members of the China 46 group gather for their 10-year reunion

It’s been 10 years since these families first met, but something deeper than mere familiarity underlies the words and gestures that pass between them. They are members of the 46th group from the adoption agency Wide Horizons to make a trip to China, and they are united by the empathy that comes with a shared adoption experience. They all went through months of paperwork, endless waiting and, finally, the voyage to China to meet their adopted children. Every year since the initial adoption journey, one of the families hosts a reunion gathering—a chance for parents and children to reconnect and observe how each child has grown over the years.This year’s reunion marked a full decade together as friends and, in a sense, family. 

This year’s host was the Salas family of Durham, and they took great pains to make the reunion memorable, planning months in advance and organizing everything from the canopy tents down to the little plates of stuffed tomatoes. Even Mei-Lin, the youngest Salas girl, has contributed to the event. Outside by the pool stand two Slushie machines she personally requested.

On the morning of Saturday, June 23, Carrie Salas was on the front lawn, tying streamers decorated with brightly colored oriental artwork to the fence along the driveway. As she finished tying the last string of ribbon, a van pulled up beside her. It was still too early for guests, and the white lettering on the rear window read, “Caution, wedding cake on board.” “The cake!” Salas exclaimed, and unveiled the pièce de résistance of the day’s celebration—a culinary masterpiece consisting of three layers decked out in Chinese lettering and topped with the unmistakable thatched roofing that signifies East-Asian architecture. Perched on a little red couch beside the structure are almost a dozen little babies crafted of white chocolate, an edible image reminiscent of the first photo taken of the 46 group, but altered to show a slightly different mood than the one Carrie describes in her account of the trip to China. 

the Salas family

Carrie says her initial motivation to adopt came from hearing stories that her husband Bill told after coming back from business trips to China. “Billy was doing a lot of business in China, and the one-child policy just tore my heart out, basically,” Carrie said. “I just figured maybe we could do some good.” Aside from the political conditions in China, her attraction to the country as a place to adopt came from a desire that she now wholly regrets. “I didn’t want a child that would go in search of her birth mother, and I figured if I went to China I wouldn’t have to deal with that. Now, that’s the last thing I would think. It was immature on my part. I’d be more than happy for Mei to find her birth parents, so I could give her back!” she jokes, ruffling Mei’s hair.

After a bit of research, Carrie and Bill decided to adopt through Wide Horizons for Children, an adoption agency based out of Waltham, Mass. They started on the paperwork. At one point during the process, the Chinese government put a hold on all international adoptions, and the Salas family could do nothing but sit and wait for the situation to resolve itself. They compensated by plastering photos of Mei all over the house. Unfortunately for Carrie, her months of anticipation did not quite prepare her for the reality of the trip.

While most families wanted nothing more after a long plane trip than to see the child they’d been waiting for, the Chinese government apparently had other ideas. “They make you jump through hoops before you actually get your baby,” Carrie said. “They shuttle you around to places they want you to visit, and then finally you go to the adoption center. I really think it’s all a ploy to take your dollars.” Some families enjoy the sightseeing prelude to adoption, but Carrie’s thoughts were preoccupied with seeing her child, and the tour seemed like yet another obstacle to endure. When she finally met one-year-old Mei-Lin, her anticipations were all but thrown in her face. “My time in China was miserable because Mei was cared for by a man, and she just hated women,” Carrie said. “She wouldn’t let me touch her. She hated me. I would touch Billy, and she would scream at me. I was like, ‘My gosh, I waited two years to get this baby, and she doesn’t even want me.’” Carrie videotaped the rejection that she received, narrating it with comments like “Mei, I’m taping this so in 10 years you’ll see what you did to me.”

Despite the emotional letdown that she experienced, Carrie still managed to take in most of the positive parts of the trip. “The people on the street were amazing,” she said. “All the old women would come up on the street and congratulate us. I think they were really glad that someone was taking care of their babies.”
Mei-Lin, like many of the girls in the group, was found with nothing to identify her except the necklace that carried her date of birth. Any other information could incriminate the parents, who would be punished for keeping the additional child.

The Hutchins-Willingham Family

Mark Hutchins of Brattleboro, Vt., had a similar first experience while adopting his daughter, Grace. “The process was a long one, and involves a lot of paperwork on both sides,” Hutchins said. “We had a process that was more like two years when we thought it would be more like a year.” For Mark, the first contact with his child also left a lot to be desired. “The first 24 hours were not easy,” Hutchins said. “We were just given this baby who was not at all happy being where she was.” But Grace seems more than happy with her present situation and is thriving both scholastically and personally.

In an effort to foster a stronger parent-child attachment and to give Grace a more individualized school experience, the Hutchins-Willingham family decided to take their child out of public school and start a home-school curriculum. “Grace has ended up being quite interested with history,” Hutchins said. “She’s really now starting to understand where things are, too, and how far we’ve traveled. Lately she’s been studying the immigration into Ellis Island, and the Chinese workers who came into the United States.” Like many other members of the 46 group, Grace’s family has been making a conscious effort to incorporate aspects of Chinese culture into their daily lives. “I remember our first fall back, we just went up on a hill nearby to watch the moon come up for the autumn moon festival,” Hutchins said. “But we have a group that gets together in Brattleboro a couple of times a month, and lately we’re having anywhere from 50 to 100 people turning up for Chinese holiday events.” Hutchins, who has hosted the reunion once before, said these yearly gatherings are a great time for the kids to visit each other and be around friends without having the constant school-age pressure to be accepted. “I think it’s quite natural when you have a 10-year-old who doesn’t want to be different,” he said.

As parents gathered outside by the pool and sipped Slushies on June 23, the kids splashed around in the water, complaining about their mascara and spraying each other with water guns. Back at the house, a couple of girls sat on the couch watching a Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen film in which the twins are harassed by a lunatic gangster who thinks he’s Chinese. In the basement, others found amusement at a pinball machine or an old-fashioned PAC-MAN game, and later moved on to compete in Guitar Hero or to play with Barbie dolls. It was both amusing and heartening to watch, and Myra Holt summarized the experience.

The Holt Family

“He’s just a regular American kid,” Holt said of her son, Marco, the only boy in the 46 group. “He likes to quote Spongebob for me, he loves to skateboard, he loves to draw. He’s a great little guy.” The Holts have lived in the suburbs outside Hartford, Conn., for the past 10 years, and their early concerns about Marco’s ability to fit in are now beginning to fade. “We live in a town where there are some other adopted kids,” Holt said. “Obviously, it’s not like living in New York or Boston. When I talk to my friends in New York, it sounds like the UN when they tell me who’s coming over for dinner, but my initial concerns of standing out in a lineup are starting to dissolve.”
Despite the travel confusion she encountered in China, Myra is equally positive in her account of the first trip. From Beijing, the Holts had to catch a second plane to Jiang Fu, and this proved to be more difficult than they had anticipated. “We got to the airport and discovered that our flight no longer existed,” Holt said. “But once we figured out how we would get there, it was actually pretty exciting, and we got to have our own little adventure. It was really great to just spend a few days with your brand new child, and we got to do that by ourselves, which was nice.”

The Holts have hosted the reunion twice in the past, once in sweltering heat and the other during a thunderstorm. But the whole family still looks forward to the event each year, and they make sure to mark their calendars months in advance. “It’s like the big dangling carrot at the end of the school year,” said Holt. “It’s not weird for Marco to be the only guy there yet, but of course I expect that to shift a little. I guess I’m hoping that someday he’ll be happy to be around so many girls. Maybe there will be some prom dates out of it or something!”

For now, it’s clear that Marco has more important things than dating on his mind. When a parent mentioned something about frogs and nets, Marco led the charge down to the pond, where at least half the kids and their parents quickly gathered to catch as many green, croaking amphibians as possible. The fun quickly wore off for most children, and Carrie finally called everyone together for a group photo. One little girl could be heard saying to another, “I like being in the group, but I hate pictures.” The other quietly agreed.

The uncustomary experience shared by parents in the China 46 group strengthened their commitment to the program. “The China program tends to be very unique because of the travel experience—the fact that the families fly over there together and go through the adoption together,” said Wide Horizons press representative Laura Wells. Currently, the China program is the only branch of the agency that has this group aspect, and is thus prone to fostering lifelong connections between families. Started in 1974, Wide Horizons for Children has placed more than 9,500 children from 11 different countries into families in the United States. However, the past two years have seen a worldwide decrease in international adoptions.

Vicki Peterson, director of external affairs and former CEO of Wide Horizons, said a variety of factors led to the decline. “In China they have finally depleted their overload of children in orphanages,” Peterson said. “They don’t have nearly as many children waiting for placement as they did when Wide Horizons started.” There’s also a wider range of countries that are adopting children from China than there was a few years ago. China itself is contributing significantly to the change in adoption rates. The one-child policy is becoming more flexible, especially in rural areas where there is more room for population expansion. China is also stepping up its own adoption rates, and currently there are more than three times as many domestic adoptions in the country as there are international ones. Peterson says this trend is true of many countries that once put up lots of kids for adoption. “The economies of many of these countries have improved. At one point, they were grateful to the U.S. and other countries, but now they don’t feel so good that the kids are going abroad.”

Despite the cultural contempt some countries have for the United States, Peterson sees this as a positive change, and she believes the China program at Wide Horizons has helped bridge cultural gaps and create awareness on both sides of the exchange. “One thing about China that stands out is the great respect and interest that the families have for Chinese culture. They really appreciate the history because they travel there and they see all the historical sites, so they come home having formed a strong connection with Chinese history and people,” she said.

Adoption is a lifelong process for the parents and the children. As the kids from the China 46 group lined up on the sofa for pictures and then gathered around the cake to haggle over little chocolate children, it was clear that the camaraderie between them will last throughout their lives. It seems probable that 10 and even 20 years from now, these children will still be getting together once a year to share stories, reminisce about their childhoods, and help each other along as their adoption experiences continue to develop.