Reflections on a Journey to China
The Rev. Meg A. Riley
Director, UUA Advocacy and Witness
(November 18, 2003) We all went to China on a fact-finding mission
about family planning. But I personally also embarked on a “Story
Finding Mission.” When you adopt a child from another country,
as I did from China in 1997, stories are essential. In the absence
of real information, we invent what we need to know. But I learned
on our trip that some of the stories that I am passing down to my
daughter are simply not true in 2003. My stories have changed.
My delegation visited the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region—sort
of the North Dakota of China. Not a place I ever expected to go.
We spoke with women, men and children in remote villages, basically
knocking on their doors and engaging in outrageously intimate conversations
involving birth control, abortion, and other things I don’t
speak with many friends and family with on such a personal level.
What I learned in several counties is that Chinese people are making
decisions by weighing factors as complex as any Americans as they
make these decisions. Cost of children’s education, quality
of life for parents and children, time pressures balancing work
and parenting. I felt like I was with my peers. I realized with
horror that, unconsciously, I expected these folks to be a little
slower than me, a little less sophisticated. I was wrong.
Most of my friends could not verbalize, for instance, the pros
and cons of various birth control methods nearly as well as these
folks!
I was also deeply moved by the pride and delight that the Chinese
people, at a village level, express about being part of the United
Nations. They take UN commitments to human rights very seriously.
Indeed, several times we were asked by bewildered people just how
it was that we had so many children being born to teenagers. Were
they getting good information about reproductive choice options?
We were asked. Doesn’t the UN say we have to provide that?
Another story that has transformed for me, and I am eager to share
with other adoptive parents, is the much-repeated ‘truth’
that girl children are simply not as valued in China as boys. With
a 1.3 billion people, truth is always complex. But birthrate demographics
alone show that in many regions across the land, the differential
between male and female births is evening out. And in all parts
of China it is illegal for technology to be used to inform a woman
of the gender of her unborn child—family planning officials
are fired if they violate this.
Over and over, parents in China expressed to us that daughters
are as precious to them as sons. For the Hui people, who are allowed
2 people, but where the birthrate is under 1.4, I heard NO evidence
that the gender of the first child determined their decision about
a second child.
Obviously, none of the people I encountered in my journey can speak
for “China” any more than I speak for “The United
States.” However, the many conversations I had left me much
less likely to assert my old stories as fact, and much more eager
to learn from the dynamic, quickly changing peoples who inhabit
the land of my daughter’s birth.
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