My wife and I made the decision to adopt a child after trying to have one of our own for about five years. I had always known that I would one day adopt a child. As an evangelical Christian, it just made sense to me. We are traditionally known for being anti-abortion, yet so few of us are willing to adopt children. I personally cannot reconcile this for myself, so it was a logical decision for me. After seeing the devastation of a family in my church who fostered a young man for years and finally adopted him, only to have his biological mother reclaim him, having a closed adoption made all the sense to me. A coworker of my wife worked for a foreign adoption agency that specialized in Chinese adoptions, so we decided two go that route.
We were notified in August of 2002 that we had been matched with a child. His name was Chen Zhi Boa and we would be able to to get him that October. They sent us a picture of him and it was love at first sight. Here was our son. I had always known that I wanted to name my first son Christian and here he was.
Meeting him.
Our families immediately embraced him. No one ever refer to him as the adopted child. He was always our child. I told Christian early on that it was up to him to decide if he wanted to tell people he was adopted or not. The bottom line was, with my wife being Filipino and my grandmother being either half or one quarter Chinese, it was completely possible for us to have a child that looked like him. Oddly enough, he had a cousin who is his doppelganger on Fe’s side of the family. He identified as Chinese, Filipino, Black, and Hispanic. He used to sign his text messages, “Mr. Hispanic Blasian.” He and I shared a close bond as I was a stay-at-home dad for a long time and homeschooled him.
Christian loved his family and remained in contact with people I didn’t even speak to. My brother’s daughter immediately referred to him as her brother. When we went to China to get Christian, she told people that we were going to bring her brother home. They had a very close relationship. He also had a close relationship with the daughter of one of my cousins. I didn’t realize how tight that bond was as he had only met her a few times in his life, but she told us that he sought her out and they communicated daily. He spoke to family members on both sides on a fairly regular basis. It didn’t matter what country they lived in or the time differences, Christian spoke to them. In fact I didn’t realize the close relationship he had with one of my cousins. Christian was all about family. And we all loved him. We miss him dearly.
