by Iris Chang
After the 1982 Chinese census revealed the population had surpassed one billion people, the one-child policy was enforced rigorously, even ruthlessly. To circumvent the law, Chinese couples who longed for sons hid their daughters with relatives, or, in extreme cases, even resorted to infanticide or abandonment. Female Chinese babies began to turn up in public areas such as parks, bus stations, on the doorsteps of orphanages, and even at the side of the road. Occasionally, handwritten notes were tucked into her clothes. “Owing to the current political situation and heavy pressures that are too difficult to explain, we, who were her parents for these first days, cannot continue taking care of her,” one note read. “We can only hope that in this world there is a kind-hearted person who will care for her. Thank you. In regret and shame, your father and mother.”
The sheer number of homeless girls overwhelmed Chinese orphanages, and underfunding and understaffing soon led to monstrous conditions. Eyewitnesses described babies who had starved or choked to death because they were tied to beds during feedings. Without shoes or socks, barely covered with thin cotton clothes, even in freezing weather, these children were often kept strapped to chairs, cribs, or toilets for days. In 1995, a journalist from the German magazine Der Spiegel described the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute as a “children’s gulag”:
In a dim room, as big as a dance hall, babies and small children are lying—no, they are not lying, they are laid out, in cribs: handicapped small bodies, some just skin and bones. Kicking and thrashing, they doze in their own urine, some naked, some dressed in a dirty little jacket. The older children have wrapped the [corpse of a baby] in a couple of dirty cloths, which serve as a shroud. Then they shoved the dead baby under the bed, where it stays until the staff gets around to removing the corpse. On weekends that can take two or three days.
Possibly to relieve the orphanages of their workload, in 1992 mainland China began encouraging large-scale international adoption. That year, about two hundred children from China joined American families. Payment for services often occurred under mysterious circumstances (some American parents were asked to donate $3,000 in $100 bills to an orphanage), causing the U.S. media to hint at a profit motive. In 1993, the New York Times Sunday magazine ran a cover story about adoptions from China under the headline “China’s Market in Orphan Girls,” calling the babies “the Newest Chinese Export.” In response, the PRC temporarily shut down its adoption program, but resumed it shortly afterward—no doubt because the American demand for Chinese children was simply too great for the program to end permanently.
Because of a trend among American women to delay marriage and childbearing in favor of their careers, there were, by the end of the twentieth century, greater numbers of affluent, childless couples eager to adopt. But they also had to compete for fewer available children, because growing social acceptance of single mothers in the United States meant more of these mothers were keeping babies born out of wedlock. Moreover, the United States adoption system had become a bureaucratic nightmare, and other countries enforced strict rules regarding international adoptions, which favored younger, traditional, and heterosexual couples. For many Americans, adopting a baby girl from China was their only opportunity to start a family, and between 1985 and 2002, Americans adopted more than thirty-three thousand infants from the PRC—the largest source of American adoptions from abroad.60
The typical couple adopting a Chinese immigrant baby was educated, older, and upper-middle-class. According to one study, their median age was 42.7 years, and about 65 percent of them had completed postgraduate studies. Because most Americans could not afford the cost of adopting a baby from China (from $15,000 to $20,000), the median household income of those adopting in the 1990s was high, in the $70,000-to-$90,000 range. The process was not only expensive but tedious and laborious, requiring background checks by the FBI, a visit from a social worker, fingerprinting by the police, and filing papers with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Typically, the adopting parents had to wait a year and a half just to have the paperwork completed.
The wait period was excruciating for many couples, especially as some formed psychological bonds with their future children even before meeting them in China. For instance, one Massachusetts woman had already received a photograph of the Chinese baby she would be adopting when the PRC abruptly closed its adoption program after the negative New York Times Sunday magazine article. “She spent eight months in purgatory, looking at that picture and thinking about how her baby was faring in a very distant country and orphanage,” wrote Christine Kukka in the anthology A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China. Shanti Fry remembered writing a new will: “I thought that if I got a child, Jeff and I could be traveling back with her from China and the plane would crash and somehow I would die and Jeff and the baby would survive—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!”
For the lucky, the long-anticipated date would eventually arrive. The adoptive parents would fly to China, meet with orphanage officials, and receive their babies in hotel rooms and lobbies. After the realities of parenthood sank in—the diapers, the squalls, the constant feedings—some agonized over the best way to handle the ethnicity of their new children. Should they be reared as Americans or as Chinese? Would the child be culturally deprived after leaving her homeland? Jean H. Seeley remembered fighting back tears when she boarded the airplane with her new daughter. “Say good-bye to China, I don’t know when you will be back again,” she told her infant. Then she wondered, “Was it the right thing to take her to grow up in a country where she would be a minority?”
That their children would one day grow up and suffer racism was evident from remarks uttered from strangers. “Why are you kissing that child?” demanded a Los Angeles police officer when he saw a Caucasian mother nuzzling her toddler from China. After the expense and time required to adopt a baby, it did not occur to many parents that they might be viewed as kidnappers or pedophiles. They were shocked by the crudeness and insensitivity of other Americans. Some heard their children called “a chink baby” and suffered offhand jokes, like “Couldn’t get a white one, huh?” Others received hostile stares from men who had served in the Vietnam War. One outraged parent even met a Vietnam War veteran who told her baby that he had “killed a lot of your cousins.”
They knew their children would one day question their own identity, and the mystery surrounding their birth and first months. Some infants were found with gifts from the birth parents—sometimes a bracelet, a pendant, a sack of rice—while others bore tiny scars or birth-marks on their skin. Were these clues that might be used one day to trace their children to their original families? The children themselves, especially the precocious ones, were tormented by the enigma. Several Chinese daughters demanded to know why they were orphaned at birth, venting their confusion during temper tantrums: “You’re mean,” one daughter screamed. “I want my other Mommy in China!”
To handle these challenges, many parents did their best to teach their children about their heritage. They delved into ancient Chinese mythology, Confucian philosophy, and the novels of Pearl Buck. Although this education was not really Chinese, but rather an American interpretation of Chinese culture, the effort, nonetheless, was genuine. One proud parent announced that “we shop at Asian markets, we go to festivals.” Her daughters loved pandas, could identify China on a map, and could recite all the Chinese spoken in Big Bird Goes to China. The parents also networked with each other, exchanging information and child-rearing tips through Internet organizations such as Families with Children from China.
The adoption process sensitized thousands of parents to subtle racism in America. Suddenly they noticed the often cruel stereotypes of the Chinese in the media, even in children’s television programs like Sesame Street, which featured a female worm-puppet named “Lo Mein.” They became more attentive to the treatment of foreign aliens by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and aggressively lobbied for citizenship rights f
or their children. Annoyed by the red tape required to naturalize their Chinese babies, adoptive parents have demanded legislation to allow citizenship immediately and retroactively for all adopted foreign-born children. As a consequence, these children are serving as bridges between the Caucasian and ethnic Chinese communities in the United States. “I began to see children and their ‘differences’ in a new light,” one mother explained. “Suddenly the nonwhite kids weren’t ’nonwhite,‘ they were ’like my daughter.’”
It is ironic that some infants who had been discarded like garbage in the PRC ended up in some of the most affluent households in the United States, while thousands of adult Chinese worked for years to earn their passage to America. These nonstudent, nonprofessional adult immigrants were the group least visible to the white community, a group largely made up of illegal menial laborers hidden in the nation’s Chinatowns.
Some started as part of a “floating” migrant population of peasant workers in China, a population estimated to be as high as 200 million to 250 million people for the year 2000. Drifting from the countryside into the cities, they serviced the needs of the urban Chinese nouveau riche, and, treated like second-class citizens, many yearned to migrate abroad, in order to secure better wages and a better future for their children. Others came from the small business or entrepreneur class in China, frustrated by a system that favored those with political clout and by the incessant need to bribe the powerful in order to survive. A factory owner from Fuzhou claimed that when he refused to pay extortion money to local officials, they accused him of a crime he had not committed. “That’s why I left in a hurry,” he later said. “I made up my mind in a few days.” Others echoed similar dissatisfaction. According to Xiao Chen, formerly an illegal alien from Fuzhou, “In China today, unless you are the child of an official, or know how to open back doors, it’s hopeless.”
For many ambitious Chinese, only three choices seemed open: to resign oneself to one’s station in life; to master the game of politics; or to leave. The globalized Western media made the third alternative the most enticing. During the Deng era, the glamorous lives of Hollywood celebrities reached the Chinese masses through satellite dishes and VCRs.61 By the early 1990s, the prospect of unlimited wealth in America had infected the Fuzhou region with immigration fever. One cause for the perceived differences in national wealth was the exaggerations of movie and television dramas, but the greatest reason could be found in hard numbers. In 1991, the per capita income in the United States was $22,204, compared to a figure that ranged between $370 and $1,450 in China, leading many Chinese to become obsessed with the prospect of making a quick fortune in America. “Everyone went crazy,” the Sing Tao Daily reported. “The area was in a frenzy. Farmers put down their tools, students discarded their books, workers quit their jobs, and everyone was talking about nothing but going to America ... If people found out someone had just successfully arrived in the United States, his or her home will be crowded with people, both acquaintances and strangers, to come to collect information about going to America.”
Even though the United States granted an annual quota of twenty thousand immigration slots to the PRC, these usually went to the Chinese with education, official connections, or relatives in the United States. Consequently, many of the poorer or less-educated Chinese had to emigrate illegally, turning to the underworld for help, to achieve their Western dream. No one knows how many resorted to such methods, for it is not the nature of illegal operations to maintain records. Estimates range from ten thousand to one hundred thousand people a year, but an exact figure is impossible: “It’s like trying to pin jello to a wall,” said one FBI agent in New York.
These arrivals bore a striking resemblance to the first wave of Chinese who arrived during the nineteenth century. Both émigré waves consisted largely of young, able-bodied adult men with wives and families remaining in their native land. According to a survey conducted by Ko-lin Chin, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, most illegal Chinese immigrants in New York City were married men between the ages of twenty and forty, former laborers with an elementary or junior high education. But instead of originating from Canton like the early waves, they came mostly from Fuzhou, a commercial and fishing city of five million in Fujian province in the south of China.
Like Canton, Fuzhou enjoyed a tradition of citizens migrating abroad and establishing overseas communities in other countries. Close-knit family relationships provided émigrés with international capital and extensive business networks. Fujian province, like Guangdong, was also renowned for its independence and entrepreneurial spirit. Historically, it had been a frontier country overrun by outlaws and adventurers, something like the Wild West in the United States. The Chinese stereotyped the Fujianese as ruthless and ambitious, obsessed with making their fortunes. It is notable that among the forty billionaires of Chinese heritage in Asia, over half either came from Fujian or were descended from Fujianese people.
The story of illegal Fujianese immigration to the United States was not new. Some of the first Fujianese arrivals were sailors who served as staff on ships of the American armed forces during World War II. Many jumped ship, then settled secretly in New York City or other areas along the East Coast. Almost six thousand Chinese crewmen, many of them Fujianese, deserted and entered the United States between 1944 and 1960. As a result, the first links—kinship ties—so helpful in establishing immigration patterns, were forged between the United States and the Fujian region, especially the city of Fuzhou. By the end of the twentieth century, some PRC officials estimated that the vast majority of illegal Chinese aliens in the United States were natives of Fuzhou.
Clearly, some had left to escape political repression. Rutgers professor Ko-lin Chin, who surveyed dozens of illegal Fujian aliens, published some of their reasons for leaving. “During the Cultural Revolution, I was wrongfully labeled as a ‘counterrevolutionary’ and tortured,” one said. “I was victimized under the one-child policy, and I am disgusted with the Communist regime,” reported another. “When my wife was pregnant with our second child, she was forced to have an abortion five days before she was to give birth.”
But the most popular reason for emigration was not political but economic. According to Ko-lin Chin, 61 percent of the people in his study cited one dominant reason: money. Dreams of riches abound in the responses collected in his survey. “I heard that everything was so nice in America, you can even find gold in the streets.” “Before I came, I thought America was a very prosperous country, that it was a heaven filled with gold.” “When overseas Chinese came back, they spent money like water ... That’s why I envied the American lifestyle before I came here.” “When I was in China, I considered going to America as going to heaven.” “For us, it doesn’t mean freedom,” a Chinese villager told a reporter when describing the Statue of Liberty. “It means opportunity.”
To fill an insatiable demand for illegal immigration, organized crime figures—known as “snakeheads” for their stealth and speed—ran elaborate smuggling enterprises. By the end of the 1990s, the industry had become highly lucrative, earning up to $8 billion a year. Indeed, some international gangs came to favor human smuggling over narcotics, because the former was low-risk but highly profitable.
Smuggling was largely a game of cat-and-mouse played between the smugglers and the authorities. The first stage was routine. The snakehead would negotiate a fee for bringing the client to the United States (in the year 2000, the going rate was about $60,000 to $70,000). After receiving part of the fee as a deposit, the smuggler would secure a list of telephone numbers and addresses of relatives in both Fujian province and the United States who could provide down payments for the journey.
The second stage—preparing the paperwork—was also relatively easy. The snakeheads secured exit visas by bribing PRC officials, and once out of China, the émigrés waited in safe houses in cities like Hong Kong or Bangkok while the snakeheads procured the travel documents necessary fo
r their entry into the United States. Fake passports would be created by professional forgers, bought as stolen goods on the black market, or obtained from corrupt officials in North America.
For some émigrés, the wait was long and agonizing. One man from Fujian province said he was locked in a motel basement for six months in Bangkok before the smugglers placed him and others on a tiny boat headed for Africa, en route to the United States. Another immigrant, a farmer, was forced to hide in a pigsty for months in rural Thailand before the snakeheads flew him to Frankfurt and then Miami.
The actual journey was the most difficult part of all. With no one single route to the United States, Chinese illegal aliens could arrive from all directions, by air, sea, or land. A review of internal INS documents revealed Chinese smuggling rings in countries like Australia, Japan, Guam, Brazil, Spain, and Russia. Sometimes the Chinese were flown directly into the United States, and in the early 1990s about one in five illegal Chinese aliens entered the United States by plane. But a much safer strategy was to fly the Chinese immigrant into Canada or Mexico instead. Once in Canada, the immigrant could hide in the airport bathroom, flush his documents down the toilet, and then claim political asylum. After his release by immigration authorities, he could sneak over the border with counterfeit papers, hide in the trunk of a car, or travel by boat, inflatable raft, or snowmobile to New York State. Immigrants could also slip across the border from Mexico, in refrigerated trucks or tourist buses.
Most of the time, the Chinese illegal aliens were required to make the journey across water and land. Many hid aboard Taiwanese fishing boats or cargo ships that sailed for Central America, or traveled by rail to cities with lax or corrupt security, such as Moscow or Budapest. Some immigrants endured long train rides to Eastern Europe, during which they subsisted on scanty meals of rice and nuts, then attempted to cross the border into Western European countries. This might involve climbing mountains and swimming across rivers. “It is arduous and taxing—many don’t make it,” Beng Chew, a London solicitor, told a reporter in June 2000. “Last year, I heard one woman in her early 30s died from exhaustion in the mountains. Some of the others didn’t want to leave her but the agent insisted that they carry on.”