GILROY
– A Gilroy father is returning to China, to the place where
three and a half years ago he and his wife met and held for the
first time their newly adopted daughter.
By SANDRA MARLOWE
GILROY – A Gilroy father is returning to China, to the place where three and a half years ago he and his wife met and held for the first time their newly adopted daughter.
Filled with love and immense gratitude for the bubbly 4-year-old named Tasia who now shares their lives, Burke McKonkie and Elaine share a profound sense of wanting to give something back to the community where their journey began. The baby girl had been abandoned near beautiful and exotic Guilin.
Burke will return to China for two weeks on Oct. 10 with an organization called Half the Sky, which is building preschools for orphanages in Guilin and in another city called Wuzhou.
“I never had a clue that I would go back so soon,” Burke said. “I thought maybe when Tasia was in high school, we’d take her to see where she came from. But to go now is a dream.”
Half the Sky is part of the resource and support community the McConkies discovered after adopting Tasia. The organization, which gets its name from a Chinese adage that acknowledges “women hold up half the sky,” was formed in 1998 by adoptive parents and educators to better the lives and increase prospects for children in China waiting to be adopted or spending their childhood in orphanages.
If someone had told Elaine years ago she would travel halfway across the world, adopt a child from China and take it home to raise, she would have never believed it.
“When we first began this process, I said ‘ya know, Burke, I don’t do third-world countries. You’re going to have to go alone.’ It seemed too scary and forbidding to adopt from a foreign country,” Elaine said. “When I was younger, I would see commercials on TV to ‘save the starving children,’ and I would think these problems don’t even relate to me. People need to take care of their own … but life has a way of teaching you.”
Originally from Utah, the McConkies came to Gilroy 11 years ago. Burke works in information technology for United Defense of San Jose, and until becoming a full-time mom, Elaine was in business administration for Hughes Aircraft.
Told early in their marriage they could not conceive, Burke and Elaine joined thousands of couples nationwide who begin the long process of adoption. After years of disappointment with failed matches, birth mothers who changed their minds and finally adoptive parent age restrictions, they gave birth to a “miracle” son, Connor, who is now 7 years old and attends second-grade at Luigi Aprea.
When having another child by birth was not possible, they decided to reconsider adoption to add a daughter to their happy home. But this time, they chose international adoption.
“It’s a daunting, but doable process,” Elaine said.
Working with Holt International Adoption Agency, the McConkies learned the success rate for adopting a child, especially a girl, from China is very high. Ninety-five percent of the healthy available children in Chinese orphanages are girls.
Although state run, the orphanages are often overpopulated, underfunded and understaffed, according to Half the Sky’s Web site. Management of the sheer numbers of children often takes necessary precedence over children’s development, socialization and education, the Web site says.
The dire need for adoptive parents has prompted the government to establish strong relationships with adoptive agencies, and to implement policies that protect the rights of adopting parents. The McConkies also were encouraged when they learned the Chinese government allows the combined ages of the adopting parents to be up to the age of 100 and that each adopting parent must be at least 30 years old. Both are now in their mid-40s.
“I think having had adoptions fall through and hearing that once you get on the bottom of the list and can actually move up, you can get a matched child, it seemed like … well, pretty much a guarantee to get a child,” Elaine said.
Finally, after 15 months of paperwork, and lots of waiting and hoping, the McConkies made the long flight to picturesque Guilin to meet and welcome their daughter, Chu Yi (a name which means “graceful appearance”). Mindful of her Chinese name and in honor of her American grandmother and great-grandmother, the McConkies renamed their new daughter, Tasia Grace, who was terrified at their first meeting.
“We were most likely the first Caucasians she had ever seen,” Elaine said, “but by the next morning, she was already pretty happy when she realized ‘OK, these people feed me.’ ”
When Burke returns to Guilin, he will meet Tasia’s former foster family for the first time. He will share with them as much about her life in the United States as he can in the eight hours of video he has recorded. However, he cannot expect to learn much about Tasia’s birth or birth family history, since strict policies forbid foster care or orphanage staff from releasing this type of information. The McConkies do celebrate Tasia’s birthday as Oct. 21, a date calculated by doctors from the appearance of her umbilical cord when she was brought to the orphanage.
When asked about her favorite things, tiny Tasia replies “healthy food!” – with no prompting from mom. She also likes preschool at Lutheran Vineyard School, her brother, “playing with friends, Irene’s house … and singing and dancing!”
“Tasia is a happy, lighthearted child that laughs at the drop of a hat. … She’s brought balance and harmony to our home,” Elaine said. “It’s like having a visitor come to your house to whom you say ‘I hope you never go home, because you’re such a delightful person.’ ”
Along the journey to Guilin, the McConkies also acquired a much greater compassion for humanity.
“We all have time and using it to make people’s lives better is a wonderful gift. People are struggling around the world … and it is our problem,” Elaine said. “If they suffer, there’s a rippling effect and the entire world suffers. We realized adopting Tasia was something we could do, and it has changed our life.”
For more information, visit www.halfthesky.org.
