New York: Lindy will never forget the night her parents brought her back to the United States from Fujian province when she was four years old.
She cried silently throughout the journey because she missed her nainai (grandmother), who raised her in China.
Lindy, an assumed name, was a “satellite baby”, a child born in the US to Chinese immigrant parents who are sent to China as infants and raised by relatives – typically grandparents – and then returned to the US to start school at five or six years old.
Parents do this for many reasons, often working anti-social hours or several jobs and sending their children to China for cultural reasons.
On her return, it took Lindy a year before she spoke to her father.
Now 17, she said, “I think it was because we had lost four years that could have been important to our relationship.”
She speaks only English now and has forgotten most of her early childhood spent in a small village with her grandmother.
She still feels distantly connected with her parents.
“I just don’t know how to show my emotions to them,” she said.
David Chen’s parents sent him to Fujian to be raised by his grandparents before he was one. When he was five, they brought him back to New York to start school.
Chen, now 26 and a student at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York, said: “I didn’t know who they were – they were strangers to me.”
To pay for him to go to China, his parents worked 14 hours a day at different restaurants, often seven days a week. The time the family spent together was limited.
As Chen started third grade, he started to have suicidal thoughts due to separation from his grandparents, the difficulty of learning English and bullying at school.
“I definitely had my emotions bottled up,” he said, rather than confiding in his parents.
The term “satellite babies” was coined by Yvonne Bohr, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, Canada, who has been studying such separations since 2006.
Babies are often sent away when they already develop a strong bonds to their parents, resulting in distress during the separation, Bohr said.
“When they return, the parents in turn may expect the children to be very happy to be home, often not understanding that for the child, this isn’t home,” she said.
Research suggests that a “satellite” upbringing can disrupt a child’s environment, which can lead to depression, anxiety and misbehaviour at school.
Lois Lee heads the Chinese-American Planning Council child care programme in New York.
Founded in 1965, it is a non-profit supporting immigrant and low-income communities in the city.
She said most parents of satellite babies worked long hours every day and couldn’t afford child care. – China Daily/Asia News Network
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