The Lost Daughters of China: Adopted Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past

by Evans, Karin

  For more than a decade, the China adoption trend had continued to build. China’s adoption program, with its centralized operations, regulated fees, and relatively smooth protocols, emerged as a model for other foreign nations, The pages of American newspapers—whether in Mesa, Arizona, or Plain City, Ohio—regularly included one story after another of little girls from China coming home to new families. From the small number of Chinese children adopted by Americans in the 1980s and early 1990s, nearly 4,000 Chinese children were adopted in 1997 when we came home with Kelly; more than 5,000 when we came home with Franny. By 2005 the number of Chinese children adopted by Americans yearly had peaked at 7,906, before the Chinese government slowed things down with a new set of rules.1I By 2008, close to 70,000 children from China had come to the United States. Those adopted in other countries brought the total to well over 100,000 little girls who’d left China, adopted by foreign parents. Little girls from China were growing up all over the world—in Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, and numerous other countries, including sizable numbers in Canada and Ireland. The biggest group outside the United States was in Spain.

  Sometimes I try to imagine a group photograph that would capture the magnitude of this event in history: 70,000 girls, ranging in age from less than a year old to college age, enough to fill a stadium. Photograph them in Central Park from high overhead in a helicopter, perhaps, all the girls hand in hand, stretching from one end of the park and back again, maybe farther. Or picture them smaller, as so many of them have been photographed—babies on a couch in China, bobbing one against another. For some reason, whenever I think of such overwhelming numbers of babies or children, I do “couch math.” In this case, ten babies to a couch would mean a group shot composed of seven thousand couches. It’s still beyond imagining. But the numbers are a fact, and the experience has touched hundreds of thousands of people if you add up the children and parents alone.

  In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, an adopted child from China came close to hanging out in the White House. On the Democratic convention floor, nominee John Kerry could be seen lifting up a small girl wearing a Chinese silk dress—his niece. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies, Jenny Bowen, adoptive mother of two girls, and the founder of Half the Sky Foundation, a nonprofit that serves the children in China’s orphanages, was selected to be one of the torch bearers. She was running, said Bowen, for all the girls who remained in China’s welfare institutions, and for all the children orphaned in the Sichuan earthquake. Musician Lucy Kaplansky adopted a child from China and released an album called The Red Thread. An eleven-year-old adopted girl living in Milwaukee, Jade-Lianna Gao Peters, was the voice of the new Nickelodeon TV Chinese culture show for children, Ni Hao, Kai-Lan.

  Yet another little girl from a Chinese institution wound up on television, sitting on Katie Couric’s lap. This was one of many East-West miracle stories. First, an adoptive mother of three, Kate Haroldson, who lives in Sacramento, California, went to an orphanage in Fenyi to adopt her youngest daughter. “Of course a half a dozen kids ran toward the gate as we entered.” One of the children was Gong Lu, a four-year-old girl who was suffering from a massive disfiguring facial tumor on her nose, a hemangioma. Haroldson went to work, contacting Love Without Boundaries (LWB), which provides medical help to kids in China who need it. She also e-mailed Dr. Lisa Buckmiller, who often traveled abroad with LWB to treat children. “I asked her if she knew how to get this sweet girl help.” Buckmiller, a pediatric vascular surgeon at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, agreed to help the child.

  Love Without Boundaries raised the money and Gong Lu was brought to Little Rock, accompanied by her orphanage director. The little girl told her doctors, “After the surgery, I hope to be a beautiful girl. Then I would like to go to school like other children.” She added, “I want to find a good father and mother who can adopt me.”

  The surgery was a life-changing success. NBC got wind of the story and little Gong Lu went on television and charmed Couric. But the tale wasn’t over yet. The doctor and her husband, Richard Hinkle, began the process to adopt Gong Lu. Though it took a while, as it tends to do, they succeeded. Today, Gong Lu likes to be called Anna. She lives in Little Rock, where she goes to school, and is the joy of her family’s life. In the fall of 2007, Buckmiller took her daughter with her on a medical mission back to China. They visited her orphanage, and Anna helped interpret for her mother.

  From Mandarin-immersion preschools to average American playgroups, from California’s Berkeley High School to New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy, children adopted from China were growing into their new lives. They excelled, they struggled. It was a wide-ranging group of children—some adopted as infants, some much older; some from institutions, others from foster care; some with special needs, some not. They’d come from numerous provinces all over China, from the thick of the urban bustle, to the dusty quiet of remote villages.

  It was also a diverse group of adopting families. In Washington state, blind adoptive parents adopted a blind child. In Albuquerque, a couple confined to wheelchairs adopted a child with special physical needs. A child born in China was adopted by a father who had grown up in the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest and a mother who was Chinese American. Another was adopted by a Hollywood star. Girls from China became bat mitzvah; others made their first communions; one sat with her parents in a Buddhist meditation class.

  When Chinese president Hu Jintao made his first state visit to the United States, in 2006, part of the greeting committee at a stop in Everett, Washington, was composed of four girls adopted from China. They presented the president and his wife with flowers and welcomed them in Mandarin.

  As the children came to new homes, the adoptive families began to create a substantial relationship with China, keeping in touch with former caretakers, exchanging photos and letters, taking trips back to their children’s first homes, raising money for the children left behind in the welfare institutions.

  So numerous now are the children adopted from China—daughters of couples, of many single mothers, of some single fathers—that they form a substantial subculture of small immigrants, a kind of nationwide sisterhood. It’s not surprising that just about everybody I meet these days has a friend or a friend of a friend who has adopted, or is hoping to adopt, a little girl from China. In our own house and neighborhood, in distant countries, back and forth across the Pacific, this East-West community continues to build.

  Much has happened in the girls’ lives, in our lives, in the adoption community, and in China, since we first walked into a Chinese orphanage on that fateful fall day in 1997, and then made a second momentous journey to China four years later. In the early years it was the parents who formed playgroups, organized reunions, and tried to think about what this all meant. Before we knew it, it was the children’s turn to explore their own lives, come to their own conclusions, and turn to one another, or to older adoptees, for support. For the older girls it was time to choose their own paths through the issues that have come with this historic mixing of human destinies.

  A decade after we adopted our first daughter, adoption itself was experiencing growing pains in China, as evidenced by the tightening of rules for foreign applicants. The Chinese government’s overhaul of its adoption policies in 2007 resulted in some substantial changes. Though adoption went on, the numbers began to fall off and the waiting times stretched out. The demographics of the adopting families began to change, since certain Chinese American families were now given preference, single parents of either gender were ruled out completely, and other new criteria for adopting parents were put in place. The rush to China for children was, if not quite over, substantially altered and slowed down.

  Simultaneously, a big wave of the girls who had been adopted in the early years were growing into teenagers. More and more were in high school. A few had started college. It was an unprecedented and powerful cohort. As they came of age, some unique emotio
nal landscapes and new vantage points for looking at this human drama opened up.

  In an average month now, some four hundred more small girls are flown across the Pacific to begin new lives in the United States. They will grow up as the daughters of teachers and football players, secretaries and school principals, novelists and political consultants, film actors and physicians, full-time moms and full-time dads. If all continues to go well, by the end of this year, some five thousand more Chinese girls will make the journey from China to the United States.

  For adopting parents, the trip to China will come after much waiting—by 2008 as long as two or even three years—plus piles and piles of paperwork and plenty of official scrutiny from agencies within the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This will culminate, if all goes well, in a referral, by which applicants’ bulging dossiers are matched with a Chinese child. With that match, the adopting parents will be given the sparest information about their new daughter: her institutional address, a small photograph perhaps, a birth date (which may be a guess), a few vital statistics (height, weight), a medical assessment (which may be cursory), and a name, chosen, usually, by the orphanage.

  For Americans picking up children in the social welfare institutions of China, this particular avenue of international adoption often represents a final miracle, after the frustrations of infertility, unsuccessful medical intervention, perhaps, or the forbidding costs of domestic adoption. For the orphaned girls and boys of China, international adoption offers a way out of the institution, a chance at a new life—but life in a culture vastly different from that of the land of their birth. The children themselves will have chosen none of this, of course. A Chinese government bureau, in combination with foreign adoption workers, will have placed their fates in the hands of American strangers.

  The fact that China could provide so many foreign parents with children, nearly every one of them a girl, was a reflection of a darker reality. The world’s most populous nation, desperate to keep its population down, had in the past several decades become a nation of lost daughters. A confluence of harsh realities—the Chinese government’s strict “one-child” population policy introduced in 1980, the culture’s traditional reliance on sons, plus untold hardships and emotionally wrenching circumstances known only to birth parents—will have forced these little girls from their families. The children who are placed with adopting families represent only a tiny fraction of those found abandoned throughout the country or of those girls missing altogether from China’s population as a result of many factors, including selective abortion of female fetuses.

  The majority of children adopted from China have no known histories to look into, should they ever want to trace their pasts. Most birth parents leave little information, if any. For all the benefits of adoption into a loving family in the West, there is a loss of roots each small girl must deal with as she grows into adulthood, coming of age halfway across the globe, having in most cases lost the thread that might someday lead her back to relatives in China.

  As prospective international parents, my husband and I tried to prepare ourselves. We sought all the help we could—the insights of other adoptive parents, the support of friends and family. Yet how could we possibly be prepared for the life ahead, for the unknown terrain, and most important, for the eventual feelings about all this from our daughters themselves? Although I feel extremely fortunate to be able to share my life with my own adopted daughters, I also feel a great sadness when I think of the possible confusion and sense of loss they and the other daughters of China may feel when they are of an age and an inclination to want to know where they came from, and why, and from whom. What would all this mean when our daughters were teenagers, living in a household in California with blue-eyed Caucasian parents, wondering what had gone on in the land of their birth?

  Someday, I knew, I would need to tell my daughters what I could about life in China in the time they were born. I had a duty to understand what we’d all been part of, but I approached the subject cautiously, aware that I was no China scholar, nor even a neutral observer. Still, I wanted to learn what might have led to that moment in an orphanage when I first looked into the eyes of one beautiful child, and then another, who’d both wound up—until that instant—with no families of their own. I wanted to know what conditions could explain the thousands of bundles found lying alone in railroad stations and school buildings and along roadways all over China. I wanted to know what had happened in the lives of the mothers in that country that had led them to such desperate acts. What cultural, political, and social forces had made China a uniquely difficult place for this generation of female infants?

  This book began as an inquiry into those questions, an exploration of this particular intersection between American and Chinese history. As a parent and as a journalist, I wanted to know what life had been like for my children’s birth parents, and what my daughters’ futures might have held had they stayed in China. I wanted to understand what life was likely to be like for the generation of adopted Chinese girls growing up in the United States. There was an important story unfolding here, a considerable human drama involving tens of thousands of children, their birth parents, and a growing community of East-West families.

  For the world at large, this book began as an attempt to fill in the blank spaces in a profound human exchange. For my daughters, it was an attempt to tackle as many of the unanswered questions as possible, so that one day they would know something about the times in which they were born and the background from which they came.

  The causes and conditions are enormously complex. As I have talked with people and worked my way through the available information, I have felt increasingly like the blind people in the old Chinese proverb, each of whom tries to describe an elephant by touching just one small part of the animal (It’s a rope! It’s a snake! It’s a wall!). While facts (as well as we can pin them down) and various explanations may describe certain happenings in one place or another, no theory can possibly encompass the point of view of every man or woman in China. As just one measure of the complexity, there are hundreds of thousands of villages in that enormous nation, each with its own small, unique social fabric. Add to that the varieties of personal experience in a country with dramatically different geographic regions, numerous ethnic strains, great economic disparities, and more than 1.3 billion residents. No statement can apply to every community, no statistics can include every reality, no single explanation can account for every lost child. Once the human heart is involved, the mystery grows ever deeper.

  By 2008, homeland trips were the latest adventures for adoptive families. Various groups, including adoption agencies and commercial travel ventures, and the Chinese government itself began offering excursions back to China. The youngsters and their parents could tour the Great Wall and the warriors at Xian and meet a baby panda at the panda preserve in Chengdu. In some cases, they could visit foster families or go back to the social welfare institution where they’d lived and reconnect with caregivers and directors and the children still there. Some institutions were even building special facilities for adoptive families who came back to visit. With every trip back to the province that a child once called home, or a trip to the institution, came the possibility that further information might be uncovered, or even that a birth family might materialize. What then?

  Every Chinese daughter adopted into an American family has a story all her own, but in some ways all the stories are similar. One of the deepest ties possible between human beings, the bond between parent and child, torn apart on one continent, is rewoven on another. By telling my own family’s story and by talking to others—adoptive parents, adopted children, China scholars, anthropologists, demographers, sociologists, psychologists, ordinary people from China—I hoped to piece together a portrait of East-West adoption. In the end, though, all I really know for certain is our small part in a series of events that are both sorrowful and miraculous, a profound mixing of Chinese and American
lives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  These words by author Betty Jean Lifton have stayed with me while I worked on this book: “As a writer I have immersed myself in other subjects, but have always returned to the adoption theme. Whether in fantasy or reality, it haunts us all, adopted and non-adopted alike. It is a metaphor for the human condition, sending us forth on that mythic quest that will prove that we are bonded to each other and to all the creatures of this world—and in the process, reveal to us who we are.”2

  As my daughters and their “sisters”—all the other adopted daughters of China—grow up, the journey continues. The next story is theirs to tell.

  1

  Journey to the East

  Moon thin as water

  And watery candlelight

  Shine upon China

  A sleeping silkworm

  Exhaling a long long thread of silk

  On a nine-hundred and sixty-thousand

  square miles

  Mulberry leaf.

  —Li Xiaoyu, “The Silk Dream”1

  In the Pearl River Delta of southern China, the land is crisscrossed by water. Rivers, like long fingers, reach deep into the landscape from the South China Sea, and along their banks fertile soil would seem to promise paradise. The climate is subtropical and mild, rainfall is plentiful, and the fields are patchworked in muted tones of green. Farmers tend their rice in rolling terraces. Water buffalo stand placidly in the fields. Where there aren’t rice paddies, plots of elephant-leafed taro and pole beans spring from the ground. Sugarcane grows in profusion, and there are mulberry trees, harboring billions of silkworms.