AN INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION JOURNEY

By Lydia Lowe
2/7/02

My husband, my six year-old daughter and I just returned from China, where we adopted one year-old Thea Limiao from Gaoming City in Guangdong Province. The trip, and the entire adoption journey, has clearly been an intense emotional experience, but also a politically thought-provoking one.

A Different Kind of Journey
We were lucky to travel with a relatively small group of four other adopting families, three of which were adopting babies from Thea's orphanage and one from another orphanage in Guangdong Province. We were the only non-whites. In our group were two single mothers: a Jewish mortgage broker originally from Brockton and currently living in New Jersey, and a young British-born executive working for Disney and living in Los Angeles. There was a family of three from rural Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, who had never taken an airplane before coming to China. There was a gregarious Christian couple from Dallas who packed a supply of Pop Tarts and beef jerky to eat in their hotel room. And then there was us: two Chinese American social change activists of the late baby boom generation and our unquenchable six year-old daughter.

Amazingly, we all got along. At meals, we tried to strike a balance between ordering what the one vegetarian could eat and what the meat-and-potatoes Texans could eat. We talked about things which drew us together: our yearning for our daughters, the idiosyncrasies of how things are done in China. But other times, it struck us that we were on a very different kind of journey than our fellow travelers.

Adoption 2 - Who's Chairman Mao?