Jiaozi

So anyway -- PANDAS!

May and I got back from our two-week trip to China a few weeks ago, and I've been busy sorting through photos while jumping back into work and the rest of the routine.

It was a wonderful trip. Not relaxing, like a trip to Hawaii, or fun, like a trip to Disneyland; it was an adventure, and meaningful to both of us.

Originally we had planned for the whole family to go, but for one reason or another it didn't work out, so we agreed I would take May, who hadn't made a return visit to her homeland. That turned out to be a great decision. It was a lovely chance for my middle child to have me all to herself, and for her to be able to call the shots about where we'd go and what we'd eat without having to negotiate with her elder sister and younger sister. And, of course, I loved having her all to myself, without the distractions of school and work. My quiet girl and I had serious talks and giggled over private jokes like a couple of schoolgirls.

We went to Beijing, which May loved (she said she could see herself living there), Xi'an, Chengdu, Nanchang, and Shanghai. The social welfare institute took us out to lunch, put up a welcome banner for May, and let us look at (but not remove) her file. Separately, we met with her foster family and walked around her old neighborhood. It was good for her to confirm some memories and correct others that were not as clear. Some people consider teenagers too old for homeland tours, but I think we went at exactly the right time for her.

Although seein g the Great Wall and Forbidden City was important culturally, and the trip to May's home city was emotionally significant, the highlight of the trip -- and the part May was most excited about -- was still probably the visit to the panda breeding center in Chengdu. It was amazing to see dozens of pandas, of all ages, in one place, roaming around their pleasant green compounds. But best of all was being able to hold a baby panda. This was crazy expensive, but they've added some little extras to make it seem more worthwhile; you get a certificate commemorating your donation, an educational film on DVD, and a hooded sweatshirt with a panda logo on it.

And you get to sit for a minute wearing a surgical gown and plastic gloves holding a chubby, soft six-month-old panda on your lap. They give the panda a stick of bamboo dipped in honey to lick, and he sits placidly for some time, not paying much attention to the people or cameras, until the honey runs out.

I smelled my panda's head. He smelled of animal fur and grass. May was in heaven, hugging her panda and looking at him with adoring eyes; it was a dream come true for her.

I hope she never forgets that feeling.

Spring break!

Not that I post here that often anyway, but at least I have a good excuse for being absent for the next couple of weeks. I'm taking May to China for her first return trip since she came to America. It will be her first visit to Beijing and my first visit to Shanghai, and we'll hit some other locations that are new to both of us. Plus we'll be returning to her social welfare institute. Maybe I'll have touristy pictures to post when we return. Zai jian!

Miscellaneous adoption-y stuff

Adoption assumptions

When Steve Jobs died, the press and public went into overdrive spinning mythical origin stories for him, and some of those stories concerned his status as an adoptive child. One graphic making the rounds had a picture of Jobs with the legend "Born out of wedlock. Put up for adoption at birth. Dropped out of college. Then changed the world. What's your excuse?" I saw other people referring to him as having been "rejected" or having a "rough start in life."

I take exception to this. While being adopted can certainly have far-reaching effects on an individual's life and identity, the fact that Jobs was adopted (or born out of wedlock, for that matter) does not itself mean that he had a rough start, and a look at his biography shows that there wasn't much exceptional about his early life. I won't repeat the details; you can Google it yourself. But suffice it to say that his birthparents made a well-thought-out adoption plan; they agreed to the Jobs family adopting him, albeit with reservations, when the first adoptive family backed out; he was raised in what sounds like a pretty normal home; and later he made contact with his birth relatives and established a relationship with his birth sister, also a talented and creative individual. Pretty typical stuff. We're not talking about Oliver Twist or Little Orphan Annie here. (As for dropping out of college, that was his choice, and it was probably because of that choice, not in spite of it, that he became such a success.)

The "What's your excuse?" line is an example of pathologizing adoption -- that is, assuming that it is "abnormal," that it's necessarily an obstacle to overcome, and that adopted people are always damaged. The flip side of it is that if you, too, were born out of wedlock and "put up for adoption at birth," you'd have an excuse for not changing the world. That's a pretty crummy message. There's a difference between holding someone up as an inspiration and using him as a case study.

In my experience, institutionalization, a poor home environment, and frequent moves to different homes are the aspects of adoption to be concerned about, and even then the effects depend on the individual. Two of my children were affected by those aspects of adoption, and one really wasn't. Not coincidentally, she is also the one who spent the least time in an orphanage. She would give you the evil eye if you said to her, "Wow, you really had a rough start in life! You would have a good excuse if you turned out to be a mess!" I have seen her evil eye, and you do not want to be on the receiving end of it.

Happily ever after

We are sci-fi/fantasy geeks, so of course we watched the premiere of "Once Upon a Time" the other night. It was fast-moving and entertaining, and I think the whole family is hooked. But they sure hit the adoption theme hard, didn't they? I mean, it's bad enough when the Wicked Queen is depicted as an evil stepmother (I say that as a stepmother), but when she is also an evil adoptive mother, that's a bit much to handle. Or it was for me. I kept asking the kids, "Are you okay with this? Don't you think it's sort of negative about adoption?" They shrugged. There was one line in the show that had to do with "that basic question [adopted children] all inevitably face: 'Why would anyone give me away?'" I asked the kids if that's a question every adopted kid faces. More shrugs. When I was still sputtering a bit at the end of the show, May said, "Mom. You take this stuff too seriously." So, yeah. They're not exactly bubbling over with feelings about adoption at this point in their lives. Sometimes I'm the one with the problem.

Welcome to the blackboard jungle

Last month a friend who is an adoptive parent posted on her Facebook wall that she was worried about her child on his first day of first grade. Another parent commented, "I feel the same way...I want to give all his classmates and teachers the back story so they will accept him." And I understood exactly what she meant.

I always want to give the back story. I want to say, "This child is not like other children in your elementary school class. This child did not have Mozart played for her in the womb. She didn't come home to a nursery decorated out of the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. Nobody sang her to sleep and laid her gently in a cozy bassinet. She wasn't fed or held on demand or given love or intellectual stimulation until much later. So maybe she doesn't stay on task very well, but be gentle with her. She has come so far."

Or I want to say, "I know you see this child as just one of the mass of Asian kids in junior high who get straight As, but you don't know the effort it costs her. She has only been speaking English for five years, and she is still catching up. She works very hard for those As. Acknowledge that effort."

I want to give the back story. But I can't. They're too old for that now, and those details are nobody's business, least of all their classmates'. I can only advocate for them behind the scenes.

When they were younger, I could write notes on the school admission forms, talk about institutionalization and developmental delays, and the officials would nod as if they understood. But I don't think they really did. All kids have challenges, they probably thought. And maybe they do, but this is my child, and I want them to know there's more to her than what they see through the filter of performance goals and required curriculum.

And beyond the challenges, I want them to know that this child, my child, is amazing. This child may never do well on standardized testing -- may, in fact, never even pass the standardized testing. (Will they hold her diploma over that? Not while I'm around.) Certainly I want my child to be able to, at minimum, read a newspaper and write a letter and balance a checkbook (or whatever electronic forms those basic skills will take in the future). But standardized tests don't measure creativity, or humor, or kindness. They do a very poor job of gauging the worth of a square peg.

So when a teacher asks my child, as one did today, "What's the setting for Because of Winn-Dixie? When does it take place?" and my child answers straight-faced, "In alien space-time" and pauses a beat before saying, "Just kidding," my heart swells with pride. Boom! It's the wrong answer -- or is it? Because for a kid who watches Doctor Who, it's a perfectly reasonable answer. And that's just the way she rolls.

Everyone has a back story. But some are more complicated than others.

New post...

at The Family Way. Just saying.

The changing zeitgeist of adoption

It's not just me, right? The way we talk about adoption -- as parents, as children, and as a society -- is changing. I can feel it all around me.

I first sensed this change a few years ago. China was just beginning to put the brakes on. Since then, China has severely curtailed adoptions, leading to a five-year wait for a healthy infant referral and putting more emphasis on placing special-needs children. Vietnam has closed and opened and closed to adoption. Guatemala has closed to adoption. All three of these countries have faced allegations of baby trafficking or corruption. Adoptions from Russia have been on hold for most of this year, ever since an American attempted to "return" her adopted son. Ethiopia has risen in popularity as a sending country, and Korea continues to hold steady. Requirements of the Hague Convention have caused slowdowns and additional paperwork concerns all around.

At the same time, children from the largest group of Chinese adoptees, those adopted during the peak decade of 1998 to 2007, are going to school and entering their teens, and their growth and development have brought some surprises. Parents who were assured, "Kids from China are all healthy and smart. They don't have the same problems as children adopted from other countries," have found that the effects of institutionalization can in fact last for years, appearing in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways.

Many of us have also read the personal stories of adult adoptees and learned more about the social and economic conditions in our children's home countries, and we don't have quite the same sanguine view of adoption as a win-win situation that we once did. We have become aware of the losses that continue to affect all the members of the adoption triad long after the adoption is finalized.

I don't want to make it sound as though we are all miserable. For the most part, our children are happy and healthy and our homes are filled with love. But living in an adoptive family is not "just like" living in a biologically-related family, nor is adoption all rainbows and ladybugs. I think it's positive that we are being more realistic about the challenges of adoptive parenting, but it requires a significant change in our approach.

These are things I have been thinking about lately. Thinking, and wondering whether we adoptive parents really have the resources we need to get our kids safely to independent adulthood.

It's not just me, right?

Why we talk about race

After school yesterday, May told me, "We had a big laugh in English class today."

"Oh?" I asked.

"Yeah. We took our grammar test, and Mr. H graded them in class while we were supposed to be reading, but mostly we were talking. In the middle of class, he said, 'May is my new hero. She's the first person to get this section on plurals all correct.' That was the part we studied last night."

"I remember," I said. "Good job!" (Fist bump.)

"Then Nina said, 'Well, of course she did! She's Asian!' and everyone laughed and laughed."

This is why I talk to my kids about racial stereotypes, including "positive" ones -- so these sorts of comments don't take them by surprise and they can be in on the joke.

But the joke is on Nina and Mr. H. They don't know that May has been speaking English for only five years.

Language arts

For the first few months May was in our home, she continued to speak Mandarin and attempted very little English. This was so unlike any other child I’d heard of – most internationally adopted children lose their first language within a few months – that I wondered if she was ever going to speak English. We communicated sitting side by side at the computer running words through a translator. When she did begin to talk to us in English, it was in complete sentences. She is a bit of a perfectionist, and I suspect that she didn’t want to speak English until she was sure she could do so without error.

She remained quite fluent in Mandarin for several years. It helped that she continued to hear Mandarin on her DVDs and CDs, spoke with Mandarin-speaking children at school, and attended weekly language classes. But even she eventually lost her fluency. Now, almost five years on, she is familiar with Mandarin but not fluent. She understands it when it is spoken to her, she recognizes written characters, and she knows when a tone or pronunciation is wrong. But she is reluctant to carry on a conversation in Mandarin – though, again, I think that may be because she isn’t sure she can do so without error and doesn’t want to embarrass herself.

Language acquisition is a complicated process. Most of the studies on how children learn a language have involved young children learning their first language and kids from immigrant families learning a second language. Dr. Boris Gindis, a developmental psychologist, is one of the few researchers studying cognitive development in post-institutionalized children, working primarily with Russian adoptees. His website is a terrific resource for adoptive parents.

He explains that the reason most adopted children learn their new language very rapidly, while forgetting their first, is that they acquire language by a process known as subtractive learning. Completely immersed in the new language, they must learn to speak well enough to have their needs met by their new families. Because their original language no longer serves a purpose, it is soon forgotten. Children in immigrant families, who hear and use English at school and their native language at home, are able to add a second language and may become truly bilingual; but adopted children, who hear and use English almost exclusively, will not.

Many parents who adopt older children vow that their children will retain mastery of their first language, but I have never heard of anyone succeeding. A child must hear – and use – a language for significant portions of each day in order to stay fluent. In fact, Dr. Gindis believes that it may impede a child’s development to attempt to retain the first language while learning the second.

Because adopted children tend to go from being monolingual in one language to being monolingual in a different language, ELL (English Language Learner) programs, which are geared toward bilingual children of immigrants, are not especially well suited to them. We didn’t find ELL programs to be particularly helpful for May. The first year she was here, she spent an hour or so each day with the ELL instructor, plowing through English workbooks. The second year, she received in-class help once a week or so, and the third year, she didn’t see the ELL instructor at all.

The chief advantage of ELL for her was that it entitled her to certain accommodations; she was excused from the state standardized test the first year, she could do her workbooks while her classmates did more advanced reading, and she got easier lists of spelling words than most of her classmates. But she clearly did not learn English through ELL; she learned it listening to and speaking with us. Her ELL classification simply gave her a bit of breathing room in which to catch up.

It can be hard to understand how some adopted children can carry on conversations with family and friends, make jokes and complain and express affection, and yet have difficulty with schoolwork years after arriving home. There are in fact two aspects to language learning: communicative or social mastery, and cognitive or academic mastery.

Immigrant children in ELL programs typically attain communicative mastery in 2 years and cognitive mastery in 5 to 7 years. Internationally adopted children achieve communicative mastery more quickly, usually within 6 to 12 months, and cognitive mastery several years later – if they achieve it at all, since some children will continue to have difficulties as a result of early deprivation and unresolved developmental delays.

This makes me appreciate even more that May had a variety of experiences in her birth family, orphanage, and foster home that helped her develop the capacity to learn. Even if her experiences were not always happy ones, she had opportunities to explore her world and meet different people, which prepared her well for the many changes she has been through.

An interesting side note: Studies have shown that children who learn a second language before puberty will speak it without an accent, while those learning a language after puberty will always have some accent. I think May has a slight accent, though most people think she speaks perfect English. She first learned the Western alphabet so that she could read pinyin, and her pronunciation reflects that. For example, the Chinese y is a weak consonant, so that “yi” (“one”) sounds very much like “ee”; May, who is currently interested in baking, continually confuses me by pronouncing “yeast” as “east.” But I am learning to understand.

Educating May

We were prepared for May to be behind her American peers academically. She was 8 when we met her and had been attending third grade for two months. She was not in the orphanage school, but attended what was described to us as a private school near her foster family’s apartment. Our home school district recommended placing her according to age, but I knew from talking to other adoptive parents that it might be necessary to place her a year behind.

I could see right away that she was very bright. She could write the English alphabet and knew what sounds the letters made. (Most likely she learned the alphabet in preparation for writing pinyin, not English.) She had studied Chinese reading and writing, a bit of art and music, and mathematics.

Watching her over the first couple of weeks, I didn’t see any signs that she was immature compared to a typical third-grader. She was well-behaved, related well to people, and was interested in learning. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to go ahead and enroll her in third grade, with English language learner (ELL) support. (The Chinese grades do not directly correlate to ours, but third grade is pretty close.)

May got right into the school routine. Obviously, language was a challenge. She was pulled out of class for ELL instruction for an hour every day. She completed reams of language arts worksheets while the other kids did their spelling and reading lessons. A couple of older students who spoke both Mandarin and English were assigned to help her find her way around, which was invaluable. Several girls in class took her under their wings, and I’ll be forever grateful for their kindness.

She was ahead in math, at least in computational skills, because the American students were just starting to talk about multiplication, and she already knew multiplication and long division. But American schools’ highly verbal approach to teaching math was a disadvantage to her. I’m not just talking about the ubiquitous story problems. She brought home worksheets asking her to identify place numbers – ones, tens, hundreds, thousands. This was in preparation for learning the more advanced computational operations, which she already knew. In most of her homework, she was expected not just to get the correct answer, but also to explain how she arrived at her answer. It wasn’t enough to do math; she had to be able to talk about math.

She finished third grade speaking conversational English, beginning to understand American-style math, reading first-grade books, and playing and chatting with new friends at recess. We spent her first summer building on that foundation. I read more challenging books to her while she followed along, to give her a better “feel” for English. She did some language arts workbooks. She watched American TV and Chinese movies.

Mostly, we talked, all of us, and she learned proper English, and colloquialisms and slang as well. For a while, it was like having a 2-year-old again; she clung to my side all the time, constantly asking questions. It was intense and exhausting but necessary, because she had a lot of catching up to do emotionally, socially, and intellectually.

Third grade is about basics. In fourth grade, we got a better sense of her educational gaps. Social studies and science were completely new subjects to her. She had no sense of world geography or history or cultures outside of China and the United States. She wasn’t familiar with art or literature, Chinese or Western. She didn’t know how many planets are in our solar system or that Earth circles the sun or that the sun is a star. She didn’t know how plants grow or where baby animals come from.

This I was not prepared for. May had skills, but she had no foundation of knowledge on which to build her broader education. Partly this was because of the Chinese educational system. The Chinese language is so complex that students spend many years learning to read and write characters properly, and language is the most important subject in school. Math comes in second.

There were also cultural reasons; China is still quite closed off, and information about the rest of the world is closely guarded. (Ethnocentrism is certainly not absent in our country – we study the history and culture of the Americas and Europe, but learn little about Asia or Africa, for example.)

But her gaps had to do with more than schooling. Most American third-graders have never studied world history or science either. But they’ve been surrounded by the general concepts since birth, through popular culture. They’ve watched Ratatouille and have a sketchy idea what France looks like and how the people speak and what they eat. They’ve recited nursery rhymes about London Bridge. They’ve seen ancient Egyptian mummies on Scooby-Doo. They’ve watched Bugs Bunny rocket through the solar system with Marvin the Martian in hot pursuit. I’m not kidding about this. You don’t realize how much our daily lives are saturated with information, trivial and important, until you spend time with someone who missed that exposure.

May learned quickly. She received minimal ELL support in fourth grade. By the end of fifth grade, she was reading English at grade level. She soon tested out of ELL. Today, having just finished seventh grade, she has a straight-A average. She writes amazing poetry and creates beautifully executed school projects. She works very hard, and complains equally hard. She is absolutely on track with her peers socially, physically, and academically, even ahead of them in some ways. Despite the challenges, placing May in third grade when she arrived was absolutely the right choice for this particular child.

We continue to build her general fund of knowledge. She is very expressive in English, but some of the more irregular aspects – helper verbs, prepositions – still trip her up. Building vocabulary is difficult because she does not have an innate sense of the language. She doesn’t automatically recognize prefixes, suffixes, and root words as a native speaker might; for example, she would not be able to figure out what monophonic means despite knowing the words telephone and monotone. She can’t figure out words from context while reading because so much of the context is meaningless.

She has little sense of historical time. I try to explain ancient Greek or Roman mythology and she can’t place their ancient civilizations in time. I try to use Jesus as a milepost, but she can’t quite grasp the magnitude of events that can occur over the course of 2,000 years. Classical music means nothing to her. She can’t associate a musical style with a particular era. The same goes for art. She wouldn’t know a Michelangelo from a Picasso. (I suppose not all American 13-year-olds would, but this is a household where art and music are valued and available.)

Literary references are lost on May. Even the nursery rhymes that every American child knows are strange to her. If she jumps away from a spider and I joke, “You’re like Little Miss Muffet,” she gives me a blank look. So many of the cultural touchpoints that we take for granted are missing. She enjoys reading young adult fiction, the more angst-ridden the better, because the language is contemporary and familiar, and she can understand modern teens’ challenges. But the language in classic works of children’s literature – Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables – is too antiquated for her to get anything out of them. She quits in frustration after a couple of pages.

In the world of science, I keep explaining that Earth is the third planet from the sun, and there are nine planets (or eight, it keeps changing) in our solar system, and our solar system is one of many in our galaxy, which is one of many in the universe, but it doesn’t seem to stick. I know she just doesn’t have the picture in her brain that we all have because we once made a model of the solar system with Styrofoam balls or a teacher took us out on the playground and used a marble to represent Earth and a basketball to represent the sun.

She learns facts, but she doesn’t know them in her bones yet. This year she learned to identify all the countries in Europe and Asia on a blank map. But she still isn’t exactly sure where Europe is on the globe. She isn’t dense; she lacks the benefit of repetition. How many times did you study the solar system in school? She is hearing this stuff for the first time. I explain as much as I can, but there’s no point of reference on which to pin the bits of information.

Helping her with schoolwork is like stitching together a tablecloth that is filled with holes. She will get it eventually, but we both feel frustrated in the meantime. She is a good enough student that several of her teachers were encouraging her to sign up for honors courses next year, and we said no. Part of her wants to do it – she says, “Mom! I’m the only Asian kid who isn’t in honors math or learning an instrument!” – but she also understands our reasoning, that she needs to get a really solid grounding in the basics before moving on to more challenging work.

So we patch the holes and make connections wherever we can. Summer is a great time for this. Movies work just fine. For literature, we can watch Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet and the Katharine Hepburn version of Little Women. Amadeus should help with music history. I’ll let her watch Scooby-Doo (shudder), and then I’ll unroll the big Wall Chart of World History on the family room floor and point to where those ridiculous mummies came from. We’ll get there one way or another.
   

The Americanization of May

When May joined our family, we had been parenting Chinese-born children for 9 years. I thought I understood Chinese culture. I was wrong.

I was surprised to find that, compared to our other children, May was so much more...Chinese. Bess and Ella were indistinguishable in behavior, temperament, and values from American-born children of American-born parents. Culturally, they were American kids with an awareness of their Chinese heritage. They celebrated Lunar New Year and ate mooncakes during the Autumn Moon Festival in much the same way that a child whose grandparents immigrated from Norway might celebrate Syttende Mai and eat lefse. China was in the background of their lives (though never far away), rather than at the forefront.

But May had been raised and schooled for 8 years in the People's Republic of China. She was in every way a traditional Chinese girl. She was extremely modest, preferring to bathe and dress herself. She was shocked by women on television showing great expanses of cleavage; she pointed at them and made faces to show me her disgust. Kissing scenes were also new to her -- you almost never see kissing in Chinese television and films -- and she covered her eyes during romantic scenes. She was generally obedient and did not speak to adults unless asked a direct question; even then, she often said what she thought the adults wanted to hear, and she spoke in a soft voice with downturned eyes. She loved girly, dressy clothes and wore jeans only if there were nothing else available. She did not understand why anyone would wait in line, and punched the buttons in the hotel elevator impatiently, as she had seen the adults do. She loved TV and believed that Tom & Jerry was a Chinese cartoon -- well, obviously, they spoke Mandarin!

May was also a modern Chinese girl. And that means that she was a C0mmunist. She revered Mao Zedong and Lei Feng. She saluted the Chinese flag and sang patriotic songs. She wore the red scarf of the Young Pioneers to school. Her formal education involved reading and writing Chinese, studying mathematics, and practicing art. She had no knowledge whatsoever of world geography. She had heard of Japan and the United States, but had no idea where they were located; she knew only that the two foreign countries had a better standard of living than China (that is, she had heard that everyone there was rich). She knew nothing of science, nothing of world history, and nothing of Chinese history prior to the Communist Revolution.

As a modern girl, she had never seen anyone wear a qipao besides waitresses at restaurants catering to tourists. And she had no sense of spirituality. She was vaguely aware of Guan Yin, and had seen statues of Buddha. But when we went to the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees in Guangzhou, she seemed to have no clue what to do with the incense sticks. 

When we returned to the United States, we eased her into American ways as slowly as possible. At her insistence, we enrolled her in school fairly quickly. (She now denies that she was in any hurry to go to school, so this may have been an instance of her saying what she thought we wanted to hear.) But at home, she watched Mandarin-language videos and had Chinese books at her disposal. We let her choose her own clothes for the most part -- the more pink and sparkly, the better, as far as she was concerned. I offered rice, noodles, and vegetables at every meal. We didn't fuss over table manners, letting her learn by example, which she was eager to do.

Of course, over time she became acclimated. She learned, to her surprise, that Tom and Jerry spoke English and were invented here in America. She tried American foods one by one and decided which ones she really liked. She hung on to her Mandarin for a year or two, much longer than most children, but eventually she learned English. She has learned things about China and its history and leadership that she couldn't have learned in China, and she now has a more balanced view of both China and America.

But her character remains, in many ways, Chinese. She is much less likely to talk back than the other girls, and mutters under her breath when she has a beef with us. She tends to employ passive resistance rather than open defiance. She still speaks very softly. She loves fashion and makeup, and, though she wears jeans most of the time, they have to be skinny jeans in the latest wash, and she is always dressed to the nines; she never went through a tomboy phase. (If you have been to China recently, you know that young women there tend to dress up all the time rather than wearing sweatshirts and sneakers everywhere like American women.)

May has very high expectations for herself academically. As she explains it, in China, if you score less than 95%, you will earn a scolding; less than 90%, and your parents will slap you. She complains bitterly about her homework -- which, granted, is a bit more difficult for her than for native speakers -- but berates herself if she gets anything less than an A on an assignment. (She is still trying to fill the many holes in her world knowledge; I could fill another post with her school experiences, and plan to.) She gets straight A's, but she notes ruefully that she's the only Chinese kid at school not taking accelerated math or learning an instrument.

Socially, she knows and is friends with most of the Chinese-American kids at school, and she probably feels more comfortable with Asians. Her two best friends are a girl whose parents immigrated from Shanghai and a girl who was adopted from China at age 6. She has friends who are not Asian, but they're more casual friends. I can see May returning to China to live someday and being perfectly comfortable doing so (provided she has enough money to go shopping).

I am telling you this because I think it's important for prospective adoptive parents of older children to be aware that their new children's behavior, demeanor, and values may be more, and differently, "foreign" than they have anticipated. And they will likely remain Chinese at heart long after they have forgotten how to speak Chinese. (Or Korean, or Spanish, or Hindi, or Amharic, or Creole, as the case may be.) Their cultural and racial identity should be honored and not completely "Americanized" out of them -- an effort that would probably fail and frustrate both of you anyway.

And I think there is a message here for those of us who adopted infants. Even before May joined us, I had some nagging questions about how effectively and accurately we as adoptive parents are conveying "Chinese culture" to our children. Celebrating Chinese holidays, wearing qipaos and silk pyjamas, putting Chinese artwork on the walls and story books on the bookshelves -- there is nothing wrong with these observances, per se, and they certainly give our children more exposure to their birth culture than most of the Korean adoptees of the 1950s through 1970s received. But it's a sort of Epcot version of Chinese culture, a sanitized version that is stuck in the 19th century and pretends that the Communist Revolution never took place.

We tend to ignore the aspects of Chinese and Chinese-American culture that are alien to us as white Americans -- values such as filial piety, high academic achievement, a rigorous work ethic, sacrificing individual desires for the good of family and country. We buy silk fans and brocade slippers at the gift shops in Guangzhou and leave behind the Mao caps and propaganda posters. We celebrate the Autumn Moon Festival but not Learn From Lei Feng Day. We take our children to culture camp to make kites and sing traditional songs, but we don't, for the most part, sign them up for Saturday math classes and violin lessons or sacrifice our free time to prepare them for an Ivy League education.

This has always bothered me, and I think we do our children a disservice when we limit their view of Chinese culture to a two-dimensional cartoon. It would be confusing to hand our 3-year-olds copies of Mao's Little Red Book in place of New Year hong baos, but contemporary China should be represented at appropriate times in their upbringing, in a manner both truthful and respectful. Our children should have the chance to make a return visit to China at some point, but they also need opportunities to associate with other Asian Americans of all ages in this country.

As for the cultural values -- well, Big A and I do expect respect, academic achievement, and hard work from our children, but that's because we are old-school, not because our children are Chinese. (Though we joke that our parenting sometimes aligns better with that of Chinese-born parents than with some of our more indulgent American peers.) I'm not suggesting that we all try to turn our children into academic prodigies -- the long-term effects of institutionalization would make that difficult for many of our children anyway -- I just find it interesting that we resist enforcing the same high standards that our children's birth culture would likely have imposed on them.

For May, over time her "Chinese-ness" has become not an obstacle but an advantage. She fits in easily with the Chinese-American community. She has a strong sense of race, culture, and identity. Bess and Ella are more thoroughly assimilated, which means they have an easier time fitting into the dominant American culture, but they would have difficulty adapting to life in China or an exclusively Asian American community.

It is too soon for me to say whether this will be a liability for them. But I do believe that May's ability to smoothly negotiate her two cultures will, despite the challenges, be an asset for her in the future. And that, too, has been a surprise.