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2. The Hong Kong Project: Chinese International Adoption in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s
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>> 47 2 The Hong Kong Project Chinese International Adoption in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s Without a doubt, China plays a key role in the American public’s understanding of international adoption in the United States. Newspaper and magazine articles about the phenomenon abound. Although Americans also adopt large numbers of Eastern European, Latin American , and other Asian children, Chinese girls have become the poster children of international and transracial adoption, if not contemporary American adoption in general. In the twenty-first century the image of American families adopting from China has become increasingly mainstream.1 In the April 2007 issue of O: The Oprah Magazine, a photograph of Chinese adoptees is featured in the article “Speak Easy: What Never to Say to an Adopted Child.” At the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, where many American adoptive families stay in China to complete visa paperwork, one can purchase “Going Home Barbie,” a Barbie who is cradling a Chinese baby.2 Adoption from China is a powerful visual example of contemporary American multiculturalism because it is predominantly transracial with white American parents adopting the majority of Chinese children . Published in 2000, Rose Lewis’s children’s picture book I Love You Like Crazy Cakes features an American woman who travels to China to adopt a baby girl. Based on Lewis’s personal experiences as an adoptive mother, the book became a New York Times best seller and garnered several awards, including a Child Magazine’s Best Books of the Year 2000 award and a Children’s Crown Gallery Award. In 2006, the book was adapted into an animated feature for a Scholastic video collection about different families entitled I Love You Like Crazy Cakes . . . and More Stories about Families. In most accounts, the history of international adoption from China begins in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the concurrent emergence 48 > 49 U.S. military involvement, and the rescue of war orphans and mixedrace children, by contrast Chinese adoptees are hardly perceived as war orphans in the U.S. public imagination. Rather, international adoption from China is cast as one of the most socioeconomically privileged forms of modern family formation with solidly middle-class if not wealthy Americans adopting Chinese girls. This popular narrative of the history of Chinese international adoption has overshadowed an earlier period of Chinese adoption in the United States. My research in the archival records of the International Social Service-United States of America (ISS-USA) branch reveals that beginning in the late 1950s, Chinese American and white American families adopted Chinese children in increasing numbers. The ISSUSA facilitated the adoptions of Chinese refugee children from Hong Kong under the auspices of what their social workers called “the Hong Kong Project.” The deplorable, severely overcrowded living conditions of Chinese refugees who fled from communist mainland China to Hong Kong resulted in the increasing abandonment of their children. Beginning in 1958, the ISS-USA collaborated with Hong Kong agencies to facilitate the international adoption of Chinese orphans in the United States. Initially, the project targeted Chinese American communities for the recruitment of potential adoptive parents, but the ISS-USA considered families of any ethnic group. The majority of these placements involved the adoption of “known” children by Chinese American families , meaning that the adoptive parents either knew of the child through a friend or other intermediary in Hong Kong or were even related to the child. However, American social workers observed with surprise that white American families were also eager to adopt these children. By the early 1960s, more than five hundred Chinese children had been adopted under the auspices of the Hong Kong Project. In 1962, a special flight of forty-eight Chinese orphans arriving in the United States for adoption received significant national publicity in mainstream and local newspapers. Yet, despite recent media attention to other historical international airlifts of children such as Operation Babylift during the Vietnam War, this airlift of Chinese orphans has been forgotten today. The history of this earlier period of Chinese international adoption in the United States is significant in two major ways. First, it illuminates 50 > 51 significantly, even exceeding interest in adoptions from Japan and Korea. By January 1, 1959, the ISS-USA was processing 139 cases of children from Hong Kong for adoption in the United States, exceeding the numbers of cases from Japan (26) and Korea (49).9 The change derived from the introduction of the Hong Kong Project and the active recruitment...