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

by Evans, Karin

  In the end, of course, the matter of the red thread is not an issue to be settled one way or another. If you try to unravel the ties with logic, you may succeed. If you believe in the idea, you’ll find more than enough evidence for its existence. Maybe the thread is woven partly from strands of destiny, partly from gratitude, partly from love. Maybe it’s all a tribute to the openness of the human heart, both young and old. One thing I do believe: These are not ordinary pairings.

  I remember a moment in the orphanage waiting room that fateful October day when I looked up from my sleeping child’s face to see another new parent, a man in his forties, holding a baby girl, tears running down his cheeks. In that moment, I would have believed absolutely that a very long red thread had wound from that child’s tiny Chinese foot in south China to this man’s big Caucasian ankle in southern California and had pulled them inextricably together. I’d also wager that the thread would hold for a lifetime.

  Kelly and Mark and I trail red threads from our ankles, too, I am certain of that. The matches are perfect because love is perfect. I couldn’t imagine a more wonderful child, a more perfect blessing. The mere fact that Kelly, who’d lost a mother, and I, who’d lost a child, had wound up together one fall day in China was a miracle in itself, and red thread enough for me.

  At the farewell dinner in Guangzhou, after the ostrich-eating and the toasting and the karaoke singing, Jeffrey, one of our facilitators, took the microphone and turned serious. “We have a saying in China,” he said. “We say that maybe these babies grew in the wrong stomachs, but now they have found the right parents.”

  6

  Matters of Life and Death

  To be an orphan,

  To be fated to be an orphan,

  How bitter is this lot!

  —Anonymous Chinese poem from the first century B.C.

  On that last night in China, the families we traveled with lined up the eighteen babies we were about to take home, and attempted a group portrait. The adults quickly propped up the children on a restaurant sofa, then dashed out of the picture. The girls bobbed against one another and squirmed. They chortled, they cried. It was a wild few minutes, and in lots of shots, at least one child, or part of a child, is lost in a blur of motion. Too many babies to deal with at once.

  As I look at that photo now, I have tried to imagine the un-pictured, the ghost children, the children left behind. Five more full couches would equal another hundred babies or so; one hundred couches, two thousand babies. It’s hard enough to stretch the imagination that far, envisioning all the faces. But hundreds of thousands of lost children? One million or more?

  Flying home from China with my arms full, I had a bittersweet feeling. Mixed with the waves of gratitude about our own good fortune was a kind of undercurrent, a faint cry in the distance. It had to do, I realized, not just with lingering questions about the babies’ lost mothers and fathers, but also with the vague knowledge of the other lost children. Numbers too big to grasp circled round our heads.

  I have felt that sense of disquiet at other times, too—hearing an American surgeon talk about the children he has seen in Chinese orphanages who desperately need more medical help than the orphanages can provide; or when I have heard recitations of random statistics or vague guesses—about dormitories filled with babies, two and three to a crib; about untold numbers of older girls still waiting, about millions of children who are simply unaccounted for. I think of my daughter’s nine-storied former home, and I wonder what sad or hopeful faces were—and are—behind those empty windows.

  All it takes to bring the statistics to life is to look into the face of one small child. Then all the numbers come with faces—and they are not easy to look in the eye. Beginning with even the most conservative figures of girls in Chinese orphanages—the 160,000, say, cited by the Chinese government1—in a given year, each time a foreigner walks away holding a baby, dozens of others are left. Some, usually the very youngest, are adopted by families within China, others are left waiting, their futures unknown.

  According to outside estimates, the number of children in Chinese institutions is undoubtedly far higher—perhaps ten times the official count, or more.2 Human rights groups say there may be as many as a million children in some kind of institutional care. Moreover, the children who make it into those institutions are probably just a tiny fraction of those who are lost altogether.

  Almost every mother or father I talked with on our trip to China and afterward said they would have carried one more child out of the orphanage and home in a minute, had they had the opportunity. Children in China are waiting for homes, willing parents are waiting for children, but a wall of bureaucracy lies between the two and the pipeline is narrow.

  An adoptive mother who picked up her daughter in an orphanage outside Guangzhou said the memory of one little girl in that institution stayed with her. There were ten babies in the room, recalled Susan Lakari, and four were adopted by the group she traveled with. “There was a little six- or seven-month-old baby in one of the other cribs and she was the only other baby awake. She was very, very interested in all the commotion. My heart went out to her and I just wanted to scoop her up and take her, too. I even took her picture, which has served no purpose except to make me feel sad when I see it and to tell others looking at our photos, ‘She was one not being taken that day.’”

  Adoptive mother Jenny Bowen, who heads up a charitable initiative, Half the Sky Foundation, for orphanages, says she remembers best a little girl of three or four in one orphanage, who was wearing a little string bracelet on her wrist, telling everyone, “My mama gave me this. My mama gave me this.” Over time, the strings had tightened and pressed into her wrist as the little girl had grown, but, says Bowen, “there was no way she was going to let anyone take that string bracelet off.”

  On the flight out of China in the seat in front of us was an American man from Philadelphia, with a new six-year-old daughter. She spoke only Mandarin, and he very little of that, but the two were communicating pretty well with a few words, gestures, and smiles. His wife, he told us, had stayed behind in China to go north to another orphanage where they had heard about a fourteen-year-old girl who had no nose. They were hoping to get permission to bring her home, too, for plastic surgery.

  At Christmastime, we received a card from our daughter’s orphanage. An illustration of Santa decorated the front. “Best wish for you,” the card said, and included a handwritten note, signed by the staff, thanking us “for having the kind hearts to take care of a little child.” They asked us to send a picture of Kelly in her new home: “How quickly the girls grow.” Inside the card were photographs of the orphanage exterior, including several of a new playground with swings, a huge sandbox, and a spring-loaded Mickey Mouse ride. The playground was inviting, but there wasn’t a child in sight, not a footprint in the sand. In the windows of the building no little faces were visible.

  By any number of accounts, though, the little ones—and not-so-little ones—are there; if not in that orphanage, in another. Innumerable children are waiting and more still are arriving on the doorsteps every day. Some are children with disabilities, cleft palates, for instance, whom orphanage directors wish someone would help. Others suffer from heart problems or other life-threatening conditions, or the more easily correctable effects of malnutrition. There are older children, too, little girls of five, six, or seven, and up, still hoping for a family. Many adopting families, like my acquaintance on the plane trip out of Guangzhou, have sought out the neediest children, but many more children are waiting, including those with serious problems in areas where there is little prospect of help.

  While some foreigners ask for older girls, most request infants or toddlers, leaving behind a population of older children. Chinese authorities can be reluctant to place older children, especially those over age ten, fearing that the adjustment to a new country and culture might be too much for them. (If children over age ten are placed, in some cases they themselves must agree to
the adoption.) Most children who get to be that old will remain in the institution until they can be trained for jobs.

  Some children who remain in orphanages become helpers for the caretakers as soon as they are potty-trained, says China-born writer Anchee Min.

  They are treated like an eldest child in a family. They know their place and that their efforts are appreciated. They grow up emotionally handicapped and don’t know it. They have no idea what affection means, because there are too many children and too few caretakers. It is a crazy household. The little ones will have marks on the tops of their heads—they will lay in the cradles all day without being picked up. They will kick and bounce themselves on the cradle bars screaming for attention. Older girls will learn not to question life and will accept things the way they are. The good part is that this ill-fate is shared by every girl they help carry through the doorway.

  Often the children left behind are mourned by the children who are adopted. One three-year-old spent her first months in the United States looking at the group photographs of all the kids still at the orphanage and trying to feed snacks to the children in the picture. Another adopted little girl of six kept asking about her best friend, adopted by another family in another part of the country. She wondered whether her friend was getting enough to eat.

  A couple from New Orleans who adopted a nine-year-old girl in Yunnan province posted on the Internet a poignant story of watching their newly adopted daughter say good-bye to her best friend in the orphanage, a little girl who wasn’t going anywhere that day. Both girls tried to hold their emotions in check. “One absolutely filled with sorrow and grief and the other filled with new hope, stealing looks at her new mom.” That mother, Martha Osborne, who works with RainbowKids International, a nonprofit e-zine and foundation that works on behalf of children who remain in orphanages,3 began a campaign to find a family for the little girl who stayed behind. She succeeded.

  Whatever the numbers, behind the orphanage walls are many ten-year-olds and toddlers, teenagers and infants, children with disabilities both mild and severe. There are boys, too, many with mental or physical impairment. Overall, far too many children are waiting, all deserving of a home.

  Anytime I contemplated such thoughts after we came home from China, I was filled anew with gratitude for my own little daughter of China. She is an exquisitely beautiful, sweet child, and I am still lost in the wonder of how we came to be together. Early on, she displayed a quirky sense of humor that was so like my father’s. I know he would have loved her to pieces. As a baby, she quickly seemed completely at home with us, proving herself delirious about ice cream, Chinese shrimp-filled dumplings, baby goats in the petting zoo, and just about any kind of live dance or musical event. At a performance of Chinese folk dancing during a local lantern festival, she sat mesmerized in a folding chair, her small feet dangling in their saddle shoes, as she asked, “More? More?” when the music was over. She paid Joan Baez the same compliment when the singer appeared unannounced at a concert we attended in Berkeley. She casually referred to our carved soapstone statue of Buddha as “Boodie,” continued to love motorcycles, and—until she got old enough to know better—assumed that all babies came from China. Whenever we walked outside at night she peered up at the sky, asking, “Where’s my moooon?”

  When I crept into Kelly’s room to check on her before we went to bed, I’d look at her lying there, moonlight on her face, pigtails askew, Pooh bear clutched in her small hands, and I’d say a phrase I learned from my friend the China scholar. “Yi nu ping an,” I’d whisper. “One girl peaceful and safe.”

  If the number of children left behind lingered in people’s thoughts, the conditions in Chinese orphanages was another topic of ongoing concern and speculation, especially in the early days of Chinese adoption. If no one had an exact count of the number of orphanages in China, much less a count of the children in them, it was equally difficult to get an overall picture of the facilities themselves.4 Of the thousand or more state-run institutions, many remained inaccessible to outside observers. Some were tucked away where few foreigners went, although charities and adoption agencies soon began making contact with many needy places. In the early years of Chinese adoption, though, Chinese orphanages kept up their guard when it came to foreigners.

  This wariness was thanks in part to the release of a documentary, The Dying Rooms—the horrifying coverage I saw while we were first waiting to go to China. First broadcast in London on the BBC, the documentary was seen later by American viewers on CBS during the 1996 Christmas season. In that film, the story of one little girl, Mei Ming, apparently ignored, emaciated, and suffering, shocked television viewers around the world. In the back room of an orphanage in Zhaoqing, just outside Guangzhou—the city through which all adopted Chinese children pass to get their visas to enter the United States—Mei Ming had, the documentary charged, been left to die. “It was the second time in her short life that she’d been abandoned,” said one of the filmmakers. First by her parents, then by the orphanage. Four days after they left, according to the filmmakers, the little girl died.

  The documentary charged that children who were disabled, too sick to care for, or somehow unappealing to adult caretakers were intentionally starved to death, denied food or water. According to the filmmakers, some of the orphanages in China were “little more than death camps.” Watchdog groups and other journalists joined in the accusations.5

  Although the documentary team also visited a privately run orphanage supported by charitable donations from within China, where the conditions were remarkably good, the weight of the footage focused on the downside. The Dying Rooms was awarded a 1995 Peabody prize “for investigating a sensitive issue of human rights with resolve, determination and conviction,” but not everyone applauded. Detractors called the film sensationalized, outdated, and poorly researched.

  In the years that followed, smarting from the adverse publicity, many Chinese orphanages protected themselves from critical eyes. But others worked to reverse the bad press, turning themselves into showcases and flinging open their doors. When a few American adoptive parents active in fund-raising for Chinese orphanages were invited to tour several of the new model institutions, including one in Wuhan, the images they brought back were not of children suffering behind closed doors, but of children playing in clean, well-lighted rooms, singing and dancing for visitors. Children with special medical needs had ready access to physical therapy and staff physicians. Depending on the particular institution, some adoptive parents could enter the children’s dorm rooms and wander among the cribs, taking pictures and videotaping. Other places kept visitors confined to a waiting room, or discouraged visits entirely, instead delivering children to their new parents at hotels, even hotels in a different city.

  A 1998 film by Corky Merwin, called Good Fortune,6 also showed interior shots of several orphanages, including the one from which Merwin adopted her own daughter, a captivating little girl of two. There could be no greater contrast to the scenes that had been filmed by the undercover team.7

  Had things gotten better? Or had China’s orphanages never been quite as bad as they were pictured? Perhaps the truth, as is so often the case, lay somewhere in between.

  The Chinese government refuted the charges of neglect: “The so-called Dying Rooms do not exist in China,” said an official statement.8 “Our investigations confirm that these reports are vicious fabrications. The contemptible lie . . . cannot but arouse the indignation of the Chinese people.” The Chinese also took the opportunity to point out the West’s failures with its own children—the harsh impact of poverty in America, widespread violence, crimes against young people. Citing thousands of examples of firsthand evidence to the contrary, some members of the community of adoptive American parents also took issue with the reports.

  In a historical context, of course, high mortality rates in orphanages hardly seemed surprising, merely part of a long, tragic reality. Even after foundling homes had been established in China
, some as early as the 1700s, few babies from remote regions ever reached such places and those who did didn’t necessarily fare well. A Chinese foundling home in the 1850s was known as shaying tang, meaning “hospice for killing infants.”9

  In poor countries still, seasoned observers countered at the time, it was a hard fact of life that orphanages—when they exist at all—are likely to have high mortality rates. If poor children in the United States often lacked access to good medical care, in China there were far fewer resources, far more people. If some of China’s orphaned children suffered from less than optimal care, their situation was hardly unique. According to the World Health Organization at the time, around the world ten million children under five were dying each year from disease, malnutrition, and violence. If children everywhere had a common enemy, its name was poverty.

  Found children in China were often in poor medical condition to begin with. Parents who leave their children wrapped in rags are not likely to have had access to antibiotics, and often lack the knowledge or the resources to get medical care for a seriously ill child. Sometimes children were left because they needed medical attention that the parents couldn’t provide. Daughters may have received less than optimum care in the first place, and the act of abandonment itself could cause health problems. The institution into which a child was taken may not be much better equipped to care for a serious medical condition than were the parents. In many places, institutions as well as individuals were barely scraping by; both medicine and expertise were in short supply.

  In recent history, whenever birth control measures were tightened in a particular area of China, hard-pressed homes for children faced overcrowding and strained resources as increasing numbers of abandoned children showed up at their doors. Many institutions were unprepared. Some areas in China lacked any welfare centers at all. Early on, there was also bureaucratic buck-passing when it came to the foundling problem. Sometimes children from neighboring regions were brought to areas served by other institutions to be left, taxing the resources of those places. “Traveling abandonment,” this was called. If anything, China’s drive for economic growth only worsened the situation in some cases, leading to cutbacks in many social service sectors, including orphanages, where orphanage workers were poorly trained and underpaid.