Parents In U.S., Children In China: Some Say It's Best -- Despite Absence, Kids Have Native Roots

WASHINGTON - On Fridays, Zhou Wei rushes home from her telemarketing job to her Hyattsville, Md., apartment to talk to her daughter Lucy, almost 6, about her math competitions, favorite television programs and the occasional tummy ache.

The conversations are by telephone, 12 time zones away in China.

Zhou left China a week before her daughter's first birthday to join her husband in the United States, leaving Lucy to be raised by her maternal grandmother.

Zhou knows what she has missed, including her daughter's first step and the day she learned to recite Tang Dynasty poems. She follows Lucy's growth through stacks of pictures. Most of the picture flow is one way, but Lucy has a homework assignment her grandmother gave her: Every night, at bedtime, she is to remember her parents by kissing their picture.

"We have to sacrifice being with her," said Zhou, 34, her voice full of longing. "We wanted to set up a good foundation here, a more (financially) stable environment."

Now Chen, 36, is a research associate in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park, and Lucy's parents are preparing for her arrival in the next few months. Zhou worries that if they spend any more time apart, the child will grow too distant from her.

Like thousands of Chinese couples who have settled in the United States in the past decade, Zhou and her husband rely on their extended family in China to raise their child. Some of the reasons have to do with the cost of day care and a desire to have their children be Chinese in more than name and blood. The others involve fundamental ideas about child-rearing and family.

Many Chinese parents see a child as security in their old age and a fulfillment of their duty to continue the family line. They express their love by doing their best to feed, clothe and shelter their child, which may mean parting temporarily if grandparents can do the job better.

Extended families loom large in China, which has a long history of many generations sharing one roof. Day-care costs aside, Chinese parents in the United States say they trust their relatives to provide more love and better care than baby-sitters - and their relatives often believe it is their duty.

"Even if they were in China, the grandparents would still be taking care of the kid, and the grandparents want to take care of the kid," said Shelly Han, an American trade consultant who is married to a Chinese man.

Han, 30, who speaks fluent Mandarin, understands the tradition and said she sympathizes with Chinese in the United States - an estimated 100,000 of them - who have been given a rare opportunity for advancement. Most feel they must devote themselves unstintingly to their studies while they can.

Still, when Han's husband, who arrived in 1988 to attend Yale Law School, suggested last year that they send their infant daughter to his parents in China, she was incredulous.

"I'm not going to send her to China!" Han recalls telling her husband, now a staff counsel to Sen. Hank Brown, R-Colo. "Children change from day to day. She's walking today. She wasn't walking yesterday. To miss those little things and moments is something you can't get back. You can't get that from letters and phone calls."

Her husband, Han Lianchao, 40, has not given up on the idea. The baby, now 1, is no longer colicky, and Shelly Han is no longer in school; but he remains eager for his daughter to be steeped in Chinese culture.

The Hans, who live in Arlington, Va., have worked out a compromise. Instead of sending their daughter to China as he wanted, they arranged for his 71-year-old mother, Wu Xunchen, to come to the United States to take care of Isabelle Anne-Jingyi Han, known as Ibby.

Shelly Han said she believes that parents need their children as much as their children need them. But Han Lianchao said a good education, including a grounding in Chinese culture and language, is more important to him than watching his daughter take her first step.

Apart from family traditions, Chinese communist ideology always has put country first. On the epic Long March of 1934-35, Chinese leader Mao Zedong abandoned three of his children, including an infant, to peasant families along the way, and his loss was considered a noble sacrifice.

China also has a history of splitting families. During the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, millions of parents were sent to labor in the fields, their children left in the care of relatives. Chinese diplomats are not allowed to take their children to postings abroad.

Child-rearing by grandparents is not unique to Chinese culture.

West Indian immigrants in New York often send toddlers and adolescents back home to shield them from crime in the United States.

Among native-born Americans, "intergenerational parenting" has been going on for decades among whites, blacks and Latinos.

Economic need is the main reason, according to Linda Burton, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist, but many black people who left the South to work in the Northeast send their children to grandparents in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia - for the summer or longer - for a stronger sense of family and roots.