Learning to write the Chinese characters for "love" and "happiness" in a Beijing classroom was the first activity for a group of American families on a cultural tour of China on Tuesday.

But this was not a typical tour group, although the parents may have been born and raised in the United States, their children were born in China, before being adopted to be raised on the other side of the world.

Thomas Shuo Fahnle, 10, learned Chinese calligraphy and paper cutting with great interest at the cultural class, accompanied by his adoptive father David Charles Fahnle.

The boy, wearing a hearing aid, dipped his brush into black ink and then painted on blank paper following the teacher's instructions.

However, for the first three years' of his life, he could not hear at all, said his 58-year-old adoptive father.

Kelly Grace enjoys playing with her American foster mother Annie Laurie Ritchie at the China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption in Beijing on Tuesday. Nearly 200 children, adopted from China, and their families are visiting Beijing on a heritage tour. WANG JING / CHINA DAILY

The boy had being fostered by a child welfare institute in Beijing until he turned three when the single father adopted him in 2005. After seven surgeries he can now hear from both ears.

"I have been a teacher of deaf children for 36 years and I know this is the area I really know something about," Fahnle said. "When I chose him, I knew his medical history and knew what I could do both educationally and medically to help him to hear and improve his academic skills, and at the same time give him a caring and loving home."

Thomas kept showing his father his "masterpieces" from the class and received compliments and encouraging words in return.

The harmonious scene made it difficult to imagine he greeted his father "with violence" at their first meeting.

"I look so different from you guys (Chinese), so when I first visited him in the orphanage and tried to hold him in my arms, he cried and he spat at me and he tried to bite me. It took a while for him to trust me and get confident around me," Fahnle said.

He said he understood the boy's panicked reaction as he had been taken care of by different nursing staff as a baby and because there are many babies in an orphanage, "he never knew who he could call mom or dad, he never had his own toys, and nothing really was his".

"I believe the Chinese orphanage system has done wonderfully in delivering a nursing service but that cannot replace parenting," he said.