Long Island adoption agency celebrates 20 years

Adopting a whole new outlook on life

The newborn Chinese girls were placed in cardboard boxes and left in front of welfare agencies. Some were abandoned in grocery markets. One set of twins was deserted in the early morning on the front steps of a primary school.

More than 200 Chinese-born girls - from infants to adolescents - with similar stories gathered at the Huntington Townhouse yesterday for a holiday party at which the bleakness of their origins was outshone only by the brightness of their collective future.

The girls darting between banquet tables had been adopted by Long Island families through New Beginnings Family Services, a Mineola-based nonprofit adoption agency that yesterday celebrated 20 years of placing children from China, Russia, Korea and Vietnam in Long Island homes.

The agency also celebrated the contribution of employee Guilan Zong, a 53-year old Chinese citizen paid by New Beginnings as a kind of guide for adoptive parents, called "aunty" by the adopted Chinese girls at the party and to whom parents gave a still more exalted title.

"She's an angel," said William Ford, 42, of Garden City, who found his adopted daughter Julia, now 2 years old, with Zong's help last year. "She was with us every step of the way until we were solidly on our feet," Ford said.