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

by Evans, Karin

  When we came home with Kelly, unemployment in China, according to government reports, was running at the highest rate since 1949.27 Millions of state workers were being phased out at a fraction of their normal salaries. The notion of the “iron ricebowl”—long-term job security—was being dashed, even for men. And overall, China’s unemployment woes have hit women hardest of all. This only adds to China’s huge population of the dispossessed, the tens of millions of rural people who seek work in the cities. People with nothing cannot care for their children.

  So much is changing so quickly in China these days that there are all sorts of new troubles—increasing premarital sex, babies born out of wedlock, babies born to girls who are themselves no more than children. Women on the run may go through pregnancy and birth with no medical care at all.

  And then there’s what Chinese journalists refer to as the “dark side.” In recent years, reports have surfaced of rings of thugs who prey on young women. One well-publicized case involved a twenty-year-old woman abducted and sold to a fifty-year-old peasant man who cut the tendons of her feet so she couldn’t escape. Another woman, mentally retarded, was traded to a farmer in exchange for a calf. Under the farmer’s brutal treatment, the woman died within a few months.28

  Most cases involve rural women sold to rural men: women carried off, forced into bondage, repeatedly raped and otherwise abused; women who never recover from the injuries, both mental and physical, suffered at the hands of abductors. Many of the victims have been young women desperate to better their condition, who fall for promises of jobs or money. Even schoolgirls have been abducted and forced into prostitution.

  The Chinese government has acknowledged the problem of abduction and sale of women—another old evil undergoing a modern resurgence—uncovering fifty thousand cases involving the sale of women and girls in the early 1990s. But observers say that regulations outlawing the practices haven’t been effectively enforced, and the trade in women continues. Paradoxically, one reason mentioned for the trafficking is the shortage of women in China, combined with the family pressures on men to marry and carry on the family line. Some men who have failed to find a wife by traditional means have resorted to buying or abducting one. Imagine, then, if a woman under such conditions were to give birth to a daughter. How many lost infants might lie in the shadow of these kinds of horror stories alone?

  I thought of the mysterious woman with the red-and-white bundle that night in Guangzhou. Whether that was a baby she held in her arms or not, whatever had brought her to that point of desperation in a hotel parking lot meant that she, too, was a lost daughter of China.

  5

  The Taming Power of the Small

  A smiling golden buddha

  In a golden temple stands,

  With a tiny golden baby

  In his gentle golden hands.

  —From Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes1

  Kelly Xiao Yu and I spent our first full afternoon together at the hotel, rolling around on the bed, making friends. She climbed me like a mountain, crawling up and over, grabbing handfuls of my clothes to boost herself. Then she’d fall off the other side, giggling, and start over. We laughed and played with each other’s fingers and noses. We were getting to know each other on some primal level. She poked a curious finger at my eyes, and rolled hers to the ceiling when she laughed.

  When I hugged her, she felt full and warm—and necessary—in my arms, as if she were settling into a dent in my chest that I hadn’t realized was so cavernous. Babies are made for this, I know, thanks to some evolutionary scheme that opens mysterious places in us into which only babies can fit. We looked into each other’s eyes and I covered her with kisses. It was a transcendent couple of hours, fixed in my memory now, both physical and mental.

  She was everything Mark and I could want and more—affectionate and easy-tempered, with a full-out zest for life. For the first few days as we walked around Guangzhou, Kelly riding along in her backpack, she kept pointing at the sights—a bird, a tree, motorcycles by the dozens—gasping, waving high an index finger and shouting, “Da!” She’d lived on the ninth floor of the orphanage, one of the caretakers had said. I had no idea if she’d ever been out of doors. She seemed dazzled and delighted by the world. Yet I wondered where in that small mind and body there might be some sadness, some sense of loss.

  We were now an East-West tour group. The babies settled into their armchair cribs, smiled and chortled, broke out in rashes, cried their hearts out, tried out Snuglis and strollers and backpacks, ate with amazing gusto, and seemed generally happy to be along for the ride. There followed another ten days of touring, paperwork, and getting to know one another. We grew close as a group, swapping tips and diaper cream, watching the babies and parents learn each other’s ways. We still had to apply for American visas for our children, which involved a visit to the Chinese medical clinic, where the babies would have checkups and inoculations, an interview at the U.S. Consulate, and a wait until the U.S. visas were issued.

  Within just a few days, we couldn’t recall what life had been like before Kelly, so perfectly did she fit into our hearts and our days. We weren’t alone in these feelings. It was amazing how comfortable the new parents and new children looked with one another—as if they had just been waiting to jump into one another’s lives and were now at home. Each time we met with the rest of the group for the day’s excursion, the babies seemed to open up more, smile more readily, relax. We did, too. The whole group was an amazingly cohesive one. Perhaps something about the hard-fought quest had helped draw us together. We seemed to all share a feeling of immense gratitude, relief, and shocked joy.

  We ate nearly every meal together as a group, maneuvering our chopsticks over the bobbing heads of our infants. Dish after dish of tofu, bitter melon, shiny black mushrooms, noodles, and rice spun around on lazy Susans in the middle of huge round tables. We wandered the markets. We visited the memorial to Dr. Sun Yat-Sen and a statue of the “founding goats” of Guangzhou, and played with the schoolchildren in a local park, all in blue-and-white uniforms, the best students wearing red scarves.

  People on the street smiled at us with our Chinese babies and many were quick to come up and play with the children—and if the babies’ legs were bare, to wave a good-natured finger, scolding us for underdressing them. A woman from Jiangmen later told me, though, that the local people sometimes had suspicions about people like us who took away Chinese babies. “They thought maybe the foreigners were making money from these girls,” she said.

  Our leader, Max, guided everyone through the next week with uncanny, perfectly orchestrated grace. Speaking softly, carrying a big sheaf of papers, he seemed to be everywhere at once, suddenly disappearing, then reappearing, smoothing the way with Chinese officials, the U.S. Consulate, the hotel, the bus drivers, waiters. When he passed us in the lobby, he stopped and smiled at Kelly and reached out to play with her finger. “How is she?” he asked. “She’s wonderful,” we chorused. “We love her.” “Good, good,” said Max, laying a hand on my shoulder, giving Mark a thumbs-up sign.

  I don’t think any of us had a clue about the behind-the-scenes negotiating that went on, as we were led by the hand through an unknown bureaucratic labyrinth. Max’s assistant, Jeffrey, took us shopping and sang Chinese lullabies to us on the bus. A sweet, lilting song called “The Little Swallow” was his favorite. Two extraordinarily capable and sensitive young Chinese women, Mary and Anna, appeared magically at our elbows whenever anyone was struggling with a stroller or otherwise needed a hand. Kelly’s small companions all had new Western names now—Lily, Amy, Hannah, Tiffany—although a number of parents had kept the girls’ Chinese names as middle names.

  For the first few days, we awoke not quite believing there was a baby there beside us, but soon the knowledge gradually sank into our sleeping and our waking. There she was each dawn, lying in her armchair crib. She woke smiling, looking at us in some expectation, it seemed. Now what? She padded around the hotel room, draggi
ng things from suitcases. She howled while we fumbled about with powdered formula and thermoses. We kept saying Xiao Yu to her—trying out as many tonal combinations as we could (undoubtedly all of them wrong), but she didn’t seem to recognize her name. The one Cantonese word she seemed able to say was Aii-ya!—that all-purpose exclamation (for surprise, alarm, or incredulity). Every day we fell more deeply in love. I was amazed at how our baby seemed to take to us, apparently eager for whatever adventures were in store.

  Kelly seemed to have no developmental delays we could see. She could walk and hold her bottle by herself and was soon trying to unzip our suitcases. Somewhere along the way, she had apparently learned to bray like a donkey, as had several of the other little girls. As we walked through the streets, she’d periodically begin to hee-haw. It was a long time afterward that a Chinese friend set us straight. She laughed and said it sounded to her as if Kelly were chanting “Ni hao, ni hao”—the Chinese greeting.

  Trucking around with brand-new babies was a Zen-like challenge. I was living in the present moment as never before, thanks to the steepness of the learning curve. Up and down the hotel elevators we rode, crowding in with visiting businessmen, dropping cookie crumbs while they gave us odd looks and puffed on their cigarettes. At night, while we tried to rock our baby to sleep, the businessmen gathered down the hall, laughing, drinking, and smoking. When Kelly cried, Mark and I lay in the dark, singing “Home on the Range” and “Red River Valley” to her.

  By day, as we wandered around Guangzhou, it was hard to get a sense of the undercurrents of terror and turmoil I had read and heard about; stories of the young, hopeful women who came looking for jobs as secretaries or interpreters and wound up working as prostitutes. The people in the adoption bureaucracy, the throngs on the sidewalks, seemed busy, optimistic, and good-humored. Though there were accounts of considerable desperation on these same streets, we remained insulated.

  One night we took a river cruise and one member of Max’s staff brought his wife and children—a nine-year-old girl and a toddler-aged boy. He told us that, as a member of one of Guangdong’s numerous ethnic minorities, he was allowed two children. China has been generally lenient in enforcing population control among its minorities—more than ninety million people altogether, whose birthrate as a result was far higher than that of the majority Han Chinese. While we motored down the Pearl River, neon lighting the buildings on shore, his beautiful little daughter, whom he clearly adored, turned cart-wheels on the deck.

  The next day we made an unscheduled stop at the local Hard Rock Cafe, and took a group excursion to the popular open area in Guangzhou, the new White Cloud Park, an immaculately kept area on the edge of town with pools and fountains, a huge modern greenhouse, flower gardens, expanses of neatly clipped grass, and some inexplicable touches—rocks incised with pictographs, a stand of Roman columns, and a few Northwest Indian totem poles. This pristine open space was a rare reward for penned-in city workers, a luxury that didn’t exist a decade ago.

  On weekends, we’d heard, the park was crowded, but we were there on a weekday and it was quiet and empty. A few young couples strolled together, the girls wearing the latest platform shoes, the boys in athletic togs. All of this came with all too familiar background music—an endless stream of American show tunes piped through some invisible speaker system. “America” from West Side Story; Engelbert Humperdinck. Kelly fell asleep to the theme from Cats. “How many miles have we come,” asked Mark, “to be tortured by Andrew Lloyd Webber?”

  And then one day, passing through a huge gate on a quiet side street, we entered the Liu Rong Si, the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees, and walked into old-time China. In a quiet courtyard under drooping trees, tourists mingled with brown-robed monks, and visitors tossed coins for luck into a miniature pagoda tower.

  We crowded quietly into the old temple with its red doors and glazed-tile roof. Today our babies were to be blessed in a Buddhist ceremony. Holding our daughters, we knelt in front of three immense golden Buddhas. The massive statues weighed ten tons each and reached twenty feet into the air, dwarfing the little Buddhas in our arms. As two monks raised sticks of incense above their heads, smoke swirled in the temple’s dusky light, and the monks began to chant. Jeffrey was at the altar, bowing and placing sticks of incense in a bowl.

  Afterward I asked him what the blessing meant. “May disaster never touch these children,” he said softly. “May they always be happy and no harm come to them.” Our daughters received another special prayer for longevity, since banyan trees are believed to impart long life. I hoped the thoughts rubbed off on us, too.

  The old temple was rich with history and significance, having survived not just the wear and tear of fourteen centuries, but the Cultural Revolution as well. An early visitor to the temple was Bodhidarma, the Indian monk and founder of the Zen sect, who once stayed overnight, lending such a spiritual presence, it is said, that all the mosquitoes in the temple buzzed away and never came back. Today the old temple is home to the Guangzhou Buddhist Association, part of the resurgence of religious observation in China.

  A smaller temple on the grounds contained an altar and a familiar image—a statue of Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. In old China, women were always anxious to touch an image of the goddess, in hopes of giving birth to sons. But the deity known as the Giver of Children is also known as a protector of women. Her name means, literally, “she who looks down and hears the cries of the world.” In the classic Chinese book Golden Lilies, Kwei-li wrote poignantly of Guan Yin’s place in the Chinese woman’s heart: “We went from Yuan’s palace to the temple of Kwan-yin, which I often visited as a child. It also was a ruin, but it spoke to me of the dead thousands of weary feet that had climbed the steps leading to its shrines; of the buried mothers who touched the floor before its altars with reverent heads and asked blessings on their children’s lives; of their children, taught to murmur prayers to the Mother of All Mercies, who held close within her loving heart the sorrows, hopes, and fears of woman’s world.”2

  It seemed fitting as I held my Chinese daughter in front of the shrine to the Goddess of Mercy that we devote one stick of incense and a prayer to all the lost girls everywhere—and to all the women in the shadows. If China was full of lost daughters, I knew by now, it was also full of lost mothers.

  It was only there in the temple that I got a powerful feel for the old China I’d read about. Cloistered in a garden away from the traffic, with monks walking quietly beneath the trees, it seemed almost possible that the kind of life described by Bada Shanren, a seventeenth-century painter known as “the master of the lotus garden,” could have thrived, the China of artists and scholars. This is how he spent his days:

  I have a clean table under a bright window. My book closed, I burn some incense. When I feel that I understand something, I am happy and smile to myself. The guest arrives, but we do not stand on formality. I brew cups of bitter tea, and together we enjoy some wonderful literature. After a long while, the rays of the setting sun light up the room, and I can see the moon rising above the pillars of my hall. The guest departs, crossing the brook in front of my house. I then call my boy servant to close the door and put down my rush cushion. I sit there quietly for a while, feeling carefree and content, my mind carried away.3

  Once we were outside the temple and back in the din and the bustle, Bada Shanren’s vision seemed the rarefied and vanishing memory that it was.

  On Halloween night, we were still in Guangzhou, and as if things weren’t culturally confusing enough, some of the new babies were now sporting costumes. A three-month-old was done up as a tiny cow, the returning two-and-a-half-year-old was dressed as an angel, and a troupe of parents and children were trick-or-treating through the hotel hallways. We passed out Snickers bars, bought at the hotel sundries shop.

  A day later, on Shamian Island, where the intruding foreigners of the last century once staked their claim to commerce, the little girls of China went through some of their last offici
al business—having their snapshots taken, their little bodies examined, and their paperwork inspected by U.S. consular officers. Every child adopted from China, whether from Sichuan in the west, or Fujian in the south, or Shaanxi in the north, must exit through Guangzhou. In that capacity, Shamian Island is a kind of way station for underage immigrants. In the month before our visit, 447 little girls were granted visas—the highest monthly total to date for adoptions from China.4

  On visa applications, we filled in what we knew about our daughters. When we came to the box on the form that asked about “complexion,” we were advised to write “fair.” Not so very long ago, we were told, the United States required Chinese people to write the word “yellow” in that space.

  The girls’ visa photos were taken in a cramped hole-in-the-wall studio. At a medical clinic, heights and weights were recorded, and the babies examined in production-line fashion, moving from cubicle to cubicle. The point of all this wasn’t to check on the baby’s health for the baby’s sake, but to assure the U.S. government that the children coming to America had no notable, unexpected abnormalities and wouldn’t be bringing any contagious diseases into their new country.

  The inoculation room, the last stop, echoed with pint-sized pandemonium. Amid piercing screams from the small victims we tried to sort out what shots Kelly was supposed to have and why, and we expressed our concern—our worries duly translated to the Chinese medical staff—about whether three inoculations all at once might not be too much for her. We were told, in translation, that she had to have the shots, period, or else no visa. This, too, was a ruling not by the Chinese medical staff but by our own government (which has since modified the requirements). And so we wrestled a small leg free and held our heaving, screaming child while the shots were given.