Posted on Wed, Apr. 16, 2008
Adoptive parents of Cambodian children forge a bond
By Jeff Gammage
Inquirer Staff Writer
Six years ago, two suburban women met at a typically suburban get-
together, a Little People's Music class where both had enrolled their
toddlers.
Joan Blair and Bonna Neang Weinstein immediately saw they had more in
common than notes and lyrics.
Weinstein is a daughter of Cambodia, a survivor of the 1970s genocide
known as the Killing Fields. And Blair has a daughter, Veata, adopted
from that war-ravaged Southeast Asian land.
"I thought, 'This is great, but how is she going to keep this little
girl interested in her heritage?' " Weinstein said of that day in
Elkins Park.
Today, Weinstein, 43, runs the Khmer Art Gallery, just north of
Chinatown, a venue alive with the majesty and mystery of ancient
Cambodia. On Friday, Blair, 54, and 8-year-old Veata will be among the
guests at a grand Cambodian New Year celebration featuring authentic
music, dance and food.
Everyone is invited, but Weinstein has issued a special invitation to
Cambodian adoptees, for she feels she understands their quandary.
Though the United States is her adored, adopted country, "there's
still that missing part."
Veata and her young peers occupy an unusual station, even within the
complicated world of international adoption. Cambodia opened to
American families in the 1990s but closed in 2001 amid allegations of
child trafficking, without completing many adoptions in between.
Only about 1,755 Cambodian adoptees live in the United States -
children bound by ethnicity and divided by geography. Their coterie is
the opposite of the big communities surrounding children adopted from
Guatemala, Russia and world leader China, who come by the thousands
each year. Because the Cambodian children arrived in the same short
span, they have no older generation of role models, and no new
arrivals behind.
Four years ago, Denise Glennon of Malvern started Southeastern
Pennsylvania Families With Cambodian Children. Her goal "was for my
child to know other Cambodian children," she said. "There are so few,
particularly in the suburbs."
Today, at the group's events, she notices that all the children are
about the same age. "Our group is going to keep going," she said, "but
it is heartbreaking."
Children adopted from China have a vibrant community centered on
67,000 children. Almost every big city has a chapter of Families With
Children From China, a sup****t and education group.
More than 400 families belong to chapters in South Jersey and the
Philadelphia area, where they take part in midautumn celebrations,
Mandarin lessons, calligraphy cl*****, cooking, music and book clubs.
By comparison, the Cambodian children's group has about 25 families.
People come from as far as Gettysburg and Rochester, N.Y., for the
annual summer picnic.
"Everyone wants this," Glennon said. "They want their children to feel
like they're part of, not really a community, because the kids don't
know each other that well, but that they're from a very special
place."
Glennon and her husband, Gary Haubold, have three daughters from China
and one from Cambodia. Sophina, 6, has enormous interest in her
Cambodian homeland, but "truthfully," Glennon said, "it's confusing.
'How can I be from there when I'm your daughter?' It's a lot to think
about."
And that's before Glennon tries to explain the homicidal reign of the
Khmer Rouge, a subject Weinstein knows too well. She was not even a
teenager in 1975 when the regime seized Cambodia and began the
holocaust of the Killing Fields.
Government workers, scholars and professionals were executed; others
were starved and beaten in labor camps. An estimated 1.5 million died.
Weinstein, confined apart from her father and brother, recalled being
ordered to dig a retention pond - during the dry season. She was sure
she was digging her grave.
Her father escaped to Thailand, and in 1979, after the Vietnamese
invaded and drove off the Khmer Rouge, she and her brother made their
way there, too. She emigrated to the United States in 1984 and lives
in Abington.
Today, many of her countrymen dwell in soul-shocking poverty, in
villages where land mines continue to kill and maim. It was desperate,
postwar poverty that drove adoptions in the late 1990s.
"The birth parents are very, very poor," said Harriet Brener of
Jenkintown, mother of a Cambodian daughter, Mya, 8. For some parents,
baby formula is an unaffordable luxury, said Brener, who previously
worked helping people adopt from Cambodia. Forced to choose among
hungry mouths, they may leave a child at an orphanage.
Cambodian adoptions peaked at 402 in 2000. The next year, amid
alarming re****ts of child trafficking, the U.S. government suspended
adoptions. Two Americans who ran a Seattle adoption agency later
pleaded guilty to criminal charges, admitting to a scheme in which
children were taken from families and represented as orphans on
immigration papers.
Advocates say the ban punishes the innocent, with estimates of
parentless Cambodian children reaching several hundred thousand. It's
unknown when or whether adoptions might resume.
Meanwhile, the American parents of Cambodian children seek community
where they can find it.
"There aren't that many of us," said Judy Haupt of Exton, whose 10-
year-old daughter, Sophia, attends a Cambodian classical dance class
in South Philadelphia.
Blair and her partner, Nancy Kraybill of Elkins Park, take Veata to
the same class, trying to provide a tie to Cambodia - an effort that
is by turns embraced and rejected. Some days, Blair said, Veata is
eager to get to class. Other times, engulfed by the culture around
her, she's more interested in High School Musical.
Weinstein wants her Khmer Gallery, in a renovated warehouse basement
on North 11th Street, to be a place where Cambodian children feel
welcome. She's planning music and language cl*****.
Walking into the gallery is like stepping into a movie, perhaps
Raiders of the Lost Ark, with intricate stone carvings filling room
after room. Life-size wooden Buddhas keep watch over smaller deities.
Behind a curtain, a windowless room holds beautiful, unsettling art, a
memorial to the Killing Fields.
"I live, breathe, sleep and eat culture," Weinstein said. "And
Cambodia is not just culture, it's identity."
|
