| Emmie's impressions By Kathy Nieber-Lathrop |
| "My birth mother could have left me there," Emmie sighed. "What?" I asked, not quite believing what I heard. "I could have been left in one of those rice paddies, couldn't I?" asked my pensive 10-year-old Chinese-American daughter. "Your birth mother was very brave and wanted you to live. That's why she left you in a safe, public place where you could be found," I managed to stammer trying hard not to cry. Emmie just looked at me, sighed, and turned back to looking out the window of the tour van. My husband, Dick, and I had planned this trip to China for years. We knew we wanted to take our two Chinese-American daughters to their birth country when they were old enough to remember the experience. We included Emmie, age 10, and Maia, age 8, in the planning process. When we discussed the itinerary and how we would visit their orphanages in Hunan Province, they both said, "Why do we want to see them? We want to see the Great Wall and the elephant that drank the water dry." They had wonderful images in their minds from seeing the Big Bird Goes to China video many times. None of these planning discussions had prepared me to answer Emmie's soul-searching question. Dick and I had talked very openly to both girls about their "birth stories." Like so many other Chinese baby girls they were abandoned or "forsaked," as their adoption papers say, and brought to the orphanage soon after their births. Emmie was found at the Yueyang railroad station. Maia was found on a busy road on the way into Chenzhou. Emmie knew from her story that several hundreds of thousands infant girls were often left in rice paddies because of the "family planning" policy repercussions in China. I don't think she felt the impact of the fate of her Chinese cousins who did not make it to the orphanage until she saw the actual rice paddies. Emmie asked me another ponderous question when we were in Beijing. "Why aren't the people in China nice?" I was confused by the question and asked her what she meant. "I smile at the desk clerks and the bell hops and say 'Nia hao' and they don't say anything to me. They don't even look at me." |
| "How does this make you feel?" I asked, hoping that she would keep talking. She did. "Sad, because it makes me feel like I don't exist." My beautiful, extremely friendly, vivacious daughter is used to engaging people wherever she goes. She is very talkative and can usually charm a smile out of the most taciturn of people. She is most loved and appreciated in our immediate and extended family, the neighborhood, and her school that it was hard for her to be ignored -- like she didn't exist. The second time the subject came up we were in Xian, getting ready to visit the Terra Cotta Warrior exhibits. This time it wasn't a question that started the conversation, but an exclamation, "The Chinese are not nice!" We had just eaten lunch and were looking at some souvenirs in the adjoining gift shop. The girls were used to the swarm of shop clerks who would persist in "giving us a good price" every time we stopped to look. So they walked ahead of me and were looking at some Chinese kites. I watched as the clerk angrily pushed Emmie and Maia aside as she saw me, a potential Caucasian customer, near her booth. I put my arms around them and said "daughters" in Mandarin. The woman smiled at me and then tried to regain my good graces. "Bu yung, xie, xie," I said. "No, thank you." As we scurried away with flocks of clerks following us, Emmie just looked at me with sad, confused eyes and said, "See, I told you." Dick and I thought we were preparing the girls for the cultural shock of the mass of humanity that they would encounter. We said that we would be in the minority and that everyone else would look like them. We thought it would be a positive thing that the girls would now be in the majority, instead of in the minority of our basically White community in Wisconsin. In China, they would see others who had the same black hair and deep brown eyes. They were both excited about seeing their Chinese cousins. As it turned out, Dick and I received a lot of attention because we were Caucasian. At the Great Wall, we were asked by perfect strangers if they could take our picture. The girls were pushed out of the way as the strangers made way for themselves in the picture. I naively thought, at first, that they wanted to take a picture of my beautiful daughters. China has so many beautiful daughters that they almost do become invisible. Ironically, when some shop clerks did find out that the girls were our adopted children and not the daughters of the Chinese couple that we traveled with, they were very attentive to us, but not them. However, the clerks were happy for the girls. They called Emmie and Maia, "lucky girls." We told them that we were the lucky ones. The last time Emmie talked about the Chinese not being nice she added to her exclamation that they were not nice because they were so serious. City after city she saw the Chinese in their daily struggles to survive. After we visited a 300-year old countryside home without running water or plumbing, I asked Emmie if she would like to live there. "No way! I like my own home. People here are so poor. I don't want to be poor." We had a desire that the girls could see the country of their births as we saw it -- so incredibly beautiful with its mountains, rivers, and lakes. They did. They loved the bamboo raft ride the most because it meandered leisurely down a small river near Guillin (and because some young boys sprayed their dad with a squirt gun and called him "lao wei" -- old foreigner). We wanted them to get a flavor of the Chinese culture that is embedded in their DNA. I think they did soak up a lot of the culture. But I think they went away feeling disconnected from the Chinese people that they met. They often hid behind me when people tried to talk to them in Mandarin. Emmie said that she was tired of having them look at her like she was an idiot because she didn't answer. One of our Chinese tour guides said that our girls were bananas -- "yellow on the outside and white on the inside." He said that is what they call Chinese who are not really Chinese. The trip was a trip of a lifetime for all of us. The reality of some of our experiences was different from our expectations. But different is OK. I can live with different and so can my daughters. They're survivors and they can survive being Chinese who are not really Chinese. They are Chinese American now. |
| Kathy Nieber-Lathrop is the mother of Emily Jingwen Nieber Lathrop and Maia Jinzhe Nieber Lathrop. Nieber-Lathrop and her husband Richard Lathrop were assisted in their adoption of both girls by Holt International Adoption Agency in 1996 and 1999. |
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