Rolling Out the Red Carpet for Chinese Adoptees
When we (the first wave of Chinese adoptees) arrived in America like a tsunami in the 90’s and 00’s, it felt like the red carpet had been rolled out for us in welcome.
*These are my personal experiences. Things vary country to country, state by state, town by town. But there are tons of adoptees where I live so my experience might not actually be uncommon.
Here are just some examples:
1) When we came to America, many of our adoptive parents thought we should have the opportunity to learn about our roots early on. A lady, named Ping, worked at a language center that had one of its offices in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. They had language teachers for all sorts of languages, but she was the Mandarin teacher. Ping taught Mandarin to the children in some of the Chinese orphanages in the bigger cities and was now living in America, tutoring mostly affluent Philadelphians' little kids. Suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, there was a wave of Chinese babies with their white mothers! She taught us songs and how to say our colors. It was a mommy-daughter kind of program. But though troops of fifteen Chinese adoptees with their white mothers came through her office every week, she was having a hard time accepting reality. She told us that she had worked in the Chinese orphanages in China for many, many years and not once did they ever say that those babies were adopted anywhere. She said that the Chinese government told her that it was not possible. Even as she saw the proof in front of her own eyes, she was having a hard time accepting that her government had not told the complete truth. I went to Ping with other local adoptees in the years before elementary school.
2) A Chinese-American woman with two children was obsessed with the Chinese adoptees in the community and managed to find a way to connect with the local FCC chapter to host her own events for us. We would have several group events (weekly to monthly) throughout the year, especially during the holidays to learn Chinese songs, games, and language with our parents. We sang Chinese songs at senior centers and had holiday parties in the middle school library they let her use. I was in elementary school when she was most active.
3) In elementary school to middle school, I was a part of a traditional Taiwanese dance troupe. It was run out of the house of a Taiwanese-American woman we'll call "Y." She and her daughter, "H," had been running this program out of their house for many years with H's friends and peers. Those girls were now college-aged and then, out of nowhere, the first wave of Chinese adoptees had "invaded" the area! We had an all Chinese-adoptee dance troupe. We had the lion dance, the farmer's dance, the fan dance, etc. The costumes/clothes were beautiful, made by people she knew in Taiwan. We performed in Philadelphia at Penn's Landing and also in China Town as just one act for Chinese New Year. We performed in senior centers and at other events in auditoriums. When we weren't rehearsing, she had other events at her house just for us adoptees! We made those cute little paper stars, learned how to make Vietnamese spring rolls, pork dumplings (yum!), and paint classic mountain/flower tree scenes.
4) In my town, there were two Chinese schools: Mainland vs. Taiwanese, Simplified vs. Traditional. For a little bit (maybe four years), they had Chinese New Year celebrations together, where each one side of town would bash the other one as their student performed their songs and dances. So, clearly, they stopped doing things together. These schools were more than just language schools, but a cultural and community centers with art and dance classes too. I went to the one next to my house...the Mainland school, where I already knew the kids there from just normal public school. They welcomed us Chinese adoptees and made a special class just for us and a few other kids whose parents spoke non-Mandarin dialects at home. Our parents sat in with us and the teachers constantly corrected my mom's attempts at Mandarin (she's tone-deaf haha!) I took an art class there where I learned how to use pastels and then a dance class. One day, my Chinese American friend from elementary school learned over to me and said, "You know that we don't even know Mandarin, right?" He was right. All these adoptive parents were convinced that their kid just had to learn Mandarin, but if you actually looked around, you would noticed that NO ONE knew how to speak Mandarin. Each year, kids (adopted and not) "dropped out" of the language program. My friends now who are all my age (early twenties) still can't speak Mandarin, even though their parents speak it and they spent four years in college taking it. To varying degrees, my friends know Mandarin or Fujianese or Cantonese, etc. etc. but fluent? I'd say not. Predictably, each year the Chinese adoptee class shrunk because well, it was just too difficult. Why should we be expected to learn Mandarin anyway? It wasn't like Paul Yang or Jane Zhou (not their real names) knew Mandarin. So why should we? We had other things to do. So I left sometime in elementary school too.
My experiences of "China" were shaped by different movies and television shows.
Movies:
1) Big Bird in China
2) A weird movie I can't recall the name of for children to learn Mandarin, where there is one scene with a bunch of little kids trying to hoist up a giant stuffed carrot
3) Sagwa the Chinese Siamese cat on PBS based on Amy Tan’s book
4) Disney's Mulan
Even "Avatar: The Last Airbender" on Nickelodean (though it is fiction) was a cool way that Asian culture permeated the mainstream. Today, it is a staple of modern Asian meme culture. My white and black and Asian friends, etc. even enjoyed it. Spirits ancestors and inner power were very cool. I was never one for Naruto, Bleach, or Pokemon (the show), but I did play Pokemon like every other kid on the DS did and saw many studio Ghibli films. Plus, Michelle Phan, NigaHiga, Wong Fu Productions, The Fung Bros, etc. were really big back then on YouTube! If I wanted to learn how to do makeup, well, I had a whole online community of Asian women to show me how it was done. The fact that my mom's eyes were differently shaped from mine was not a boulder in the pathway of me learning how to do eyeliner.
But mostly just living in a diverse community with a strong Asian American community made me feel like I BELONGED.
Where I live, there are tons of immigrants from all over the world. First gen, second gen, third gen, etc. I didn't even know certain stereotypes for different groups until I went to undergrad where people there were rude and ignorant and actually believed stereotypes.
Growing up, no one ever harassed me about being Chinese, Asian, or adopted. No one.
A common response to the "I'm adopted" statement was, "oh like my friend so and so." It was a non issue and no one really cared. I had Asian friends, white friends, black friends, etc. I felt accepted by my friends and that's what mattered. Race was "irrelevant." People seemed to form groups based on personality traits. I was even bullied over the years by a diverse group of people!
How could the Asian American community have been so welcoming and encouraging of the wave of Chinese adoptees? I don't know. It was just normal.
They were excited and happy for us. Never a harsh word tossed our way. No semblance of any ideologies of us being stolen or bought or kidnapped. Not even when I went to high school and made many more Asian American friends did I ever feel looked at strangely. Going to their houses or their birthday parties were normal. People coming to my house never blinked twice when I had white parents. (Although, I do find myself being surprised when my Asian friends have Asian parents.) No one asked stupid questions. If I said I was adopted their Asian parents just wanted to know from which part of China.
It wasn't until I went to undergrad that white professors and black professors insisted that transracial adoptions were modern day slavery. They didn't even bother to learn about my nation's history, struggles, or norms. China has traditions thousands of years old. I was insulted that they had reduced my entire life story to a side show of America’s sin of slavery. That somehow my adoption was motivated by white supremacy. Racism is real and it is bad...but the history of the world does not revolve around America’s past. The history of China, of Mao, of the revolution of communism, and of the one child policy has literally nothing to do with the civil war in America. Yet, my college professors could only see the world through America’s eyes. Meanwhile, my Chinese American friends and my experience with Chinese people had never ever swerved my adoption story straight down the white-black racism problem. Surprise! America is ethnocentric, even when it tries to be progressive.
*These are my personal experiences. Things vary country to country, state by state, town by town. But there are tons of adoptees where I live so my experience might not actually be uncommon.
Here are just some examples:
1) When we came to America, many of our adoptive parents thought we should have the opportunity to learn about our roots early on. A lady, named Ping, worked at a language center that had one of its offices in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. They had language teachers for all sorts of languages, but she was the Mandarin teacher. Ping taught Mandarin to the children in some of the Chinese orphanages in the bigger cities and was now living in America, tutoring mostly affluent Philadelphians' little kids. Suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, there was a wave of Chinese babies with their white mothers! She taught us songs and how to say our colors. It was a mommy-daughter kind of program. But though troops of fifteen Chinese adoptees with their white mothers came through her office every week, she was having a hard time accepting reality. She told us that she had worked in the Chinese orphanages in China for many, many years and not once did they ever say that those babies were adopted anywhere. She said that the Chinese government told her that it was not possible. Even as she saw the proof in front of her own eyes, she was having a hard time accepting that her government had not told the complete truth. I went to Ping with other local adoptees in the years before elementary school.
2) A Chinese-American woman with two children was obsessed with the Chinese adoptees in the community and managed to find a way to connect with the local FCC chapter to host her own events for us. We would have several group events (weekly to monthly) throughout the year, especially during the holidays to learn Chinese songs, games, and language with our parents. We sang Chinese songs at senior centers and had holiday parties in the middle school library they let her use. I was in elementary school when she was most active.
3) In elementary school to middle school, I was a part of a traditional Taiwanese dance troupe. It was run out of the house of a Taiwanese-American woman we'll call "Y." She and her daughter, "H," had been running this program out of their house for many years with H's friends and peers. Those girls were now college-aged and then, out of nowhere, the first wave of Chinese adoptees had "invaded" the area! We had an all Chinese-adoptee dance troupe. We had the lion dance, the farmer's dance, the fan dance, etc. The costumes/clothes were beautiful, made by people she knew in Taiwan. We performed in Philadelphia at Penn's Landing and also in China Town as just one act for Chinese New Year. We performed in senior centers and at other events in auditoriums. When we weren't rehearsing, she had other events at her house just for us adoptees! We made those cute little paper stars, learned how to make Vietnamese spring rolls, pork dumplings (yum!), and paint classic mountain/flower tree scenes.
4) In my town, there were two Chinese schools: Mainland vs. Taiwanese, Simplified vs. Traditional. For a little bit (maybe four years), they had Chinese New Year celebrations together, where each one side of town would bash the other one as their student performed their songs and dances. So, clearly, they stopped doing things together. These schools were more than just language schools, but a cultural and community centers with art and dance classes too. I went to the one next to my house...the Mainland school, where I already knew the kids there from just normal public school. They welcomed us Chinese adoptees and made a special class just for us and a few other kids whose parents spoke non-Mandarin dialects at home. Our parents sat in with us and the teachers constantly corrected my mom's attempts at Mandarin (she's tone-deaf haha!) I took an art class there where I learned how to use pastels and then a dance class. One day, my Chinese American friend from elementary school learned over to me and said, "You know that we don't even know Mandarin, right?" He was right. All these adoptive parents were convinced that their kid just had to learn Mandarin, but if you actually looked around, you would noticed that NO ONE knew how to speak Mandarin. Each year, kids (adopted and not) "dropped out" of the language program. My friends now who are all my age (early twenties) still can't speak Mandarin, even though their parents speak it and they spent four years in college taking it. To varying degrees, my friends know Mandarin or Fujianese or Cantonese, etc. etc. but fluent? I'd say not. Predictably, each year the Chinese adoptee class shrunk because well, it was just too difficult. Why should we be expected to learn Mandarin anyway? It wasn't like Paul Yang or Jane Zhou (not their real names) knew Mandarin. So why should we? We had other things to do. So I left sometime in elementary school too.
 |
| Asian influence in my childhood partly came from fictional characters. |
Movies:
1) Big Bird in China
2) A weird movie I can't recall the name of for children to learn Mandarin, where there is one scene with a bunch of little kids trying to hoist up a giant stuffed carrot
3) Sagwa the Chinese Siamese cat on PBS based on Amy Tan’s book
4) Disney's Mulan
Even "Avatar: The Last Airbender" on Nickelodean (though it is fiction) was a cool way that Asian culture permeated the mainstream. Today, it is a staple of modern Asian meme culture. My white and black and Asian friends, etc. even enjoyed it. Spirits ancestors and inner power were very cool. I was never one for Naruto, Bleach, or Pokemon (the show), but I did play Pokemon like every other kid on the DS did and saw many studio Ghibli films. Plus, Michelle Phan, NigaHiga, Wong Fu Productions, The Fung Bros, etc. were really big back then on YouTube! If I wanted to learn how to do makeup, well, I had a whole online community of Asian women to show me how it was done. The fact that my mom's eyes were differently shaped from mine was not a boulder in the pathway of me learning how to do eyeliner.
But mostly just living in a diverse community with a strong Asian American community made me feel like I BELONGED.
Where I live, there are tons of immigrants from all over the world. First gen, second gen, third gen, etc. I didn't even know certain stereotypes for different groups until I went to undergrad where people there were rude and ignorant and actually believed stereotypes.
Growing up, no one ever harassed me about being Chinese, Asian, or adopted. No one.
A common response to the "I'm adopted" statement was, "oh like my friend so and so." It was a non issue and no one really cared. I had Asian friends, white friends, black friends, etc. I felt accepted by my friends and that's what mattered. Race was "irrelevant." People seemed to form groups based on personality traits. I was even bullied over the years by a diverse group of people!
How could the Asian American community have been so welcoming and encouraging of the wave of Chinese adoptees? I don't know. It was just normal.
They were excited and happy for us. Never a harsh word tossed our way. No semblance of any ideologies of us being stolen or bought or kidnapped. Not even when I went to high school and made many more Asian American friends did I ever feel looked at strangely. Going to their houses or their birthday parties were normal. People coming to my house never blinked twice when I had white parents. (Although, I do find myself being surprised when my Asian friends have Asian parents.) No one asked stupid questions. If I said I was adopted their Asian parents just wanted to know from which part of China.
It wasn't until I went to undergrad that white professors and black professors insisted that transracial adoptions were modern day slavery. They didn't even bother to learn about my nation's history, struggles, or norms. China has traditions thousands of years old. I was insulted that they had reduced my entire life story to a side show of America’s sin of slavery. That somehow my adoption was motivated by white supremacy. Racism is real and it is bad...but the history of the world does not revolve around America’s past. The history of China, of Mao, of the revolution of communism, and of the one child policy has literally nothing to do with the civil war in America. Yet, my college professors could only see the world through America’s eyes. Meanwhile, my Chinese American friends and my experience with Chinese people had never ever swerved my adoption story straight down the white-black racism problem. Surprise! America is ethnocentric, even when it tries to be progressive.
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