International Network Connects Chinese Adoptees

According to Chinese folklore, babies are born with invisible red threads that connect their spirits with those who will be important in their lives. As children grow older, the threads shorten, drawing them closer to those within their destiny.

Jennifer Jue-Steuck with Emma Perry, Nora Groves, Jacquelyn Floyd, Lea Waller, Rachel Floyd, and Karis Barker. (Photo by Jeri Floyd.)

Adopted from Taiwan at age two, Jennifer Jue-Steuck had a Chinese American adoptive mother who helped her understand the red threads that connected her to Chinese culture and history. Now she is hoping to strengthen threads between Chinese adoptees around the world through Chinese Adoptee Links International (www.chineseadopteelinks.org), a group that seeks to connect adoptees online and help them meet each other through sponsored events, such as the one held in Los Angeles earlier this month.

Since the early 1990s, the single largest source of Asian adoptees has been mainland China. Today, more than 100,000 Chinese babies have been adopted by families in developed countries around the world, including 62,000 in the U.S. Because of China’s one-child policy, hundreds of thousands of female babies are abandoned at orphanages each year. About 95 percent of transracially adopted children are female.

While in Europe last summer doing research on adoption literature, Jue-Steuck, 29, had a life-changing moment when she encountered a little Chinese girl and her Spanish mother on a Barcelona street. “The honking horns and chorus of city sounds faded away. … All I could see were the girl’s soft brown eyes desperately searching mine, as if to say, ‘Are you my birthmom?’ recalled Jue-Steuck. “I began to think about what responsibility I have to share what I’ve gained to help other Chinese adoptees connect with who they are, where they come from and the importance of their collective voices.”

“You’re bound to realize very early that you’re different than most people around you,” continued Jue-Steuck, who was raised in the wealthy Southern California city of Laguna Beach. “There is a longing to find other people like you and a need to connect based on common experiences.”

Many adoptive parents of young Chinese children find commonality through organizations such as Families With Children From China, a network of locally based groups across the U.S. These networks offer not only advice and support during the international adoption process, but also provide educational and cultural programs for child adoptees and their families.

“Once adoptees enter college or leave home, they suddenly find themselves removed from, not only their families, but also from any network of other adoptive families and fellow adoptees they might have connected with earlier,” said Jeri Floyd, president of the Southern California FCC chapter. “An organization like CAL will help our children stay connected, filling a void and forging a lifelong bond unlike any other.”

Since April, Jue-Steuck, a former travel writer and a graduate of Harvard and NYU, has met with hundreds of adoptees and families in more than a dozen cities in Europe and North America. She started a pen pal program. “We have thousands of pre-teen and teenaged Chinese adoptees who will be reaching an age soon when they will probably be asking a lot of questions about their origins and identities,” said Jue-Steuck.

“Transracial adoptees form a unique identity that is composed of a combination of identifying with the ‘minority experience,’ knowledge and values from the white culture, and aspects of their birth culture,” said Dr. Amanda Baden, a board member of the group and a New York City psychologist who studies and counsels transracial adoptees and their families.

Jue-Steuck envisions the network as helping to spin red threads, connecting adoptees around the world “with their sisters and brothers in faraway places, and linking all of us with our ancestral culture, history, people and offering us the potential to weave a tapestry of dreams that transcends borders and boundaries,” said Jue-Steuck. “Who knows what we can accomplish together.”