The Wait Continues

I honestly thought I would become a better blogger during this very long road to adoption. Although I think about it every day, writing about it on any sort of regular basis would probably drive me crazy. I wonder if other adoptive parents feel this way? I think I might look back on some of my favorite adoption blogs and ask.

In the meantime another heartbreaking story surfaced this week from China. The New York Times published a story in yesterday's paper about children being stolen from the parents by Chinese officials who then sell them to orphanages. These orphanages in turn allow foreigners adopt these children. This is one of my greatest fears as an adoptive parent. It's heartbreaking enough to know that the people of China have to give so many of their children up because of the one child law and extreme poverty. I can't even imagine the heartbreak. But to have your child ripped from your arms? I just can't go there. I pray every night that our child finds her way to us honestly with only the best of intentions.

Chinese Officials Seized and Sold Babies, Parents Say

LONGHUI COUNTY, China — Many parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again.


At least 16 children were seized in Longhui County.

But Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one December morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, Mr. Yuan was holding his 52-day-old daughter at a bus stop when a half-dozen men sprang from a white government van and demanded his marriage certificate.

He did not have one. Both he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage.

Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about $745, to pay the fine he said they demanded if he wanted to keep his child. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.

“They are pirates,” he said last month in an interview at his home, a half-hour trek up a narrow mountain path between terraced rice paddies.

Nearly six years later, he said, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter: “Please come home as soon as possible.”

Mr. Yuan’s daughter was among at least 16 children who were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, an impoverished rural area in Hunan, a southern Chinese province, parents, grandparents and other residents said in interviews last month.

The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue.

The practice in Longhui came to an end in 2006, parents said, only after an 8-month-old boy fell from the second-floor balcony of a local family planning office as officials tried to pluck him from his mother’s arms.

Despite a few news reports outside the Chinese mainland about government-sanctioned kidnappings in Longhui and other regions, China’s state-controlled media ignored or suppressed the news until this May, when Caixin, an intrepid Chinese magazine well known for unusually bold investigations, reported the abductions and prompted an official inquiry.

Zeng Dingbao, who leads the Inspection Bureau in Shaoyang, the city that administers Longhui County, has promised a diligent investigation. But signs point to a whitewash. In June, he told People’s Daily Online, the Web version of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, that the situation “really isn’t the way the media reported it to be, with infants being bought and sold.”

Rather than helping trace and recover seized children, parents say, the authorities are punishing those who speak out. Two of the most vocal fathers were detained for 15 days in Shaoyang on charges of soliciting prostitutes at a brothel. Released last month, the two men, Yang Libing, 47, and Zhou Yinghe, 34, said they had been entrapped.

Mr. Yang said he was constantly followed by government minders. Mr. Zhou said the village party secretary had warned him to stop talking to reporters about the abduction of his 3-month-old daughter in March 2003 or face more punishment. “They are like organized criminals,” Mr. Zhou said.

China’s family planning policies, while among the strictest in the world, ban the confiscation of children from parents who exceed birth quotas, and abuses on the scale of those in Shaoyang are far less common today than they once were. Even so, critics say the powers handed to local officials under national family planning regulations remain excessive and ripe for exploitation.

“The larger issue is that the one-child policy is so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely,” said Wang Feng, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directs the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.


The scandal also has renewed questions about whether Americans and other foreigners have adopted Chinese children who were falsely depicted as abandoned or orphaned. At least one American adoption agency organized adoptions from the government-run Shaoyang orphanage.

Lillian Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said by telephone last month that the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Shaoyang children — all girls, all renamed Shao, after the city. The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eligible for adoption, she said, and her agency cannot now independently investigate their backgrounds without a specific request backed by evidence.

“I’m an adoption agency, not a policeman,” Ms. Zhang said.

The Shaoyang welfare agency’s orphanage is required to post a notice of each newly received child for 60 days in Hunan Daily, a newspaper delivered only to subscribers in Longhui County. Unclaimed children are renamed with the surname Shao and approved for adoption. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about $5,400 to the orphanage.

Reports that family planning officials stole children, beat parents, forcibly sterilized mothers and destroyed families’ homes sowed a quiet terror through parts of Longhui County in the first half of the past decade. The casualties of that terror remain suffused with heartbreak and rage years later.

Yang Libing, one of the two fathers accused of soliciting prostitutes, said he was a migrant worker in the southern city of Shenzhen when his firstborn, Yang Ling, was stolen from his parents’ home in May 2005 when she was 9 months old.

Family planning officials apparently spotted Yang Ling’s clothes hung to dry outside the family’s mud-brick home. Her grandmother tried to hide her in a pigsty, but the grandfather, Yang Qinzheng, a Communist Party member and a former soldier, bade her to come out.

“I don’t disobey,” he said last month. “I do what the officials say.”

Yang Ling’s parents had not registered their marriage. To keep the baby, the officials said, the elder Mr. Yang would have to pay nearly $1,000, on the spot. Otherwise, they said, he would have to sign away the girl with a false affidavit stating that he was not her biological grandfather.

“I was totally outraged,” he said, but “I did not have the courage to resist. They do not play by the rules.” He signed the document.

Yang Libing discovered the loss of his daughter during his monthly telephone call home from a pay phone on a Shenzhen street. “Is she behaving?” he asked cheerily. The answer, he said, made him physically sick.

After racing home, he said, he begged family planning officials to let him pay the fine. They said it was too late. When he protested, he said, a group of more than 10 men beat him. Afterward, the office director offered a compromise: although their daughter was gone forever, the Yangs would be allowed to conceive two more children.

“I can’t even describe my hatred of those family planning officials,” Mr. Yang said. “I hate them to my bones. I wonder if they are parents, too. Why don’t they treat us as humans?”

Asked whether he was still searching for his daughter, he replied: “Of course! This is not a chicken. This is not a dog. This is my child.”

Hu Shelian, 46, another anguished victim, gave birth to a second daughter in 1998. Even though family planning specialists said couples in her area were allowed a second child if the first was a girl, she said family planning officials broke her windows and took her television as punishment.

After she had a third daughter the following year, they levied a whopping fine of nearly $5,000. When she pleaded poverty, she said, four officials snatched her newborn from her arms, muscled her into a car and drove her to the county hospital for a forced tubal ligation. Her baby disappeared into the bowels of the Shaoyang orphanage.

Xiong Chao escaped that fate. Villagers say he was the last baby that officials tried to snatch, and one of the few returned home.

Now, six years later, his 63-year-old grandmother, Dai Yulin, patiently scrawls blue and white chalk numerals on her concrete wall hoping — in vain — that Chao will learn them.

“He has been to primary school for a whole year,” she said, “and he still cannot recognize one and two.”

Nearby is the tiny, dark room where, she said, she tried and failed in September 2006 to hide Chao from family planning officials. He was 8 months old, her son’s second child. Officials demanded nearly $1,000, then took him away when she could not pay.

His mother, Du Chunhua, rushed to the family planning office to protest.

There, as she struggled with two officials on the second-floor balcony, she said, the baby slipped from her grasp and fell more than 10 feet, to the pavement below.

Later, she said, as the baby lay in a coma in the hospital, his forehead permanently misshapen, officials offered a deal: they would forget about the fine as long as the family covered the medical bills for Chao.

Also, they said, the Xiongs could keep him.

More Paperwork Drama

My husband and I had to renew our home study paperwork and refile our international adoption request with the U.S. Unfortunately the information was sent in two different envelopes and of course only one was received. I received a curt email informing me of this from some official. After contacting our local agency and confirming the second package was sent FedEx, received in his office and signed for by someone, the officer basically told me he didn't have so we had send another one. I have a vision of our home study sitting on his desk under a pile of other FedEx envelopes and it is just too much trouble for him to look at the bottom of the pile. The whole adoption paperwork process is so daunting. It's amazing anyone gets anything. I did manage to get a copy of the curt email in the regular mail today on pink paper. So kind of him.

Wo Ai Ni Mommy

This week my husband and I watched an documentary on Chinese adoption. "Wo Ai Ni (I love you) Mommy" is the story of an 8 year old Chinese girl who is adopted by a family on Long Island. The family has 2 biological sons and a 3 year old Chinese girl who was adopted when she was an infant. I have to admit I found the film unsettling, for many reasons. I realize that adoption is not easy, especially on a young child. Eight year old Fang Sui Yong speaks no English when she meets her new Mommy. Her new mom speaks very little Chinese. Thankfully the filmmaker is Chinese and does a lot of translating between the two. I don't know why, but the adopted mom in the film brings with her to China a bevvy of flash cards and starts trying to teach the poor kid English in their hotel room. This is a huge struggle for the child and ultimately brings her to tears. I am not sure if this was the right thing to do while they were still in China. the poor kid is completely overwhelmed and this just adds more stress to her already fragile state.

Throughout the film we see various struggles of this little girl trying to adapt to her new life. Ultimately she totally acclimates and forgets how to speak Chinese all together despite her parents enrolling her in a Chinese language program. We see her making new friends, going to glamour girl parties, and dancing at her older brother's Bar Mitzvah party. While I recognize these rites of passage it just seemed so plastic. Is this what life in America is all about? It just seemed so shallow to me. I guess we are all entitled to our opinion. This girl is undeniably loved by her new family. The documentary spans approximately the first 18 months of her new life in America. She has flourished into what appears to be a happy girl. I wonder what lies beneath the surface and what demons she will deal with when she gets older.

Paperwork Updates

Our adoption clearance paperwork expires in September. We are in the process of working on updating it with our social worker. It's hard to believe we have been pursuing adoption almost 2 years. Sometimes it seems time is flying and at other times standing still. It such a weird feeling. I want to plan but I am too superstitious. Everything is going along the way it should and I don't want to jinx it. I have read stories about other parents adopting and how they go about decorating nurseries and buying baby clothes years in advance. I think that would make me crazy. I mean, I want to be prepared but not that prepared for that long of a wait. Our daughter's room will be where our upstairs office is right now. It has western and northern exposures. I have an idea in my head of what her room will look like: soft green walls,oak crib, a rocking chair and a stuffed Winnie the Pooh waiting for her (among many other goodies).

With the new academic year approaching I have been cleaning out old calendars and day planners. I am a little obsessed with writing in planners. I have several and I like to use a different one every year. In 2008 I was using an orange leather bound Franklin Covey. For much of 2009/2010 I have been working with a Levenger Circa. last month I bought a cheapie Staples wire bound academic calendar. It was maybe $9 and it's light and flexible. I am contemplating a Filofax but haven't bought one yet. Anyway, in my 2008 calendar I found an entry on August 2 - the day Neil and I went into the city to an information session given by our adoption agency.It was a beautiful day and we were so excited. I saved the page for our China scrapbook. I may not want to decorate a room or buy clothes but a scrapbook is totally acceptable.

Mother's Day

I find Mother's day to be kind of difficult. My mom passed away in 1999. Today is just another reminder that she died too young. Then I think about my own battle with infertility and my heart aches even more. I try to focus on the positives: all the amazing women in my life who are mothers and who play such an important role in my world. I think of my Aunt Cindy, who at my age was widowed with an 8 year old daughter. Her sheer will and determination to keep her child's life as close to normal as possible. Putting her own life on hold while being a single parent. Holding down a house and all the drama and expenses that come along with such a responsibility, again on her own. I think about my mother-in-law who sends me birthday cards entitled "To our daughter." How she refers to be as one of her kids and treats me with the same love, compassion, understanding and support as she does her own flesh and blood. I also think of an unknown woman in China who will give up her own daughter so that I might be a mother myself. These women humble me. I can only pray that I learn from them and the example they have shown me.

Happy Mother's Day

The Waiting Continues....

I think one of the most difficult aspects of being a waiting adoptive parent (besides the waiting) is what I call "The Inquisition." I know people mean well, they want to know if we've heard anything, how much longer do we have to wait, why is it taking so long? I feel like a broken record sometimes. "Yes, it does take a long time, No we don't have an exact date, Chinese adoptions have slowed down considerably due to various factors" etc. I guess hearing myself say the same answers over and over just re-enforce how difficult the wait really is. Not to mention that I seem to be seeing children EVERYWHERE. I kind of felt this way after each of our failed fertilization attempts. It's an empty feeling that gets worse as time passes. I wonder how other adoptive parents cope? Sometimes I wish we didn't tell anyone about our plans. I just got sick of hearing "when are you having a baby?" and "don't wait too long." Instead of just saying we could not have children it was easier to say we are adopting. I almost hate going to family get togethers or parties because I know it's inevitable that one of us will be cornered and asked what's going on with the adoption.

If anything, this whole experience has made me more sensitive to others. I sat next to a girl in class last week who was very pregnant. I did not try to rub her belly or ask all kinds of questions. We worked together brainstorming on a class project and got a lot accomplished. I wonder if I had asked her when she was due if that would have left her open to tell her whole life story, which I could not bear to hear. I was hoping she just wanted to be a student like me that evening an not suffer though an inquisition from a complete stranger.

Russian Adoption Tragedy

Yes, I am a horrible blogger. There is nothing new going on in our adoption journey other than waiting so I bide my time reading other adoption blogs and adoptions in the news. Today's news is heartbreaking. A woman in Tennessee adopted a 7 year old boy from Russia last September. The new mother claims the child was emotionally unstable and threatened to burn her house down with everyone inside.

So rather than be the legal parent she agreed to be and get her son the help he needs she buys him a one way ticket and sends him back to Russia.... alone.....

Nevermind the legal drama around this. Let's think of the kid for a moment. He is 7 years old. He was removed from his biological mother's home because she was an alcoholic and could not take care of him. Do you think maybe she drank while she was pregnant? Yeah, me too. What kind of horrors has this poor kid been through? I am guessing as an orphan he did not get the attention he needed and deserved. Did anyone try to get him any help? As I sit here praying for a child of my own all I can think of is how undeserving this woman is. The kid is probably better off without her. Here is the story below for anyone who cares to read it. I am sure there will be many follow up stories as Russia is thinking of suspending adoptions to the U.S. all together.

Adopted boy, 7, sent back alone to Russia

American family puts 7-year-old on one-way flight — alone

The Associated Press

updated 6:14 p.m. ET, Fri., April 9, 2010

MOSCOW - Russia threatened to suspend all child adoptions by U.S. families Friday after a 7-year-old boy adopted by a woman from Tennessee was sent alone on a one-way flight back to Moscow with a note saying he was violent and had severe psychological problems.

The boy, Artyom Savelyev, was put on a plane by his adopted grandmother, Nancy Hansen of Shelbyville.

"He drew a picture of our house burning down and he'll tell anybody that he's going to burn our house down with us in it," she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "It got to be where you feared for your safety. It was terrible."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the actions by the grandmother "the last straw" in a string of U.S. adoptions gone wrong, including three in which Russian children had died in the U.S.

'A monstrous deed'
In an exclusive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, President Dmitry Medvedev said the boy "fell into a very bad family."

"It is a monstrous deed on the part of his adoptive parents, to take the kid and virtually throw him out with the airplane in the opposite direction and to say, 'I'm sorry I could not cope with it, take everything back' is not only immoral but also against the law," Medvedev said.

The cases have prompted outrage in Russia, where foreign adoption failures are reported prominently. Russian main TV networks ran extensive reports on the latest incident in their main evening news shows.

The Russian education ministry immediately suspended the license of the group involved in the adoption — the World Association for Children and Parents, a Renton, Washington-based agency — for the duration of an investigation. In Tennessee, authorities were investigating the adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, 33.

Any possible freeze could affect hundreds of American families. Last year, nearly 1,600 Russian children were adopted in the United States, and more than 60,000 Russian orphans have been successfully adopted there, according to the National Council For Adoption, a U.S. adoption advocacy nonprofit group.

"We're obviously very troubled by it," U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington when asked about the boy's case. He told reporters the U.S. and Russia share a responsibility for the child's safety and Washington will work closely with Moscow to make sure adoptions are legal and appropriately monitored.

Asked if he thought a suspension by Russia was warranted, Crowley said, "If Russia does suspend cooperation on the adoption, that is its right. These are Russian citizens."

"Child abandonment of any kind is reprehensible," said Chuck Johnson, acting CEO of the National Council For Adoption. "The actions of this mother are especially troubling because an already vulnerable, innocent child has been further victimized."

Letter details psychological problems
The boy arrived unaccompanied in Moscow on a United Airlines flight on Thursday from Washington. Social workers sent him to a Moscow hospital for a health checkup and criticized his adoptive mother for abandoning him.

The Kremlin children's rights office said the boy was carrying a letter from his adoptive mother saying she was returning him due to severe psychological problems.

"This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues," the letter said. "I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability and other issues. ...

"After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child."

The boy was adopted in September from the town of Partizansk in Russia's Far East.

Nancy Hansen, the grandmother, told The Associated Press that she and the boy flew to Washington and she put the child on the plane with the note from her daughter. She vehemently rejected assertions of child abandonment by Russian authorities, saying he was watched over by a United Airlines stewardess and the family paid a man $200 to pick the boy up at the Moscow airport and take him to the Russian Education and Science Ministry.

Nancy Hansen said a social worker checked on the boy in January and reported to Russian authorities that there were no problems. But after that, the grandmother said incidents of hitting, kicking, spitting began to escalate, along with threats.

Grandmother: Mother lied to
She said she and her daughter went to Russia together to adopt the boy, and she believes information about his behavioral problems was withheld from her daughter.

"The Russian orphanage officials completely lied to her because they wanted to get rid of him," Nancy Hansen said.

She said the boy was very skinny when they picked him up, and he told them he had been beaten with a broom handle at the orphanage.

Joseph LaBarbera, a clinical psychologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, said adoptive parents are many times not aware of the psychological state of children put up for adoption.

"Parents enter into it (foreign adoption) with positive motivations but, in a sense, they are a little bit blindsided by their desire to adopt," said LaBarbera, who specializes in the psychological evaluation of children and has worked with a number of children adopted from Russia and other foreign countries. "They're not prepared to appreciate, psychologically, the kinds of conditions these kids have been exposed to and the effect it has had on them."

Russian state television showed the child in a yellow jacket holding the hands of two chaperones as he left a police precinct and entered a van bound for a Moscow medical clinic.

Boy: Mother was 'bad'
The U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, said he was "deeply shocked by the news" and "very angry that any family would act so callously toward a child that they had legally adopted."

Anna Orlova, a spokeswoman for Kremlin's Children Rights Commissioner, told The Associated Press that she visited the boy and he told her that his mother was "bad," "did not love him," and used to pull his hair.

Russian officials said he turned up at the door of the Russian Education and Science Ministry on Thursday afternoon accompanied by a Russian man who handed over the boy and his documents, then left, officials said. The child holds a Russian passport.

Rob Johnson, a spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Children's Services, said the agency is looking into Friday's allegations, although it does not handle international adoptions.

Bedford County Sheriff Randall Boyce also said Torry Hansen was under investigation, but he hasn't interviewed the Hansens because their lawyer has advised them not to talk.

Lavrov said his ministry would recommend that the U.S. and Russia hammer out an agreement before any new adoptions are allowed.

"We have taken the decision ... to suggest a freeze on any adoptions to American families until Russia and the U.S.A. sign an international agreement" on the conditions for adoptions, Lavrov said.

He said the U.S. had refused to negotiate such an accord in the past but "the recent event was the last straw."

Pavel Astakhov, the children rights commissioner, said in a televised interview that a treaty is vital to protect Russian citizens in other countries.

"How can we prosecute a person who abused the rights of a Russian child abroad? If there was an adoption treaty in place, we would have legal means to protect Russian children abroad," he said.