The tears flowed from joy, but they were also tinged with sorrow. I knew all too well that our daughter, while gaining a better life in Philadelphia, would also be losing something precious. We were plucking her from her Chinese roots and whisking her off to an alien culture.
We knew we had a challenging task ahead - figuring out how to raise our daughter to be an American citizen while also honoring her Chinese heritage.
For us, it wasn't enough to take Qian to Chinatown once a year to have a festive meal on the anniversary of her adoption. Rather, we wanted to integrate Chinese culture into our daily lives.
Although we gave our daughter an American name, Mia, we kept Qian as a middle name and decided to follow Chinese nickname tradition and call her Qian Qian.
I framed a large map of the Luxi River scenic area, our daughter's birthplace, and hung it in our dining room. I began playing Chinese CDs instead of our usual music.
With the help of a Chinese neighbor, I began studying Mandarin. And when she got older, we enrolled Qian in the Saturday Mandarin classes offered by a local Chinese school.
Alas, the effort at instant Chinese culture didn't take. Even in a neighborhood as diverse as Mount Airy, it's hard to maintain a child's Chinese heritage when you don't live around Chinese people or speak Mandarin every day.
As our daughter matured, the need to fit in grew ever stronger. She'd rather be outside playing with her neighborhood friends than sitting in a stuffy classroom practicing Chinese characters on Saturday mornings. When she hit middle school, she asked her friends to call her Mia rather than Qian.
Almost inexorably, we were drawn into the maw of white, middle-class American culture in a city built largely on the labor of its Irish and Italian - not Chinese - immigrants.
