Beyond the Lion Dance

By Jeff Gammage
New York Times

Jin Yu is 7 now, and lately she’s been telling me she wants to go and visit her nannies, the women who cared for her at the orphanage in China.

Not so much for herself, she says, but for them. Because she is sure they must miss her and wonder how she’s doing.

I promise we will try to go.

“They are going to be so surprised!” she tells me.

I hope so. But the turnover in Chinese orphanages can be steep. Low pay and 24-hour shifts are not strong inducements for tenure. A friend recently sent photos from the orphanage in Xiangtan, where my daughter spent her first two years, and I didn’t see one nanny I recognized. There’s every chance that by the time Jin Yu returns, everyone who might remember her will be gone.

I wonder if my child is hoping to visit people as much as a time and place, to somehow grab hold of a life that fell away when she was a toddler. If in wanting to visit her nannies, she is seeking to regain part of what she surrendered in coming to this country.

But I can’t give my daughter China. I can only give her Chinatown.

Every Saturday morning, my wife and I take Jin Yu to Lion Dance class, watching as she and the other children practice their steps under the critical eye of their sifu. The troupe’s public performances dictate the schedule of our lives the way those of other families are organized around travel soccer. On Tuesday nights, Jin Yu and her little sister, Zhao Gu, attend a Chinese culture class near our home, learning the Mandarin words for vegetables and fruits, dancing with long blue-and-yellow ribbons, and helping to make dumplings and wontons.

Jin Yu Gammage, 7, at the Mid-Autumn Festival in Philadelphia in September. (Photo: Jeff Gammage)Is that enough? Or perhaps too much? Jin Yu is old enough to be enchanted by China, although Zhao Gu, at 4, is much more interested in Leap Pad than the Great Leap Forward.

My daughters are two of the nearly 62,000 Chinese children who have been adopted into new homes in this country during the last 15 years. Almost all are girls, abandoned by Chinese parents barred from having “extra” children and pressured to raise sons. For these kids, a new family comes at high cost: their language, their food, the sights and smells of their homeland, the faces of their countrymen.

My wife and I try to mend that severed connection by making China an integral part of our lives, expressed in everything from the music we buy to the art we hang on the walls. But culture is a tricky thing. And in me, my daughters have a poor teacher. I have no experience at being Chinese.

Certainly my parents never felt the need to drag me to fiddle lessons and clog-dancing contests to show me I was Irish. They didn’t send me to after-school classes to learn about the Great Famine. Then again, they didn’t have to. For them, and through them for me, the past was close behind. How my maternal grandfather dropped the “Mc” from the start of his surname, because to be identified as Irish was to go without work. How my paternal grandfather trained horses in Ireland and America. How his wife tried to teach her children – my father among them – to speak Gaelic. How that language disappeared within a generation, and none mourned its passing, the ways of the old country no longer relevant or useful.

I worry I’m succeeding only at forging my children’s links to a vanished, historical China. That knowing the starting and ending points of the Great Wall, the home city of the famous Terra Cotta warriors or the animals of the Chinese Zodiac will do little to help them thrive as Asian girls living in 21st Century America.

A Chinese friend who visited from Beijing thinks I’m daft, lugging my girls to New Year’s banquets and dragon-boat races. “They are not Chinese. They are American,” she told me. She meant American in more than address, American in a way that’s obvious to anyone who is not from America. It’s the way they stand, how they carry themselves, the cut of their hair, the things they find funny or sad.

The irony is that in this country, my daughters are seen as wholly, fully Chinese. Indeed it is Chinese blood that runs in their veins.

Like every father and mother, I know that later on, it will be all my fault — as it has been the fault of parents through millennia. So when that time comes, when Jin Yu is a teenager, full of the certainty of her years, which blame can I live with? For having dragged her to National Day parades and Moon Festivals? Or for not having done so, for having let the tie to her past slip away like the string of a wind-tossed kite?

At least I get to pick.

I hope someday my daughter will see that her mom and dad made an effort, however flawed and imperfect, to restore part of what was taken from her. I hope if we do return to China that some of what Jin Yu learns in this country will help her make sense of that one. That if we can visit the orphanage, she will feel at ease, even if she doesn’t feel at home.

Jin Yu asks me if her nannies loved her, and I tell her I am sure that they did.
I ask what she plans to say to them.

“I’ll say, ‘Ni hao,’” she answers. “I still speak a little Chinese.”

http://relativechoices.blogs.nytimes.com/author/jgammage/





China-Babies Research