Journey of a lifetime revisited: Adoption trip to China 25 years ago changed our lives

 

Larry, Lynne, Arianna in China in 1997.

A quarter-century can seem like a long time, but the 25 years that have elapsed since my wife and I adopted our first child, Arianna, from China have gone by in a flash. Today, our daughter is a teacher, having graduated from Bridgewater State University in 2018, but in 1997, she was a toddler waiting for her forever family to take her out of China, which at the time was losing thousands of its daughters yearly due to that government’s one-child policy, which wouldn’t be ended until 2015.
In what now seems like an eternity ago, my wife and I traveled to China to adopt Arianna in the fall of 1997. This article --- which appeared in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA on Tuesday, Oct. 25 --- looks back on that trip of a lifetime.
The column follows, and the link to the column on the newspaper’s website is: https://www.thesunchronicle.com/opinion/columns/larry-kessler-the-journey-of-a-lifetime-indeed/article_925e991f-b63a-54cd-8589-8929d929285d.html

Ari, Alana and Larry on Larry's 70th.

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Prologue
Twenty-five years ago this fall, my wife Lynne and I had just returned from the most meaningful trip of our lives. The nearly two weeks in China, where we had traveled to adopt our first daughter, Arianna, forever transformed our world.
After the trip, I wrote the longest story of my career for The Sun Chronicle, which was published in the Tuesday, Oct. 28, 1997, edition. Headlined “Journey of a lifetime,” the journal of my trip, along with a related story about the other families who traveled with us, were written at a time when international adoptions, and adoptions from China in particular, were just taking off.
The stories elicited many positive reactions from readers. Many shared their adoption stories with me, while others said they were so inspired by my articles that they decided to pursue an adoption.
Those reactions were humbling, and in the years since, my columns have updated our daughter’s story at various milestones, including her high school and college graduations and her bat mitzvah 13 years ago. Now, 25 years after the “Journey” story ran, I’m revisiting it to provide more insight into why our adoptions of Arianna and her sister Alana five years later --- the girls aren’t related and come from different provinces in China --- remain the most important accomplishments of our lives.
The trip of a lifetime
It’s hard to imagine what our lives would have been like if we never had made that long voyage more than half a world away. We left our home in North Attleboro at about 5:30 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 15, 1997, and we arrived back home on Sunday night, Sept. 28.
But as long as the trip was, the journey actually had begun more than 1 ½ years earlier, when we started the long process by attending an informational session with a Massachusetts-based adoption agency, Alliance for Children, in February 1996.
We made that decision after reading a story on international adoption one month earlier in The Sun Chronicle by my longtime colleague and friend, Betsy Shea Taylor. Her story about an Attleboro couple, Daniel and Sara Kass, who had gone to Ecuador to adopt Lewis, inspired us.
When we began the process, thousands of Chinese children were being adopted annually to parents in the United States and other nations due to the Chinese government’s one-child policy, which was ended in 2015.
Our first meeting with the adoption agency kicked off a laborious process that required us to jump through a series of bureaucratic hoops, including: doing a home study with the adoption agency to measure our fitness to become parents; passing an FBI screening; getting fingerprinted; and completing paperwork for both the U.S. and Chinese governments.
After a series of delays, what was supposed to be a six-month wait for a referral --- the photo of the child you’d be adopting --- became a longer one. Finally, on Aug. 13, 1997, one day before my 45^th birthday, we received the picture of our daughter, named Shen Yao, who was then 14 months old. We soon found out that we’d be traveling in mid-September, shortly after our daughter turned 15 months. (We had decided to keep her Chinese name as her middle name and called her Arianna ShenYao Kessler.)
About a month later, our departure day arrived. We flew out of Boston’s Logan International Airport bound for San Francisco, where we caught an 11-hour flight to Hong Kong. When we landed it was 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. After spending most of Wednesday touring the city, we went to the Hong Kong airport that evening to catch a flight to our daughter’s home city of Hefei, China. Before boarding our flight, we met many of the 10 other families who were part of our travel group put together by our adoption agency.
After landing in Hefei that night, we were told we wouldn’t receive our daughters until Friday, one day later than expected. Many people, including us, were relieved to have an extra day to collect ourselves before becoming parents. Nonetheless, the reality that we’d be handed a life to take care of was daunting enough to make our final childless night a sleepless one.
The handover of our daughter to us on Friday, Sept. 19 --- which we celebrate as our daughter’s adoption day --- went as smoothly as possible. The snacks we brought came in handy, and the girls gradually adapted to their new families, although fathers and mothers walking the hotel halls at all hours with their kids became a common sight.
The two weeks in China breezed by, and we were soon back in the United States. I’ll never forget how animated my daughter was when she got into the town car at Logan Airport. Sensing the excitement, she clapped her hands, as if to say: “Get me home already.”
All grown up
Once home, we found ways to immerse our daughter in aspects of Chinese culture, but we also resolved to raise her as our daughter. We also made a commitment to stay in touch with most of the parents from our adoption group, which included families from New York, Rhode Island and Florida besides Massachusetts.
Starting in 1998, we began holding annual reunions, and over the years, the get-togethers proved important for both the parents and children. Now, with our daughters working in many professions, they’ve been staying in touch on their own through social media and occasional gatherings, including attending the weddings of two of their fellow adoptees.
It’s hard to believe that a quarter-century has passed since Arianna’s first adoption day in China, something that remains one of the proudest moments of our lives.
Indeed, seeing our daughter and her fellow adoptees thriving, their collective adoption day could be could be called a miracle given how much it changed their lives and that of their parents.
And it all began with, as the spot-on headline called it 25 years ago, the “Journey of a lifetime.”
Larry Kessler, a retired Sun Chronicle local news editor, can be reached at larrythek65@gmail.com. He blogs at larrytheklineup.blogspot.com