The Chinese in America (52 page)

Many Chinese immigrant scientists had originally entered the labs because they appeared to offer not only an intellectual environment, but also the secure haven that had eluded their early years. As immigrants who had fled war and revolution since childhood, many longed for a certain measure of peace and stability. Now they began to wonder about their decision. “In hindsight, there are some things I might have done differently,” Wen Ho Lee later wrote. “I might have made different career decisions, maybe going to work in private industry, or teaching at a university, rather than devoting more than twenty years to the national laboratories.”

In response to Lee’s experience, many have urged scientists of Chinese heritage not to work in the field of government defense. “Boycott Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and other national labs run by the Energy Department,” read one Web page that supported Wen Ho Lee. “Don’t apply for jobs there. You’ll just be a high-tech coolie, a glass ceiling will prevent you from advancing, and they’ll do to you what they did to Wen Ho Lee.” The unofficial boycott was a success. In February 2000, not one single Chinese graduate student from universities in the PRC, Taiwan, or the United States applied for the top postdoctoral fellowships at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Before the Lee affair, about half of the ten finalists would have been ethnic Chinese.

The boycott led to protracted negotiations between officials at the national laboratories and Chinese American activists, which, as this book went to press, had not yet been resolved. And the boycott was soon followed by litigation. In March 2002, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of hundreds of Asian American employees at Lawrence Livermore who alleged they were victims of discrimination.

Only time will tell if the racial profiling tactics and obsessive security measures of the late 1990s have jeopardized U.S. national security more than protecting it. According to Michael May, a Stanford University physicist, the United States evolved as the world’s leader in technology because for more than a century it had embraced the talent of foreign immigrants in academia, industry, and government. The nation’s entire scientific system—its universities, companies, and defense institutes—had been fueled by a brain tap from other countries, European as well as Asian. In the first half of the twentieth century, men like Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller enriched the American scientific community and assisted, either directly or indirectly, the nation’s national defense. In the second half through to the twenty-first century, Asian immigrants have also been making important contributions.

The degree to which the United States academic community has benefited from the Chinese is borne out by statistics. By the end of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants constituted the largest group of foreign students in the United States, mostly concentrated in science and engineering. In 1997, about half of all foreign scientists with doctorates in the U.S. came from either the PRC or Taiwan. If the scientists of Chinese heritage from other regions were included, the numbers would be even higher.

Officials at Los Alamos had to confront their need for foreign brainpower when in 1999 they advertised a postdoctoral position in nuclear materials—and not one of the twenty-four applicants was American. They also learned that the fallout from the Wen Ho Lee case had cost them several world-class Chinese scientists. One was Feng Gai, an expert on the proteins that might unlock the secrets of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. When the Department of Energy fired Wen Ho Lee, it ordered Feng Gai to stay home from work while Los Alamos erected a new screening system for foreigners. At this point, the lab lost him to the University of Pennsylvania, which gave him a professorship in chemistry as well as a new $400,000 laboratory. In a
Newsweek
“My Turn” column, David Pines, a senior scientist at Los Alamos, wrote that he had discouraged a brilliant young scientist from the PRC from accepting a postdoc at the lab, because he “felt his every move would be monitored.” Pines wondered “whether we’ve lost a chance to attract to America a major contributor to science—and a potential Nobel laureate.”

 

 

For Chinese American intellectuals not interested in working for the government, the 1990s were a time of extremes. Some “high-tech” Chinese made fortunes, while others were badly fleeced. The media depicted them as moguls and geniuses, crooks and spies. But no matter how great the economic and political pressures against them, these could not compare to the experiences of another population, mostly hidden from view. This group of Chinese immigrants—the “low-tech” Chinese—came from the poorest echelons of society, and their fates differed widely, depending on a random throw of life’s dice.

One group of new émigrés was Chinese baby girls, abandoned by their biological parents in China and adopted by American families. Perhaps it was inevitable that China, an overpopulated nation filled with parents who could not afford to feed their children, would provide the answer to thousands of desperate couples in the United States, a country with soaring infertility rates and a diminished supply of infants available for adoption.

This emigration pattern grew out of a Chinese experiment in social engineering. The Chinese population had exploded under the leadership of Mao, who had long considered birth control a form of genocide. In 1979, to reverse the trend, the Deng administration created the “one-child family” policy: couples who gave birth to only one child received better government benefits, while those who had more than one could be penalized with heavy fines. The goal was to shrink the population to 700 million people by the year 2030.

But centuries-old traditions die hard. In China, a woman’s value historically hinged on her ability to give birth to sons to preserve the family name. Restricted to one child, families in some regions came to consider female life so worthless that they did not even bother to name daughters; in those same areas, many couples were willing to risk everything, even government persecution, to try to have a male heir.

After the 1982 Chinese census revealed the population had surpassed one billion people, the one-child policy was enforced rigorously, even ruthlessly. To circumvent the law, Chinese couples who longed for sons hid their daughters with relatives, or, in extreme cases, even resorted to infanticide or abandonment. Female Chinese babies began to turn up in public areas such as parks, bus stations, on the doorsteps of orphanages, and even at the side of the road. Occasionally, handwritten notes were tucked into her clothes. “Owing to the current political situation and heavy pressures that are too difficult to explain, we, who were her parents for these first days, cannot continue taking care of her,” one note read. “We can only hope that in this world there is a kind-hearted person who will care for her. Thank you. In regret and shame, your father and mother.”

The sheer number of homeless girls overwhelmed Chinese orphanages, and underfunding and understaffing soon led to monstrous conditions. Eyewitnesses described babies who had starved or choked to death because they were tied to beds during feedings. Without shoes or socks, barely covered with thin cotton clothes, even in freezing weather, these children were often kept strapped to chairs, cribs, or toilets for days. In 1995, a journalist from the German magazine
Der Spiegel
described the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute as a “children’s gulag”:

Possibly to relieve the orphanages of their workload, in 1992 mainland China began encouraging large-scale international adoption. That year, about two hundred children from China joined American families. Payment for services often occurred under mysterious circumstances (some American parents were asked to donate $3,000 in $100 bills to an orphanage), causing the U.S. media to hint at a profit motive. In 1993, the New York Times Sunday magazine ran a cover story about adoptions from China under the headline “China’s Market in Orphan Girls,” calling the babies “the Newest Chinese Export.” In response, the PRC temporarily shut down its adoption program, but resumed it shortly afterward—no doubt because the American demand for Chinese children was simply too great for the program to end permanently.

Because of a trend among American women to delay marriage and childbearing in favor of their careers, there were, by the end of the twentieth century, greater numbers of affluent, childless couples eager to adopt. But they also had to compete for fewer available children, because growing social acceptance of single mothers in the United States meant more of these mothers were keeping babies born out of wedlock. Moreover, the United States adoption system had become a bureaucratic nightmare, and other countries enforced strict rules regarding international adoptions, which favored younger, traditional, and heterosexual couples. For many Americans, adopting a baby girl from China was their only opportunity to start a family, and between 1985 and 2002, Americans adopted more than thirty-three thousand infants from the PRC—the largest source of American adoptions from abroad.
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The typical couple adopting a Chinese immigrant baby was educated, older, and upper-middle-class. According to one study, their median age was 42.7 years, and about 65 percent of them had completed postgraduate studies. Because most Americans could not afford the cost of adopting a baby from China (from $15,000 to $20,000), the median household income of those adopting in the 1990s was high, in the $70,000-to-$90,000 range. The process was not only expensive but tedious and laborious, requiring background checks by the FBI, a visit from a social worker, fingerprinting by the police, and filing papers with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Typically, the adopting parents had to wait a year and a half just to have the paperwork completed.

The wait period was excruciating for many couples, especially as some formed psychological bonds with their future children even before meeting them in China. For instance, one Massachusetts woman had already received a photograph of the Chinese baby she would be adopting when the PRC abruptly closed its adoption program after the negative
New York Times
Sunday magazine article. “She spent eight months in purgatory, looking at that picture and thinking about how her baby was faring in a very distant country and orphanage,” wrote Christine Kukka in the anthology
A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China.
Shanti Fry remembered writing a new will: “I thought that if I got a child, Jeff and I could be traveling back with her from China and the plane would crash and somehow I would die and Jeff and the baby would survive—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!”

For the lucky, the long-anticipated date would eventually arrive. The adoptive parents would fly to China, meet with orphanage officials, and receive their babies in hotel rooms and lobbies. After the realities of parenthood sank in—the diapers, the squalls, the constant feedings—some agonized over the best way to handle the ethnicity of their new children. Should they be reared as Americans or as Chinese? Would the child be culturally deprived after leaving her homeland? Jean H. Seeley remembered fighting back tears when she boarded the airplane with her new daughter. “Say good-bye to China, I don’t know when you will be back again,” she told her infant. Then she wondered, “Was it the right thing to take her to grow up in a country where she would be a minority?”

That their children would one day grow up and suffer racism was evident from remarks uttered from strangers. “Why are you kissing that child?” demanded a Los Angeles police officer when he saw a Caucasian mother nuzzling her toddler from China. After the expense and time required to adopt a baby, it did not occur to many parents that they might be viewed as kidnappers or pedophiles. They were shocked by the crudeness and insensitivity of other Americans. Some heard their children called “a chink baby” and suffered offhand jokes, like “Couldn’t get a white one, huh?” Others received hostile stares from men who had served in the Vietnam War. One outraged parent even met a Vietnam War veteran who told her baby that he had “killed a lot of your cousins.”

They knew their children would one day question their own identity, and the mystery surrounding their birth and first months. Some infants were found with gifts from the birth parents—sometimes a bracelet, a pendant, a sack of rice—while others bore tiny scars or birth-marks on their skin. Were these clues that might be used one day to trace their children to their original families? The children themselves, especially the precocious ones, were tormented by the enigma. Several Chinese daughters demanded to know why they were orphaned at birth, venting their confusion during temper tantrums: “You’re mean,” one daughter screamed.
“I want my other Mommy in China!”

To handle these challenges, many parents did their best to teach their children about their heritage. They delved into ancient Chinese mythology, Confucian philosophy, and the novels of Pearl Buck. Although this education was not really Chinese, but rather an American interpretation of Chinese culture, the effort, nonetheless, was genuine. One proud parent announced that “we shop at Asian markets, we go to festivals.” Her daughters loved pandas, could identify China on a map, and could recite all the Chinese spoken in Big Bird Goes to China. The parents also networked with each other, exchanging information and child-rearing tips through Internet organizations such as Families with Children from China.