Over dinner one night, Kay Johnson told her family she was worried about Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born nuclear scientist accused of spying for China. He had lived in the U.S. for 36 years and was a naturalized citizen.
Johnson felt the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist had been unfairly targeted for prosecution because he was born in an ethnic Chinese country, had traveled frequently to China and had many Chinese friends. What she didn't say: Those same things are true of her 9-year-old daughter Lili, who was adopted from China.
"It was touchy," recalls the professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. "I wanted to talk about the case, but I didn't want to turn around and say [to Lili], 'You'd better watch out when you grow up.' I didn't want her to feel insecure."
For Johnson, who was among the first Americans to adopt after the Communist government relaxed its restrictions on foreign adoptions in the late 1980s, that discussion was just another sobering reminder of the emotional battlefield her family entered by tying its future to a country whose government is viewed with mixed emotions by many Americans.
Alleged espionage, religious repression, worker exploitation. At a time when the United States is lurching from one tense moment to the next in its complex and often contentious relationship with China, that country has also become one of this country's leading sources of foreign adoptions.
Caught in the middle are 20,000 Chinese adoptees and their families who are just beginning to discover what it means to have the most personal and joyous of experiences--the creation of a family--ensnared in one of America's most challenging post-Cold War relationships.
Even for Johnson, a China scholar with a deep understanding of this complex geopolitical dance, watching these tensions reverberate through her daughter's life has been an eye-opening, occasionally painful, experience. Most of these adoptees are girls, a legacy of China's one-child population control policy.
"Right now, she's proud of being Chinese," Johnson says of her strong-willed daughter, who prefers using Lili to Helen, her American name. "But that's going to have a double-edged meaning. She will always carry a foreign face, and as long as U.S.-China issues are tense, there's always the slight possibility that will become a problem."
