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

by Evans, Karin

  China’s daughters—hundreds of thousands of them, maybe more—struggling already for their place in a biased culture, were forced from their families. Many wound up on the side of the road. Those who were found ended up in state care.

  Even a mother or a family who wanted desperately to keep a daughter could be caught in the squeeze. One account involved a couple who had a first baby, a girl, and wanted to have another child.17 Because they lived in an area where one child was the limit, the only way to gain permission for another pregnancy was to erase the girl from the records. So, they told the government officials that the baby had died. The officials said, “Show us the body.” The parents said they couldn’t do that; they’d buried the child. The officials said, “Show us the grave.” Ultimately, the resourceful parents gathered up some bones that appeared to be human to “prove” their story and satisfy the officials.

  But now the daughter’s fate was sealed. The parents would have to either hide her forever or find someone else who could take her in, which has happened through the ages in China. They said they’d be willing to find some kindhearted people to adopt their daughter, but at the time the government had made that difficult for Chinese citizens, counting adopted children against the adopting couple’s birth quota.

  I heard the first part of this family’s story, but I never heard the end. The little girl may have been kept hidden, thus slipping into oblivion, listed as deceased and unable to attend school or get medical care. Or the desperate parents eventually may have done what so many others had done—left the little girl where they hoped she’d be found and taken to an orphanage.

  While reports of forced abortions circulated widely, one of the least noted results of China’s policy was this increase in the abandonment of babies. Although there was a clear correlation between the policy and the tiny human fallout—a new crackdown on family size in a certain district was almost predictably followed by a new flood of abandoned baby girls in that area—the Chinese government tried to avoid political embarrassment by ignoring the subject, even going so far as to direct orphanage officials to keep the numbers under wraps.

  There were attempts to reverse the trend and raise the status of girls within China—poster campaigns praising the virtues of girls, for instance, but the old traditions had strong roots. Increasingly, as pressures mounted, more and more healthy baby girls turned up alone—wailing in doorways, tucked under park benches.

  The government’s coercive measures simply added new weight to the existing bias in favor of boys. While forced abortions affected unborn male and female children alike, the perils for living children fell on the girls. According to Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, by the early 1980s, the Chinese press carried a number of reports of parents drowning, suffocating, or abandoning their baby daughters so they would have another chance to try for a boy. The Anhui Women’s Federation disclosed that in one village alone forty baby girls had been drowned in 1980 and 1981. And that village was hardly alone.

  China Wakes coauthor Sheryl WuDunn observed the effects of the population policy close up among her own distant kin in China. One relative and his wife hid for several months when she was pregnant with a third child, moving from village to village. She gave birth to the son they had always wanted. But what would have happened, WuDunn wondered, if that third child had been a girl? “Would they have accepted fate and returned to their village with their infant daughter to accept the fines and sterilization?” she wrote. “Or would they, in their torment, have told the midwife to plunge their baby daughter into a bucket of water?”

  In the difficult years following the government’s edict, untold numbers of desperate parents resorted to the age-old solution: infanticide. Reportedly on the decline after the Communists came to power, infanticide now again played a part in the fate of newborn daughters. So a new enemy, ultrasound technology, which allowed families to learn the sex of an unborn child and choose to abort the females. According to Human Rights in China, both female infanticide and sex-selective abortions—as well as the concealment and abandonment of living daughters—represented a desperate response by peasants to the harsh birth control measures.

  China manufactured its first ultrasound machines in 1979, and produced some ten thousand of them in the next decade. Initially pressed into service to check whether women were retaining their government-required metal IUDs, these machines soon found a more popular purpose. According to one report in the 1990s, 97.5 percent of all aborted fetuses in China were female.18 Although in 1991 it was made illegal for doctors to use ultrasound to reveal the gender of unborn children, according to numerous reports, the practice has continued in China and elsewhere in Asia, with both doctors and hospitals selling the service to those who can afford it.

  If wealthy people could pay for an ultrasound test or afford the penalty for an extra child, poorer rural people had neither option and resorted to abandonment and infanticide. There are reports that the Communist Party soon became alarmed at the widespread resurgence of female infanticide in the countryside, and local population control officials were told to try to educate the peasantry out of the ancient prejudices against daughters. But the root cause of the new troubles for girls—the one-child policy—was handily ignored.

  Margery Wolf, in her book Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China, summed up the suffering of China’s rural people: “The decision of young parents to kill their baby cannot be easy. Indeed, it may not even be theirs, but rather made for them by a senior generation for whom it may well be equally hard. The couple, together with their sorrowing parents, see before them a life of increasing poverty, for they have no sons to help them in the fields and no one to provide for them in their old age.”

  Faced with the resistance of rural people, in particular, to the single-child restriction, the government loosened its grip in 1988, coming up with what’s been called the “one-son or two-child” policy. This allowed families in one-child areas whose first child was a daughter to have another child—with the built-in understanding that they were getting a second chance to produce a son. In that way, the revision gave a nod of official approval to the age-old bias: Families with girls deserved another chance to have a son because sons were so important. Oddly, too, the relaxed rules worked against the policy’s goals—encouraging some families to keep having children until they produced a son.

  The more lenient rules probably meant that more firstborn daughters got to stay in their families, but the situation soon produced a new group of casualties—second-born girls. After the birth of a second child, parents faced the prospect of sterilization. If they gave birth to two daughters and they still wanted a son, the only way around the rules was to hide the second daughter or get her into someone else’s hands. China’s orphanages soon found themselves with new mouths to feed.

  The Chinese authorities intentionally made it difficult for families to violate the population policies by simply fostering children out to friends or family to avoid fines or punishment for having had extra children. Until the spring of 1999, when that portion of the law was changed, Chinese families who took in abandoned children were penalized the same way they’d be penalized for giving birth to an extra child without permission. 19 Otherwise, the government feared, families would just find a way around the one-child policy by finding temporary or permanent homes for extra children. But that logic resulted in another, perhaps unforeseen, early effect of the one-child policy: In large part, it meant that abandoned children who wound up in orphanages or on someone’s doorstep couldn’t be adopted by Chinese families. In 1999 those rules were changed, and Chinese adoptions have increased in the years since.

  Throughout history in China, there had been informal routes of adoption, even though there might also be some reluctance to adopt children from outside the family lines.20 Families who lacked sons of their own were often able to adopt the sons of relatives and neighbors who had too many children to care for. Couples unable to have
a child might just find one at their door or be handed a baby someone else had found.

  A fairly typical account of such an event appears in Golden Lilies, written in the early 1900s: “[Kwei-li’s] cherished baby boy . . . didn’t live long enough for his father to see or hold him. Her faith shattered, Kwei-li fell into despair. Her anxious family found an abandoned baby girl on a nearby towpath, and placed her in Kwei-li’s arms. Of this she tells us: ‘. . . I sat stiff and still, and tried to push away the little body pressing close against me; but at the touch of baby mouth and fingers, springs that were dead seemed stirring in my heart again.’”21

  But in contemporary China, the officials were watching. Families feared reprisals if they took in a child. Chinese citizens were allowed to adopt “genuine orphans” where it could be documented that the parents had died, but the 1992 Adoption Law officially relegated nondisabled abandoned infants to the status of unadoptable children within China—until the law was changed in 1999. At least one observer has contended that many more Chinese in China adopt girls than is generally believed—though it’s not much talked about—and if the Chinese government loosened the law to allow couples with a boy to adopt an abandoned girl, it might relieve some of the pressure on the orphanages.

  It’s one of the hard facts of contemporary life, then, that the blessed and happy event Mark and I experienced on a fall day in 1997 was shadowed by reports of what had gone on—and was still going on—for the girls and women of China. When we journeyed to Jiangmen, seventeen years had passed since the authorities had announced that the government of China was going to meddle in women’s reproductive lives far more than their mothers-in-law had ever thought of doing. The population policy had been in effect for nearly two decades and the nation’s orphanages were struggling to care for the casualties.

  Worse, the girls who were found and taken to institutions were just the tip of the iceberg. Millions more were simply unaccounted for.

  When demographers look at the population of a given area, certain patterns tend to hold true. In a natural ratio, boys at birth outnumber girls by about 105 to 100, an imbalance that ultimately corrects itself because girls have better survival rates than boys. But in China, the natural order of things has been badly skewed. Millions of girls who would be expected to be in the population today are missing—so many lost that China is experiencing a “gender gap.” By 1992, a survey sponsored by the Chinese government showed that more than 12 percent of the baby girls who should be growing up in that country were simply not there, a percentage that translated to 1.7 million lost girls each year.22

  In 1996 there were thirty-six million more males than females in China. The population was already so out of balance that demographers reported in the 1990s that five of China’s thirty provinces had 120 boys for every 100 girls. By 1998, according to research by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the overall ratio of boys to girls had climbed to 120 boys per 100 girls.

  It is not only the girls of this generation who are missing today. By broad estimates, thirty million females in China—a number equivalent to the entire population of Mexico City, say, or a full 5 percent of China’s population—are missing. Gone. (China, by the way, is not alone in this phenomenon. India’s statistics also reflect a vast number of missing females, and worldwide, according to Betsy Hartmann, more than one hundred million females who should, by normal expectation, be alive and well on the planet are missing.) By 2008, China’s gender gap was wider than ever, with a surplus of some forty million males.

  Where are the lost women of China? “Some were killed at birth in the 1930s and ’40s and so are not present as elderly women today,” writes Sheryl WuDunn. “Some died as girls because they were not given adequate food, clothing, and health care. Some died in the 1958 -1961 famine because their parents saved the rice for the brothers.”

  Others, the victims of ultrasound, and subsequent gender-specific abortion, were conceived but never born. Some were born but didn’t make it past infancy, and others may have just eluded official recognition. China has a huge floating population, unconnected to the registries of any particular area, and unknown numbers of girls may be hidden within this group. If this transient population now numbers as many as one hundred million people, as some experts claim, that may mean that millions of unregistered children may have been born to those people in flux.

  Whatever the mix of explanations, an enormous number of little girls has disappeared, largely to the world’s indifference. As New York Times writer Bob Herbert declared: “There has never been the kind of international outcry that there should be over the girls who are missing from the population of China. The world has largely closed its eyes to this immense tragedy.”23

  Strict population measures, according to the Chinese government, have worked—the birth rate has slowed dramatically—but at what price? “In its grave demographic distortion of the Chinese population and in the pain it produces, this policy appears as a monumental form of national self-mutilation,” writes University of Washington anthropologist Ann Anagnost.24 Ironically, of course, many observers from other nations continue to praise the policy, taking for granted China’s need to reduce its rate of population growth, while ignoring the human suffering involved.

  Within China itself, despite individual resistance to the dictates of the policy, or the way it’s been enforced, there’s actually been widespread acceptance among the people that the policies are necessary. Says Anagnost, “At the height of the student movement in 1989, when students and intellectuals all over China were demonstrating in support of expanded political rights, the issue of reproductive rights was never once mentioned.” In fact, the demonstrators conceded that the threat posed by a rising birth rate was something the national government had every right to address.

  Says American anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh, who has conducted research on Chinese population policy since the mid-1980s, “It’s hard to find anybody who openly criticizes the policy, although these days there is a lot of ferment in the air. I have not heard anyone, including feminists, criticize the policy on this particular ground. ‘The treatment of infant girls is really regrettable,’ they say, ‘but we need this policy for national development, we need it to enhance the wealth and power of the nation.’

  “This is very troubling to me as a Western feminist,” Greenhalgh continues. “It would be bad enough if equal numbers of boys and girls were being abandoned, but the gender skewing . . .” Her voice trails off. “You have to understand, on life-and-death matters, this is not a good time to be female in China.”

  Others note that the enforcement of China’s birth policy has resulted in a kind of rural-urban schism. Although the problem of abandoned children and infanticide is widely known in the cities, urban people tend to blame the problems on “backward” rural people, and few attribute the human cost to the Communist Party’s family rules. In fact, says China scholar Eileen Otis, “If it weren’t for the broad support of the policy among the urban population, who accept it as the prerequisite for the country’s economic development and their own upward mobility, the policy would not be feasible.”

  By 1991, single-child families had become standard enough in urban China that an American family traveling with two children was a double curiosity. “The moment we stepped off the plane in Shanghai,” wrote Ann Anagnost, “we sensed a reaction to the mere plurality of our children that was almost palpable. As we walked the crowded streets, the street vendors, mostly elderly women, would tap out a tattoo with their wooden clappers to the accompaniment of ‘You liangge yo-o-o’ (There are two of them!).”

  The overall picture to date was a curious, contradictory one, varying from province to province, from city to village. In the broadest sense, it seemed that China’s emphasis on economic development combined with the government’s surveillance has persuaded urban people that limiting their families was worth it. Peasants, on the other hand, depending on the relative stringency of the enforcement in their area, e
ither had gone about their business much as they always had, or had been forced into a brutal corner if that first (or second or third) child turned out to be female.

  On paper, China’s females are protected as never before. The Law on Protection of Rights and Interests of Women, which went into effect in 1992, makes clear that “drowning, abandoning or cruel infanticide in any manner of female babies shall be prohibited; discrimination against or maltreatment of women who gave birth to female babies . . . shall be prohibited.” Various other laws give men and women equal rights to inherit family property; others forbid domestic abuse and grant women access to divorce and the right to humane treatment in general.

  But in practice, China’s women, who make up one-quarter of the women in the world, are still caught in age-old restraints. And quite apart from the one-child policy, a woman who makes it through the reproductive minefield, gives birth, and manages to hang on to her child, can encounter other hazards. Working conditions alone can make things difficult for a mother. If she’s lucky enough to have a job and keep it after having a child, she can wind up on the night shift or working under horrific conditions with little protection and low pay. In some foreign joint ventures, workplace conditions are among the worst for women, since cheap female labor remains one of China’s main attractions for international capital. The work week can be grueling—twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks. Workers’ safety is not a high priority in much of China, and accidents—explosions, fires, building collapses—abound.25 In southern China’s boomtowns, most of the victims of such calamities are women in their mid-teens to mid-twenties who have come from the farmland to work in the cities.26