Needle, meet haystack:
2007 September 27
I got this comment on the LJ branch of the site yesterday:
I just ran across this blog entry and I was wondering (although it’s none of my business, of course) whether you guys have given any thought to searching for Meredith’s birth family, or if you’re going to let the girls decide when they’re older whether or not they want to pursue a search. Since they’re so thrilled with each other, knowing they might have another sister and/or brother still in China must be somewhat heart-wrenching. I have no idea what I would do in that situation – I was considering adopting from China before I had my daughter, and I’ll admit that the thought that I wouldn’t have the birthparents breathing down my neck seemed to me to be a plus. Now I’m not so sure…<
The short answer is that we have no intention of searching, just as we had no intention of searching for Mere’s twin sister. That one dropped in our lap. As far as I know, the birth parents will never ever reveal themselves to us, and we have no way to search for them – nothing to go on if we had the desire to. So to us, it’s a moot point. And it is theoretically possible that they might turn up some day and announce themselves to us, but I can’t imagine that’s very likely.
I don’t endorse that sort of search, either for siblings or for birth family. What happened to us was unique. And I’d move heaven and earth to be able to make their greatest wish come true, because I know how deeply they feel about each other. OK, here’s the long answer, after the cut, in detail:- We have never given any thought whatsoever to looking for the birth-parents of the twins. Period. It’s not a revulsion at the idea, it’s a matter of you-gotta-be-kidding and we’d-never-find-them. No leads, no evidence, don’t ever expect to find any. Needle, meet haystack of 1.3 billion.
- This presumes that the birth parents would want or allow us to find them. The law in regard to the abandonment of children / one-child-policy / etc., was meant to stop the rise in the Chinese birth rate, not just fob the kids off onto some other state agency, where they’re still mouths to feed for the state. The rules were made stiff on the violators because the state felt that otherwise, the population rate of growth would make for chaos and rioting as the number of people became unsustainable, and it needed to make bloody sure people would not try to loophole the rules. And when I say stiff, I’m talking massive fines, jail, that sort of thing. Especially for the abandonment. I have heard third-hand that there’s a six-year statute of limitations on prosecution, but I wouldn’t trust the Chinese authorities on that one. Or much of anything else.
- With the punitive measures in the rules, only a damn fool would stick their head up and say ‘yeah, I dropped that kid off at the orphanage gate, where’s my prison garb and here’s all my money.’ My study of Chinese history has shown me over and over again that in general, the masses are highly not interested in talking to the authorities about anything or Making Themselves Noticed; just keep your head down, don’t attract attention to yourself, and avoid Trouble at all costs. If there was a true system of justice in China and a state philosophy that supported it, things might be different. But justice, as such, is arbitrary and capricious in China. So very few would be willing to hold up their hand and announce that they did leave a kid at the orphanage gate. There’s no percentage in it for them, as such.
- The authorities in China are not particularly interested in digging up old bones. When we asked a lot of questions about Mere’s finding situation, the reaction was ‘look, it’s a baby. It’s a nice baby. You wanted a nice baby, here’s a nice baby. Give her a nice life, love her, and leave the past behind.’ Searches for information from other parents of that sort are strongly discouraged, usually in nice terms, but discouraged, and the local authorities seeing this happen all the time are singularly uninterested in doing any real digging on the matter. They do do a pro forma search, including an is-this-someone’s-baby ad with pictures in the local paper, but it’s usually a waste of time that the rules say has to be done. The idea is to do what the rules mandate and not make extra work and fuss, and once a case is out the door, it stays closed. They don’t want the extra trouble.
- That’s not to say that we’re not curious about the back story. We’re aware that Mere wants to know about her dim past, and we’ve figured that she would from the git-go. Her parents could be alive, or dead. She could have siblings there. But we’ve been very careful as to what we have said to her on the matter, and to treat the subject as wildly suppositional at best. Because…
- There’s nothing in the way of evidence to go on. Between me and Susan, we have some theories as to why the twins were dropped off at different times and places, but the orphanage has said there was no note, or locket or anything else left with either baby. A person who was doing a mini-documentary for various parents who wanted to see the town of Jiangmen and the places the kids were found decided on his own to leave some fliers posted up around Meredith Ellen’s finding location in a residential neighborhood) with pictures of her as a baby and when she was five years old, and the fliers asked anyone who might know something to call a cell phone (in China). Nobody called them. So we have zero information to go on if we did want to look, in any event. And we are very careful to never make up stories about her possible familial situation in China, because she’d take it as gospel if we said it.
- We are aware of the Dutch TV story about the birth parents from Chongqing being shown the kid’s videos, etc. My Dutch sucks, which I’m sure my wooden-shoe fore-bearers would be scandalized over, but I downloaded and DVDd the streaming video off the Dutch TV site of the program. I got a translation for the show, and there’s subtitles in the show itself in spots. To explain, there’s this ‘missing persons’ show Spoorloos that finds long-long Uncle Fred for you, and the show decided to find this one little girl’s lost family in China for her. Apparently the parents and the kid had had a serious desire to find the birth parents, and the show somehow dug them up after articles had shown up in the Chinese press about the search.
- The entire show was heartbreaking. The birth parents had two older kids, and the second one had cost them a mint in heavy fines – the equivalent of years of salary – that they were just finishing paying off over ten years or so. When they had #3, they abandoned her in the ‘usual’ manner. And of course, it had eaten them alive to do so, but they were desperate. They sat down to watch with the producers of the show a video of the little girl and her life in the Netherlands – and it was obvious that they had never, ever forgotten her, and while they were grateful that she had had a good life in a faraway country, they felt like canned crap for doing what they had to do. Then the producers showed the birth parents’ reactions to the film to the adoptive parents in the Netherlands…and got their reaction. A reunion of all concerned was shown this month on Dutch TV.
- The Chinese press has the story about the Meredith twins, and it was all over the news there a year or so ago. The Jiangmen paper printed it. But they added this huge hokey story about the girls that was totally false (including matching parts of a locket, Dick the Wonder Sheep, etc.) that we were NOT happy about. I’m sure it made for a great tearjerker story for the Chinese, but it’s rubbish. It’s highly possible that the birth parents saw that. And as Susan pointed out to me, it’s also highly possible that the rubbish in the newspaper story massively confused them – they didn’t put any locket on the kids! And so on.
- So if the birth parents wanted to find us, they could. They have our names (both families were ID’d in the story, along with location and the photos) and could easily dig us up in the USA. This presumes that they’d have the resources to do that digging, or the desire. Or want or be able to, say, come here. That’s one big whopping if. I honestly can’t imagine that it would ever happen.
- We eventually want to have both families go back to China together and visit the orphanage. But I think that China will be such an alien situation to the girls that they will shrink from the strangeness of it all. And the idea of that trip is NOT to discover their specific personal history roots any further than seeing the orphanage again. Please note that I and Susan have made every effort to assist Mere into looking into her Chinese heritage. But the older she gets, the less inclined she is to doing so.
- Even if the birth parents would show up, the reaction might be quite tricky. I have seen ‘reunion’ situations where the birth family has assumed that the kid is now a rich American, and the rich American will now assume her filial duty and bring the family over here to America and take care of them financially, etc. That simply would not happen. And above that, the kids are so Americanized that they would no longer have a desire to be a culturally Chinese kid, nor would the birth parents understand the twins’ circumstances and lives here. There’s too much of a cultural and time gulf for all concerned. And it would tear up the kids quite a bit. So far as those kids are concerned, the families that they have are the parents they’ve got and love. Anyone assuming anything else would be in for a big shock.
- It would also be possible to determine via DNA testing if the alleged birth parents were who they said they were. However, DNA in and of itself does not make a family relationship – I have none with my daughter, but we have a ton of personal similarities, and we’re very close. If the birth parents expected a family relationship, they would be surprised if it did not come off, and I can’t imagine that it would. They’d be way too alien to the girls, and the girls to them.
- Yes, I know all about open adoptions. Ours is not such a case, and it’s true that many people consider the China adoption route because they fear a situation like the Baby Richard case where a mom changes her mind and wants the kid back. With the strong push for anonymity in the case of China due to the severe penalties involved for either having the extra child or in abandoning her, such situations just didn’t seem likely. From my own part, my highest priority was in adopting a healthy child without being damaged from The System or in her mother’s womb.
- The twin bond between the girls is a different matter. The girls, ever since they reunited in the spring of 2005, have been about as close as they could be. It’s a true twin bond of peers, and while I don’t grok it as such, I admit and agree that it’s there. They *understand* and need each other on a level that I can’t grasp directly, and it’s nothing we created or set up for them. I never have to ask when a candle is burned out what her deepest wish is. I know what it is. Sissy. To live very near her, like right next door. And I think it’s the same for Sissy.
Actually, there are three posts in my mini-series about searching for birth parents. You just got a link to the middle one.
http://american-family.org/2007/09/03/thinking/
http://american-family.org/2007/09/04/thinking-some-more/
http://american-family.org/2007/09/05/think-think-think/
Ah, thank you. I’ve been trying to look at your blog, but since it’s HUGE and there’s not a really good scorecard to tell who are all the players, it’s a little rough.
I don’t really go for the sibling search stuff; we were tangentially involved with one such and found their tests to be pretty uselessly limited. I try to discourage it as much as possible.
I just added a brief cast introduction to my about page. Now that you mention it, I can see how that would be a bit confusing.
I don’t really understand the fascination with the idea of searching for siblings in the China adoption community. I think there were a few too many separated twins stories showing up around the same time and it caught a lot of people’s attention. I really do believe there will be a good number of adoptees who end up searching for birth families in China. A lot of them will be disappointed, but I am sure there will be more than a handfull of successes too.
It may have caught people’s attention, but I think these people have no clue as to how tricky it is to do, how much of a haystack they’re digging for, and what the heck that they will do if they get what they’re looking for! And the birth families issue is more difficult than that, by far.
In the case of the kids, look-alikes alone doesn’t cut it, as siblings can look quite different. There’s a ton of other factors involved that we went through in checking out ‘the meteorite that fell in our backyard’, including DNA testing. Not all DNA tests are all that accurate or good; there’s one outfit I know of that does OK testing but mostly, their methodology for doing it stinks. I’ve seen WIDE inaccuracies in the DNA testing that made me very unsure as to what the heck they were doing.
There’s the whole issue of cultures and life styles. We lucked out; Mere’s twin’s family are very nice people and have been good about all of this to the max, with everyone’s first concern being the kids and their interactions. I’ve seen situations where the two families in a similar separated twin situation couldn’t stand each other – politics, rules of the household, idiosycracies, etc. Think of the worst in-law stories you’ve ever heard.
Add into this with the birth families the whole cultural gulf between modern Americans and a farm family in Guangdong, say, and – wow, that would be hard to deal with. You ‘grok’ that better than most, I’d bet, but most Americans are blind to anything outside the ‘American’ norm, whatever the heck that really is.
Meredith has *never* had any racial problems from the kids her age, and only the usual boy versus girl stuff for her age group to deal with. The main problems in regard to race in her mind are the ‘mommy doesn’t look like me and I wish I could fit in that way’ department,. but nobody’s ever said that to her. (She gets far more annoyance at class because she’s the Class Brain, and she gets tired of kids asking her for the answers in class.)
Actually, the thing that does bother me a lot is in regard to these ’searchers’ getting so het up that there HAS to be a pony under that pile of horse manure that they’ll get themselves in trouble; there are people always looking for the gullible out there, and this would be a prime area to work in with no guarantee of really accurate results.
Oh, I fully believe that finding birth family (either here or in china) is like opening Pandora’s box. Once the door is open, you can’t really undo it. I think people tend to think about the fantasies more than the realities of what they might find.
At the same time, people are going to search. There will be no stopping them, no matter how hard the Chinese government might try. I think the Chinese adoption community likes to keep its’ head in the sand about these issues, but before long they are going to be smacking us in the face whether we like it or not. I think we need to start talking about what needs to be considered when contact happens. It is better to be prepared and not need the preparation than to walk headlong into a situation that can rapidly turn disasterous for our children.
It probably also won’t be long before birth parents start searching too. I have a friend who met a Chinese birth mother who had emigrated to Canada who was clearly still very distraught about the child they didn’t keep. (It is difficult to explain, she took down her old posts, but you can read my take on the story here: http://american-family.org/2005/03/04/holy-shit/) If she or her husband were just a tiny bit web savvy, it is totally concievable that they might be able to locate their child if she was placed in a western country.
While the majority of birth parents lack computer access, China is changing rapidly. The odds that our children’s siblings in China will have internet access is not unimaginable. Just this week, I located email addresses for two different individuals in my daughter’s rural finding town which probably has less than 5,000 people.
Birthparent contact in an international adoption would be complicated, but there are many countries in which American adoptive families regularly have contact with birth families (Russia, ethiopia etc.). It is not the same as a domestic open adoption, but I don’t think that more knowledge is necessarily a bad thing in the long run even if it makes life more complicated in the short term.
The points you make are good ones, but there is a lot of wiggle room for each adoptees’ personal circumstance. As parents, we have to decide what is in the best interest of our own children. In 10 or 20 or even 30 years, I am the one who will have to look L in the eye and explain the choices we have made that impacted her entire life, so there is a lot for me to think about.
I think people tend to think about the fantasies more than the realities of what they might find.
Yep, that’s the heart of it, in my mind. They read stories like ours, and think it sounds dreamy. They don’t realize that even with those dreamy stories, there’s the heartache where a little girl is shuddering with tears in your lap, crying out “I WANT SISSSYYYY”. And Sissy is 700 miles away, with her own set of tears. And the next reunion is months off….
And you realize that all your odd money and vacation time feeds that relationship. You don’t begrudge that, because the absolute delight that those two have in each other is like seeing twin beacons of young joy together, but it is a very big, intense, hairy deal for all concerned, a relationship that is quite central to them. You didn’t MAKE that relationship, you allowed it to grow, but it is there and very major to your daughter’s happiness. And you mess with it at everyone’s peril.
I also feel that people have no serious idea just how futile a lot of the searching would be, or – well, in my own mother-in-law, I’ve been blessed, but I can’t say that about my other in-laws nearly so much. When you marry someone, you are adding their family to you as part of your family – no matter how much of a PITA you may think Uncle Ned is, the kids like him, so you take a deep breath and Deal With Uncle Ned. And so on.
There’s a wonderful movie called AVALON, about an immigrant Jewish family in Baltimore, and their family’s relations over the years, It speaks to a lot of this, where the wonderful atmosphere of a big happy family group can fall apart and be poisoned by the darndest things. That it’s hard to keep up that equilibrium, but it’s hard to be without the closeness and warmth engendered in the grouping.
Meredith also had (in first grade) a friend named Jessica – her mom and dad had met in university in Nanjing, and they had come over here to make a life for themselves in America. Jessica’s house was huge, in a nice suburb – and the parents were getting ready to bring over Jessica’s maternal grandparents.
But the friendship foundered because Jessica was not happy with her situation. Her parents worked long hours in the Chicago loop as programmers in a high-end financial firm, and they didn’t have much time for her. They loved her dearly, but were living the American dream in their own way, and must have been paying a heck of a mortgage on that house. BIG house.
Jessica’s grandparents spoke no English and Jessica little Chinese. Her parents were pushing her hard to learn Chinese and this and that, and were starting to push hard on all of the filial piety levers. Jessica saw Meredith, who was taking Chinese with me in weekend classes, more or less for the fun of it, and saw the amount of fun Mere had with us and the freedoms she had, and looked at her future – and ended up hating Meredith for it. She wanted nothing more than to be as Americanized as possible, with parents who had a good deal of time to putter around with her – and Meredith wanting to be more Chinese with the help of her gwailo parents? Just too much.
I Agree that sooner or later, you will find more of these birth parent reunions happening, and I seriously thin it will have to happen more from the birth parent end than the adopted kid end – because there’s not that much evidence to go on. I have no idea what evidence you have (you’re welcome to contact me via e-mail to discuss this) but I doubt it’s much, as most adopted families are lucky if they know anything that detailed about the finding circumstances. There’s usually no note, and the information we had about Meredith was ‘outside of a “holiday farm”. Well, the entrance to the ‘holiday farm’ turned out to be right outside of the front door of the orphanage! (What ‘holiday farm’ turned out to be was something akin to a cross between a petting zoo and a park that recreates what a working farm is like…)
And truth be told, if it wasn’t for the Internet, we would never have found Mere’s sister Mer. And it was the oddest turn of events that I even looked at their site at all; they had went for #2 child, and came back, and posted tons of ‘come see the new addition to our family’ messages all around, including to the DTC group and the one for our orphanage! I said – oh, yeah, I remember those guys – they named their kid Meredith, funny that – and took a look. Normally, I IGNORED those sort of messages. Yes, it’s a baby. Big deal. But this one, I did look at….and dropped my jaw at the resemblance of the kids.
In the Sisterfar group, that’s something similar to a bunch of the situations – that, or the parents of both sets went and picked up the kids at the same time from the same orphanage, and say – how odd, our kids look amazingly like each other. Then they do a little more digging, and….
All of the other cases would not have happened without the internet, by and large.
As to the birth parents, you and I know about the lack of resources and internet availability in China, but that China is booming and growing…
The odds that our children’s siblings in China will have internet access is not unimaginable. Just this week, I located email addresses for two different individuals in my daughter’s rural finding town which probably has less than 5,000 people.
Going on about this.
When I was in China, I was amazed at the crowding, and at the rapid growth of the cities, and how far things had come. Since I keep a very close eye on news about China, I am still more amazed at what I see, and I wish I had the money and time to visit and see more of it all for myself.
I have been on the Internet in one form or another since the early 1980s. I was trained as a lawyer, but developed a deep interest and aptitude for tech and computers waaaay back – and have had some sort of PC around since 1983. I consider myself pretty savvy on the subject of tech and the internet, but I also realize that most people aren’t. I don’t expect people to have internet addresses here, and I am still in wonder that they have internet addresses in some small village in the hinterlands, knowing the crush of rural poverty.
(My father was a total gearhead, and he started off with his love of cars around 1929, buying a Model T to take it apart and put it back together again in the countryside outside Chillicothe, Ohio. He had been a farmboy, and he left the farm eagerly to work in the factories in Dayton, Ohio, because it was less awful and better paying than anything on a farm. He always looked at my Mom’s romantic notions on farming a plot of land as ‘you gotta be kidding – farmwork as FUN?’. So I look at all of the people who desert the rural areas of China to work in the Pearl River Delta and so on and – yeah, I know where that comes from.)
Another movie recommendation: NOT ONE LESS, which really speaks to this whole rural to city part pretty well. I love Zhang YiMou’s stuff.
Anyway, I’m rambling. In any case, without much evidence, the birth parents are the ones who will have to look. And maybe they will get up the desire to do so. Which means that they wold have to understand the internet, and understand what they are looking for!
For example….
Let’s say that the birthparents of Meredith and Meredith are Mr and Mrs. Fong, who live in a village outside of Jiangmen. They now have a good internet connection, and someone they know and trust who can deal with their Big Secret about abandoning the twins and advise them on how to use the internet.
First off, there’s no ‘Fong’ in anything about Meredith. All of the kids that went through that orphanage were named ‘Jiang’, and Mere’s name wouldn’t mean beans to them *unless* they had access to the orphanage records. Good luck with that!
Second, there’s the language barrier. To search for a child who was adopted internationally, they would have to have to be proficient in English at the least. Burbling parental on-line stories are all written in idiomatic English – if they’re English speakers and if they are posting anything on the internet at all! To track down details like “Jiangmen” and the finding date and whatnot, they’d have to be able to read and understand whatever form the information was in. And I know from Sisterfar that lots of people adopt from China from other countries than the USA – and people who don’t speak English!
Third, there’s the chance for the birth parents to recall what the baby looked like and compare and contrast that with an older child, which is harder than it seems.
OK – assuming that everything goes perfectly. Let’s say that they get enough details that they can figure out that Meredith was adopted by this couple in suburban Chiago, and they have an email address and so on, and they have a English-speaker around in their trust, and so on – what then? Do they trust that the other couple won’t blow a gasket and turn them in and be annoyed at this couple who WANT THEIR CHILD! (Well, not really, but you can imagine people who would get that defensive.) And would Mr and Mrs. Fong be able and willing to put the resources into dropping everything and coming over to America on the basis of their feelings about a long-lost child, who won’t know them from Adam and Eve?
I dunno.
In our case, there’s a BIG lead of information. See the following:
http://journal.memnison.com/2007/03/14/chinese-anyone/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/738907.html
http://journal.memnison.com/2007/03/14/another-version-of-the-story/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/739286.html
http://journal.memnison.com/2007/03/14/geleisi/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/739335.html
http://journal.memnison.com/2007/03/18/naming-conventions/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/739827.html
http://journal.memnison.com/2007/04/13/sisterfar-in-the-papers/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/747195.html
The Live Journal stuff is the more heavily commented versions; I cross post everything here over there.
Short version is that there’s a trail a mile wide in the Chinese newspapers (and particularly in the Jiangmen newspaper that gives the names and photos of BOTH adopting families, finding details and general ideas about where both families live! Heck, there were finding details that the guys at the paper got out of the orphanage that WE didn’t have!
In any event, if anyone was likely to hear from the birth parents with that sort of information lying around, it would be us. Now, granted, the bulk of that story is absolute bull dung, as noted in my postings, but – would the parents know that? Naaaah. And this is the closest we have to a sheep in our house. Wooly, yes, but canine.
THE MORTIMER’S MOM STORY:
OK, had to do some digging, since the original has kinda gone off the beam:
http://mortimersmom.diaryland.com/050302_5.html
http://mortimersmom.diaryland.com/comments/1109910973.html
Wow…some story! Yeah, that could happen, and my heart goes out to that poor family…
HEIDI BUB:
There’s also this story: Google “Heidi Bub”, or check out these links:
http://www.daughterfromdanang.com/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/daughter/peopleevents/p_heidi.html
http://www.adopting.org/heidi.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/daughter/sfeature/sf_mail.html
And also:
http://operationreunite.com/default.aspx
http://operationreunite.com/RealReunions/Heidi.aspx
Thanks for answering my question. It’s been a very enlightening discussion!