Lily Nie is the ultimate tiger mother, matriarch of 9,350 children whose adoptions were facilitated by Chinese Children Adoption International, the Centennial organization she established in 1992.

Instead of seeking the limelight, she prefers to slip to the side. Her office door is papered with a giant handwritten tribute, one of many outsized Mother’s Day gifts, including bouquets of paper flowers made from thank- you notes, that Nie has received over the past 18 years.

Most of the notes are from the Chinese children she’s helped place. Behind each childish hand are parents who adore Nie, 47, and her husband, Joshua Zhong, who co-founded the agency.

“Lily runs the company — it’s her ideas, and her knowledge of the Chinese government,” says Janelle Lomheim, a single mother who adopted three girls through CCAI.

“Boy, does she love the kids. Well, they both do. They are just my heroes. I’ve always admired them, but after reading the book, I really appreciate them now.”

The book is “Bound by Love.” Zhong commissioned Linda Droeger, another CCAI adoptive parent, to write it.

It’s a biography of Nie and Zhong, and their disciplined childhood and adolescence in Maoist China, where they became engaged before Zhong emmigrated to study at a bible college in South Carolina. In 1987, Nie, then an attorney at Shanghai’s Fushun Law Firm II, somewhat reluctantly followed him to the U.S., where they married.

When Zhong received a scholarship to Denver Seminary, they moved to Colorado. Nie enrolled in at the Spring International Language Institute, working as a maid and teaching Mandarin to earn tuition money.

By 1990, Zhong was working on a joint doctorate at the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology, and helping Chinese students stranded in the U.S. after the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. He and Nie were the parents of twins — a boy and a girl — and Nie was working on a master’s degree in business administration.

From humble beginnings

In 1992, as abandoned infant girls crowded Chinese orphanages following strict enforcement of China’s one-child per family law, the Chinese government relaxed its policy restricting foreign adoptions.

Nie and Zhong noticed the news about that change. At first, Nie looked into becoming an adviser for an adoption agency, but a Colorado licensing official suggested instead that she open her own agency.

Zhong, the extrovert and marketing specialist, took the lead as the front man for Chinese Children Adoption International. CCAI’s first office, furnished with a secondhand file cabinet, a secondhand fax machine and a cumbersome desk bought from Riverside Baptist Church, was in an unfinished basement.

There was more than a year of delays, including a 10-month period when the Chinese government suspended foreign adoptions altogether. In March 1994, Zhong led CCAI’s first six client families on the agency’s maiden flight to China.

Even then, there were fits and starts. Bureaucratic confusion, interagency jealousies and technological cavils nearly thwarted the adoptions altogether. But finally, the families were united with the girls waiting for them.

The children were thin and malnourished, with bow legs and bottomless eyes. Instead of diapers, they wore a bit of soiled cloth tied around their waists with a string that often was embedded in their skin.

“The orphanages were terrible then,” Zhong said.

“In those days, the babies were treated like an assembly line, all lined up in cribs. They had propped bottles at feeding time. Nobody held them. When feeding time was done, the workers took the bottles away, whether they were empty or not.

“Now, it’s very different. Working in an orphanage no longer is one of the worst jobs in China. Now, you see a lot of Buddha babies: round cheeks, not malnourished.”

Changing perceptions

CCAI played a large role in changing the Chinese perception of its orphanages. CCAI is the first Chinese- owned and run U.S. agency specializing in Chinese adoptions, and is still the largest. CCAI’s adoption fee (between $17,000 and $27,000, depending on the complexity of the process) is on the low-to-middle scale of international placement fees.

Over the years, CCAI has established bilingual Chinese agents in all of China’s provinces. CCAI also established several Lily Orphan Care Centers, designed to teach nannies and foster families about child-care techniques and addressing the developmental issues that characterize institutionalized children. These centers, along with the Chinese government’s increased support, helped dramatically change the way Chinese orphanages are operated.

For children too old to be placed, Nie and Zhong, together with CCAI parents, established charity outreach programs to help orphanages with food, utilities, medical care and education. “Adoption would be meaningless if we didn’t reach out to the children left behind,” Nie said.

That logic also fueled the Joyous Chinese Cultural Center, which Nie and Zhong opened in 1996 to teach Mandarin, and Chinese dance, songs and games to adoptive families. The center is a short walk from the elegant building that now houses CCAI.

“We are not a typical adoption agency,” Zhong says. “We ask: What will happen to the Chinese children adopted in this country when they want to learn about where they’re from?”

The enthusiasm that fueled foreign adoption has infected families in China, where government officials no longer stringently enforce the one child per family law. The increased demand for healthy Chinese babies means that prospective American adoptive families face a much longer wait — up to five years.

The wait is much shorter for Chinese children with special needs — sometimes only 18 months. Sometimes the special need requires a simple surgery, like repairing a cleft palate. Sometimes, children have more complicated medical needs, including congenital heart problems, cerebral palsy and other issues.

Because of the shorter waiting period, CCAI has seen a leap in the number of families asking for orphans with special needs. In 2004, Nie and Zhong adopted one of those children. Anna Jie Zhong, whose congenital heart defect was surgically corrected, is now in high school.

Colorado furniture dealership owner Janelle Lomheim adopted three children, each of whom had special needs, through CCAI. She adopted Sydney, 7, from China’s Shaanxi province in 2004. Her youngest daughters, Alexis, age 5 and orphaned in Haiti, and Stella, age 3, from China’s Yulin province, were adopted last year. They were two of the 583 children that CCAI placed in 2010 — “more than two orphans’ lives changed forever in every working day” last year, Zhong observed.

“It’s wonderful — I mean hard, but it’s good, too,” Lomheim said.

“Last year, there was a lot of running around to doctors and special- needs therapists. Alexis has traumatic stress disorder; she’s seen terrible things, been in horrible, horrible circumstances. Stella has malformed legs and dislocated hips, but she’s so smart! She understands everything! It’s so good to have a family! I always wanted kids.”

Claire Martin