The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [190]
That their children would one day grow up and suffer racism was evident from remarks uttered from strangers. “Why are you kissing that child?” demanded a Los Angeles police officer when he saw a Caucasian mother nuzzling her toddler from China. After the expense and time required to adopt a baby, it did not occur to many parents that they might be viewed as kidnappers or pedophiles. They were shocked by the crudeness and insensitivity of other Americans. Some heard their children called “a chink baby” and suffered offhand jokes, like “Couldn’t get a white one, huh?” Others received hostile stares from men who had served in the Vietnam War. One outraged parent even met a Vietnam War veteran who told her baby that he had “killed a lot of your cousins.”
They knew their children would one day question their own identity, and the mystery surrounding their birth and first months. Some infants were found with gifts from the birth parents—sometimes a bracelet, a pendant, a sack of rice—while others bore tiny scars or birth-marks on their skin. Were these clues that might be used one day to trace their children to their original families? The children themselves, especially the precocious ones, were tormented by the enigma. Several Chinese daughters demanded to know why they were orphaned at birth, venting their confusion during temper tantrums: “You’re mean,” one daughter screamed. “I want my other Mommy in China!”
To handle these challenges, many parents did their best to teach their children about their heritage. They delved into ancient Chinese mythology, Confucian philosophy, and the novels of Pearl Buck. Although this education was not really Chinese, but rather an American interpretation of Chinese culture, the effort, nonetheless, was genuine. One proud parent announced that “we shop at Asian markets, we go to festivals.” Her daughters loved pandas, could identify China on a map, and could recite all the Chinese spoken in Big Bird Goes to China. The parents also networked with each other, exchanging information and child-rearing tips through Internet organizations such as Families with Children from China.
The adoption process sensitized thousands of parents to subtle racism in America. Suddenly they noticed the often cruel stereotypes of the Chinese in the media, even in children’s television programs like Sesame Street, which featured a female worm-puppet named “Lo Mein.” They became more attentive to the treatment of foreign aliens by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and aggressively lobbied for citizenship rights for their children. Annoyed by the red tape required to naturalize their Chinese babies, adoptive parents have demanded legislation to allow citizenship immediately and retroactively for all adopted foreign-born children. As a consequence, these children are serving as bridges between the Caucasian and ethnic Chinese communities in the United States. “I began to see children and their ‘differences’ in a new light,” one mother explained. “Suddenly the nonwhite kids weren’t ’nonwhite,‘ they were ’like my daughter.’”
It is ironic that some infants who had been discarded like garbage in the PRC ended up in some of the most affluent households in the United States, while thousands of adult Chinese worked for years to earn their passage to America. These nonstudent, nonprofessional adult immigrants were the group least visible to the white community, a group largely made up of illegal menial laborers hidden in the nation’s Chinatowns.
Some started as part of a “floating” migrant population of peasant workers in China, a population estimated to be as high as 200 million to 250 million people for the year 2000. Drifting from