Wanted: Grown woman for adoption

By Zou Huilin (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-01-24 07:26

A well-educated retired couple in Wuhan want to adopt a daughter.

Nothing wrong with that, except that they want a grown-up and well-educated woman and their criteria are as tough as those, as many people say, for the "Super Girls" competition.

It's not that former Ministry of Construction expert Tian Zhendong and wife Ding Shuhui, a retired professor, don't have an offspring.

In fact, their son is a computer science major who joined IBM's Chinese branch after graduation. He is married to a woman who is highly educated, too. She is a dentist. But the two emigrated to Canada in 2000.

The elderly couple want their adopted daughter to be between 25 and 40, with a college or higher degree, but without living parents. She should be cheerful, kind-hearted, caring and unmarried. And she has to be living in the capital of Hubei Province.

But there's more than something for the adopted daughter, too, in the bargain. The couple have vowed to leave their 96-square-meter apartment to her after "living happily" with her for three years. Such a house in Wuhan is worth 400,000 yuan ($51,282).

Till date, 103 women have attended the selection process, and the couple have shortlisted five of them.

"My son was 30 years old when he emigrated to Canada. Initially, I didn't want him to leave China," Ding told Wuhan Morning Post recently.

"But then my husband and I thought that as parents we should not be selfish, instead we should support him to develop his career abroad."

But after he left, Ding began feeling lonely, especially when her husband was invited to deliver lecturers in other cities.

Her decision to let her son shift to Canada was not right after all, she thought. To overcome their loneliness, Ding and Tian talk to their son and daughter-in-law for up to two hours at times on the weekends.

But even that cannot fill the void left behind by their son and daughter-in-law. For six years, they have suffered their loneliness. And during one such moment they decided to adopt a daughter with the help of the local media.

Some people have alleged that the couple have used their apartment as a bait to get a daughter, and the women who want to become that have bitten it. But the couple deny the charge, saying that most candidates have done so because they were seeking parental love.

Wuhan Senior Resident Affairs Office officials believe adopting children is a good solution for such couples. Along with the local civil affair bureau, the office is working out ways to help them.

But Wuhan has 300,000 senior citizens who lead lonely lives, and most of them are resigned to their loneliness because, unlike the Tian-Ding couple, they cannot afford or would not like to go in for adoption.

(China Daily 01/24/2007 page5)



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