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.
We had another non-milestone yesterday. We received our “brown envelope.”
The brown envelope is, well, a large brown envelope. It’s from the US consulate in Guanghzou. It tells us that USCIS has told them to approve our child’s visa when we go to pick her up. It also has some forms: “Petition to Classify Orphan as an Immediate Relative,” “Application for Immigrant Visa and Alien Registration,” medical forms, and a few others with similarly exciting names. Some of these we’ll need to fill out just before we go. Others we’ll fill out while there.
Why do I say this is a non-milestone?
Well, first, the letter is dated Feb. 8. But they don’t send them until after the Chinese government has acknowledged our petition, which happened March 3, and then they wait a little longer. By the time you actually receive the brown envelope, it is anti-climatic. Also, our agency has warned us that not everyone even gets a brown envelope and not to worry about it if we don’t get one.
Still, it’s a sign of progress of some kind, and since we’re looking at a long wait right now, any kind of forward movement is something to celebrate.
I wrote earlier on why we decided to adoption. At the time, I didn’t feel that I was expressing myself very well. As time has gone by, I’ve been less happy with it.
Of course, I could just go back and edit that posting, but that seems wrong. The web may be an impermanent medium, but that just smacks of egregious revisionism. (Speaking of egregious, how about that last phrase?)
Instead, I will probably keep coming back to this topic. I’ll worry at it and pick at it until it’s been done to death and we’re all sick of it. Maybe by that time I’ll have it figured out. Probably not, though.
My thoughts, and my dissatisfaction with my earlier posting, have recently focused on my inability to express the fact that—although we came to adoption chronologically after trying to have a family naturally—I don’t feel that it is in any other way secondary or that we’ve somehow compromised anything in choosing this. My feeling is that this is how our family is meant to be put together by adoption, but we just weren’t bright enough to figure it out at first. That says more about us than it does about adoption.
Note:
There are several other topics that I want to deal with on an on-going basis, the way I am writing about this topic. When I first post on such a topic, I’ll create a new category for it, and when I later post on that topic, I’ll tag each posting with that category. For example, I’ve created a category called “Why Adoption,” and I’ll tag both this posting, the previous one, and any future posting on why we chose adoption with that category.
On 13 October 2005, we went to orientation at our agency, CCAI. Actually, the orientation was officially on 8 October, but my wife and I are Seventh-day Adventists, and we weren’t comfortable with attending the orientation that day. Because of that, and because we had things to do at church that day, we asked them if we could handle the orientations another day or another way. The CCAI office here in Georgia was very helpful and agreed to orient us the next Thursday.
We had gathered some documents together to bring with us, things like a floor plan of our house and copies of our passports. Most of the things we already had, and we just needed to make copies of them. Fortunately, we’d recently bought a multi-function office machine, so making copies was as easy as moving our cat Elsa off it. That’s not as easy as it sounds, because our cat really likes sleeping on it, but we managed. (In the picture, we’ve covered the multi-purpose machine so it won’t get completely clogged by cat hair.)
The people working in our agency let us know more about the process and what we need to be doing. When we left, we had our marching orders, and it was time to get busy.
In the next episode, the bewildered explorers are lost in a paperwork jungle….
Saturday evening, 6 May, we went to a potluck for waiting families in the Atlanta area. We were all at different places in the process. Most of the families there had been waiting longer than we have been (we’re in our second month), but one couple were still doing on their paperwork, so the waiting hadn’t even officially begun for them yet. Most of us didn’t have any kids, but the family hosting the event, another waiting family, and the speaker (who is not waiting) were all on their second or third adoption.
Since we’re vegetarian, we made sure to bring something that we could eat. Jackie fixed a casserole and some egg salad sandwiches. There were a few other things we could eat though, and the deserts were very good.
We met a number of very nice parents and parents-to-be. And I had a big surprise when I recognized the lady who opened the door. When we went to get our fingerprints, there were several other people paper chasing for China, and the family hosting the potluck was one of them. It was nice to be able to get to know them better.
Most of the evening, however, was taken up by a nurse practitioner who told us about health issues we might find in our children when we go to China and how best to prepare for them. She had adopted about six years ago, “back in the dark ages of China adoptions,” she said. Her daughter was running around playing with the other kids, most of whom were several years younger. Since then, the NP has started consulting on the side. She has helped a lot of families prepare for their trip, reviewed their matches for possible medical issues, and given advice while the families are in China.
She talked some about formula. She recommended using Enfamil (IIRC), because it comes in individual packets, which are easy to pack, easy to prepare, and as you use them, you get more room in your suitcase.
She also talked about some of the nutritional problems the babies may face. Although overall, the nutrition of the adoptee infants has gotten much better, we should still be prepared for them to have some nutritional deficiencies. Generally, though, the deficiencies are fairly mild and respond readily to a proper diet.
But the highlight of the evening was her discussion of parasites. One was a very small, but uncomfortable mite-like creature. This is treated by washing all your clothing and covering yourself with a cream for eight hours or so. She recommended doing this while you’re still in China, before you show any symptoms. When you do get symptoms, they are very uncomfortable. Lots of scratching and itching. And the incubation period is just enough time for it not to pop up until you’re on the hellish 18-hour flight back or at home you’re suffering from jet-lag.
The other parasite was even better. It was less contagious, and you wait to treat it until you get back home. But it is very disconcerting. She talked about getting panicked calls from new parents babbling about an earthworm in their daughter’s diaper. Yes, you read that right. It is the ascariasis. Go check it out. There’s a picture. When you’re treating it, it’s even more fun. Basically, the treatments involve poisoning the parasites, so they try to leave the body by any means possible. That means the mouth, nose, and anus.
I can’t wait.
Actually, I really can’t, but I’m not looking forward that part of it.
She gave us a lot of good information, and Jackie and I are already talking about consulting with her as we start planning to travel. It was also a lot of fun to get to talk to other people going through what we are. We’re looking forward to future potlucks.
5/12 Note: I should point out that I have the impression that the parasites I mentioned above are pretty rare. It's good to be mentally prepared, but I’m really not expecting to find them.
Has it really been so long since I’ve posted here? I guess so. I’d better get busy.
I’ve been watching the logs for this blog, seeing which searches people are using to get here. Most of the searches involve things like “china red thread” or “china wait time.” One jumped out at me, however. Instead of search for China or adoption, it was looking for me. That was kind of weird. I assumed that people—old friends or new contacts—may occasionally search for me, but here I had proof. It was also empowering, because I was spying on the spy.
And I had some other information about my spy: I’d contacted some people about a potential career opportunity, and the same day the spy had googled me, I’d been contacted by someone from that institution. (I’m being intentionally vague here, since the outcome of this is still up in the air.) Being the brainiac I am, I immediately put 2 and 2 together and thought I had identified the spy.
Of course, I was wrong. I met with these people for the first time on Monday, 1 May, and the person I had identified knew nothing about our impending adoption. Someone else—Beth—fessed up, though.
And as I was leaving, she rushed up and said, “wait,” and thrust a colorful bag into my hands. On the way home that afternoon, Jackie opened the bag. It was a copy of The Red Thread (amazon) by Tord Nygren. This is a picture-book (so naturally amazon doesn’t have an image of it), in which a red thread winds through a world populated by fictional characters from a number of stories; artists; and the many creatures and people from the illustrator’s imagination. It’s an incredible children’s book, but it is also fun for someone of any age to look through.
After opening it, Jackie just said that this was the most thoughtful gift anyone’s gotten us, and Beth doesn’t even know us.
So here’s my shout-out: Beth, YOU ROCK!
(And I’d better get that thank-you in the mail, or I definitely won’t rock.)
Jackie’s been on a blog-writing jag of late. She’s trying to get a record of our process up and up-to-date. She’s also been pulling paperwork, matching dates, and working out the time-line of what happened when. Her blog’s more detailed and researched than mine.
I’m paying more attention to my experience of things, so my posts are more impressionistic, shall we say.
If we disagree on facts or dates (are dates not facts?), I’d go with what she says.
We really sweat this one. After talking with some people, we decided that our criteria was this: big enough to have some clout and resources in China; not so big that it would be unresponsive to our needs; handled adoptions in more than just China, so we would have options if China closed down for some reason; and someone who gave a warm fuzzy feeling, or at least just passed a gut check. Jackie looked up information on-line about a lot of agencies, and we talked to a number of them on the phone. At this stage, we had narrowed things down to three agencies: one top contender and two others. I was OK with the one we’d chosen, but Jackie wanted to think about it. I honestly felt that we would be fine with any of our choices, but Jackie recognized, rightly, that this was a major decision that could color our entire adoption experience. Plus, she’s a comparison shopper; I’m not.
We’re going back and forth, unable to make up our minds. We wanted to have a decision made and our application in before the FCCA Autumn Moon Festival on September 17, 2005. (More on that in another post.) But at the last minute, we decided that we needed to see some physical, paper information packets from the primarily agencies we were considering. I think we may have had packets for one or two, but we wanted to see them for all the agencies.
It was a good thing we waited too. While we were at the Autumn Moon Festival, we talked with a number of people who really raved about the agencies we were looking into, but some were also telling us that Chinese Children Adoption International (CCAI) was very good. We had not considered them earlier, because they do the most Chinese adoptions in the US (too large) and because they only do Chinese adoptions (no backup). However, the people who talked about them thought very highly of them, and everyone said that the Chinese adoption program in general is very stable and that we should not worry about it closing. Based on all this, we thought we should include CCAI in our final cut.
We returned home and ordered yet another information packet, this time from CCAI, and we were really blown away. All of the agencies were very good, and they all have good charities to help the children in Chinese orphanages who are not adopted. But as we looked at the packet and watched the DVD included, we were very impressed by how service-oriented CCAI seemed to be and by how much emphasis they placed upon their charity work and upon helping the children.
Just to be sure, Jackie called some of the references they provided, as well as the Better Business Bureau, Everyone we talked to had only good to say about CCAI.
So less than a week after Autumn Moon Festival, we had decided to use an agency that wasn’t even in the running before the Festival. I still think that any of the other three agencies would have been fine, but so far we’ve been very happy with our choice.
