” a child. I hope and pray and believe there’s a mutual benefit, but I’m trying hard to keep a colonial attitude out of this.)
I also need to ask myself what I can do to contribute to the better solution, especially since I now have a stake in this. The article mentions that our giving should be driven by the SWIs’ needs, not by IA, and by supporting domestic adoption and helping orphanages care for those least likely to be adopted. How well are we doing this currently? I have no idea. But this is certainly something to think more about.
But in spite of these difficulties to domestic adoption, China has also always had a thriving informal adoption “program.” Without this, its SWIs would be seriously over-strained. But the problems face by those adopting informally are tremendous. I’ve finishing reading a chapter from *Wanting a Daughter* on this, so you’ll hear more about it soon.
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.
Filed under: reading
To pass the time while Jackie and I wait for a referral (for the Chinese government to match us with a child, in non-adoption-speak), we've both been doing some reading on adoption and China. I’m going to start sprinkling book reports in among the postings here. A lot of times, however, the book may just be an excuse to talk about something else.
I’m going to put all the book reports in the “reading” category, so they will be easy to get at.
