by Evans, Karin
Long ago, these rivers helped open this part of China to the world. First Romans, then Arabs, then European missionaries and merchants all ventured upriver. By the late eighteenth century, the British had established a foothold with the East India Company, seeking China’s wares. In the place they called Canton, British merchants put up their warehouses, pushing opium in exchange for Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea.
Today the provincial capital is not called Canton, as it was in the old days of Western imperialism, but Guangzhou. Foreigners still are drawn here, some by the welcoming entrepreneurial atmosphere, others for reasons of the heart. Waterways still spiderweb the delta in this part of Guangdong province, but the waters are grayer now and the air is hazier. And there are other rivers here, too—concrete superhighways, the first built in 1989—along which flow locally made goods, imported ideas, and an on-the-move populace. Freeways, some privately financed by business tycoons, link the now sprawling cities of the Pearl River Delta with one another, with bustling new trade zones, and with enterprising Hong Kong to the south.
My husband, Mark, and I were rolling along one of these highways on a mild fall day in 1997, viewing the changing landscape of China through a tour bus window. Just a few years before, it had taken seven hours to travel from Guangzhou to the midsized southern Chinese city of Jiangmen, where we were headed, but the new freeway had shortened the trip to less than two.
We sped along with the standard collection of Chinese traffic—overloaded trucks, underpowered scooters, swarms of bicycles and motorcycles, and an occasional European-made luxury car with tinted windows. Despite these modern intrusions, some of the terrain we passed through still looked ancient and serene, like a scroll painting of old China. Viewed from the bus window, a human being, small in the landscape, wearing a straw hat, stood beside a pair of yoked oxen. Rivers ran through the mist; boats motored languidly along the rivers. Here and there were old villages, made of red brick with tile roofs curving gracefully toward the sky.
When Jiangmen City came into view, it was wrapped, like most of urban China, in a cloud of haze, though less densely than Guangzhou. Traffic picked up and the bus slowed, rolling past boxy concrete structures and small factories. The road filled with increasing numbers of wobbling bicycles and skittering motorbikes. We passed a truck so full of pigs that, viewed through the slats, they seemed to be stacked double and triple; some looked upside down. Beside the highway, green vegetation gave way to dust, and the calm of the countryside was broken.
I was riveted on this scenery, noting its landmarks and trying to soak in the feel of it, curious about what lay beyond the village walls we had seen and behind the iron-grated windows we now passed. Somewhere in this landscape our daughter had been born. Whether she came into the world in the green of the countryside or the gray of the city, I didn’t know. But Mark and I were on our way to meet her. Traveling toward a Chinese orphanage, we were about to become parents.
For one who waits,
A moment seems like an eternity.
—Fortune cookie message, 1996
The journey that found us peering through a bus window at the landscape of southern China had begun nearly two years earlier, half a world away, when we first set foot on what turned out to be a very long paper trail. In January 1996, my husband and I walked into an international adoption agency and emerged with a thick folder of forms. We sat down and pondered a number of questions: “Please give a brief statement of your reasons for wanting to adopt a child. What is your profession? Education level? Income? If you’ve had experience with infertility, please provide details.” We filled in the basics: One writer, one lawyer, both over forty (in my case, well past). Recently married, no children. Both previously married and divorced. Three siblings each. Good health, covered by health insurance. Pets? One aging, gentle Siberian husky and two cats. Hobbies? Cycling, gardening, reading, painting.
Why did we want to adopt? I wrote that I’d like to share my life and love with a child and be part of that “gift of wonder” that writer Rachel Carson celebrated in her book of that title. I said that I had lost a baby years before, an infant son who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at birth and died at three days old. I had thought of adopting ever since, but the circumstances had never seemed right until now.
Mark wrote that he, too, had long wanted children, but it hadn’t worked out. He said that his hero in the father department was the lawyer Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. He described Atticus as a man who gave his children the utmost respect and loving guidance, and with great patience helped them understand and prepare for a world that could be harsh and unfair.
We began the process of adoption with high hopes and great anxiety. I didn’t need an adoption agency to tell me I was seriously out of sync when it came to starting a family. My college friends were now sending their children off to college. Yet I had this clear, certain yearning, a longing I had tried to push aside for years after my baby died, busying myself with work and various projects. I had, as one cyclist friend put it, kept my head down and my feet moving. When, after more than a few disappointments, I found myself one day with a man who also wanted to adopt a child, all my old desires woke up. I was startled by their sudden appearance and intensity.
It took courage to call an adoption agency, to get my hopes up; to risk judgment on my worthiness at being a parent. But some door, long closed, had opened. Sunlight and possibilities filtered in. Why not? I thought.
We had heard that China had lots of babies available for adoption, and it seemed a better idea to us to try to adopt a child who was already without parents than to try to compete with a large pool of couples in America who were vying for a diminishing number of newborns. I’d lived in Hong Kong during my first years as a journalist and I was drawn to that part of the world. Something about the land and water, the sights, sounds, and smells, the people bustling through the streets, just agreed with me. I’d felt at home.
The adoption agency agreed that China was a good idea for us. There were numerous little girls available, the application and approval process tended to be faster than in other countries, and China at the time was more forgiving of older parents than were some South and Central American adoption programs. Moreover, the Chinese adoption program wasn’t tainted by rumors of stolen children or babies for sale or black-market profiteers. The health of the children was generally good. China was, in fact, blessed by the relative absence of such modern ills as fetal alcohol syndrome or HIV infection. The children could be adopted at a young age—most at a year old or younger—lessening the chances of attachment disorder, and the care in the orphanages that dealt with foreign adoption was apparently good.
So we set forth. I comforted myself with the thought that maybe it would be better for a small orphan in China to have an older mother than no mother at all. “The Chinese respect what you are trying to do,” the woman at the agency told me. Having passed our initial interview, we put down some money and walked away with our instructions. We were told the whole process would take about a year and cost around $15,000.
We next had to apply to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for “advance permission to adopt a foreign orphan.” That required digging up our original birth certificates, marriage certificates, and divorce decrees; and getting fingerprinted for a background check by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We also needed a home study by a licensed social worker, required by the State of California—as well as by the INS and the Chinese authorities—to certify that we were stable candidates as parents and would provide a safe and supportive environment for a child.
Since the INS form asked the question, one or two orphans?, we requested permission to adopt two children at once; we thought it would be good for the children to have each other. But the agency said this wouldn’t be possible. China didn’t allow foreigners to do this—except in the rare case of twins. Evidently, they felt it would be unfair to allow foreign parents to take two children at
once when many of their own people were now limited by government policy to a single child.
It made a rough kind of sense, but then we found that once an American family adopts one child, they can adopt a second. They just have to start the entire process all over again, from start to finish, and pay a second set of fees. And the second time (adoption rules have since changed, so check the website of Families with Children from China, www.fwcc.org, for current regulations2), a family was required to adopt a child with “special needs”—some medical problem, usually correctable, that required attention. At the time, parents under thirty-five, or who already had children living at home, were also assigned a child with special needs. But these guidelines, we soon found, could shift depending on who was working with what agency, when, and in which province.
At the point we began, thousands of adoptive parents had gone to China before us and thousands more were waiting with us, drawn halfway across the world by a strange series of events. In the world’s most populous country, babies were being found abandoned on a daily basis—nearly all of them girls. Some of the lost children wound up in state care. By the time Mark and I began the application process in San Francisco, many of China’s institutions were filled to overflowing with abandoned baby girls, a small percentage of whom were making their way through the bureaucracy into the waiting arms of would-be parents like us.
The current wave of adoptions from China had begun as a trickle in the late 1980s. At first these arrangements were informal, individual affairs, which broke through the Chinese government’s earlier reluctance to let non-Asians adopt Chinese children. A few Americans working in China managed to find abandoned or orphaned children, to more or less invent their own paperwork and make arrangements with the various layers of government. “I’d go to the police station and cry every week,” said one American woman who was living in China in the mid-1980s and wanted to adopt a little girl who’d been left at a medical clinic at five days old. Eventually, the woman convinced both the Chinese and American authorities to let her leave China with the child, but it was a struggle.
In 1989, 201 children from China entered the United States, but the arrangements still were scattershot. Centralization came with the approval of a national adoption law, which China enacted in 1992, officially granting foreigners the right to adopt Chinese babies and setting up protocols for doing so.3 Soon a number of U.S. adoption agencies were working with China, including veteran international groups such as Holt International Children’s Services. By 1995 the number of Chinese children adopted annually by American parents was up to two thousand, and by the year 2000 it was more than five thousand.
The babies were usually between six and twelve months old by the time the necessary paperwork had been completed on both continents and the prospective parents had traveled to China to pick them up and take them home. Most were the small victims, it was generally believed, of the Chinese government’s rigidly enforced population control—the so-called one-child policy.
In the United States, meanwhile, there were growing numbers of couples with infertility problems—six million by a 1998 count4—an increasing percentage of whom were now competing for a decreasing number of American infants available for adoption. The rate at which American women relinquish their babies had declined dramatically in the past few decades.5 Given the availability of birth control and abortion in this country, the increasing number of single mothers who choose to raise babies on their own, and the number of childless people seeking healthy infants, would-be parents trying to adopt a newborn could find themselves facing tough competition, long waits, great expense (private adoption fees as high as $30,000, and more), broken agreements, and worries about the security of the legal adoption bond—fueled by several well-publicized cases of birth mothers attempting to take back their children. According to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, for every person who succeeded in a domestic adoption, there were five or six others who didn’t.
So, by the 1990s a growing number of people had turned to international adoptions—in Guatemala, Chile, Paraguay, and Ecuador; in Eastern Europe and Russia; and in Asian countries including Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and South Korea, where there had been a long-standing adoption program dating back to the 1950s. But at the time Mark and I began our adoption process, China had the greatest numbers of infants available for adoption. Since an overwhelming majority of the would-be parents in the United States, whether they were pursuing parenthood through in vitro fertilization or adoption, said that they preferred girls,6 China seemed a perfect destination for a large number of childless Americans. A few added another reason for choosing China: the absence of identifiable birth parents.7
By the late 1990s, at least a hundred agencies were involved in the business of getting Chinese children into the hands of American parents. They ranged from seasoned, large nonprofit Christian organizations to independent for-profit agencies to lone liaisons trying their luck at the baby-brokering business. There was by now a special adoption unit at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, where a long line of adopting parents were interviewed each day so that their new children could be granted visas and the right to enter the United States.
Mark and I were soon answering dozens of personal questions. (Have you ever received psychiatric or psychological treatment? Have you ever been arrested, or have you ever had an arrest record expunged? What are your plans for child care?) We added up our assets, dug out our tax returns, asked friends to write letters of reference, requested letters of verification from our employers, and went to our doctors for the required checkups.
Within a few months we had a folder five inches thick, stuffed with forms and reports. We began to learn how much patience, acceptance, and trust was called for. Maybe it would all work out and maybe it wouldn’t. As is usual with such a process, the recitation of our histories barely scratched the surface of our lives. But we dutifully laid out our stories on paper, expressing our great desire for a little being to pour our love into and to guide in the world.
There was no blank space on the forms for the few questions that would occur to us later as we felt our way through the bureaucratic maze: Are you ready to place the decision about whether you’ll be able to have a child, and who that child will be, in the hands of strangers? Are you willing to pay hefty sums of money to people you’ve never met in order to make it all happen? Are you willing to open your lives to government agencies, domestic and foreign, to jump countless official hurdles, to document just about every aspect of your life, and to go through the agonies of waiting far longer than you thought, with very little assurance about anything?
Yes, yes, and yes, as it turned out.
We began a lengthy period of anticipation and confusion, joining hundreds of other would-be adoptive parents and becoming part of a subculture I never knew existed. We entered the world of the waiting.
“Why China?” people began to ask. “Because a little girl is waiting for us there,” I said at first. But a lighthearted answer invariably led to a more weighty inquiry. How to explain all the lost, available girls?
Experts on China’s lost girls frequently referred to an “epidemic” of abandonment when they talked about the problem.8 Babies, female babies, it seemed, were found everywhere, every day. Babies in sunlight and babies in moonlight. Babies wrapped in newspapers, babies bundled in rags, babies in baskets, babies in boxes. Boys, too, were found occasionally and taken to institutions, but they tended to be children who suffered from mental or physical handicaps, and they were in the minority, less than 10 percent at most. Just how many of these lost children were there in all? No one seemed to really know.
I started writing letters to my as-yet-unknown daughter. All I knew at the time was that she’d be born somewhere in China, that she would wind up, for whatever reason, without a family, and that through some shuffling of destinies, our lives eventually would be woven together. At least, I hoped so. I had begun to think about her all the time.
I found a notebook at a fair run by a group of bookbinders. The cover was decorated with Chinese characters. I had no idea what they meant, which seemed an appropriate place to begin. I hoped whatever they said was in keeping with the spirit of writing to a tiny girl in China.
“Letters to an Unknown Daughter,” I wrote on the first page. Each day I looked at the characters, wondering, and opened to a blank page. I began:
Dear Daughter, I’m beginning this journal of thoughts at a very uncertain point in your life, possibly months before you are even born, and I will have to start by offering you a loving explanation, rather than any clear facts, about our eventual coming together. The “you” I am writing to seems both elusive and strangely real. I can sense a spirit there as I write. The earthly details are hazy, of course. When we get together, you and I, I won’t really know what you’ve been through—who carried you and gave birth to you, what she first whispered to you, how long she held on to you before having to make a deep, sad decision. I am certain the loss of you will linger with her all her days.
Among the collection of thoughts and reflections I have been gathering for you is this one: “Remember, there is a home we all come from, even before our mothers. We are all interconnected, parts of long-dead dinosaurs, the stardust of exploded stars.” Those words came from the rector of the little church I attend. Her enduring message is one of reconciliation among people. She encourages all who listen to hold each other in our hearts, no matter what our external differences.