Translating across generations: Interview with Vivian Ling on adoptee narratives
Vivian Ling is a Chinese language educator, translator, and editor. She taught at Oberlin College and Indiana University, and directed immersion programs in cities including Taipei, Shanghai, Kunming, and Beijing. Her academic work focused on language pedagogy and Chinese cultural studies, with publications including The Field of Chinese Language Education in the U.S.: A Retrospective of the 20th Century. In recent years, she has turned her attention to publishing bilingual and popular works on Chinese folklore and traditions.
She is the editor and translator of Love Without Borders, scheduled for release on 22 July 2025 by Earnshaw Books. The book, originally written in Chinese by Ni Wencai, addresses international adoption during the one-child policy era. Drawing on Ni’s experience as a county official in Gaoyou, Jiangsu, and his contact with adoptive families abroad, the book reconstructs the connections between abandoned children and their adoptive families across continents. The English edition includes updated testimonies, contextual additions, and newly translated material intended for a Western readership.
How did your collaboration with Ni Wencai begin, and what led to the decision to produce an English edition of the book?
My connection with this book actually began with a group of adoptive families in the United States. In 2008, a group of American “Gaoyou families” started planning a reunion in Seattle for 2009. Mr. Ni had published his book about these families in 2007 and gave a copy to every Gaoyou family he was in touch with. This was a precious gift to the families because it embodied their adopted children’s connection to their roots in China. However, hardly any of them could read it, so they sought volunteers to produce a rough translation of the essential parts.
I had a personal interest in adoptions, so I stepped up to the plate, thinking I could produce a satisfactory rough translation in a matter of days. But as soon as I started translating this book, I recognized its value for a much broader audience. Here was a heartening story of adoption that had not been told by any other publication and deserved to be heard. I made up my mind to edit and translate this book for a Western audience.
Life has a way of diverting our best intentions, so it has taken me 16 years to bring this book to fruition. The silver lining is that these adopted children have come of age, and we have gained the clarity of hindsight, which makes this book richer.
As for how I connected with Ni Wencai, I had planned a trip to China in 2009, so I made a detour to visit Mr. Ni and the orphanage under his jurisdiction. The decision to collaborate on an English edition was a result of that visit.
How did your personal experience as the adoptive parent of a Chinese daughter shape your decision to translate Love Without Borders?
The focus of my academic career was directing study abroad programs in China for American college students. I am a true believer in immersion education—”if you want to take a shower, you’ve got to get under the shower and get yourself thoroughly wet!” Many of my students heeded my advice. As director, I too did not just observe from the sidelines but became personally involved with people in Chinese society.
My adoption was atypical in that it involved a preteen girl I took under my wing, and the “adoption” was never officialized. It started with helping a migrant family in Beijing and ended up bringing their “left-behind child” (留守儿童) to the US. This daughter has earned a doctorate and is now a clinical psychologist in Seattle. She joined our family in the US just a few months before I volunteered to translate Love Without Borders for the Gaoyou families, so my own adoption experience must have been an impetus.
What were the main challenges in translating a work originally written for a Chinese domestic audience, particularly one shaped by political sensitivities?
The biggest challenges were in editing and supplementing the original Chinese book published in 2007—18 years ago!—for a contemporary global audience. As editor, I made the historical content relevant today and balanced the perspectives of China and the West. The retrospective view from 2025 provides the clarity, objectivity, and inclusiveness that was not possible in 2007. This was accomplished chiefly through the prologue and the last three stories in Chapter 6, “Voices from Gaoyou Adoptive Families.”
Translating from Chinese into English presents a different set of challenges. A literal translation can be done by any bilingual person, or by AI today. But for a work of this nature, it requires a translator with sensitivity to both cultures, the ability to read between the lines, and an understanding of how a reader of the translated version would interpret the words. As a bilingual/bicultural person with half a century of experience translating from Chinese into English, I have overcome these general challenges.
But in translating the original Chinese edition of Love Without Borders, I consulted with the Chinese author endlessly, asking him “Did you really mean to say this?” or even “Would you like to revise what you said in 2007 for this 2025 English edition?” In other words, I used the process of translating to do some editing as well.
You included updated narratives from adoptees and families. How did you select which contemporary voices to include?
I actually reached out to all the adoptive families to seek their input into this book. I requested permission to quote them, to include photos of them, and invited them to submit updated information. In the end, it was not a matter of selecting from many volunteer contemporary voices, but a process of recruiting and enabling the voices that I felt would broaden the scope of the book. I also reached out to others not included in the original Chinese edition—people in the adoptive community and journalists, filmmakers, and authors—to provide a fuller context for the main stories in this book.
The more controversial aspects—such as trafficking, coerced relinquishment, or local-level corruption—are addressed with care. How did you balance clarity and restraint?
The dark aspects of Chinese adoptions during the one-child policy era have been amply covered in Western media. Because there’s a market in the West for sensational topics, and journalism is in a way a commodity, these controversial aspects have received a disproportionate amount of exposure. Love Without Borders addresses the positive side of the adoption story that has been overshadowed by the negative coverage, thus bringing much-needed balance to the public perception.
But I did not want this book to err on the other side of the scale either, so I presented a comprehensive overview in the prologue, including recognition of the negative aspects, and set the main story of this book against the full background that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. An important purpose of this approach was to prevent readers from suspecting that this book is a whitewash of the Chinese adoption story that they have heard and believed. I wanted the reader to see this book as another important side of the story that they may not have heard before. Last but not least, I wanted the adoptees to see and embrace the bright side of their origins.
Several sections explore efforts to retain or rediscover Chinese culture among adoptees. From your perspective, how effective are these efforts in practice?
I have two different answers to this question, depending on the goal of the effort.
The adoptive parents made tremendous efforts to give their Chinese children a sense of belonging. They knew that their children—with biological roots in China and cultural roots in the US—would sooner or later face an identity issue. They wanted to show their children that they too embrace Chinese culture, so that the children would have pride in being Chinese and would not have to choose sides. For many adoptees, the identity issue may never be fully resolved, but I believe the effort has largely succeeded in bringing the two sides of the identity gap closer. In the best-case scenario, they can fully integrate the two identities into a “1+1=more than 2” mindset. So if the adoptive parents’ goal is to develop a sense of connection with China in their search for identity, their effort has largely succeeded.
As for how well the adoptees retain or rediscover Chinese language and culture, it depends on the educational environment, the opportunities provided by the adoptive parents, and the inclination of the adoptees. This applies not only to adopted Chinese children but also to natural-born children of ethnic Chinese immigrants. The challenges are the same, but the natural-born children have a home environment to practice Chinese culture, so they are more likely to absorb it by osmosis than the adoptees. There are anecdotal cases of adoptees who have achieved superior Chinese language and cultural skills, and these typically come by way of intentional effort to search for their roots. Many adoptees do not have the goal of achieving a high level of Chinese language and cultural proficiency, but most of the ones who have this goal do achieve it.
Did you notice significant changes in adoptee narratives or identity discourse between the early 2000s and today?
A lot has happened in the last two decades in the lives of the adoptees and their families, and much more of the behind-the-scenes realities about the sourcing and process of international adoptions have come to light. In the early 2000s, the adoptive families’ narratives were based on their hopes and dreams, and the adoptees were being nurtured in the warm, safe cocoons of their families. As the children grew up and interacted with the greater environment, issues of identity emerged, making the growing pains that naturally occur with every human being even more challenging for the adoptees. Their fraught experiences probably led some families to decline updating their narratives for the book.
In the early 2000s, all the narratives came from the adoptive parents. As the adoptees came of age, they began telling their own stories. Many organizations in the adoptive community have shifted their focus from the parents to the adoptees, and the narratives and dialogues are increasingly coming from the adoptees themselves.
To his credit, the Chinese author Ni Wencai, back in 2007, had foreseen the long-term psychological effects of adoption. He had studied the wave of adoptions of Korean children by Americans a generation earlier and addressed this issue in chapter 2. He also gave glimpses of what he saw lying in the future of the Chinese adoptees. In a way, writing this book in 2007—and giving a copy to all the American adoptive families that he was in touch with—was his way of beginning a dialogue to help the adoptees deal with the identity issue in the future.
While working on the translation, did you consult any institutional sources beyond Ni Wencai’s materials, such as policy documents or academic research?
Even before I became involved with this book in 2008, I was interested in international adoption of Chinese children, so I kept abreast of all the publications on this subject. When I began editing and translating this book for publication in 2024, I researched all the relevant Chinese and English materials, as though I was writing my own Ph.D. dissertation. My intention was not to create additional content but to fact-check for objectivity and accuracy, but this process did result in some significant new content to balance and round out the Chinese original.
What stood out most to you among the letters written by American and Canadian adoptive families?
I found the few letters from adoptive children to be most touching, for they were straight from the heart, with no varnishing. The letters written by adoptive parents showed tremendous eagerness to stay connected with their children’s roots. In most cases, those roots could only be traced as far back as the orphanage supervised by Ni Wencai. Ni initiated the string of correspondence because he was eager to stay connected with the “daughters of Gaoyou” who have migrated to the other side of the planet. It was heartening to see how this bridge for ongoing dialogue was formed by their correspondence. With growing political tension between China and the US, this bridge for dialogue has grown in significance.
Did you have direct contact with any of the Western families mentioned in the book? If so, did it influence your interpretation of the text?
This question overlaps with question 4. I connected with all the families mentioned in the book through email and/or the “families with children from Gaoyou” Facebook group. My more extensive connections were with Charles Day’s family and the folks featured in the last three stories in Chapter 6. The people that I connected with extensively did play a role in shaping the final version of the book. Aside from extensive correspondence, I met with all of them on Zoom. In the case of the Day family—featured most prominently in this book, including on the cover—we had an in-person “family” dinner in Seattle. As for the authors of the three personal stories, I played a significant role in editing, co-authoring, and even ghost-writing their stories.
What aspect of Love Without Borders stands out the most from all the other books that have been published about the adoption of children from China during the one-child policy era?
Love Without Borders stands out from all the other books in that it offers a unique blend of Chinese and Western perspectives. The adoption of children from China during the one-child policy era is a sensitive and controversial subject. It is also political and cross-cultural, making an even-handed treatment hard to come by. Among the plethora of books, articles, and documentaries in the English language, there are just two exceptions that provide a balanced perspective—one book and one documentary, both created by Chinese who have migrated to the West.
The Chinese author of Love Without Borders had studied in Australia and is a scholar with an international outlook. The original Chinese version of the book was informed by his exchanges with Western adoptive parents and therefore already had a bilateral perspective. The current book in English—being a collaboration between a Chinese author and an American editor/translator—has further enhanced this blend of Chinese and Western perspectives. In the era of unprecedented tensions between the United States and China, a book that focuses on the people-to-people relationships between these two nations, and that treats a controversial subject with sensitivity and even-handedness, is a much-needed dose of fresh air.
Can you envision how readers of this book will react to it? And what do you hope they will get out of it?
This book is intended for an English language audience, but I hope it will find a part of this audience among the growing number of native Chinese with English reading competence. The contemporary generation of Chinese people are interested in Western perspectives, and they now have the ability to see those perspectives directly through English language materials.
I hope readers in both China and the West will see the narratives presented in Love Without Borders as the truth that both sides can embrace. I also hope that they will wish to discuss this sensitive topic with each other. This book should provide the common ground to facilitate such conversations.
No single book can be the final word on the subject, and this book certainly does not pretend to be such. Implementation of the one-child policy was complex and diverse, with great variations at different times and from region to region. International adoptions as a byproduct of this policy also varied widely by place and time. Readers of Love Without Borders should understand that the book represents the experience of one orphanage in a relatively prosperous region of China, one that is untainted by the corruptions that have been widely reported in the West. But I hope readers will not see the book as having been filtered through rose-colored glasses.
Finally, I hope the children adopted from China and their families would derive a sense of pride in their personal history, and also some moral support as they face the challenging issues of origins and identity.
Photos courtesy of Vivian Ling
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