Three Redmond High School (RHS) students, who are adoptees from China, spent part of their summer break “giving back” to their birth country.

Twelfth grader Lanfen Kaplan and 11th graders Tian Kisch and Amy Pumputis, recently made the trip with other members of an organization called Families with Children from China-Northwest (FCC-NW).

The journey allowed the Redmond teens to reconnect with bits of their past, but it was mostly an opportunity to share time and loving care with children at orphanages and private foster homes in Beijing and Xian.

They went to five different locations, mostly working with kids between six months and three years old.

“We spent about six hours a day, holding kids, feeding them, changing diapers,” said Kisch. “We did it in shifts — some worked in kitchens or did yard work, too.”

Pumputis said “interacting with the kids was the most rewarding,” especially because many were awaiting medical treatment for conditions such as cleft palate. They also visited a home where school-age children had brittle bone disease.

Although the RHS students couldn’t visit the same orphanages which had placed them with American families, “these were similar to places that took care of us,” said Kaplan.

Kisch, Kaplan and Pumputis hope to make FCC-NW trips to China a biennial tradition, if not for themselves, maybe for other teens from the Redmond community who were adopted from China.

Before and during their trip, they maintained a blog about their expectations and their actual experiences, www.fccnwchinatrip.blogspot.com.

Chatting with the Redmond Reporter as a follow-up, they described some of their “culture shock,” now that they are used to living in a modern city in the western world.

“This was my second time there,” Kisch noted. “For some in our group, this was their first time back.”

What were the most noticeable differences between people in China and here in Redmond?

Kisch giggled and explained, “They have a different sense of space. They get really close to you, almost like they’re ‘in your face.'” Pumputis agreed, “They don’t know what personal space is!”

Kisch added, “Skin color is also an issue. In China, lighter skin is higher in social status because the farmers’ skin is brown from working in the sun. Here, people spend money to go to tanning parlors.”

Kaplan commented, “There is a different perception of people’s size, though. They seem more accepting of weight issues than here.”

And food was a huge difference, the girls agreed.

“We ate way too much rice. We were very happy to have McDonald’s when we found one there and when we got home,” said Kisch. She also said that they avoided drinking milk in China because it’s not pasteurized. Kaplan said nearly everyone in their group became ill with some sort of “tummy troubles” during the course of the trip, because the food was so dissimilar to what they usually eat.

Still, “I’ve thought about going back, staying longer,” said Kaplan.

She said she felt a true kinship with the other volunteers from FCC-NW: “We could all relate, we all went through something similar, it was so personal to us.”