Adoptees return to Hong Kong November 2015

Thank you Serena for your write up!

Serena’s write up of Hong Kong 6-18th Nov 2015

Returning back to Hong Kong with other Hong Kong adoptee brothers and sisters for a HK reunion was a chance not to miss even though it took a bit of persuading from others. I was so glad that I listened and returned in November 2015 for 2 weeks.

Many thanks to Polly for letting me stay at her house on Lantau Island, a very tranquil suburb away from the business of city life.

Back on mainland HK, my excitement of seeing everyone on the first day at the YMCA hotel was fantastic. I saw familiar faces and got to know new brothers and sisters. We spent time chatting, catching up. exchanging new news, and our feelings of just being in HK, where we spent our first fragile years. It was amazing to see Winnie again, to whom I am most thankful, as she let me stay at her wonderful studio where I was surrounded by her art. She has helped and guided me and others so much, and she made our return journey so memorable.

Sunday 8th Nov – Our first Adoptee reunion meeting was where Fanling babies home was located, where some of the adoptees grew up  After dim sum we went to the local Fanling Assembly of God Church where most of the orphanage children attended each Sunday. We had a pleasant surprise seeing 7 older sisters who are now in the 60-70’s. They remained at the Fanling babies home, grew up, went to work and had families in HK. They came to the church to share their thoughts on what it was like to stay in HK and not be adopted. These ladies still remain firm friends and support each other just like sisters.

Monday 9th Nov – The welcome meeting at HK University was a private time for us adoptees to share our background stories and how we started life from children’s homes to adoptive homes. It was great to hear and get to know where each brother and sister came from.

My next trip was shared with 6 other ladies who started life at Chuk Yuen children’s reception centre, which is now a family service centre. Allen who works there at present, showed us around inside the building, which has changed completely since it was a children’s home. However, he was able to show us the location of the original baby rooms, where we ate and the play area on original drawing plans of the Chuk Yuen children’s reception centre. This was a very special and exciting day for me.

With Polly I also visited the place where I was abandoned, at 3 Hing Hon Road, opposite the University Museum and Art. It was a very moving moment even though I don’t remember anything about my time as a baby in HK. I managed to speak to someone inside the building who spoke English and he said the local Chinese newspaper has been very helpful in writing many stories for lost children trying to find their birth mothers in this area.

Sightseeing highlights

An evening at Happy Valley to watch the horse races.

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Visiting 10,000 Buddha’s monastery. It was mind blowing seeing so many buddhas, which were in lovely surroundings with trees plants and the sound of birds everywhere.

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A Macau trip with such interesting architecture and old Portuguese style buildings everywhere. We ate our way towards  the Ruins of St Pauls. I sneaked into the Grand Lisboa Hotel. One of the tall buildings in Macau Wow what a view!!!

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Polly showing 15 of us around Cheung Chau and Lantau Island. I swam in the sea and we chilled out wandering around, and the day ended with tea and cake at Polly’s house.

Group Picture at Discovery Bay

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I had the unique opportunity to view all the way around Hong Kong Island from a support boat. Polly’s Husband, Tim does boat racing big time. It looked like a very tough relay race for the rowers who take in turns in doing a stint in the racing boat. The support boat travelled around following the racing boats and was there to carry the racers and equipment.

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Walking from Ngong Ping to Tai O on Lantau Island seeing the old houses on stilts and fishing boats everywhere was a magical time in the countryside. It was like going back in time. Almost all the tiny houses where made of wood and metal.

 

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Mapping Exercise

Please reply by email to Hkadoptees@btinternet.com

Mapping exercise
You may have already seen this request on FB, but I am keen for everyone to see this message and invite you to participate, as I think the map has the potential to show some interesting patterns.
Having just returned from the HK reunion I am now starting to reflect on the amazing experience – not only of being in HK itself but the level of sharing and support there was at the reunion.
After I went to visit the location of where I was found, I remembered that one of the ideas I had for the reunion event would be to have a map of HK on which we could mark the location of where we were left or found. I thought it would interesting to see this information mapped out.
I am still interested in doing this exercise.
The information on the map would only be
1. Year and month found/left
2. address – street name & if in a building (eg stairwell, hospital, orphange, police station if known)
3. & orphanage(s) sent to.

The focus is primarily on HK adoptees found or relinquished in the 1950s and 60s as I would like to produce two maps – one of locations as they are now and if possible another using map(s) from Late 50s & 60s

I would like to emphasise that there will be no names (as identifying information) on the map(s),

If you would like to participate in this, please can you send me these details.

Also, if you have any reservations or queries about it, please let me know.

 

BAAF has gone into Administration

Sadly I have been informed by Julia Feast that they went into administration on Friday 31st July.  It has all happened very quickly and has been a terrible shock.

The announcement was made late on Friday afternoon and people at HQ who were made redundant were asked to leave the building within the hour.

Julia will be keeping me informed over the next few weeks before the Farringdon office closes down on the 14th August.  Julia and a handful of others have been tuped to Coram.

Here is the official announcement on the BAAF website http://www.baaf.org.uk/

 

 

 

Time, Teeth and Tiny Costumes

by Claire Ling Chi Martin

15th June 2015

Time – invented by humans, measured by humans, perceived by humans.  I haven’t had much of it lately – hence the delay in writing this report.  Any ol’ excuse will do.

It’s said that your relationship with time defines your personality.  You Through Time people are efficient and organised – your timeline is out there in front of you, in clear view, a planner; straight, ordered, sequenced – past events on the left, future events to the right.  You know where you’ve been, you know where you’re going.  You run things.  Dependable and on the dot.  The rest of us don’t know what time of day it is and we’re cool with that.  We’re In Time people, living in the moment.  The past is behind us, un-dwelled on, out of sight, out of mind.  Our timeline passes through our heads from back to front, we look forward, seeing the future before us.

Time’s weird.  It speeds up as you get older, it hurtles by – and it crawls when you’re waiting for the milk to boil or a bus to catch.  On Saturday, 25th April, 2015, I experienced both sensations.  It seemed like only yesterday that I was exploring the streets of Marylebone looking for St Paul’s Church, mobile thrust in front, following a little moving dot and, as per, going in entirely the wrong direction.  Salvation usually transpires in some equally confused Hong Kong Adoptee, similarly equipped, peering myopically at street names.  One year later, here I am, entering the LUL zone once more, heading for the 2015 reunion.  LUL – London Underground Ltd, has its own time.  Haven’t you noticed, when you look up at the electronic indicator for the next train, the time it’s supposed to arrive bears no relation to the number of minutes it actually takes to turn up?  A LUL minute is longer.  Much longer.  I emerged, blinking, at Rotherhithe, map flapping in the breeze.  After only the slightest waywardness, (no really), I found a willing local to escort me closer to Sands Studios and, fortunately, encountered a fellow adoptee.  We quickly spotted a group of front runners, gaggled together at the entrance.  With equal measure of pleasure and relief, I recognise more and more faces now and, with the merest fumbling in the filing cabinet of my mind, can put names to most of them.

The entrance to Sands Studios is modern and cheery – a neat café area with homely (alright, Americans, homey) atmosphere, all red chequered clothed and raffia seated – and then I turned left into the Picture Library and Time Stood Still.  Low ceilings, timber beams, casements of wood and glass housing rows of leather clad tomes, I half expected to see a Dickensian clerk shuffle forth, frowning at the disturbance, or dwarfish characters from Diagon Alley beholding the intrusion with weary distain.  I had not expected to see Thomas Cromwell of “Wolf Hall”, well his costume anyway, and Anne Boleyn’s costume down another bank of display cabinets.  I put my astonishment on pause for the flurry of greetings.

Hong Kong Adult Adoptee Reunions are becoming more and more like extended family Christmases – a gathering of the clans (well, OK, orphanages – Po Leung Kuk, Fanling, St Christopher’s, Shatin) from far and wide.  I often ponder how many of us had been together more than 50 years’ ago as babies in regimented rows of cots in charitable institutions – barely bonded with birth families before being abandoned, then plucked from the streets to institutions – just settled again before being flown across the globe – dispersed into the white Western world, yellow dots, drifting.  We cling to flotsam, the few possessions we brought with us, brocade jackets, name bracelets, shoes, passports, adoption records – some of us brave enough to lay them out on the long table in the Picture Library – precious photos and press cuttings – “A baby for Christmas”, how grateful and relieved we were supposed to be to find new families – the upbeat optimism of fascinated journalists belies the bewilderment on our faces – I know that many of us didn’t smile till we were at school.     There’s something of the long, lost family about us.  Common early experiences fleetingly shared, an uncanny rapport, vast canvasses of life history sketched out but not yet painted in, more detail added with every reunion, individual meeting or phone call.  Almost sisters.  Blood.  Nature versus nurture.  Our only blood relatives are those we gave birth to.  Saplings uprooted and re-planted in a foreign land.  Deeply buried fears and feelings are barely articulated but understood by another person for the first time without explanation, stories shared in love and laughter.  Observe us, by all means, gaggling like geese, but our ability to laugh at ourselves keeps us sane.

We’re guided further into the Tardis-inducing interior where the space on the inside feels far more expansive than you’d expect from the outside, and time and space warps from room to room via rambling corridors lined with costumes and curiosities from different periods, senses assailed from all sides like Alice spiralling into Wonderland.  I had to Google it later to understand the whole eclectic mix of film, theatre, costume design, photography and museum that inhabits this 19th century warehouse with its reclaimed Tudor timber.  We settled into the assortment of settees and armchairs that filled the most comfortable little cinema on the planet.  After an introduction, we embarked on a warm-up exercise thinking about a gift we’d like to give and one we’d like to receive.  A chocolate box variety of ideas revealed our trinket obsessions and personal passions then morphed into more philosophical thoughts on bottling time and passing on wisdom.  From such sharings we learn so much about each other and ourselves.  How fascinating to discover that so many of us have extremely limited facial recognition – some of us even mistaking our family members – another throw back to our challenging origins.  I can’t tell you how much social media has assisted me in recent years with this problem – potential clients and colleagues have photos all over the place, thankfully.  And not very good teeth – cue reminiscences about milk allergies.  Remember the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (hereafter BAAF – I’m not typing that again!) adoption survey?  I recall with amusement one of the academics telling his dentist about announcing the results at the book launch and being embarrassed to admit that the condition of our teeth had not been included in the survey.  Seems we have rubbish eyesight, too.

We often have a speaker at our reunions and, this year, it was our venue host, Annabel Stockman.  I gathered, despite daydreaming through the intro, that the Hong Kong Adult Adoptee Network (HKAN) committee members met this energetic and vibrant mother of two (now) teenage adoptees from China at the Mothers’ Bridge of Love tenth anniversary bash at the Museum of Childhood.  She’s written a book about those adoptions:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Annabel-Stockman/e/B0034OYIKM

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and is currently writing another book about the clothes the babies were in when they were handed over to their new adoptive parents:

http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/3464095-hand-me-over-hand-me-downs

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We were treated to a slide show of precious little outfits, steeped in significance, stretched out, laid flat and preserved like pressed petals, captured by a camera’s lens for all time.

 

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Each represented the personal experiences of the adopting family as their bewildered bundle was handed over, sometimes reluctantly by its current carer.  Our own parents didn’t collect us in the same way and many had never stepped foot in the country of our birth.  Some of us weren’t even told that we were adopted which made for some intriguing double-think.  In contrast, these intrepid pioneers had survived the scrutiny of British Social Services, braved China’s bureaucracy, dealt with corrupt officialdom with the utmost delicacy and, occasionally, had to handle the chagrin of being duped.  Particularly heart-wrenching was Annabel’s account of adopting a disabled boy only to be thwarted after having looked after him for a couple of days in a remote provincial hotel.  Themes emerged, threading their stories with our own parents’ accounts of not being able to put their babies down, go out of sight or the presence of men.  Annabel side-stepped some of the later psychological problems by home educating her two.

After homemade soup and a thorough peruse of our own souvenirs, we assembled in the picturesque frescoed theatre with its Wherefore Art Thou wooden balcony for group photos.

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We adult adoptees have craved each other’s company since Debbie set up the first HKAN get together in 2007, meeting regularly in different venues around the UK and even Hong Kong and the USA.  Our younger sisters from China have benefitted from the support of charities such as Children Adopted from China (CACH) and Mothers’ Bridge of Love (MBL).  Whatever the mechanism for gathering us together, what’s the attraction?  For me, personally, it alleviates the symptoms of Only Chinese Child Syndrome, a phrase I’ve made up to articulate the feeling of being a Brit trapped inside a Chinese body.

An Afternoon Tea Party for our Adoptive Parents ~ hosted by a Hong Kong adoptee

Date: Saturday 22nd August, 2.30pm. Venue: A fellow adoptee is kindly hosting this event at her home in London. The address will be given near the time to those who are attending. Who is invited? Adults adopted from Hong Kong in the 1950’s-60’s – whether through ISS or private arrangements – and their parents. Space is limited, so whether partners/siblings/friends can attend will depend on the numbers attending.  This event aims to give our adoptive parents an opportunity to meet and share their memories and experiences.  Sadly, many of our parents have passed away or are in poor health; this is a real opportunity for those who remain in good health to meet up with others who took part in an amazing programme.

Journey Home – 2015 HK Adoptee Reunion Week of November 8, 2015 in Hong Kong

We invite adult adoptees from Hong Kong orphanages to attend our next reunion, which will be held the week of November 8, 2015 in Hong Kong.  This is a special opportunity to meet other Hong Kong adoptees like yourself – to share adoption experiences, develop friendships and be part of our network.
 
Come join your fellow HK Adoptees in group discussion meetings, special arranged visits to Hong Kong orphanages as well as sightseeing, free time and lots of eating! Friends and family are welcome to attend too.
 
Explore your pre-adoption and HK cultural history in a fun, informal and spontaneous way. This is also an opportunity for you to look for your Hong Kong records, birth family and relatives.
 
See what fun we had at our first Hong Kong Adoptee Reunion held in 2010. 
 
 
If interested in attending, please register by contacting us at  info@fanlingbabies.com

Next Reunion London Saturday 25th April 2015

Date: Saturday 25th April 2015

Times: 10:30am for an 11:00am start; 4pm finish

Venue:  Sands Studios

82 St Marychurch Street

Rotherhithe

London SE16 4HZ

 

http://www.sandsfilms.co.uk/Sands_Films_Studio/Sands_Films.html

 

Cost for attendance: £5 per head – children free.

Tea & coffee will be available on arrival and at intervals during the day.

Sands Studios has an on-site canteen.  They have kindly offered to prepare fresh soup for lunch.  There will be a charge for this, approx. £5 per head – soup & bread, fruit.  Their chef will come in especially to do this – he will cook a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian soup.  We therefore need firm bookings by Friday 27th March in order for us to give catering numbers to our hosts.

Group meal after the meet up tba – suggestions welcome.  Bear in mind we will be in East London.

See map for directions.  Kate travelled via underground when she went to check out the venue – it’s a 10-15 minute walk from Bermondsey Tube station; Rotherhithe Overground station is two minutes’ walk.

There are a few small shops near Bermondsey Tube station where you can pick up sandwiches for lunch on the way if you don’t want the soup option; but there are no shops in the immediate vicinity.

Agenda to follow.

Booking

To guarantee your place please send your payment to Debbie Cook
If you wish to take the lunch provided please confirm numbers
 
For address please email for hkadoptees@btinternet.com for details
Sandsfilms Map

ISSHK roots tracing book – submissions invited from Hong Kong-born adoptees

You may be aware that ISS Hong Kong branch plans to publish their second book on roots tracing, containing pieces written by adoptees. 
Information is contained in the attached document.  In order to avoid disappointment, please note the following:
  • Articles are invited from Hong Kong-born adoptees
  • Maximum word count of 1000 words
  • ISS-HK retain editorial rights
  • ISS-HK will hold the copyright
  • You are invited to submit photographs, but be mindful of the copyright condition. Ensure you are legally entitled to assign copyright on photographs to ISS-HK.
  • ISS-HK does not guarantee to include anyone’s article
  • If you wish to submit an article, remember to complete and send a release form assigning copyright to ISS-HK. 
Contact details for ISS-HK are contained in the documents

 

LETTER FROM GLADYS HUNG, ISSHK Re: BOOK SUBMISSIONS – January 2015

Dear adoptees,

After the first publication of “Laughter and Tears Adoption Stories in Hong Kong”, ISSHK is going to have a second adoption book about root tracing.

For the past 55 years, many babies and children have been adopted to the countries in the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand etc. and grown up in these countries. Many of them have gone through the root tracing process. We hope to collect their stories and share with others about their precious experiences in root tracing and its meaning to their life.

The book will be published in both Chinese and English. Adoptees are invited to share their experiences during different stages of their root tracing. Due to limited pages of the book, every story is up to the limit of 1000 words.

The topic can be chosen as below:

–           When did you start to trace your origin in Hong Kong?  What were the factors caused you to start the tracing?

–           How did you start the tracing process? What was the result?

–           What was the impact or meaning to you after the tracing?

Your pictures are welcome to share to enrich the content of the book. Attached please find the consent form of adopting your story and pictures for the book. Adoptees will be informed and have a free copy when their stories are adopted in the book.

If you have further questions about the book or send us your story, please email to Gladys Hung at gladys.hung@isshk.org or Wind Au at wind.au@isshk.org.

Yours sincerely,

Gladys Hung

 

Additional Note from ISSHK:

We are welcome to all root tracing stories of the adoptee adopted from Hong Kong. As the pages of the book are limited, we do not guarantee to publish all stories. Thank you for your assistance.

 

INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SERVICE – HONG KONG BRANCH 

Consent to Release Information

(by writer of the articles)

I, the undersigned, consent to release my article to International Social Service Hong Kong Branch (ISS-HK) for the purpose of publishing a book about ’ Root-tracing Stories-Intercountry Adoption’. I understand that ISS-HK has the copyright of the book and can make necessary amendment to the article, if necessary.

(Signature of Writer)

(Name of Writer in Block Letters)

Date: ____________________

Interesting Reading

On 1 November CCC Press Publish a new book of short stories from Hong Kong.

The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong, 2014

Marshall Moore & Xu Xi

CCCP Critical, Cultural and Communications Press

This collection of short fiction provides an insight into different types of ‘Hong Kong person’. It is interesting to read the introduction as the editors explore what Hong Kong identity is. They state that ‘although it has long had a majority Cantonese Chinese population, the presence of significant expatriate communities—Western, Indian, Filipino, and others—creates a unique cultural diversity’

Eight writers explore the question of what it means to be in, from, and of the Hong Kong of the past, the present, and the future.

As a HK adoptee, not having any sense of what it is to be a Hong Kong person I enjoyed reading the fiction, as there are references to rituals and attitudes that I have not come across before. I was also reminded that ‘who we are’ is so much more than how we look to others!