Adoptive parents of Cambodian children forge a bond

Sophina Haubold, 6, of Malvern, gets a push from her father, Gary, at East Goshen Park. Hers is oneof about 25 families in the group Southeastern Pennsylvania Families With Cambodian Children. (Photo: CLEM
MURRAY / Inquirer Staff Photographer)

Bonna Neang Weinstein will open her Khmer Art Gallery, at 319 N. 11th St. in Philadelphia, on Friday night for a New Year celebration for local families with Cambodian children.

By Jeff Gammage
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Staff Writer (Pennsylvania, USA)

Six years ago, two suburban women met at a typically suburban get-together, a Little People's Music class where both had enrolled their toddlers.Joan Blair and Bonna Neang Weinstein immediately saw they had more in common than notes and lyrics.Weinstein is a daughter of Cambodia, a survivor of the 1970s genocide known as the Killing Fields. And Blair has a daughter, Veata, adopted from that war-ravaged Southeast Asian land."I thought, 'This is great, but how is she going to keep this little girl interested in her heritage?' " Weinstein said of that day in Elkins Park.Today, Weinstein, 43, runs the Khmer Art Gallery, just north of Chinatown, a venue alive with the majesty and mystery of ancient Cambodia. On Friday, Blair, 54, and 8-year-old Veata will be among the guests at a grand Cambodian New Year celebration featuring authentic music, dance and food.Everyone is invited, but Weinstein has issued a special invitation to Cambodian adoptees, for she feels she understands their quandary. Though the United States is her adored, adopted country, "there's still that missing part."Veata and her young peers occupy an unusual station, even within the complicated world of international adoption. Cambodia opened to American families in the 1990s but closed in 2001 amid allegations of child trafficking, without completing many adoptions in between.Only about 1,755 Cambodian adoptees live in the United States - children bound by ethnicity and divided by geography. Their coterie is the opposite of the big communities surrounding children adopted from Guatemala, Russia and world leader China, who come by the thousands each year. Because the Cambodian children arrived in the same short span, they have no older generation of role models, and no new arrivals behind.Four years ago, Denise Glennon of Malvern started Southeastern Pennsylvania Families With Cambodian Children. Her goal "was for my child to know other Cambodian children," she said. "There are so few, particularly in the suburbs."Today, at the group's events, she notices that all the children are about the same age. "Our group is going to keep going," she said, "but it is heartbreaking."Children adopted from China have a vibrant community centered on 67,000 children. Almost every big city has a chapter of Families With Children From China, a support and education group.More than 400 families belong to chapters in South Jersey and the Philadelphia area, where they take part in midautumn celebrations, Mandarin lessons, calligraphy classes, cooking, music and book clubs.By comparison, the Cambodian children's group has about 25 families. People come from as far as Gettysburg and Rochester, N.Y., for the annual summer picnic."Everyone wants this," Glennon said. "They want their children to feel like they're part of, not really a community, because the kids don't know each other that well, but that they're from a very special place."Glennon and her husband, Gary Haubold, have three daughters from China and one from Cambodia. Sophina, 6, has enormous interest in her Cambodian homeland, but "truthfully," Glennon said, "it's confusing. 'How can I be from there when I'm your daughter?' It's a lot to think about."And that's before Glennon tries to explain the homicidal reign of the Khmer Rouge, a subject Weinstein knows too well. She was not even a teenager in 1975 when the regime seized Cambodia and began the holocaust of the Killing Fields.Government workers, scholars and professionals were executed; others were starved and beaten in labor camps. An estimated 1.5 million died.Weinstein, confined apart from her father and brother, recalled being ordered to dig a retention pond - during the dry season. She was sure she was digging her grave.Her father escaped to Thailand, and in 1979, after the Vietnamese invaded and drove off the Khmer Rouge, she and her brother made their way there, too. She emigrated to the United States in 1984 and lives in Abington.Today, many of her countrymen dwell in soul-shocking poverty, in villages where land mines continue to kill and maim. It was desperate, postwar poverty that drove adoptions in the late 1990s."The birth parents are very, very poor," said Harriet Brener of Jenkintown, mother of a Cambodian daughter, Mya, 8. For some parents, baby formula is an unaffordable luxury, said Brener, who previously worked helping people adopt from Cambodia. Forced to choose among hungry mouths, they may leave a child at an orphanage.Cambodian adoptions peaked at 402 in 2000. The next year, amid alarming reports of child trafficking, the U.S. government suspended adoptions. Two Americans who ran a Seattle adoption agency later pleaded guilty to criminal charges, admitting to a scheme in which children were taken from families and represented as orphans on immigration papers.Advocates say the ban punishes the innocent, with estimates of parentless Cambodian children reaching several hundred thousand. It's unknown when or whether adoptions might resume.Meanwhile, the American parents of Cambodian children seek community where they can find it."There aren't that many of us," said Judy Haupt of Exton, whose 10-year-old daughter, Sophia, attends a Cambodian classical dance class in South Philadelphia.Blair and her partner, Nancy Kraybill of Elkins Park, take Veata to the same class, trying to provide a tie to Cambodia - an effort that is by turns embraced and rejected. Some days, Blair said, Veata is eager to get to class. Other times, engulfed by the culture around her, she's more interested in High School Musical.Weinstein wants her Khmer Gallery, in a renovated warehouse basement on North 11th Street, to be a place where Cambodian children feel welcome. She's planning music and language classes.Walking into the gallery is like stepping into a movie, perhaps Raiders of the Lost Ark, with intricate stone carvings filling room after room. Life-size wooden Buddhas keep watch over smaller deities. Behind a curtain, a windowless room holds beautiful, unsettling art, a memorial to the Killing Fields."I live, breathe, sleep and eat culture," Weinstein said. "And Cambodia is not just culture, it's identity."

If You Go What: Cambodian New Year Celebration.When: 6 to 8 p.m. Friday.Where: Khmer Art Gallery, 319 N. 11th St., Philadelphia.Admission: Free, but a reservation must be made at rsvp@punchmedia.biz or by calling 215-300-6081 or 215-882-1188.

Contact staff writer Jeff Gammage at 610-313-8110 or jgammage@phillynews.com.