Emily's Adoption

This is for online friends who hear a lot about Emily and want to know more about her. I've done my best to make a long story short here!


Emily and I met for the first time in a province Ministry of Justice office in Thai Nguyen, Vietnam, on October 18, 2001. For 15 months before that, I'd been doing paperwork, having a social worker write a report about me, getting fire and health department approvals, being vaccinated, getting health reports, and so on and so on and so on. Finally, on September 1, I got actual pictures of an actual baby:



However, I am 99% sure this is the earliest picture that I have of her. It was sent to me about a year after we were back home, by a family who was at the same orphanage in the first week of August. The minute I saw it I knew it was a picture of her. She would have been at the orphanage about 2 weeks when it was taken.



I got on a plane to go to Vietnam on Monday October 15th, a little over a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but the possible risks of international air travel were not as much in my mind as the fact that INS in Vietnam was starting to reject more and more applications by parents to bring home their adopted chidren.

I arrived in Hanoi on Wednesday afternoon October 17th local time, having flown through Chicago, San Francisco, and Taipei. Twenty four hours later a translator and I rode the hour and a half distance to Thai Nguyen from Hanoi in a taxi van, to attend my Giving and Receiving ceremony.

There were several other families there for their ceremonies also, none from the United States - instead, from Canada, France, and Italy. The large conference table was surrounded by translators, orphanage officials, relinquishing birth families, adopting parents, and babies. The road to the orphanage was being rebuilt, so we did not get to visit, but another family sent me some pictures of the place Emily lived for 3 months before I met her.


She was a long slim baby with lots of hair for a 3 1/2 month old, very clean except that her hair needed to be washed, and with a slightly worried look on her face at times. Pretty much the first thing I had to do was put her into a diaper and new outfit, so that they could take back the clothes she was wearing for other babies at the orphanage. We got to keep the pacifier and the little blue and white drool rag tied around her neck.


Because Emily had been in an orphanage, the person responsible for formally delivering her into my care was the director of the orphanage, with the authority of the Vice Director of the Ministry of Justice.




She was mostly very quiet until we got into the van to go back to Hanoi, at which point she woke up from a doze, realized she had been taken away by strangers from the people she knew, and screamed most of the way back and then for quite a long time at the hotel. She was finally diverted by the arrival of the other family staying there with us, who came over to see what we were up to - right from the start she liked to be social! She finally smiled at me and fell asleep, and slept for about 5 hours before waking up and demanding formula in no uncertain terms. She liked it so hot that her little head sweated while she drank it. In the morning, she was very pleasant - fortunately I'd been told to expect some obviously upset behavior right at the outset just because of the big changes that all babies in her position are experiencing.



You might think that would be the end of the story, but we were in Vietnam until November 12th. We stayed in Hanoi until Wednesday the 24th, to get a Vietnamese passport to allow Emily to exit the country (she would remain a Vietnamese citizen until our arrival at US Immigration in San Francisco). Then we travelled to Ho Chi Minh City and filed for INS permission to immigrate her. It took two weeks to receive this approval, and for awhile it looked like we would not get it, or at least not before my Vietnamese visa expired on November 14th. Without going into much detail, this was a psychologically grueling period, and we did what we could to enjoy the city given how much stress I was under, between taking care of a baby in a hotel room and worrying about what could happen. Luckily, there were always other families there in the same hotel, so we weren't totally alone.




By the time we finally got approval, we both had gastroenteritis and were feeling pretty awful, but nothing was going to keep us from getting Emily's immigrant visa and getting on that plane! Emily was drinking formula diluted about 1/4th and spiked with salt and sugar, because anything else caused a bad result. We visited the International SOS medical clinic 3 times, and one Vietnamese hospital who wanted to admit her, but we had a plane to catch and the SOS doctor said she seemed to be alert and remaining hydrated so there was no reason to put off travelling.




Of the three families from my agency who were there applying at the same time, two of us were approved and left at about the same time; the third was denied, had to leave her baby in foster care and return home to appeal, and did not return for the baby until late December.

When we got off the plane in San Francisco and the INS worker processed Emily's visa and stamped her Vietnamese passport with the magic stamp, it was finally over and nothing else could go wrong! We had a nice welcome at the Baltimore airport when we finally arrived there on November 13th.


Emily today (May 2004)