About two years ago, I wrote a blog entry about a gentleman who does research for parents of adopted Chinese girls. He did some work for us. I found out last week that he has a blog as well.

In the local paper last week, there was a Reuters article on child trafficking rings in China. Like most adoptive parents of Chinese girls, this made no sense to me. The vast majority of the girls in Chinese orphanages never get adopted so it seemed logical that with such a supply, the demand for blackmarket children would be non-existent.

Well our researcher explained the situation in an excellent post. I encourage everyone to read it.

Orphanage directors are now so dependent on fees from foreign adoptive parents, that the youngest and healthiest babies go overseas. Orphanages compete with each other for those dollars, and if an orphanage wants to have more “desirable” children available for foreign adoption, some directors find nefarious ways of obtaining them.

To the locals who want to adopt, those same fees that foreigners have no problem paying are prohibitive and the only alternative is to accept older or special needs children. With a black market, few Chinese couples are willing to adopt legally.

Meanwhile the population of older, hard-to-place children continues to grow.

When we were adopting Claire, we asked the Fuling director how many Chinese couples adopted from her orphanage.

She laughed and said, “None.”

In addition to abandonment, families are increasingly using prenatal scan to determine the sex of the fetus and aborting it if it is female. The government used to ignore this problem, but now it is a criminal offense to have a gender selective abortion. They were previously banned, but bribes to doctors took care of that inconvenience.

As a consequence “fertility” rates are now dropping and now the population is rapidly aging. Males already outnumber Females 6 to 5 and the ratio is getting worse. For newborns it is 4 to 3. In schools it is 3 to 2.

China has attempted to soften the one-child law: Parents are allowed to have a second child if their first was a girl, if they are college educated, or if they are part of a declining minority. Anything to avoid abandoned girls and aborted fetuses. Revoke the one-child law? Can’t do that.

Since it is all related to patriarchal society, with birthmothers always seeming to blame pressure from their mother-in-law, China is now trying a form of affirmative action in 24 cities. Elderly people in some rural areas (where the problem is the worst) are receiving pensions if they had only one child or only have daughters.

A representative from the Family Planning Commission said this was intended to give monetary value to girls. Apparently it is not obvious that daughters are worth anything.

Ironically when we adopted our girls, we had to agree not sell our daughters.

We rented a house for a half week at the northern edge of the Smoky Mountains with the four other families that adopted with us from Maoming China 6 years ago. We came from Connecticut, upstate New York, Louisiana, and Ohio. There were 10 kids (half were 6-year-old Chinese girls) and 10 parents. We were in a five bedroom house. Two laundry rooms and a slowly leaking hot tub. The two babies slept in their parents’ room. The 6 older girls slept together in the great room on a patchwork of ajoining air mattresses. (An instant slumber party.) The two brothers slept in the loft. We reminised each night and went sightseeing each day.

The first day, we went to an overpriced aquarium. Claire waved bye-bye to every fish as we passed and we temporarily lost a our camera case. To even up the plushy ratio, Marissa picked out an Eagle Ray. She ignored my suggestion to name it “Eagle Ray Charles.” She named it “Stinger” even though it isn’t a Sting Ray.

The second day, we convoyed to Dollywood. Oh just shoot me now. The drive to the parking lot was indeterminably long and the wait for the tram to the entrance seemed even longer. Those in farther lots were being served first! When it did arrive at our stop, the tram wrangler(?) in the very back referred to the guests disparagingly in the third person while conversing over the speaker system with the tram driver in the front. Classy. He also bragged how no one ever has to wait more than 15 minutes. A lie by my watch. You don’t appreciate how nicely Disneyworld does it until you see how poorly other amusement parks do it by comparison. And we hadn’t even entered the park.

After our family spent $142 just to get in the door, some of our group were remarking how close they came to turning around at the entrance. Along the lines of “I would have turned around had I know you wanted to bail too.” Too late.

We started with a Veggie Tales show. (Some of the attractions were for meant for Christians only.) There weren’t many rides, but along the streets were simple crafts we could do for additional fees. The girls did maybe 5 “carny-quality” rides all day. I did one. Chris, none. We bailed after four hours. The exit was through gift shop. Wouldn’t you know. Two more stuffed animals were purchased: a horse (surprise!) and leopard (surprise again!) and we were back on the tram. Chris wanted to get the animals to make up for the good time they didn’t have. Arghhhh! We’ve had a better time at grandma’s county fair for a tenth as much.

To wash the crass commercialism from my palate, our family went into the Smoky Mountains National Park. The last major National Park that is still free. We went to the peak and saw a bear cub eating along the road. We took pictures. I felt better.

Our group dispersed in the morning vowing to do it again in two or three years.

On the way home we stayed at the lodge at Cumberland Falls State Park. We went swimming in the afternoon and saw their waterfall in the evening. I have empirical evidence that you can still buy a can of coke from a vending machine for only 50 cents. Life, again, was good.

Even before I picked up the letter, Chris knew who it was from. Other parents of children from Fuling Social Welfare Institute were receiving letters too. When China started to build the dam, there was a sharp increase in the number of abandoned girls in river town of Fuling. The orphanage had to expand. Now after accumulating so many children over the past dozen years or so (98% of the children are never adopted), it needs to expand again.

My 3 bedroom house is 3300 sq ft. I have 5 people in my family. The current children’s living area at the Institute is 4 times bigger but they care for 400 children.

The cost of the new complex is around $3M. (I’m sure the 25-acre project would be much, much more than that in the U.S..)Through gifts from Western adopting parents over the past 4 years, they have a third of that already. The local county has donated the land. Since nothing is coming from their federal government, the rest has to come from overseas donations. So we are all getting letters.

I have no way of determining this, but I am curious what the locals think when they see an orphange go from a 2000 sq ft house to a 15,000 sq ft building then to a 100,000 sq ft campus in less than two decades. Is this viewed as progress?

On the streets of Chongqing (the metropolitan city next to village of Fuling), I got the most disapproving glare from an older gentleman when I was carrying my newest family member outside the hotel. Was he disappointed because a Westerner was adopting one of his country’s girls or because a Westerner was the only option the baby had? The orphanage director laughed when asked what portion of the children were adopted domestically. Despite the fact that every Chinese adult is aware of the abandonment problem, Chinese couples never consider adoption and, apparently, aren’t responsible for supporting their orphanages either.

Perhaps, as long as Chinese parents continue to abandon their children, it should made legal and taxed heavily. At least then, as the orphanages burst at the seams, there will be the resources to care for the girls properly.

We do try very hard to expose them to their culture, but most of the Chinese people we expose them to are fellow adoptees. So much for authentic culture. Because of that, for the longest time they assumed being adopted implied you came from Asia (and vice versa).

We do have acquaintances who have adopted Caucasians (from Russia) but they don’t appear to have much interest in exposing their children to their heritage. I could see how some parents, whose children look like them, might have the desire to suppress their children’s original culture. And probably get away with it. The author of the article and I probably agree that this is not the best thing. I’m not even sure they know they are adopted. Not telling your child he or she is adopted is a big no-no. It betrays parental trust at a very emotional level. Only bad Disney movies (Snow Dogs and Country Bears to be specific) would suggest that lying to your adopted children about this is even an option.

While we were at the orphanage this past March, the director gave us a gift box of the delicacy. The box was quite decorative–it looked like a box for fine chocolates–but since I cannot read Chinese, we took the director’s word of its contents and never opened it when we were over there.

Last week, my wife sorted out the souvenirs of the trip and finally opened the shiny green box. It contained six small vacuum-sealed pouches, each with a sticker (in Chinese of course) indicating its flavor. In a word, it looked: peculiar. But my wife had a gleam in her eye. She would save it for a party hosted by one of our fellow adoptive parents. Chinese new year was around the corner and the hosts’ daughter, our oldest daughter, and a third family’s daughter, all Chinese, had January birthdays. My wife thought it would be a hoot if the husbands (not the wives) would sample the food stuff.

So at the party, after the lasagna but before the German chocolate cake, my wife cut open a pouch and squeezed it out on a plate. Dig in guys. With a diet coke and napkin at the ready in my left hand, I stabbed some Zhacai with a fork. It had the consistency of fat, overcooked bean sprouts and the approximate taste of saurkraut. A little spicier, thinker, very limp and cold. My wife chose not to splurge on 20 seconds in the microwave.

Zhacai

While no one joined me when I took a larger second bite, we still have five pouches left if anyone is interested.

Last month she wrote an article describing her “encounter” with a birthmother who had abandoned her child. I now have enough anecdotal supporting evidence that when Katie and Claire ask (and I know they will) if their abandoning birthmothers’ loved them, I can sincerely answer “yes.”

But I now have other questions after reading the article.

The compassion of bystanders for abandoned children is not always there. Xinran was ridiculed for attempting to come to the aid of an abandoned child. We too felt this while we were in China adopting Claire, when we got the occasional dirty look from pedestrians. Why the lack of compassion?

The birthmother who called Xinran and admitted to abandoning the child on a cold winter morning was sobbing when she reported that her family and village(!) were urging her to get rid of her child. I cannot imagine how a village could pressure a mother into abandonment or infanticide.

Xinran reports another birthmother wishes for a rich person to take her daughter. This to parallels our experience. While in China adopting Katie, a father offered to sell us his preschool daughter. One could charitable in saying these birthparents wanted a better life for their children, but I cannot think but that the love of a birthparent is beyond any monetary sum.

A birthmother wonders if foreign adoptive parents “know how to feed and love them.” This coming from a parent who had decided to leave her daughter defenseless on a street corner. When we adopted our girls, the Chinese and Vietnamese governments had us sign an affidavit indicating that we would never abandon or sell the children. What was unthinkable to us apparently wasn’t a given in their society.

Finally, a birthmother begs the new family “to love her as if she were their own.” This is the one phrase I hear in casual conversations that annoys me the most. Of course I am going to love my daughters as if they were my own because they are my own. It annoys me to no end that some don’t consider my family to be a true one. I am not a fake parent and my children belong to no other than my wife and me. Well-meaning strangers often say “I’d consider adoption if I couldn’t have children of my own.” I can never get myself to reply “good for you!” These same people should never adopt because adoption should never be viewed as a consolation prize. (The Institute for Adoption Information has a handy guide as to what phrases can be offensive to adoptive families.)

Xinran has a book out that looks promising.

This was a throwback to the Danwei system of state-run working units which, in the best interest of state, controlled whether you could marry, divorce, get a passport, or get an education for your child. Some of those in line today were filing for divorce now that couples no longer have deal with a mandated mediation by the local civil affairs department.

Over time these laws, like many official functions, occasionally amounted to extortion by employers before these were approved.

The government has not given any indication that it will repeal the household registration system that dictates where Chinese may live.

So I take them to the first class today. While the young Chinese instructor doesn’t have the 15 or so five-year-olds under complete control, she’s doing a better job than I do with my own three girls. She plugs in her laptop and the music starts. She proceeds to teach them not traditional Chinese dance, but American jazzercise.

While it did not expose them to the culture I was hoping. It did tire them out a little.