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, 25^th 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 19^th 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

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

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.

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.

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.