My Beautiful Orchid

Over the next year her mental and emotional development skyrockets. She’s fascinated by puzzles and routinely completes ones that are designed for ages 8 to 10 with minimal, if any help. At 24 months her speech explodes and by 30 months she is downright articulate and able to carry on details conversations. A few weeks ago at the age of 3½ we saw her pediatrician, who was amazed at her speech and mental development. At Claire’s age, she told me, she’s content with a child’s progress if they can count at least to 3 unaided. Claire counts to 30 unaided, and with minimal assistance to 60. She adds and subtracts single-digit numbers, and is just beginning to learn the concept of multiplication. She knows the entire alphabet, writes her own name, and reads some simple sentences by word recognition. At work I get regular phone calls from her—she understands the speed dial on Audrey’s cell phone and knows when it says “Calling Scott”. Today she’s teaching me Mandarin.

She loves music—Disney, classical, kids bible songs, Norah Jones, and more. She even dances and sings at the top of her little lungs to her favorites (“Em-eye-ceeee-kay-eee-wyyye, EEEMM-OHHHH-YUUUUEESSS-EEEEEEEEEE!”). Ever hungry to learn about her world, she devours books, especially ones with colorful pictures and stories of other places, people, and animals. At 18 months she could identify giraffes, lions, tigers, polar bears, elephants, orcas, sea lions, octopi, and more by sight. Today she recognizes at least 50 other species of plants and animals as well: water lily, edelweiss, rose, walrus, fruit bat (which she distinguishes from the vampire bat and other members of the same family), great blue heron, sandhill crane, bald eagle, flamingo, wolf, tiger, mountain lion, leopard, panther (the last four of which she distinguishes from each other as separate species of large cat), gulper eel, blue crab, swimming shrimp, sea urchin, razor clam, scallop, nautilus, hermit crab, giant squid, bottlenose dolphin (which again, she differentiates from the spinner dolphin and other members of the porpoise family), beluga whale, narwhal, humpback whale, anglerfish, oarfish, queen triggerfish, blue tang (her favorite fish), and many more. In some cases she can discriminate male from female by overt markings or body morphology (including deer, elk, common mallard, and kelp greenling to name a few).

Two months ago at the doctor’s office she notices a boy coloring on the floor. “Daddy, what is that boy drawing? Is that a circle?” “Well, almost honey. It’s a spiral. See how it’s like a circle, but doesn’t quite close back on itself? It gets ever smaller with each revolution until it comes to a point.” “Oh”, she says, and without missing a beat exclaims, “like a galaxy!” She understands that galaxies like the Milky Way are spiraling star clusters. She also understands the sun, stars, planets (Saturn is the one with rings), comets, shooting stars, and the Moon (she even correctly identifies its crescent, half, and full phases—we’re still working on waxing gibbous).

At birth she was abandoned, and for 13 months she languished in institutional anonymity, her little soul starved for love and nurturing. Now, like a sponge she absorbs a whole new world and before our eyes her heart, mind, and soul take shape.

Our beautiful orchid is blooming!

Fortunately, stories like Claire’s are becoming more common. In 1988 the U.S. State Dept. issued 12 immigrant visas for children adopted from Chinese orphanages. In 1992 Beijing relaxed its restrictions on international adoption and the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) was opened in Beijing to oversee the process and serve as a liaison with Social Welfare Institutes. By 1995 over 2,000 immigrant visas were being prepared in the U.S. alone, and by 2002 when my wife and I filed our petition the figure had reached 5,053. Thousands more are being issued to other nations as well and each year the number increases. Thanks to an unprecedented level of Sino-Western cooperation the world has been exposed to a human tragedy of staggering proportions and thousands of families are providing homes to infant girls who would otherwise have little hope. Numerous adoption agencies and relief organizations have established working relationships with hospitals and Social Welfare Institutes. These have led to improvements in living conditions and opportunities for a wide range of medical care, including corrective surgeries that until now had been prohibitively expensive.

And yet, the problem continues to be misunderstood. The underlying forces are well known—a cultural and economic preference for sons, and China’s aggressive population planning efforts. Most Westerners take this at face value. Families want boys, not girls. Beijing wants its population targets met and is pursuing them relentlessly. Infant girls are caught in the crossfire. While there is much truth in this, the realities are far more complex and easily distorted by the Western media and activist groups—many of whom have conflated at least as much as they’ve revealed, ¹ and a few of which have been downright negligent. ²

Patriarchy & Chinese Tradition

Patriarchal traditions are not unique to China. For that matter neither is infanticide or abandonment. But to the Western mind, their epidemic of gender-specific abandonment is as baffling as it is disturbing. Most of us can identify with the desire for a son, but how could any mother or father kill or abandon their own daughter? The problem is more complex than it appears and cannot be understood apart from the traditions that shaped it—traditions that go back nearly 2500 years. Throughout history few thinkers have shaped Chinese culture more than Confucius (551-479 BCE) whose life spanned the final years of the Spring-and-Autumn period (770-476 BCE). This was a time when power became decentralized after the Zhou Dynasty fell in western China and gradually crumbled in the east over the next 3 centuries.