021 ｜A White Mother and Her Chinese Daughter ｜International Adoption - English Version
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Maya, I think, has given me more gifts in my life than I have given her, frankly. I see myself signing the papers with one hand, holding her with another, and her eyes are just looking and locked right on my face, right on my face. And she's not crying. She's just kind of watching a toy and looking at my face. I'm signing the papers.

We just did what was in our heart and we tried to do the best we can. You know, reaching out and trying to give comfort and trying to give a home to a child who doesn't have one. I mean, it pretty much is in some ways that simple. It's gonna be alright.

Both of your lives were heavily impacted by the same policy with different results, different ways in which you've grown up. But again, I think of that as more of a bridge between you and the millions of others like you who had that same experience. So there are connections, there are similarities, there are ways to, again, connect on a human level that can bypass government's frictions and just bring us together as human beings.

Welcome to the new episode of Oh Mama. We are not here to judge anyone but to hear all stories about Chinese women. In the following two episodes, we are going to hear stories about a mother and a daughter. The mother, Melissa Leckie, adopted her daughter, Maya, from Changzhou, China 24 years ago when Maya was 9 months old.

In the Tokyo Olympics, more Chinese discovered that there are many Chinese adoptees representing various countries. People are curious and asking questions. I think these two episodes could contribute to the conversation here and help more Chinese people to learn about this huge group of people who are mainly girls, the losses they have to endure, the lives they are living. And the families adopted these girls. So let's hear Melissa's story today.

Hi Melissa. Hello. Thank you for asking me to do this. I really, really appreciate you agreeing to do this along with Maya, of course. So I feel even though I've known you for five, six years now, but I'm still very excited to hear this maybe more intimate part of your story because I know the basic story, but not

some of the questions here today. I'm very curious. So first of all, can you do a brief intro of your family members for our audience? In the family that I created, you mean? Yes. Okay. In our family, we have two members and I am the mother.

And my daughter, Maya, is now 24 years old. She's almost 25. And I adopted her after meeting her in China. Great. That's one of the main reasons that I am inviting you today because your relationship with Maya is very unique, at least to many of our Chinese audience who may not have a lot of knowledge on this topic.

Because for example, for me, I didn't know this group of people existed until I came to the US in 2013. So for those who haven't heard of this whole international adoption community, can you briefly tell us how you and Maya became a family? Like, how did you hear about this thing? How did you get to know you can do this international adoption?

Well, we're back in the mid-1990s when I learned about the possibility of adopting a child from China. I had been thinking for quite some time about wanting to become a parent and I was visiting a friend of mine and we were talking about this desire that I had to become a mother

And in our conversation, she mentioned to me a friend of hers who was like me, a single woman. She was a few years younger than me. At that time, I was 45 years old. And she went into her house and came out with a piece of paper that had this woman's name on it and her phone number. And she encouraged me to call her.

which I did that evening. Her name was Rose, and Rose, it turned out, was going to be going to China very soon. She had been in the process of preparing for her adoption for quite some time. But she told me about what she had done to make this possible to happen in her life, and she encouraged me to pursue this as she had.

and left me with the name of an adoption agency, which was called China Adoption with Love. I called that adoption agency the next day, which was directed by a woman who had immigrated from China. I went over to her house that next day, met her, talked with her about what the process would be.

In fact, that very morning I signed up with her to begin the process, which would end just about a year later with me in China meeting my daughter in an orphanage. But that process in going through what we call a home study,

where a social worker comes to the house and asks you questions and determines if they think that you are capable of parenting, if you have the financial ability to take care of a child, if you are well-suited to becoming a mother. So I went through that home study.

So then we proceeded with the process of getting the kind of payment. We would go to the orphanage and would pay for the services of the people arranging the adoption. Then I became part of what's called a travel group, in which there are anywhere from maybe four to eight to possibly ten families that travel together to China to go through the process of meeting the child who they have been paired with.

with through the Chinese officials, I think are in Beijing and do the pairing of the prospective adoptive families with the children who the various orphanages throughout China have said are available for adoption.

Thank you so much for sharing this. So since you already mentioned the people who kind of match you with your child, can you tell us a little bit more if you know anything about this kind of black box procedure that they do over there?

Well, that's a good description for it, the black box, because to my understanding, there's never been a reporter or a family that's been admitted to that area of the Chinese adoption operation. That has been sort of referred to as the matching room. So really, all I know is that the paperwork that we fill out, in which we describe ourselves a little bit to people, we fill out the questions that the Chinese government asks us to fill out.

And then each of our papers, I think with our picture on it, I think we include a small picture, go into this room.

And that's where many people talk about the sort of red thread happens that somehow magically you then are matched with a child who has been found her way. Usually it was a her back in those days, her way into the orphanage system. And so in my case, I ended up being paired with my daughter.

who eventually became Maya Shia Ludke. So that was what happened there. Yeah, I just kind of feel so magical. And it's like so many families' fates and the children's fates are somehow decided by these people who may never ever met you or Maya. Yes, I just felt that's kind of sad and magical and a lot of mixed feelings towards that.

No, I agree. I think that there is a great and profound sadness with it, that this was, in a sense, the fate of them when they were born for a variety of reasons, because they were born a girl when the parents or the grandparents, in this case, or in any case, may have insisted that with the one-child policy in place,

They wanted to have a boy for often traditional reasons, cultural reasons, but also sometimes for economic reasons in terms of viewing them as potentially a contributor to the family in terms of farming in rural areas or in terms of passing along a business, etc.,

So that is why there was such an abundance of girls who were in the orphanage beds at the time that we were doing the adopting in the 90s. Now that began to shift later on and there became more of a gender equality in terms of boys and girls as more of the children filling the orphanages became children who were handicapped and not children related specifically to the one child policy.

But of course, I think you're absolutely right. There's a sadness that comes along with, obviously, the immense joy that I felt at being united with this incredible child who instantly became my daughter. So I know every family, they will receive a tiny, tiny photo of their child, the parent child. Do you remember the moment you got your photo of Maya?

I do. I remember exactly the moment I got it and how I took it. It was a tiny, tiny little photo. It's like a square. And I never thought to take it and kind of blow it up into something bigger. But I noticed that when I got paired with my travel group, that most of the families had blown up the small picture and made it bigger. But I just kept carrying the small picture around. And I can remember the day I got it, I can remember driving immediately over to show it to various friends.

And immediately, and this is kind of, it's odd, but I looked at it and looked for ways that we resembled each other and quickly found them in the idea that my daughter's picture, she had a very round face and I tend to have a round face.

And she had, of course, that baby chubbiness of a sort of double chin. And I tend to have a double chin. So I began to look at the things that we had in common. I mean, obviously, I knew that we didn't have the biological resemblance, but maybe it's just a mother's instinct. How long after you got the photo did you fly to China?

I don't remember that, but I think it was at least several months, but I could be wrong. I mean, probably three or four months at least.

So I lived with the picture for quite some time. That was my only connection. Aside from the records that we got that were supposedly the health records, all in Chinese, I think that Lillian helped me to read a few of them, which kind of gave maybe health and weight and et cetera, and indicated that my daughter had no evident health issues that were there. And obviously that was reassuring to find out.

So I had the health record and I had the photograph and I believe that they may have come in the same envelope at the same time. So between the time were you preparing your house, did you get a crib or? I was doing a lot to prepare my house. And again, friends turned to me because I'd shared this news so widely that people began to reach out and in very kind and generous ways.

donate things. A friend of mine donated a beautiful crib. Her children were past the crib stage. And I remember my parents driving up with some other furniture. My mother brought me a rocking chair, which I love and still have to this day. And I remember my father taking the crib back

the day that my parents arrived and brought the bed that Maya would eventually move into when she was two years old. But yes, setting up the kind of baby room. And friends of ours arranged a baby shower, which happened actually after I returned from China with Maya. But they were, again, very kind and generous in terms of the kind of gifts that they gave.

By the time Maya arrived here, I did have a baby room set up. Yeah, I imagine that few months would be very exciting. And then now let's come to a time when you flew to China and actually hold Maya in your arms. You remember the moment that you finally meet in person?

Yeah, the conventional way for this to happen and the way it did happen for two members of our travel group. I remember two of our families did receive their babies and meet their babies in the lobby of the hotel where we all gathered around with them. It probably was overwhelming for the child as well as for the parents in retrospect, but we were all so excited we couldn't help ourselves.

But in our case, in our orphanage at Changzhou, five of the families of the eight that traveled were meeting their children in Changzhou. So we took a bus that was about maybe an hour's ride from Nanjing, which was the provincial capital.

And we arrived in Changzhou, checked into our hotel, and the next day we were going to go to the orphanage. And so we arrived, our little bus pulled into the courtyard, and we walked up this flight of stairs and into a room. And I remember that there were two things. One is that there was tea made for us, and the other was that there was a big bowl of lychee fruit on the table. And that was sort of there.

And we waited for quite some time. It was in June, so it was a little bit hot. And all of us, of course, were just incredibly nervous. We were nervous together, wondering when the babies would arrive. And all of a sudden, I think it was Lillian who said, the babies are here.

And the caregivers, I later saw this in a video that I had given my video camera to someone to take pictures and they'd taken it outside when the caregivers were lined up with the babies and they walked them in one by one. So there were five of them coming in. And I believe Maya was either second or third to come in. And as she came in, she was sort of resting in her caregiver's arms. The caregiver passed her to me and

And so what would happen, and we saw this in the hotel, is that the babies would understandably cry because this caregiver who they were so used to and held close to were suddenly handing them off to this stranger.

And of course, the stranger didn't look anything like any of their caregivers. And we were new. We had different smells to our body. We had different ways of touching them. So I didn't know if Maya would sort of burst into tears and that would be my first holding of her and trying to soothe her.

But in fact, she just immediately was somehow comfortable in my arms. And I remember that we then sat down on the couch because we had some paperwork that we had to sign. And I don't remember this because I have such a clear memory because it was just such an amazing day that, you know, all of this comes together. But fortunately, I have a lot of pictures that tell me what happened afterwards.

And I can see her. I'd brought little toys, finger toys, and that I could give her to hold on to and look at. I see myself signing the papers with one hand, holding her with another. And her eyes are just looking and locked right on my face, right on my face. And she's not crying. She's just kind of watching a toy and looking at my face. And I'm signing the papers.

And then I decided I wanted a picture holding her outside on this little balcony. And someone took a picture. And once again, she's looking right at my face and I'm looking at hers. So, you know, I could be making all this up, but I felt like that was an immediate connection that the two of us established at that moment. This sense of what motherhood was, because I didn't remember ever having such a strong connection

between myself and another human being as I had at that moment with this child. So it was kind of a great way to kick off what's been now 24 years of us being together. And we expected that after we met our children, we would take our children. They were now our children. But in fact, we were told that our children would not be leaving with us that day.

which was an exceedingly difficult thing to hear. But we were invited, and this is something that's exceedingly rare. It's first of all rare to go to the orphanage to meet your children. But what was even more rare was that the people in the orphanage invited us to come up as they put the children back into the cribs that they were in,

And we went up and were able to walk through the rooms where all the children were, not just the ones that we were adopting that day, but all of the children who were in cribs throughout the orphanage. We were allowed to take photographs and take videos, which, you know, to this day, I can see that scene again and remember it. But then we had to leave.

And that was about the hardest leaving I think I've ever done. And we were told that what we had to do the next day was take the bus back to Nanjing, sign the papers in the provincial office, and then we would come back to Chongzhou and we would return to the orphanage the next evening. And then we would leave with the children.

So we arrived at the orphanage with the expectation that we would then be reunited with our kids and we would leave and we'd be back at the hotel and etc. It had been a long day. But in fact, the people at the orphanage had decided and set up a banquet that we would attend. And the banquet went through, as you know, being in China, many courses.

and several rounds of drink. Each course we would think might be the last course, but no, there was another course. And this banquet went on and on, and all of us, as much as I think we felt the kindness and the love that these people were expressing toward us by giving us a banquet, there was this urgency I felt, I mean, I can't speak for anyone else,

to just be with my daughter again. You know, I just thought, wow, this is going on a long time. But finally the banquet came to an end. And the next thing I knew we were on our little bus with the children in our laps and heading back to our hotel. By that time, it was fairly late in the evening. And so the only thing I could think about was just us getting into bed and going to sleep.

And although they had cribs in the room, I slept with Maya next to me that night. She just kind of cuddled up and kind of nested as I kind of lay on my side. And she slept with me that evening. During the banquet, they didn't give you the... No, we didn't have them while we were at the banquet. No, no, no, no. We had to wait. We had to wait until the banquet was over. I totally understand how long that would take.

Now you have Maya. Yes, finally. Do you feel like you need to learn how to be a mother, how to feed her, how to meet her basic needs? Does she still wear a diaper at that time?

It definitely does. Although, as you know, in China, there's less emphasis on diapers than we place in the West. But when she left, they did have diaper on her. And we, of course, had brought some diapers with us from the States, as we'd been told to do. I was the oldest of five children and the youngest baby in my family was born when I was 10 years old.

So my goodness, I mean, I learned how to diaper kids and learned how to give them baths and all of that. Not that I was specifically told to be my mother's helpmate, but because I was so intrigued by these little babies. I mean, one arrived when I was eight, one arrived when I was 10. So of course, I mean, as the oldest girl in the family, I wanted to do all of that and wanted to be involved.

So I felt very confident in my skills in terms of the sort of physical care of her. I'd done babysitting. I'd been a nanny. I mean, I had a good, good understanding of all of that. What, of course, one never understands if they're going to be good at or even if they've succeeded at is the emotional well-being of children and sort of how you prepare them eventually because that's your job as a parent is

to be an independent being and to have the capacities to function well in the world. So, I mean, what I can say to that is that I hoped that I had those qualities, that I felt like I had good friendships, that I'd nurtured well, and that I

I also had previously written a book about being a single mother, and I'd interviewed many, many mothers about the raising of their children, and particularly as single parents. And so I think those conversations and actually pulling together all that material and writing that book had given me a really wide frame of reference for the different ways that parents went about the task of

of trying to do the best they could in terms of preparing their kids both physically and emotionally and socially for the tasks of becoming a really a functional adult. So that's something I'm still working on and hopefully getting better at, but I don't think you ever start off feeling that you have all the answers. I think you learn and then you ask.

You ask other parents who are going through things and you become close with other families. And that's one thing that happened with us, particularly those of us who had adopted from China. We came together in organizations called Families with Children from China.

And those organizations, which had hundreds of families, sometimes a thousand families in a region, together, not only did we come together physically with each other where we could share lessons, particularly about the adoptive experience and trying to bring resources to learn about how we parent children who are adopted, who have lost their

family of origin are being raised in an adoptive situation, that puts on different layers of emotional well-being and trying to do whatever we can to give them the resilience to deal with that sorrow, with that loss.

even as they're experiencing this growing up in the family that they have. I stepped up to become the editor of the journal that we shared. And so constantly I was reaching out to families to ask them to write about some of these things that all of us were finding as stumbling blocks or challenges. When we encountered the issue of racism that our children were facing and we didn't,

We set up workshops and programs so that the children and us, and we could be educated about the different racial experiences that our children were have from the ones that we had experienced. Because for the most part, we were white Caucasian families who had privilege of

in this society based on our skin color. And we knew that our children would face different biases, prejudices and racism that we were not facing. So that was an important thing for us to learn about.

So as the editor of this journal, I was able not only to choose some of the subjects that we would take on, and I chose some of the really tough ones and asked people to write about it. So I had an exposure to these parts of this experience that I think a lot of other people didn't have, or I should say, a very intimate, up-close exposure, because I was editing those stories, I was talking with families as they were writing their experiences, etc.,

That was a gift. I mean, I felt like I did this in many ways as a way to give back to this community what it had given to me. But I realized in retrospect how much I received back in the sense of being the person who was doing this. Yeah, I think one of the things that I'm most amazed about this whole international adoption community is the existence of the community. It's that

So many people, they're constantly talking about their experiences and then they're empathetic towards each other and they just kind of support each other. So I kind of learned a lot from this community as well because after seeing this community, I was like, I need to build something like this for my people. So for people like me, yes, I think that was very amazing that you have this organization support there. You know, what I want to say is that what we started to do was to really listen to the experiences of

of the Korean adoptees because that wave of adoption had happened in this country as a result of the U.S. involvement in the Korean War and the children who were left in orphanages by parents during that time. And that became the go-to country

for families in America who wanted to bring a child from Korea into their lives. And they did this at a time in American history, the 1950s and early 1960s, in which there was this sense that America was colorblind.

that there was a sense that we were a melting pot and that if you came in and you were part of a white American family, that you were part of a white American family. Okay. And parents didn't realize that was sort of this idea that if you're now one of us, that we're going to just treat you the same. We love you the same. And so everything will be taken care of.

And the Korean adoptees as they got older and they particularly got to college age, which is what many of them are about, when we became the parents of children from China who were very young,

We were listening to these Korean adoptees and they were saying, no, no, you don't. No, no, no. When you're raising a child of color and you're a white family, you have to acknowledge that difference. You have to actively acknowledge you have to support that child, you know, et cetera, in this broader society. And it was from that experience of listening to the Korean adoptees share the experiences that they wish they

they had had in their families, that their families had been part of a larger community and their families had addressed these issues, that we basically, standing on their shoulders, created these organizations so that we would try not to make the same mistakes that had been made before. I see.

Yeah, I definitely see a lot of Korean adoptees online on YouTube as well. So how did you explain to Maya about the situation about your relationship? You mean about our relationship, the fact that we look different? Well, that was, I mean, one of the things about being an adoptive parent of a child from a different country and a different ethnic group

group and who is of different color and whose facial features are different is that you both know this very quickly, right? I mean, it's unlike some of the private adoptions that take place in America or adoptions of Caucasian children by Caucasian parents. And one of the things that's been discovered in that is that there are many adoptive parents in that case who

that never get around to telling their kids they're adopted. And then later their kids find out and the kids are very angry that they haven't been told. That was never an issue with us. They knew that. And one of the great things is that people started writing books that we could read to our children. My friend...

who had been the one to tell me about Chinese adoption, was one of the first ones to write an amazing storybook that I immediately bought and started reading to Maya. So we had these stories to tell. And one of the things I did from a very early age is I began just telling her stories before she could really comprehend what they meant. But the story lived within her about the story of me taking a plane and flying to a different country and

meeting her and bringing her home to where she lives today

So all of that was built into, I'm sure she doesn't remember because these stories were told while I was in a rocking chair and she was an infant and, you know, maybe through when she was a toddler. But from the very beginning, those stories were something that she learned both from reading storybooks, but also me just, you know, telling the story again and again. And as I say, it was pretty apparent to her as soon as she got to an age where she

she could focus and look and see herself in the mirror and see me, that, you know, that we look different. And we were with other families. Oftentimes, children didn't look different than their parents. So there wasn't a topic that you could hide from or run away from. And one of the important things I think that I learned early on, which I think came from

maybe her childcare people, but also from me reading things, is just answer the question the child asks. Don't think you need to give an encyclopedic answer. The child asks a question, answer it honestly, and then stop. You don't need to go into a huge explanation at that point.

but always be there to answer the questions. And also one of the things that would happen repeatedly, and this wasn't so much something that I remember specifically with Maya, but I heard about it from many families, is that they would be out in their community. They would be with their child. They might be in a line at the supermarket or whatever, and people just felt they had the right

while the child was present, to ask them any question they wanted to. How much did you pay for your child? Did you, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so as a parent, one of the things you always had to be prepared for was to be able to be responsive to your child after a situation happened that was awkward or challenging for that child to hear or whatever. So together we learned and shared the ways that we would respond to

to this? You know, there was curiosity. People were curious, but they would often ask questions seemingly blind to the fact that the child was standing right there while they were asking these questions that weren't appropriate to be framing in the way that they were with the child being a part of it. So that was another thing that we had to learn how to kind of cope with.

But again, through having our journal, being able to share our stories, being able to come together in gatherings and large gatherings to do activities together. We would always celebrate the Chinese New Year together. There might be 400 families that would come together. We'd do it at a children's museum. The kids would play. The parents would have a chance to talk and mingle. So there were a lot of these opportunities to share a sort of wisdom that came out of our experience.

I see. Yeah, I interviewed a mom who adopted three girls from China before. And she was like, when other people asked her, she just kind of said, oh, I left my Chinese husband at home to kind of explain why these kids don't look like her. Because she didn't want to really explain what's going on. You said that kids ask questions. So did Maya ever ask about, say, oh, where's my parents? Why didn't they raise me? Or do I have a dad? That kind of question.

Well, those are a lot of questions all at one time. You know, to my memory, and you can ask her, to my memory, she wasn't a kid who was absorbed by what she had lost. And she didn't question me about those things. Sometimes when she celebrated her birthday, you know, I would make an effort to remember her family in China. But it wasn't something that was provoked by her constantly asking me.

Now, that is not to say that there weren't other kids who had the exact same experience she did, who didn't constantly ask their parents these questions, and they certainly had a right to. And I would have been happy to respond to them. But Mayad was not someone who lived with those questions being foremost in her mind. And if she had them in her mind, she didn't vocalize them to me. So either she wrestled with these issues herself,

or talked with friends of hers who had been adopted and asked them these questions. But it wasn't something that she brought to me and asked me to answer that for her. And in terms of not having a father, that was something that we talked about occasionally. I don't remember her ever saying, oh, but I wish you did have a father for me. I don't remember her

stating it that concretely, but I'm sure that that was a loss for her too when she looked at other families and saw, you know, this kind of package that other families had and saw the things that fathers did with their daughters, etc.,

So I recognized that these were all losses, but again, perhaps it was a fault of mine that in some ways I waited for her to raise them and felt prepared to respond, but it wasn't something that she raised with any frequency. Now, I will say that also at the time that I adopted Maya,

a lot of other single women were adopting children from China. So there were lots of families that looked like ours within this families with children from China. In our group that had gone over to China, eight of us, half of them were adopted as a single parent doing that adoption. So, you know, it wasn't such an oddity.

right? I mean, when we would meet as an adoption group, it wasn't as though the other seven families all had a father and a mother. So even within her travel group, which was probably the group of kids that she knew in some ways, in some ways best, but she knew a lot of kids in the Cambridge area where we lived. You know, having just a mom wasn't

wasn't something that was a stigma or something that was profoundly odd. It wasn't within her school that she would be raised by a single parent.

So again, I think it was the context in which she grew up. Had she grown up in a community where very, very few families had the experience of single parents raising children or very few families had adopted children from China, she might have felt like she stood out more and it might have been more uncomfortable for her.

But in fact, being raised in the community that she was and going to the public schools as she did and belonging to families with children from China as she did, as we did, none of this was an odd experience within any of those groups, her school, her community or families with children in China. Yeah, that's really interesting.

nice I'll say but I don't think the whole situation is very nice but that's good for her yeah so and just before that you mentioned that you felt the instant connection with Maya the first time you hold her did you ever go through any effort after that because I interviewed someone before when they adopted their girls they would go through a long time period where they built trust like

let the kids know that they will never leave them again because I guess the kids were traumatized before. So for you, did you have any that kind of issue?

Well, Maya was nine months old, which is very different than adopting a child when they're two years old or three years old or even older from the orphanage where that's been their experience. And yes, even at nine months, there can be those issues of attachment, the attachment issues. But that was not something I felt was a challenge for us. I felt from that very first day, Maya sort of

sunk into and came to my arms and sort of my hugs and my rocking chair and all of those things very naturally that there wasn't something where she tensed up. That can be a signal to you if the baby tenses up.

rather than kind of falls into and relaxes in one's arms, that they don't feel secure in that place. It would be like us, you know, walking toward the edge of a cliff and our body suddenly... And I don't think I ever had the sense that Maya felt a risk or a danger that I was going to leave her, that this attachment that we had was going...

to disappear. I'm kind of a big hugger, so I would always hug her and, you know, when I left her at daycare, I'd always hug her. There would always be that physical connection. And to this day, it's my tendency to do that. She's not as wild about it now as maybe she was back then. But, you know, it's just been always my tendency. So I didn't ever go through any kind of specific process

of making her feel as though she was more attached to me, because I think that very naturally that feeling existed, or at least I felt that it was there. But as the editor of the journal, there were ones in which I wrote about, and we talked about this in the journal, of people talking about going through the process of working through attachment issues, would be what it would be called.

and working through the process, which is fairly well known, you know, in psychology of how you work with a child who has been traumatized, doesn't feel that natural attachment. And you as a parent give them the trust that you're talking about. So that is certainly something I don't want to pretend that that didn't exist within our broader community. But again, within our family, that wasn't something that was an issue for us.

That's great. I just kind of feel like it's so beautiful that you have the instant connection and everything. So next question is pretty big. I'm trying to make it more specific. The question is, how has Raising Maya changed your life?

So I feel like this question will worth an hour conversation here. Raising Maya has made my life what it is. I mean, this is the experience that for some reason I knew I always felt like I wanted to have, but not looking at it from a selfish point of view. I felt that I did have the skill set that would enable to me to be a good parent to a child and

And because I had had one marriage that had failed and I had not, uh,

found another partner in life, I just felt a very, very strong pull to the parenting experience. And I will say that I'm glad that finally at the age of 45, I did listen to myself strongly enough to make the decision to do this on my own. And I just feel like

I can't even begin to imagine my life without it. I just can't even begin to. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, looking back on my life, you know, this quarter century, 25 years has been the most meaningful part of my life. I can't imagine going through life without this experience and without being her mother. It just doesn't seem possible. Of course, it was possible. I didn't

have to run into a friend who gave me someone's number who sent me to China. I mean, that's part of what I think about is that red thread. All of this has a sense of a meant to be moment. So no, I totally see the world through the lens of being Maya's mother. I mean, I see it now in my climate activism. I've become a climate activist and part of it is really driven by the fact

that I am a mother of a child who one day hopefully will become a mother of a child. It's a kind of generational promise that I make. I always used to say to Maya, my job is to keep you healthy and safe. I mean, there are other ones, but you know that and on the playground, my job is to keep you healthy and safe. And my job still is to keep her and my

the children she'll have healthy and safe. And that, from the lens of being her mother, has led me to be totally, totally engaged as a climate activist. Because if we cannot provide a livable climate for generations to come, then we're not only endangering their health, we're endangering their safety, we're endangering everything that is about being a parent.

So I would say that, you know, Maya coming into my life has reshaped my life totally, absolutely, totally. And the fact that I'm now writing a book about events that happened back in my 70s that ended up having an influence on the issue on women's rights, I want to tell that story because I feel it's an important one to leave for my daughter.

And it's important one for her to have left with her to share with her daughter. And when I say that, it's not just her and her daughter. It's that next generation of girls and boys, young men and young women, and then the future generations. So there's this notion of generational storytelling that we learn from the stories that we tell each other generation to generation. And with climate upon us now and the crisis that we face,

I just feel like if I don't do what I can with that, that I'm also not acting as I should as her mother. So it is profoundly, profoundly, every single day changed my orientation of life and to how I live it.

Yeah. And on a side note, I definitely tell your story to my friends as well. So I kind of feel like I am also trying to carry your Lexi to some place. Yeah. So I definitely tell people about you, like this amazing woman I met while I was in Boston. Yeah.

So I wanted more people to know your story. I will say men who look at fatherhood can look at fatherhood in the same way. But mothers seem to have the societal job of thinking very generationally. You know, once they are raising a child, it becomes part of who they are in their identity to think about preserving things for generations to come.

Before I was a mother, I may have intellectually understood that, but I didn't understand it in the way that I did once I was her mother.

Yeah. So about this part, I have one more kind of comment, I guess, because when I read a lot of stories in Chinese about the international adoptions, a lot of people will say, oh, these white Caucasian family, they're like saint. They spent a lot of money and then help these kids and blah, blah, blah. So how do you feel about this kind of...

You guys are the same feeling, thoughts, comments? You know, Maya, I think, has given me more gifts in my life than I have given her, frankly. We're not the kind of white saviors. I just don't think about that at all. I can only talk for myself. I can't speak for the larger community.

But, you know, when you understood the one-child policy that was happening in China, and you understood that these girls were being given up by their families because of a policy that the government had put into place, and that these children were potentially going to grow up in an orphanage situation without a family,

And in China in particular, to not be connected to a family, I mean, it's just, I mean, family is a cultural block, a foundational block of who you are, you know, in China. And, you know, it really is in any society. But there was just a feeling on my part once I learned more about the situation and the circumstance in China and the fact that the orphanages were closed

were filling up with girls who had been found, like generations before us, who had responded to the situation in Korea or responded to the hunger in Ethiopia or responded to the situation in many countries around this world. In Russia, in Romania, I just think that Americans have within their own

hearts and within their own ability. Through the situations where adoption agencies are set up to make it possible,

that there is sort of a desire to reach out and to give children families. Beyond that, we just hope that we can do well by them, we can do right by them, that we can be the parents, that they will come to love and they will come to need, and that we can be in some ways a way to help them through the sorrow and the sadness at what the circumstances that put them in the orphanage are.

but to simply not respond to that kind of situation that we know about. I don't know how else to explain it, but I think the answer is that we just did what was in our heart and we tried to do the best we can. And beyond that, we don't pretend that we're doing anything that is greater than just who we are as human beings.

you know, reaching out and trying to give comfort and trying to give a home to a child who doesn't have one. I mean, it pretty much is in some ways that simple. After you had Maya, have you ever thought about having another child through different ways?

I know a number of the families in our adoption group went back to get a second child from China because they wanted to give their children a sibling and they wanted to have the experience of having raising two children. And but none of the single parents did.

I just felt that I was 45 years old and I just looked at what I thought was my capacity. Also living not in a place where I could have a big home with several bedrooms and the rest. I really had two bedrooms, one for me and one for Maya.

and also the expenses of living in the place that I live in were very high. So I think I took a very practical look at it. One that I think, you know, if there was any aspect of this that Maya raised at times with me, it was the fact that she was being raised as an only child. Not as much about the absence of a father and not as much about curiosity about, you know, her birth family, but really the idea of not having a sibling, I think, was the challenge. She has cousins.

And she's close to her cousins, and that's great. But I do wish in some ways that I had had the ability to do it. You know, maybe had I been younger, maybe had I not been living in a city that was pretty expensive in terms of just the square footage of the place I could live in and the cost of the childcare, and also the capacity I had to live.

earn a living while I was also trying to be a good parent and an available parent to my child. I just weighed all of those things and really felt that I was going to be the best parent I could for Maya. And I just couldn't stretch myself to any greater potential.

It wasn't that I never thought about it, but it was in weighing all of the impact that it would have on her, on me and on our lives. So it might have been a bad decision.

You know, it might have been a bad decision, but you make the best decision you think you can make at the time. To your question, maybe it was the wrong decision, but it was the decision I came to, weighing all the factors that I had. Yeah, definitely. I was just curious. I was not being judgmental or anything. So...

We've talked about how you got Maya and then how you kind of connected instantly. And we also already mentioned about the racism part because you are white, Caucasian, and Maya is Asian. So I imagine you'll get a lot of stares from strangers and group questions. So do you have a few examples that you can tell us to show the kind of situations you guys have been in before?

No, I don't actually, because growing up in the city or living in the city and going to the school that Maya went to, the public school, which had enormous diversity and had a number of families there who had children from China. I have to say that I don't recall a lot of instances that happened in my life. The ones that I recalled for you earlier are ones that I heard about in conversation from people.

And in many cases, they were families who perhaps lived in suburbs where this family experience was less well-known, et cetera. So Maya might remember some that I don't recall, but I don't think that there are

any that I could bring to mind right away. That is not to say that maybe something like this didn't happen to us, but it's not something that has stood out through the years of, you know, through 24 years of banking my memories that sort of comes out to mind for me now. What I think is more the issue is what happened when Maya was out in the world herself.

without being there with me and experienced a different experience in the larger world because of the reactions to her as an Asian girl, young woman, et cetera, when she wasn't in the larger world that maybe our family created.

of the sort of Caucasian privilege, the white privilege. I wish in retrospect that she had potentially shared more of those experiences of what she was confronting in that, you know, in people maybe making comments about her eyes or comments about who she was or putting stereotypical notions onto her because of how she presented herself to the world.

But I've later learned, and only from really listening to some interviews Maya's done and hearing her talk about it, that in fact when she would be out in the world separated from me, separated from the larger white community, there would be instances that wouldn't have happened to her necessarily when she was with me.

That were challenging for her. And now, you know, in the last few years, as you are well aware, there has been a much more of an outright threatening and discrimination and words being put to very confrontationally toward Asians.

basically on the streets, on public transportation, on social media. So I have no doubt that now that she's a young woman and she's out in the world and that she is experiencing what I'm

I've read and seen that many Asian people are experiencing in this country now that we have sort of opened the floodgates to this Asian prejudice and bias that's come out so strongly, in part because of our last president who made it a

point of, you know, of being critical of what he called the Asian flu or the Kung flu or whatever. And that just opened the floodgates to this. So I'm obviously so much more aware of it now than I would have been then. And I think it's so much more present or blatantly present now than it was when Maya was younger and living in just this community, which was perhaps a little bit of a safer space for her.

Definitely. Yeah, I feel like because when you talk about she kind of a bigger Caucasian family and then herself, I kind of feel that must be lonely in some way. Even if you're very empathetic, you cannot 100% understand what she had to go through. No, there's no way that I can 100% understand it because I don't face it every day.

You know, I don't face it when I get on to public transportation or whatever. So no, there's no way that I can understand it fully. I can understand it intellectually. I can read about it. I can understand it in that way, but I can't understand what it's like to live in that every day.

Definitely. I feel I kind of look forward to talk about this part with Maya because I can feel maybe we'll have more similar experience since we both are Asian. So in a more historical perspective, this mass international adoption from China is one unique situation. It likely will never happen again. How do you feel like being a part of this history?

Well, it does appear now that it is going to be a unique, probably a span of maybe 20 year experience. There's going to be a diaspora of these mainly girls, some boys now increasingly as more families adopt boys who have come into the orphanage system with some handicapped, you know, what they call the handicapped children from the orphanages.

So this is definitely going to, it appears, be a kind of a one-time grouping of people who are going to go through life as this sort of, you know, to use a clinical term, a cohort. And I wouldn't be surprised if they're much studied and looked at as they age and go on through. It kind of reminds me in some ways of

of that documentary series where a man started with the children at the age of seven and then every seven years through the 50s. What's wonderful is that as these adoptees move into their 20s now, at least the first vanguard of them,

They are starting to write in their own voices and pushing the parents' voice back. And I think that's exactly right, you know, to say, no, no, no, you don't any longer have to own this story and talk about what our lives are like. We have the agency and the capacity to talk about our own lives and our own experiences. And they're doing so. They're using social media. They're doing blogs. They're doing photo essays. They're doing projects.

for college papers. They're doing projects for graduate studies where they're doing their own investigative studies and publishing their own results. And I think that's really the way it should be, that this is really their experience, their story. And I hope that they do continue to tell it because I think that this is an opportunity to understand what happens

when one country decides that they're going to limit their population and the limitations that they put on it result in those children being adopted into a different society, into with families of a different race. And I think these are going to be

pretty much invaluable stories for us as we become a much more diverse, multicultural, global society to understand this experience. And I think these girls have a lot to share. And if they're willing to do it, I think that there can be an enormous amount that can be learned from so many of us.

And as we see the tensions build governmentally and politically between China and the U.S., I've always hoped that these girls in some way could be a bridge of sort of human connection between these two societies so that we don't lose the sense that there are things that connect us just as there are these political issues that divide us.

But that's a lot to put on them. So I'm not going to say that they have to play that role. They may not want to, and that's fine. But in my vision, in my imagination, I've always imagined that they could play a

key role in reminding all of us as peoples that there are things that connect us that sometimes can be larger than these issues that we have that divide us. But those are their decisions to make. They're a pretty strong group and they've had this understanding from the very beginning of their lives that there is something to the notion of coming together as a community and finding one's power and voice within that kind of community.

So I just hope they'll continue to use it in ways that both teach us. You know, there are now these Facebook groups, and I belong to some of them, in which parents are invited to listen, but they're not invited to comment. And I think that's fine. I think that's great. I mean, if they want to listen and try to learn from what they're hearing from the children that we all raised,

And we can perhaps learn a lot from listening to them. But no, your time is up. No, we don't want to hear your voices. You're not part of this conversation. But if you want to listen in and learn and be educated by what we're saying, and you want to really hear what we're saying, that's fine.

And so I think that's where things should be. I think that's where the conversation should be at this point, and it is, and I'm glad to see it. I'm glad to see many of these young people writing essays. You know, Maya, of course, one of the great things that I think is her contribution is having the courage to go back to her town where she was left as an infant and meet girls her age.

and learn about what their lives were like in those villages where she left because of the one-child policy. And, you know, producing the Touching Home in China story, which will hopefully live forever on the web and become a teaching tool. We hope we have a curriculum for it that you helped us to develop. You know, that is an enormous and huge contribution that Maya has made to this conversation.

It's a rare story to be told that one of the girls adopted has really gone back and done that kind of exploration with girls of her age who grew up in the community where she might have grown up. Who knows? She might have been born to a migrant family. Who knows? We don't know.

But that she had the courage to do that and to have her story be told is something that I'll always be grateful for. And I don't think that it's every 16-year-old who would have said yes when her mother came to her with that idea. And it's something that I just have felt it was an incredible gift that she gave back to her community in having the courage to say yes and going to do that.

Yeah, definitely. Now I can feel honored that I am about the same age with Maya's group so that we kind of grew up together and now we may become mothers.

around the same time. So I'll definitely continue to follow the group. Well, your life too was impacted by the one child policy in a different way. So that's another sort of bridge that you have to understanding kind of the sadness that can come with that and you know the decisions that are made by either government officials or sort of forced on families to make in response to a policy that's been put on them.

I mean, both of your lives were heavily impacted by the same policy with different results, different ways in which you've grown up.

But again, I think of that as more of a bridge between you and the millions of others like you who had that same experience. So there are connections, there are similarities, there are ways to again connect on a human level that can bypass governments' frictions and just bring us together as human beings. Thank you so much for your time.

And thank you. This has been fun. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Okay. See you later. Thank you for listening to the episode. In the next episode, we will hear Maya's story and her take on growing up in the U.S. as a Chinese adoptee.

If you like the show, please share it with your family and friends. You can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts, which will help more people to find the show. If you would like to share your story, please write to me at omama.fm at gmail.com. See you next time.

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