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Perhaps more A-parents (which is a trendy abbreviation for "adoptive parents" I can only promise I'll try never to use again) should read more stories like this one, in which England's foreign secretary, David Miliband, is praised by a mother who adopted from Shenzhen eight years ago. He's just adopted internationally, too. From the United States. There's more detail about his adoption in this rather critical Guardian column, which mentions quite a few things about the context of Miliband's happy day - in that he wound up snubbing a Saudi Arabian delegation because he had to "dash off to America." There are extra helpings of "but it's only an adoption, not a birth" and "surely Prince Saud should take precedence"… [more]

What is that baby really saying? A lot of frustration seems to be tied up with language - and what they call "language delays" are all too often a part of parenting kids adopted internationally. Toddlers like to be understood - and when son (son!) uses a new word and realizes that we know what he means, his face lights up. Of course, babies have their own language, and chances are, if you're an average parent adopting from China, you'll be meeting these new kids when they're really quite new indeed, so what you need right away is some kind of baby translator to know what the latest bout of crying is over. And now (supposedly) you can know for sure. Yes, the good researchers… [more]

If you're soon to be traveling to adopt a young Chinese person - or if you're just the type to be interested in other people's trips - you could do worse than to cast your eyes over Randy Cassingham's travel blog. If you haven't heard of Cassingham, he's one of the godfathers of internet publishing. He's been running a for-profit e-mail newsletter, This is True, since the mid-90s. It collects news stories from the world press - focusing on the bizarre, idiotic and just plain unbelievable - and presents them in a snappy little digest with just a little bit of wry editorializing. There's a free version that's worth checking out if you haven't already. Anyway, he and a bunch of subscribers recently got… [more]

As parents of kids from China, it's important (they tell me) to seek out Asian-American role models - people who are relatively noteworthy and who are both Asian and American, who live well here, in this society. So here's another one. Scientist. Adventurer. Atom Scrambler. Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz is a Costa Rican-American of Chinese descent. The Chinese press typically calls him Zhang Fulin (張福林 ), his Chinese name. That's the same "Fu" you'll see in a lot of adopted kids' names - the lucky one. Within China, he's considered the first Chinese person in space. Being in space is, as previously established on this very blog, pretty cool. And on one of his missions, he hung out in space itself, not… [more]

Those who have already been through the process of adopting a child from China will, I'm wagering, immediately understand why Google's latest web thing is so cool. Just take a look: This is a page from a Chinese music-and-food blog, translated by Google's new Chinese translator. That is, it's a translator that doesn't do pinyin - it translates written Chinese characters into English sentences. That (more or less) make sense. Like, here's the original front page of that blog. And here's what the writer is actually saying. (Duck's blood? Um, delicious.) Why is this remarkable? Well, for one thing, it's already working better than Babelfish as… [more]

One of the things about parenting that I find interesting - I was just talking about this with a friend yesterday, in fact - is the way milestones work. It seems like parents-by-adoption are a little more obsessed over developmental hurdles, and for good reason - institutional infancy has a way of interfering with development in lots of little ways. For example, when we met Daughter, she was just turning 1 and had yet to learn to crawl. She could roll around and grasp things, but she'd never had enough time just lying on the floor to get the hang of moving from point A to point B. Now she's a ballerina. That's the interesting thing, to me. Both those common metaphors - milestones and… [more]

If you've already adopted a child from China - or are just considering adoption from China - you'll probably be interested in reading as much as possible about the process. Not just the dry "fill in this form, then make this appointment" stuff, but the actual experience of taking a journey from your own homely house to that country over there (the one between Russia and Thailand) and coming home with a small human being in tow. I'm quite fascinated by the story told in Cindy Champnella's The Waiting Child, although I haven't read the whole thing. There are excerpts online at Google books that give you enough of the flavor of the tale. It's the true story of Jaclyn Champnella, who was adopted at age… [more]

I have been a bad adoptive parent. I'm beginning to get the idea that parenthood is really one long negotiation involving equal parts frustration (because they never do what you want them to do) and guilt (because you never wind up doing what you should be doing). One of the things I feel like I should be doing - one of the Big Important Things for internationally adopted kids - is signing Daughter up for Mandarin lessons. She's four, she's brilliant, and she's taking ballet. She likes ballet. She does well at it. But when she's 24, I wonder if she'll have built up a tremendous reservoir of resentment over not having any real mastery over the language of the country of her birth. I know… [more]

Because traveling families (and other people with a connection to China, like, uh, people who've adopted from China) need to know what's going on, here's just a few headlines from the Middle Kingdom:

• The Dalai Lama just got a medal from America's government, and boy, is the Chinese legislature ticked off. That official statement is as good a way as any to learn China's version of Tibetan history. It also ends dramatically: No force can stop the progress of Tibet in the great family of the Chinese nation. All attempts to interfere in China's internal affairs and undermine China's fundamental interests are doomed to failure. You can practically hear the ominous music swell, can't you?
• On a marginally related note (and of more interest to

One day, the Leader of the School called all his pupils and declared, "Life and death are serious things. You pupils waste your time making offerings, seeking worldly blessings and not even trying to break out of the cycle of life and death! If you give yourself over to delusions, how can blessings save you? Go to your rooms and think for yourselves! "Those who have true wisdom, use it! Each of you has to write a verse for me. For the student who best sums up the basic ideas taught by the Buddha, I will hand over my robes, naming that person the next Leader of the School. Go on! Hurry!" ...Late that night, Head Monk Shen-hsiu snuck out and wrote a verse on the wall by… [more]