ST 2005.05.25

Fatherhood
Love is thicker than blood
Whether parents are natural or adoptive, it's how they care for their kids that counts
By Mathew Pereira

RECENTLY, my friend Lian Kee and his wife told their 13-year-old daughter, Pamela, that they were not her natural parents and that she was adopted.

My eyes filled up as my wife told me this, and I tried to visualise the stunned teenager standing with her parents, trying to come to grips with what she had just heard.

Pamela was still a nameless baby in China when Lian Kee first told me about her. Their hearts were set on this beautiful girl they had seen at an adoption agency in Hainan Island, he said.

They were to make a follow-up trip to bring her home after the paperwork was done.

Seeing Pamela in church every week, I have watched her grow from a tiny bawling baby into a confident, cheerful, chatty girl. She had some very close friends in church whom she spent a lot of time with, given that she had no siblings.

Her parents meant everything to her, but I wondered if this would now change.

I spoke to Lian Kee, who is in his 50s, the following day. Yes, Pamela cried. She was crushed.

But it was something his wife and he had decided a long time ago to do. 'We have been praying for the right time,' he said.

As a father, he was loving and committed to Pamela to a fault. But her not knowing that she was adopted ate into him, he said.

It was not the first time that I had heard of his desire to be a perfect father.

In contrast, just a week before this incident, I was told about another father. His successful business in China took him away from home regularly.

'He is never home,' his sister-in-law complained. And when he is, he does not talk to his children.
'He was never actively involved in bringing them up, he just made sure that their material and physical needs were provided for,' she added.

His sons, she noted, had grown up with little guidance from him. 'The kids take up courses and drop out midway, job-hop and basically did not have the perseverance to see something through,' she said of the two sons who were in their 20s.

What an irony - a natural father who did not bother much about his kids but an adoptive parent who tried to be the perfect Dad.

But Lian Kee is not the first adoptive parent who has set himself high parenting standards. It made sense. People like him are eager to have children and consider it a privilege to be able to adopt.

As such, I have always been left with a positive view of adoption. In fact, I seriously contemplated doing it about 10 years ago.

Then, my wife was in her mid-30s and we had three children. Our target from the onset (at a time when the Stop At Two policy was still in place) was four.

Not wanting to go through the anxiety of a fourth pregnancy and also for a variety of other reasons, we thought of adopting instead.

At that time, I was hearing of more adoption cases. From anecdotal evidence, the number appeared to be on the rise and I believe it has been increasing steadily.

Last year, there were 731 child adoptions in Singapore. Two-thirds of the children were from abroad. The year before that, 672 children were adopted.

It was my Mum who scared me off my plans. It is fine if you have no children, she said. But with three of your own, you are bound to discriminate against the adopted one.

I could not quite tell if she was articulating fears about the possibility of her discriminating as a grandmother or whether she really had no faith in me. But she had planted enough doubts to make me drop the idea.

However, I continued to support adoption, pushing the idea among close friends who were unable to have children of their own.

I remember a good friend who laughed when I handed him a hongbao when his wife and he adopted a child. 'There is no reason to,' he said. 'I adopted the child.'

'I know,' I replied and pushed the hongbao into his palm.

The child, whether adopted or not, made no difference to me. He was now the child's father.

About two weeks after Lian Kee shared the events in his family with me, he suffered a stroke.

Fortunately, it was a mild one which the doctors assured he would almost surely recover fully from.

Even so, when I visited him in hospital, he was in a contemplative mood and had been giving life and death issues serious thought.

He was ready to die, he said, 'but for one thing - I would like to see my Pamela graduate'.

His wish was no different from what mine would have been, if I were ill.

I asked him at the hospital how Pamela was coping.

'Has she gotten over the whole incident, has it changed the relationship?'

He said that things had worked out well.

In fact, on the night when she was told about her adoption, she had walked over to hug him tightly, just before she went to bed.

And she had said: 'Dad, I love you.'

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