"It's a rite of passage that after all this waiting and travel, you are finally together," said Carter Lee, a former Haddonfield resident who lives in Madison, N.J., with her husband and their two daughters adopted from China.
But now the future of the red couch is in limbo, reflecting the changing fate of Chinese adoptions themselves.
In March, Lotus Travel of Bellevue, Wash., which specializes in adoption trips, announced that it planned to buy the couch from the White Swan, which is renovating, and, Lotus said, getting rid of the sofa.
In an e-mail, a White Swan spokeswoman said she had no information about the sale of the red couch, although she acknowledged that the hotel planned to redecorate.
Iris Culp, homeland programs director for Lotus, said the company had a "gentleman's agreement" to buy the couch and expected to have details soon.
"It's symbolic of the families spending some of their first moments together, and that is why we felt it was important to retain it for families," Culp said.
That there is even talk about the sale of the red couch speaks to the declining popularity of U.S. adoptions from China. In 2005, Americans adopted 7,903 children from there, more than double the 3,401 adopted in 2010.
Similar drops have occurred elsewhere as countries struggle to improve transparency and end corruption and child-trafficking.
China is still the most popular foreign country for adoptive U.S. parents. That is in part because families feel more comfortable knowing that China's one-child policy for Chinese parents offers an explanation of why the children are available.
Perhaps embarrassed by the huge number of baby girls it was giving up to other countries, China began restricting adoptions in the middle of the last decade. It limited adoptions for single people and banned them for those older than 50.
