Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China
by Kay Ann Johnson

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• ISBN13: 9780963847270
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China

Book Review: An adoptive Mom who's NOT disappointed
Summary: 5 Stars

Why does Disappointed appear to be so angry with adoptive parents in China, or with Kay Ann Johnson for talking about in-country adoption? I don't think the book is trying to promote domestic adoption as if it doesn't already exist, and as a replacement for international adoption. Johnson shows that it's been happening for quite a while, and that these families suffer all sorts of discrimination and obstacles because they adopted foundlings outside the social welfare system.

I think Johnson is just saying that there are hundreds of thousands of adoptive families in China, far far more than the rest of us who have adopted, and that these families and their adopted daughters deserve better than they are now getting from their government. Johnson isn't facilitating these adoptions, but Disappointed seems to blame her, and would question the love a Chinese woman can have for the baby she finds on her doorstep.

What's embarrassing is the entitlement and me-centeredness in Disappointment's note. Does she really believe that she is superior to a Chinese adoptive parent? Encouraging full citizenship for Chinese girls adopted domestically and encouraging a change in the law so that more Chinese parents can adopt legally does not make Johnson the enemy of international adoption; she is an adoptive parent herself.

I'm always appalled by people like Disappointed who say it's not about "the material and educational advantages that many of our daughters enjoy" when that's EXACTLY what they think it's about. Yes, we all deeply and sincerely want our children, and we can give them much besides family and love, but we can't give them a life within their birth culture, free from the complications of being an Asian Adoptee in a White World.

So Disappointed had to deal with endless bureaucracy and travel half way around the world to have a daughter. Was that really so hard? Should that really be a deciding factor in who might want these girls more? Does it compare to what her counterparts in China have to put up with, when they decide to adopt and raise a foundling? Her tone seems to declare "I'm better than that woman in China, because all she did was open her door, while I had to do paperwork!"

Johnson has tremendous empathy and compassion for adoptive families in China, who by and large have a much harder road than we do. Disappointed would do well to cultivate some of that empathy and compassion herself. Every minute of every day I am thankful for my daughters, but I just can't let myself think, the way Disappointed does, that I am somehow more entitled than anyone else or able to want them more than anyone else, least of all the adoptive families in China who endure far more than we do in order to have their daughters.

Summary of Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China

Those touched by adoption from China want to know why so many healthy infant girls are in Chinese orphanages. This book provides the most thorough answer to date. Johnson?s research overturns stereotypes and challenges the conventional wisdom on abandonment and adoption in modern China.

Certainly, as Johnson shows, many Chinese parents feel a great need for a son to carry on the family name and to care for them in their old age. At the same time, the government?s strict population policy puts great pressure on parents to limit births. As a result, some parents are able to obtain a son only by resorting to illegal behavior, such as "overquota" births and female infant abandonment.

Yet the Chinese today value daughters more highly than ever before. As many of Johnson?s respondents put it, "A son and a daughter make a family complete." How can these seemingly contradictory trends--the widespread desire for a daughter as well as a son, and the revival of female infant abandonment--be happening in the same place at the same time? Johnson looks at abandonment together with two other practices: population planning and adoption. In doing so, she reveals all three in a new light.

Johnson shows us that a rapidly changing culture in late twentieth-century China hastened a positive revaluation of daughters, while new policies limiting births undercut girls? improving status in the family. Those policies also revived and exacerbated one of the worst aspects of traditional patriarchal practices: the abandonment of female infants.

Yet Chinese parents are not literally forced to abandon female infants in order to have a son. While birth-planning enforcement can be coercive, parents who abandon are rarely prosecuted. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Chinese parents informally adopt female foundlings and raise them as their own. Ironically, as Johnson shows, in some places adoptive parents are more likely than abandoning parents to incur fines and discrimination.

In addressing all these issues, Johnson brings the skills of a China specialist who has spent over a decade researching her subject. She also brings the concerns of an adoptive parent who hopes that this book might help others find answers to the question, What can we tell our children about why they were abandoned and why they were available for international adoption?

Children's Books

• Subjects > Children's Books
• Parenting & Relationships > Adoption
• Current Events > Poverty > Social Services & Welfare
• Politics
• Social Sciences