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

by Evans, Karin

  In 2007-2008, Zia spent five months in Shanghai. She said she was impressed with the diversity of opinions among China’s people, and struck by how outspoken they were. Nearly everyone she talked with told her they believed China was changing for the better.12

  Rural women working in the cities are gaining a new measure of independence. Girls, stepping out on their own, are sending money home to their aging parents. Increasingly, China’s women are making their own choices. A Catholic priest living in southern China noted that “in rural areas where the mothers can’t read or write, the daughters are going to college in the U.S. and studying Greek tragedy.”

  A young woman I spoke with at Wuyi University in Kelly’s hometown impressed me as a living reminder of the changing times. Smart, independent, and optimistic, she’d come from the north on her own and was making a living teaching English. She’d done enough traveling to find Jiangmen City a little boring. She said that daughters are valued more these days, and that once she herself decided to start a family, it wouldn’t matter to her whether she gave birth to a girl or a boy.

  “I think things are changing a lot,” said another young Chinese woman studying in this country. “In my family I have an older sister and an older brother. We live in a small city. My mother at first wanted to have a grandson, but then my older sister had a daughter, and then my older brother had a daughter. My mother said, ‘It’s okay. I love them.’ She changed her attitude. Even in the countryside now peasants are changing their attitudes.” Couples who have ended up with two daughters are adapting to their fate in ways that may promote more favorable attitudes toward girls in the future. Such families may marry a son-in-law into the family, rather than marrying the daughter out, as has normally been the case.

  A 2008 New York Times article profiled several single mothers in Shanghai—women who had chosen to keep a baby and raise the child alone, against huge odds. While they described the uphill challenges they faced trying to register their children so they could go to school, or protect them from social stigma, these women were nonetheless indicative of the dramatic changes that were becoming possible, albeit slowly, in the lives of Chinese women.13

  And so the changes were slipping through in the complex and contradictory world that is China.

  Fa Mulan might live on as the historical example of a Chinese heroine, but the country boasts real, contemporary heroines as well—women who aren’t just stepping into a man’s role and saving the day, but staying in their own lives and looking out for one another. Women like Xie Lihua, for instance, who first brought the high suicide rate for Chinese women to the attention of the world in the magazine she founded, Rural Women Knowing All, a publication that includes self-help articles on reproductive health and other empowering information for its female readers. “[Chinese] women have lost something,” Xie Lihua told a Washington Post reporter, “but now we can choose our own lives.”14

  Interestingly enough, as men have left rural villages looking for work, the women have been left behind to run things—and they run things very well.15 The China Population Welfare Foundation’s Happiness Project was offering support—such as livestock and small loans—to help such women help themselves. In numbers alone, rural women are a force to be reckoned with: More than four hundred million women and girls live in China’s countryside.

  In a traditionally closemouthed society, a young Beijing journalist named An Dun had encouraged women to speak out about their most intimate problems. Her books Absolute Privacy and Going Home—filled with poignant details of unwanted pregnancies, agonizing love affairs, and other personal difficulties—are being eagerly read by Chinese women hungry to hear and share one another’s experiences. In 1999 the Chinese edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves was released—albeit with a few omissions, such as the section on lesbian concerns. In Wuhan province, the former home of thousands of adopted daughters of China, the New Sun Marriage Shelter, the first women’s safe house in China, had opened.16 Women who had grown up in China were currently writing one powerful book after another about conditions in their homeland.17 And the 2008 Beijing Olympics would bring out the women athletes, numerous Chinese female competitors to make our daughters proud. China’s women’s soccer team, of course, had years earlier come within a single field goal of winning a world title.

  In Hubei province, I read with interest, a woman who made some extra income tending mulberry trees and raising silkworms had used the money to buy her daughter a computer. In a strange way, it made me feel good to know that China’s time-honored silkworms and mulberry trees were continuing to weave themselves through the country’s fast-changing way of life. The gift of a computer to a daughter also seemed a heartening thing.

  There are also unsung heroines all over China today: aunties in orphanages, caring for little girls who have no one else; foster mothers, taking babies into their homes and bidding them emotional good-byes when their adoptive families come for them; birth mothers, who are every day finding a way to give their daughters a future that they themselves, for whatever reason, could not provide.

  To the list of unsung women of courage should be added every single lost daughter of China, too—those still in orphanages, some growing older, waiting for families who haven’t yet come and may not—and all their sisters and cousins growing up across America and Canada and Europe, who will someday muster the courage to face all the questions that await them.

  Girls in China’s orphanages by now have an ever-expanding international network of well-wishers—adoptive families, including big and little sisters, who keep in touch. It’s my guess that some of the best grassroots diplomacy in years to come will be accomplished by China’s lost daughters themselves and by the growing links among orphanages, orphanage officials, and adoptive American parents. It is natural for people to want the best for a country that has allowed them to come home with such beautiful little children.

  “I thank my daughter’s mother every day,” said San Diego adoptive mother Marty Foltyn, echoing the gratitude of thousands of other American women. “You may get no thanks in your village,” says another adoptive mother of her child’s birth mother in a documentary called Letter to Maya, “but we will not forget you.”18

  One of the Americans we traveled with said she was making it a point to stay in touch with her daughter’s orphanage. “It’s important to send pictures and letters to be placed in my children’s files in case their birth mothers ever want to search or have contact with them, or just to know that they’re okay,” she said. “It’s also important to send those pictures to the orphanage, so that international adoption remains a positive experience for all involved.”

  But there were other, less heartening clues as to the effects of an increasingly fast-paced and material world, not just on China but on China’s children, China’s only children, in particular. In China’s big cities a generation now has grown up without siblings. (Among other ramifications, this fact may soon cause the terms “aunt” and “uncle” to all but fall out of use.) In an Asia Week article called “Little Emperors—Is China’s One-Child Policy Creating a Society of Brats?”19 Todd Crowell and David Hsieh observed parents and grandparents in Beijing indulging their sole offspring. One recipient of too many consumer goods was a granddaughter, referred to as “our little precious” by her doting grandfather.

  Jan Wong, in her book Red China Blues, offered some amazing reports on the spoiling of single children in big cities where the one-child policy had been strictly enforced. “Many parents of the nineties,” she wrote, “were part of the lost generation of the Cultural Revolution. After suffering so much themselves, they were determined not to deprive their only child. Beijing’s biggest toy store was always jammed with parents buying toddler-sized fake fur coats, imported baby shampoo and red Porsche pedal cars.”

  Yet she saw good things coming out of the situation. “Many people thought that a country populated with Little Emperors was headed for disaster. I disagreed. Granted it might be unpleasan
t to live in a nation of me-first onlies, yet I saw a social revolution in the making. For generations, Chinese society had emphasized the family, the clan, the collective over the individual. Now, for the first time in four thousand years of history, the relationship was reversed. Where the Mao generation failed, the Me generation just might succeed.” She quoted a British friend, Michael Crook: “If you have a population of Little Emperors, you can’t have little slaves. Everyone will want to tell everyone else what to do. You’ll have democracy.”20

  China-born international business consultant George Koo has pointed out that there has been, even before the Olympics, more movement toward freedom in China than the Western media usually acknowledges, forgoing such reports in favor of more sensational accounts of human rights abuses. In a story in the Harvard International Review, Koo noted: “While the China-bashers in the West dwell on and are fixated by the images from Tiananmen on June 4, 1989, China has moved on. Elections have been held in the countryside in recent years; the most recent ones have been observed by representatives of the Carter Center, sent from the United States.”21

  No sooner does one take heart in such statements than China begins another roundup of those clamoring for democracy or doing something else viewed as a threat to the state. China expert Michel Oksenberg of Stanford University has predicted that China will continue to go through a pattern of relaxation and tightening, relaxation and tightening. In its very pragmatic way the Chinese government is counting on economic prosperity as a crucial factor in future political stability. By now the Western model of materialism has both feet in China’s door, and the desire for consumer goods and a higher standard of living has been firmly planted.

  In the leadup to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the spotlight cast on China’s human rights practices intensified. The Tibet uprisings and brutal crackdowns raised the conflicts and contradictions to another level.

  There is reason to hope that increased prosperity and freedom will benefit China’s women and girls, particularly if China sees that improvement as a matter of self-interest. But a struggle lies ahead. Working conditions are still dismal and, sadly, foreign companies doing business in China are among the worst offenders. 22 Behind all too many goods made in China, I now knew for certain, were exploited workers, most of them women, any one of whom could be the mother of a child who wound up in an institution or worse.

  I long ago put away the notebook in which I wrote those first letters to my little daughter. But before doing so I took the book to a Chinese student so she could translate the Chinese writing on the cover I’d always wondered about. “It is only a fragment of a larger writing, maybe part of a poem,” the woman told me. “It says something about the moon and writing, but I can’t tell what it means from such a little piece of the whole.” Perfect! If there’s one lesson to be learned from China, it’s to always be aware of how little you know.

  In the fall of 2000 in New York City, a number of people whose lives have been touched by adoption, including local families from the Greater New York Families with Children from China group, held a ceremony in the Marble Collegiate

  Church, Norman Vincent Peale’s old place of worship. “Celebrating the Spirit of Adoption,” the gathering was called, and I was honored to be a part of it. Ethereal bamboo flute music and passionate Korean drumming resounded through the sanctuary, as did some Stephen Sondheim and a Hebrew song for peace. The words of May Sarton, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Alice Walker were read. Lynn Franklin, author of May the Circle Be Unbroken, read from her account of giving birth to a baby, to whom she said good-bye as an infant, and then meeting her lost son twenty-seven years later.

  A young woman named Hollee McGinnis, adopted from Korea as a child, and founder of an organization for adult intercountry adoptees,23 read these words, the last lines of which have stayed with me ever since:

  When I was twenty-four, I took the train over from Seoul to Inchon to meet my birth father’s family. They had been fishermen in islands in the Yellow Sea before moving back to the mainland. It was five in the afternoon. The train was crowded with commuters. I was gripped by this fear inside and started to cry. I was with a woman, an adoptee, who was half black and half Korean. She said, “You’re just making more room.”

  Of course, she was right. In order for me to embrace these people as part of my family, and be the cultural bridge I keep talking about, I had to let go of some things in order to make room. It was terribly frightening. But by crying I began to shift my feelings so I could be open to the experience of being with them and having them become part of my life again.

  Meeting my birth family opened up a whole new chapter in my life. But I had to decide what to do after the reunion. Should I develop a relationship with them, and if so, what kind of relationship?

  I’ve always had my family in everything that I do. When I came back, my dad, who’s in his sixties, said to me, “We may not be around in twenty years. You should develop this relationship with your Korean family.” My mother said, “Hey, I’m planning to be around for a lot longer than that!”

  And I realized that because my parents shifted their thinking about what it means to be a family, I truly became their daughter. Similarly, with my birth family, I was given the choice to shift my thinking about family to embrace them into my life again.

  I believe that adoption is about the possibility of opening your mind and heart to take in a person because you choose to love {that person}. I was a stranger in a foreign land until my parents chose to love me as their daughter. Imagine if we all walked around looking at strangers and thinking, You could have been my son or daughter.

  Imagine.

  Epilogue

  Floating on its moorings of twilight

  clouds

  my small boat drifts along in memories

  while I muse on the future. How lovely

  this world, how close it is to heaven.

  And how unfathomable the water

  that embraces the face of the moon.

  —Meng Haojan, “Night-Mooring on the Chien-te River”1

  I knew from the moment I began to write and from the moment I wrote the original epilogue that there was no way to wrap up this tale, no way to make any final pronouncements about this human drama. By its very nature, this story of East and West lives will flow on and on. Soon, in fact, there will be myriad new stories—the most relevant and necessary ones—told by the daughters of China themselves, and perhaps one day we will hear more from some of the birth families.

  While newly adopted girls (and boys), most of them in the one-year-old or toddler range, continue to be welcomed into American families every month, the children adopted in the 1990s are now coming of age. Many are teenagers; some are in college. There are nearly seventy thousand stories out there in the United States alone, falling under a huge umbrella, but in the end each story is personal and singular. Already numerous adoption stories have been written—or partly written—by adopting families and by adopted young people. Several are posted on websites.2 Others are yet to be told. Some might need telling around a campfire with good friends. But no matter how much is written or said, there will always be another chapter. There’s so much we don’t know, may never know, about the circumstances that surround this story of human upheaval and reconciliation. And who can predict what these girls will think and do as young women—or even tomorrow?

  My own daughters were growing up more quickly than I ever could have imagined. Each year, it seemed, they were coming into different questions and new feelings about their lives, including their origins, even as they tackled all the usual transitions that kids go through.

  What a journey it has been, and continues to be. What an amazing, blessed, and baffling journey.

  The Slowdown

  In 2007, however, the adoption community received some unwelcome news from the Chinese ministry in charge of adoption. Already, in years past, the ministry had ruled out single fathers and placed a quota on single mothers, limiting
the number presented by any one agency to a small percentage of the total applications. Now the government announced another tightening. Effective May 1, 2007, China would no longer allow adoption by single parents, period. Nor would it allow adoption by applicants over fifty (although people up to the age of fifty-five could adopt a special-needs child). China ruled out would-be parents who have a body mass index of more than forty; those taking medication for major psychiatric illness; those with serious facial deformities, limb deformities, or paralysis; those who are blind, deaf, or mute (although in some cases a person with such a disability might be allowed to adopt a child with the same condition); and those with chronic and debilitating illnesses, AIDS, or other infectious diseases. In addition, China added stipulations concerning divorce and remarriage, and set a minimum figure of $80,000 for a family’s net worth.

  The Families with Children from China group responded with letters, respectfully and gently making the case that single parents in particular had done very well by China’s children. But the Chinese ministry has held firm. Citing the increase in foreign applications, as well as an increase in domestic adoption in China, the government said it could no longer satisfy the needs of all foreign adoptive families.

  “The number of applicants is much larger than the number of internationally adoptable children,” said the letter from the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA). So, went the thinking, China would have to choose those families they considered best suited, “who have better conditions in all respects.” That translated to married heterosexual couples, and priority would be given to couples if at least one of the applicants, or one of the grandparents, had been born in China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong.

  The reasons for all this have become a matter of extensive debate. Some experts had all along argued that Chinese domestic adoption was more substantial than was generally thought, and that keeping orphaned children in China was a better solution than letting them be adopted by foreigners and taken abroad. Other observers pointed out that China’s orphanages were still full of waiting children, so why not keep the doors open to as wide a pool of applicants as possible? According to those with access to the orphanages, the populations did seem to be shifting—fewer healthy babies, more children with disabilities.