Losing Your Language Through Foster Care

Every time N. saw a Chinese immigrant family enjoying their time together, he would be swallowed by sorrow. 

N. often recalls the moments when his daughter got sick as a toddler and he carried her in his arms to the clinic. “I had never thought that one day my daughter and us won’t be able to directly communicate,” said N., who asked to be identified by the first initial of his last name only to protect his privacy. 

His daughter, now 17, cannot communicate with him directly, because she has lost her Chinese language after she was placed in a non-Asian foster family. And she is no longer his daughter by legal means. And his wife, fighting to get their daughter back from New York City’s foster care system, died in the middle of the long battle from cancer.

Unfortunately for N., because of the low number of certified Asian foster parents, the rate of Asian children being placed with foster parents from their own racial background is the lowest among all racial groups. His daughter didn’t get the chance to keep her Chinese language in the foster care system which helped loosen the tie she had with her birth parents, and eventually was adopted by her foster family.  While living with foster parents from a different race doesn’t necessarily mean a child would lose his or her original cultural identity and language, there is no law mandating foster parents to immerse children in their original culture. 

Research has shown cultural dissimilarity in foster families can affect children’s mental health, and language barriers can distance children from their biological parents even more, making family reunion, a major goal of the child welfare system, more difficult to reach.

Now President Trump’s mass deportation campaign is leaving many immigrant parents in jeopardy, including a significant number of asylum seekers from China. With the possible spike of children left alone in the U.S., and the lack of efforts to recruit Asian foster parents, some in the community say a bigger crisis might be looming. 

A Separation

Both N. and his wife grew up in the coastal province of Fujian, China where the traditional culture encourages tough love including corporal punishment to some degree. 

One day a teacher saw red marks on N.’s daughter’s arms and legs, left by her mother who slapped her with a clothes hanger when the little girl refused to go to bed. N.’s daughter was taken away at school by the Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) 13-years-ago.

N. said his wife was never abusive to the child. The little girl, who was 4-years-old then, had been living with his mother in Manhattan’s Chinatown so that the couple could focus on building their business, a takeout restaurant in Florida. The long distance only made his wife, who was pregnant with their second child to be delivered not long after and went to New York for a prenatal check, indulge the little girl even more. She showered her with toys and goodies whenever she came to New York. 

It might be that the hormones during pregnancy gave her a short temper, he thought, and “our daughter would be returned to us very soon.” But he was wrong.

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Nicole Huang at Parent-Child Relationship Association.

Photo: Rong Xiaoqing for Documented

Once a child gets into foster care, the New York City family courts would hold hearings to find a permanent solution. The child could be returned after the birth parents fulfill certain requirements, or be released for adoption. In court, N and his wife., who knew nothing about the system, were facing a sophisticated foster family who tried hard to adopt the little girl. His wife’s death amid the legal battle also setback the case.  In 2023, when N felt he had run out of options,  he signed a settlement that had his daughter being adopted. 

But the first time N. realized the ties between him and the child might be unraveling was a year after the incident, when he found during regular visits allowed by the ACS that the girl completely stopped using Chinese, the only language he and his wife spoke.  “I thought that was a big problem,” said N.

According to the ACS, while Asian children only make up 1.7% of the roughly 6,400 children in foster care in New York City, Asian foster parents still don’t meet the demands – they make up only 1.3% of the close to 4,390 foster parents. The rate of Asian children being placed with foster parents from their own racial background is 16%, less than half of the rate of white children, and not even a quarter of the rate for African-American children.

While 45% of children in the foster care system are living with relatives and friends in familiar environments in an arrangement called kinship care, that rate for Asian children, many from new immigrant families without extensive networks in this country, is only 22%, also the lowest among all racial groups.   

Although suspicions of child abuse and child neglect is what might bring the ACS to one’s doorstep, Asian families are sometimes penalized by the system because of cultural misunderstandings, such as marks left on the child’s skin by traditional medicine treatments. 

Still, considering Asians make up 18% of the population in the city, some researchers and advocates believe they are underrepresented in the foster care system. Part of the reason is clear to people working in the field. 

When people in a Chinese community in New YorK find a missing child on the street, “they will keep the child under watch at a mom and pop shop and post a message on WeChat calling for parents who lost their child to come to pick the child up,” said Ling Ye, who has been working for elected officials in the Chinese concentrated neighborhood of Sunset Park since 2016 and is running for city council. “They won’t call the authorities because they are frightened that the ACS would take the kid away.”  

In a paper collected in the 2015 book “Addressing Racial Disproportionality and Disparities in Human Services,” some social work researchers depict a dire picture of what might happen to Asian children who are taken into the system — they are less often reunited with their birth families than White and Latino children, they pointed out. And it is partly because of child welfare workers’ unintentional discrimination due to a lack of knowledge about cultural and socioeconomic nuances. “This discrimination comes in the form of ‘interpreter services falling short, placement needs not being met, context of families not being addressed.’ ” the paper goes. 

In a lawsuit pending in the New York State Court of Appeals, Wen Z., an immigrant from Fujian, said he has experienced all of that. 

Tragedies Made Sadder 

Eleven years ago, Z.’s newly born son Ke Yong was taken away by the ACS. The agency believed the mother’s schizophrenia had prevented her from caring for the baby. According to court documents, Good Shepherd Services, the foster agency that handled the case, mistakenly marked Z.’s first language as Mandarin instead of the Chinese dialect Fuzhounese, and had not initially provided him an interpreter in the correct language during their communications. 

Meanwhile, Ke Young was placed at four foster care families speaking English and Spanish one after another and grew up speaking little Chinese. While biological parents are expected to regularly visit their children in foster care, the agency had not provided interpretation for Z  who is identified by the initial of his last name only to protect his privacy, during these visits in the first four years. 

Last June, State’s Supreme Court terminated Z. and his wife’s custody  of their son, finding Z’s wife’s mental health status disqualified her as the child’s guardian and Z didn’t sufficiently involved in planning for their son’s future after the child got into the system. Community and civil rights organizations filed two separate amicus briefs to call for the Court of Appeals to take on Z.’s appeal.

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Council members Shekar Krishnan (middle) and Sandra Ung (second from the left) and others at the City Council’s 2025 Lunar New Year celebration.

Photo: Rong Xiaoqing for Documented

People with disabilities and who don’t speak English make a significant part of the population entangled in the family regulation system, said Sania Chandrani, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the organizations which filed an amicus brief. If families “have both of those barriers, then it’s going to be even harder for them to access justice.” 

Charlie Jiang, is an attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, another organization involved. “They (the father and the son) can’t communicate,” he said. “How could you make a bond if you can’t communicate well with each other?” 

In April, the Court of Appeals decided to review the case, with hearings likely to start in September. In a written statement shared with Documented and Sing Tao Daily, Z. described the pain of not being able to communicate directly with his son. “I feel very sad because he is my son — my only son. I want to be able to get him back,” he said. 

Good Shepherd Services and the ACS declined to comment on this case. 

In recent years, the ACS has been trying to improve its language services. Since last year, the ACS has allowed foster care agencies to use its language service vendors. Improvements are visible.  “Way back, children were used as translators when they did investigations,” said Judy Ah-Yune, director of Manhattan community services at the Chinese Planning Council (CPC), an organization that has been pushing for better translation services at the ACS.

But the number of Asian foster families hasn’t changed much, nor has the chance for Asian children to be placed in families sharing their cultural backgrounds. “I’m definitely aware of a number of cases where children lose the language that their parents speak while they’re in foster care,” said Emily Wall, Z.’s lawyer from the Center for Family Representation, an organization aiming to maintain family integrity.

Looming Crisis 

There is no law requiring agencies to place children in foster families from their own cultural backgrounds. A federal law prohibits agencies considering race or ethnicity in foster and adoption placements, although the law also requires states to try to recruit foster parents reflecting the diversity of children in the system. 

In 2019, the ACS implemented a new placement module that lists language as one of the factors to consider in order to find the best match for foster children. But many other factors are also considered, such as children’s ages, medical needs and where they go to school. Marisa Kaufman, an  ACS spokesperson said this explains why only 18 of the 111 Asian children in the system are placed at Asian foster families when there are 60 certified Asian families. 

But some researchers believe cultural dissimilarities in foster families can do severe damage to children. In a paper published in the Children and Youth Services Review in 2012, researchers from the New York University and Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center found that different ethnic backgrounds in foster homes contribute to depression and loneliness symptoms among children, and different spoken language contributes to children’s conduct problems. 

In a 2024 study, Stephen Chen, associate professor at the Department of Psychology of Wellesley College, found the more Americanized children in Chinese immigrant families are, the less likely they understand their parents’ Chinese ways of expressing affection. “It had a lower effect on their feeling of security and attachment to their parents,” Chen told Documented and Sing Tao Daily. 

If the lack of Asian foster families is a chronic problem, it is getting more urgent now, said social services experts in the Asian community.  A significant number of asylum seekers crossing the southern border in recent years are  Chinese —at  least 37,000 in 2023 alone — a record high. A report from the Mayor’s Office of Immigration Affairs also shows 18% of Asian New Yorkers live in mixed-status households —- meaning that at least one member is an undocumented immigrant — compared to 12% on average. 

While a surge in child welfare cases due to mass deportations hasn’t emerged yet, social services organizations have seen some troubling signs. Nicole Huang, executive director of the Parent-Child Relationship Association, said she is now helping a woman from China who was reported for alleged child abuse last December soon after she arrived in the U.S. and lived in a shelter in the city. Her two children were both taken away by the ACS and are living with a non-Asian foster family. “There will be more cases like this,” said Huang. 

A Gap to Fill

It is dinner time, and Bella cannot wait for it. Tonight Ileen Park prepared jeyuk-bokkeum–a stir-fried spicy pork belly dish, kimchi, and, of course, rice, for her family. Bella also got her favorite myeongnan-jeot–salted pollock roe in a small plate placed right in front of her. Bella, 3, is equipped with a pair of practice chopsticks. But she is not good at it yet, so Ileen and her husband Chuck Park have to feed the little girl every now and then. “Yummy!” Bella exclaimed while she extended her arm to rub Ileen’s cheeks. 

While the scene might be common in many Asian families with toddlers, the Parks are not Bella’s parents in legal terms yet. She came to the Korean American family as a foster child when she was five months old. Her Chinese birth parents are mostly absent from her life. In May, the court decided to make Bella available for adoption. And the Parks, whom Bella has been calling mommy and daddy since she started speaking, are going through the procedure to adopt her.

Bella is the fourth foster child the Parks have cared for since they became certified foster parents. In 2020, when the couple —who already had a healthy 7-year-old boy of their own — were thinking of expanding their family, they decided to take a new route. “We heard about foster care and it seemed like a meaningful, powerful way for us to selfishly grow our family. But it also seemed like a service for another family,” said Chuck. 

But when they went to a foster agency to take the required training to get certified, the Parks realized how unusual their decision was. “There were about 30 people there,” said Chuck. “We were the only Asian people.” 

It is not easy to recruit foster parents. In a recent op-ed piece in amNY that sought to encourage people to certify, Ina Mendez, deputy commissioner of the ACS, said “simply put, more are needed” about the city’s foster parents.

But there might be some unique challenges to recruit Asians, especially among first generation immigrants. Traditional Asian cultures value blood relationship in a family. The Parks, who were both born in the U.S., said their immigrant parents love Bella as their own, but they still don’t understand the rationale of foster care. “You’re taking care of somebody else’s baby, and they’re very confused,” Chuck said. 

The hours of training, meticulous background checks, strict requirements on living spaces, the visiting time for birth parents that is often scheduled during work hours, and the base stipend lower than $1,000 per child per month, could also be deterrents. “Many first generation immigrants don’t have the capacity to take in foster children,” said Lynn Cai, co-deputy director of Garden of Hope that provides counseling to Asian domestic violence victims and parents entangled in the child protection system. 

Still, for those who have both the will and the means, it is clear there is an information gap. Andy Chen, a community activist who has helped some Chinese parents in encounters with the ACS through the years, said he hasn’t seen any efforts to recruit foster parents in the community. 

Chen, 36, came to the U.S. when he was 13, and grew up when his parents worked long hours in restaurants. This experience, plus speaking fluent Chinese, makes him a natural to understand new immigrant parents, and to connect them to social services in the community. Chen said  he has a tender heart for children, but he has no idea of how to become a foster parent. 

“My parent’s generation have been living in survival mode,” said Chen. “But many young people like me would be interested in doing this if we are provided with the information.”

The L.A. model  

Los Angeles, the only municipality ranked higher than New York in terms of the number of Asian children in the foster care system, according to an analysis of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, may provide an idea to make things better. The Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) there established the Asian Pacific Program in the 1980s. And in 2014, when the department couldn’t find a Korean speaking foster home to place a Korean-speaking boy, it helped the community based Korean American Family Services (KFAM) to launch the Asian Foster Family Initiative (AFFI) to recruit Asian foster parents. 

The initiative so far has reached more than 8,000 Asians with information seminars, helped about 500 families to finish the training, and more than 200 Asian children have been placed with Asian foster families. 

“Even a toddler who barely speaks a language, they come to my home from a non-Asian home and they just happily clap their hands when they see a simple bowl of rice,” said Alice Lee, program director of AFFI, the only Asian focused foster program in the nation. 

For prospective Asian foster families, it really makes a difference. Ronnie and Ann, a couple who asked to be identified by their first names only and were certified via AFFI three years ago, know it. After certification, the couple —Ronnie, who is Filipino and Mexican and Ann who is Japanese —tried another agency but came back to KFAM. “We just feel like they’re more of an extension of our family now,” said Ronnie. “I think having those types of ties and that warmth will keep us around.”

Kaufman, the spokesperson for the New York ACS, didn’t address the question about whether New York would launch similar programs focusing on Asian families. “Our office of foster parent recruitment works with the foster care agencies to recruit foster parents of all races and ethnicities,” she said in an email.

But more decision makers in New York have started paying attention to Asian families entangled in the child welfare system. 

In 2016, amid the legal battle N. was having to get his daughter back, Margaret Chin, then council member representing Chinatown, proposed a bill aiming to mandate the ACS to provide native language classes to children from non-English speaking families in foster care. But when it was passed in 2018, it was amended to only require the ACS to do a feasibility study on providing such classes. 

Chin, who has retired, said an issue about the limitation of the authority of the city council prompted the amendment. Council staff “pretty much came back and said this is all we can ask for now,” said Chin. “And then maybe later on we can demand more.”

When Chin proposed the bill, there were only two Asian council members, and now there are six, including at least one  with first-hand experience with the child protection system— the city’s first Indian-American council member Shekar Krishnan. “It was traumatic for my parents,” Krishnan said. 

As a child, stretch marks on his back set off a child abuse alert during a regular physical check and put his parents under investigation by the ACS. The case was closed soon after when the ACS realized it was a mistake. But it helped to prompt Krishnan to become a civil rights lawyer. 

“I think we don’t have enough Asian foster parents because our city government has not done nearly enough to engage our Asian American communities,” said Krishnan. “We’re very conscious about changing it.”

Sandra Ung, a Chinese-American council member representing the Asian-majority neighborhood Flushing, has introduced a bill requiring the ACS to provide a multilingual disclosure form to parents in the beginning of an investigation. She said she has not seen the ACS participating in the numerous street fairs in her district like other government agencies. “I don’t think these kids deserve any less than having a foster family that’s from their culture and that speaks their language,” Ung said.  

For N., the changes that might happen are too late. When his  wife, who had wrapped herself in pensive sadness since their daughter was taken away, died in 2016, her last wish was for him to reunite with their daughter. N. commuted between Florida and New York to continue with the court case by himself after he lost his wife. The efforts stopped in 2023 when he was told by his lawyer that his daughter was hospitalized after a suicide attempt, and the foster family blamed him for pursuing the case for so long and sending the child into depression.