Film: Ricki’s Promise
“More than 80,000 children have been adopted from China, a nearly all-female wave of cultural transplants, and many of the eldest are now traveling to a lost homeland in search of their birth parents.
Ricki Mudd is one of them. In the hands of Millersville University professor and documentary filmmaker Changfu Chang, her complicated life story stands for all the rest.
Chang’s new film, Ricki’s Promise, is the tale of a girl granted the unlikely opportunity to ask all her questions – and finding only uncertainty in the answers. The 84-minute feature is showing here Saturday during the Asian American Film Festival.
“She carries a whole generation behind her,” Chang said in an interview, “to go to China, to look for information.”
The film marks Chang’s ninth screen examination of a complex and evolving topic, one that has moved in unusual directions since he produced Love Without Boundaries in 2003. Chang’s movies have been screened across the United States, must-see fare for researchers and parents immersed in what amounts to a grand social experiment.
The girls growing up in this country are Chinese by blood, American by upbringing, yet not Chinese American – their lives a constant negotiation of ethnic expectation and reality. Many adoptees, now teenagers and young women, are asking hard questions about where they were born and why they were abandoned.
“Collectively,” Ricki says in the film, “our stories are like a puzzle with missing pieces. Sometimes we don’t even know how many pieces are really missing.”
China’s birth-planning laws generally limit couples to one child, and girls can be unwanted in a land where culture and economics dictate a need for sons. Because it’s illegal to have “extra” children and to place babies for adoption, girls have been secretly left at bus stations or on street corners, then swept into state orphanages.
The pace of Chinese adoption has dropped sharply in recent years, as rising incomes and changes in birth laws allow more Chinese families to keep a second child. And the narrative of the one-child policy has been dented by evidence of baby trafficking in Hunan province.
In previous films, Chang accomplished what was thought to be impossible – locating birth parents, and then persuading them to talk on camera. In Ricki’s Promise he goes further, trailing and filming a girl who not only found her birth family but promised to spend a summer with them when she turned 18.
“Having my birth parents is, like, an added benefit,” Ricki, now 21, said in an interview. “They love me and I love them. But it’s not like it was necessary for me to move on in my life. It wasn’t necessary for me to feel complete.”
She grew up with a flexible definition of family, she said, including four adopted siblings and several step-siblings from her American parents’ previous marriages.
“Family for me has been so broad,” she said. “So having another family was just, ‘There’s more to my family.’ ”
Ricki, of Seattle, was 5 when she was adopted – not a sleepy, unknowing baby, but a confused, distressed child.
Years later, parents Wendy and Bill Mudd were told that their daughter had been under the foster care of a woman called Madam Fan. But Fan gave conflicting accounts, and then a couple claiming to be the birth parents made contact.
When Ricki was 12, the Mudds traveled to China to meet the couple, who confirmed their identity through photos of Ricki as a child, including some showing unique physical features known to both sets of parents.
The Chinese parents shared a story of interfamily conflict and disapproval that had led to Ricki’s being seized, without their knowledge, and placed in an orphanage by government officials.
In the movie, Ricki, then 18, returns to China as an intelligent, articulate, and Chinese-speaking young woman who wants to understand the factors that pushed her out of China and into a home in Washington state.
“It’s in America’s psyche – we want to have closure, to have answers,” said Chang, a former reporter for Fujian Television who earned a doctorate at Purdue University. “But the reality of that is very hard. What happened in the past? It’s up to interpretation. In Chinese culture, we have more tolerance for uncertainty.”
Ricki is one of fewer than 100 Chinese adoptees who have located their birth parents, her experience a map for others who follow.
“Now is the time for them to really ask the questions about who they are,” Chang said. “To go to China is a way for them to relate, not just to birth parents, but to the culture. Ricki found out who she was.””
A film about girls seeking their lost homeland
[Philly.com 11/21/14 by Jeff Gammage]
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