journal features

adopting in China

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Shanghai, 2009.10.25

So it seems that adopting a baby in China is still an option.

I hadn't heard much about that in recent years, but at our hotel there is a large group of Spanish speakers all with babies of about the same age. At first I thought nothing of it. But then Mari quietly said something about "adoption" and I had another look. Sure enough, all of the babies were Asian.

Given that my time as a father has been spent nearly entirely in Asia and that all of the children I know have wholly or partially Asian features, it just didn't dawn on me to look at the 'race' of the babies. Yup, babies all look Asian, makes sense, nothing to see here.

I'm really pleased to see that this is bringing needful parents and children together, even if it does result in the unwitting migration of tiny people to the other side of the world. The parents were uniformly beaming, I'm sure that the children are heading to a better future than they'd know if left unadopted in a country already home to 1.? billion others.

And I have no question as to the perseverance of these new parents. Having spent twenty minutes with Chinese beauracracy just changing some Japanese yen, I can only possibly imagine the dimmest outlines of the nightmare involved in adopting a child in this country. Hotel full of Spanish strangers, I salute you.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)