Please vote for Uncle John!' a five-year-old Chinese girl shouted cheerfully into a microphone at a Democratic Party rally in New York in the early spring. Often dressed in a traditional cheongsam, Iris Kerry Kaler, the adopted daughter of United States Senator John Kerry's sister, Peggy, is regularly pictured by her uncle's side when he comes to New York.
It wasn't always like this. No one knows where life began for the pretty little girl pictured reaching
out to her uncle with such glee. Adopted in 2001, it is likely Iris was born in 1998, perhaps somewhere in the poor countryside around Chongqing city or in nearby Sichuan province. Found abandoned outside the Chongqing long-distance bus station on September 10, 2000, without any note or identification, Iris will probably never know where her first home was - or who her parents were. But what is for sure is that if 'Uncle John' unseats incumbent George W. Bush in November's presidential election, Iris, whose life began in poverty and abandonment, will become the first Chinese member of the extended First Family.
Hundreds of thousands of girls - and some boys - are abandoned every year on the mainland. Many are adopted, either domestically or internationally, with most overseas adoptees going to the US - up to 7,000 this year. All travel a long, fraught road to their new families. Yet few make a transition as dramatic as that of Iris Kerry Kaler, who in six months from September 2000 to March 2001 went from being a vulnerable, no-name girl standing alone in a bus station to a cherished member of one of the most famous clans in the US. Iris is now a happy first-grader in the coveted Shuang Wen School in New York's Lower East Side. Once one of thousands of children living off the average 150 yuan a month allocated per child in China's state-run orphanages, Iris now holidays in East Hampton and lives in the world of New York's do-good, centre-left intelligentsia. Her mother, Peggy, works as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) liaison for the US mission to the United Nations and her father, George, is associate dean at Sophie Davis School of Bio-Medical Education at City College, part of the City University of New York. It's a dizzying change but Iris has handled the transition brilliantly.
'It wasn't something we did a lot of research on,' says George Kaler from his home. 'We heard people had good experiences adopting from China. We read some books about the whole situation, about a lot of girls being abandoned in China. We'd also read some stories about people not having a good experience with Russia and Eastern Europe, the way kids were treated there. It looked like it would work.'
Becoming parents was a late-life decision for George, 57, and Peggy, 62. 'We'd tried to have kids when we first got married and weren't able to,' says Kaler. 'We decided that since we had busy lives we were just going to be Aunt Peggy and Uncle George to our nieces. Then Peggy was at a memorial service in England for an aunt who died and talked to some cousins. She asked, 'Do you think George and I are too old to adopt?' The cousins said no and she came back all excited, and we started filling out forms, and here we are. I think there are times when it's exhausting, but I don't think we're too old.'