by Jeff Gammage
“I had an accident?”
“We don’t know, darling. It was there when you came to us from China.”
“Do other girls have one?”
“No, darling, they don’t.”
Jin Yu falls silent.
That explanation is enough for her. At least for the time being.
Our daughter’s “finding ad.” Jin Yu’s name is sixth from the top
9 THE PRESENCE OF THOSE UNSEEN
MOST AMERICAN parents don’t know anything about their daughter’s Chinese mother and father. Not me. I know everything. Or at least, I like to pretend that I do.
The woman who gave birth to Jin Yu lives in a small town on the far eastern outskirts of Xiangtan, almost halfway to the city of Zhuzhou. She has a job in a Xiangtan bicycle factory, her working life spent fixing long steel spokes onto round chrome rims.
She’s young, and pretty, and relentlessly optimistic, which makes her unusual among her neighbors, people for whom hardship is as certain as the rain.
She was twenty-two when she had her first child, a girl named Bao Tan, and a year later she became pregnant again. She had no government permit authorizing her to have a second child, and at first she didn’t tell anyone, not even her husband. Later, after sharing the news with him, she hid her swelling stomach under billowy dresses and bulky shirts. Friends thought she was putting on weight and kidded her about her husband spending all his money to supply her with rich delicacies.
They had wed at twenty, their marriage a disappointment to their parents, who had hoped to steer each toward another they thought more suitable.
Her husband runs his own business in Xiangtan, a fruit-and-vegetable shop that he strategically located beside a big Western-style hotel popular with Canadian and American visitors. He sells them Coke imported from Hong Kong, oranges from Japan, and Granny Smith apples that come all the way from Washington State.
Husband and wife ride the bus to Xiangtan together every day.
The prospect of a new baby was greeted not with elation but apprehension. If they scrimped, if they saved everything, spent nothing, they could afford to raise a second child. But they could never afford to pay the fine for violating the provincial birth-quota regulations, a penalty amounting to several years’ wages. Still, they decided that if the baby was a boy, they would somehow have to find the money to keep him. A son, by the mere fact of his gender, would redeem both of them in the eyes of their parents. A son would continue the ancestral lineage, carry out his filial duty to provide for them in their old age. Maybe they could borrow the money to pay the fine. Maybe friends would help. Maybe even their parents.
If the child was born female, they decided, they would do what others had done.
On a scorching summer day in August 2000, she gave birth in the bedroom of their small apartment, attended by her husband and the one friend they dared to trust with the truth.
“A girl,” the friend said softly as the baby was born. “It’s a girl.”
She called in sick to work for the next three days. A virus, she said. She touched her baby’s cheeks and nose. She traced the curve of the girl’s mouth, so like her own. She gazed at her baby’s eyes, beautiful dark pools of light. It was like looking into her own face.
She was sore and tired, exhausted physically and mentally. But on the third day she forced herself from bed, wrapped her baby in a blanket and walked the four blocks to the bus stop.
Her husband had offered to go with her, even to go himself, but she had said no. There would be less chance of attracting attention if she traveled alone.
The bus was nearly empty at that hour, the highway traffic light. None of the other passengers noticed her. She was just a woman with a baby, heading to the city. Twenty minutes later, the bus stopped at the first in-town station, and she climbed down the three stairs by the exit door and stepped onto the sidewalk. Her legs ached. She stood there for a moment, letting the other passengers move ahead, trailing as they walked toward the bus station and on up the street.
Her child felt heavy in her arms.
She came to the head of an alley, a local shortcut marked by a bench and a government billboard that read, ZHI SHENG YIGE HAIZI HAO. “It is good to have just one child.” She had reached her destination. She watched the bus-station door swing closed behind the last of the other riders. She glanced left and right. Then, in a single, fluid motion, she set her baby down on the curved seat of the bench.
The girl, small even for a newborn, made not a sound.
The woman spoke no final words to her baby. She whispered no last “I love you” or “I’ll never forget you” or “Always be a good girl.” There was nothing she could say that she had not already said, and nothing at all she could say that the child might remember. She had given her baby what she could. Her mouth. Her eyes. Her chin. A chance.
She stepped back, pausing a moment to observe the tableau she had created—“Child Without Mother.”
Then she took ten quick steps across the street to the eastbound bus stop, taking up a pose as just another tired night-shift worker waiting to catch a ride out of Xiangtan. The front page of yesterday’s newspaper lay on the ground. She picked it up and folded it in half, holding the paper in front of her as she kept her eyes focused just over the top of the page, on her child on the opposite sidewalk. Already they were farther apart than they’d ever been.
Now she could hear the rumble of an oncoming bus, precisely on schedule, the machine that would ferry her back to her home and forever away from her baby.
She thought, This is not right. And, This is a mistake. Her arms felt unnaturally empty. A second later the bus rolled to a stop in front of her. The passengers filed off and crossed the road toward the station. She was the only person waiting to board.
The driver tapped his horn, impatient. “Get aboard, get aboard,” he called.
The bus doors stood open. She didn’t move. She couldn’t move.
Just then a man across the street cried out, “A baby!” She could see him bent over the bench, his back to her. He had gray hair and a blue shirt, torn at the shoulder.
“Staying or going?” the bus driver barked, his hand on the door switch.
She stepped up and the doors slapped shut. Through the window she could see that a ticket agent had come outside of the bus station to investigate. That was good. He would call the police. A crowd was forming on the sidewalk, encircling the gray-haired man and his tiny find. He was holding the child slightly away, his arms extended. She wanted to shout, “Not like that. She doesn’t like to be held like that.” The bus lurched forward. She couldn’t see her baby. She never saw her baby again.
That’s what happened.
How do I know all this? How do I know the most intimate details of this woman’s existence, of her husband, of how the two of them came to the most excruciating decision of their lives? How do I know the particulars of the strategy they devised to surrender the child they’d spent nine months nurturing?
I don’t. How could I? It’s a fantasy. A fable. An invention. A flashback to a war I never fought in. It’s one of a dozen or more versions of the story I tell myself about my daughter’s beginnings, about how she came to be, about how the people who gave life to her could plan and carry out their permanent separation and expect that all involved would somehow survive the experience.
The story always starts with a germ of real or imagined truth. For some reason I dwell on Jin Yu’s mother, perhaps because the two share not just blood but gender. Was the woman young? Yes, she was young. And very much afraid. Did she love the father of her child? No, she met him only once. He didn’t even know she was pregnant. What name did she give her baby? None. She knew if she named the child she could never let her go.
From those grains the tale expands, growing full and intricate, existing as the assumed truth for weeks or months until it is replaced by another elaborate web of daydream.
Sometimes, in my mind, my daughter’s Chinese mother is
older, about thirty-five, a peasant who labors shin-deep in mud, planting rice in the fertile fields around Xiangtan. She is known for her powerful intelligence. Sometimes she’s a well-to-do college student, giving birth surrounded by girlfriends who swear they’ll keep her secret. They rush to tell their boyfriends the moment the child is born. Sometimes she is a teenager, single and alone, her only companion her unbreakable determination. She gives birth in a neighbor’s stable.
What do I truly know about this woman and her decision to give up her baby? Practically nothing. Officially, less than that.
I know this: the woman who gave birth to Jin Yu is physically beautiful, and her beauty is so artless and casual that she neither works at its maintenance nor notices its effect upon others. I know that a smile is her natural expression, empathy her natural response. I know she has a will of iron, that those who seek to move her from a core belief do so at their peril. She possesses a quick wit. And a willingness to tease and be teased. When she laughs, it is as if all humanity is her friend, and when she cries it is as if the world is ending. I know that whatever her education, employment, or station, whether she works designing computers or picking cucumbers, she is conspicuously, exceedingly smart.
I know because these are the qualities that define her child, my daughter.
The account provided by the Chinese government can be summed up in seven lines:
The girl who would become my daughter was found on August 5, 2000, at a place called Guangxin Alley, located in the Yuhu District of the city of Xiangtan. She was judged to be three days old. She was taken to the Yuntang police station and, later on that same day, to the city’s social welfare institute. At the orphanage the administrators gave her the surname shared by all the children, She, pronounced “Shuh,” which means “of society” or “socialism.” For her first name they chose Jin Yu, meaning “Gold Jade,” in hopes it would bring her luck and fortune.
Chinese officials offered no other information. No indication of whether Jin Yu was found early in the morning or late at night. Or whether it was raining or dry. No name or address of the person who found her. No description of Guangxin Alley itself.
The few details I’ve managed to add to that bare outline were gleaned slowly, over months, their discovery greeted with a celebration that far exceeded the scope of the information itself.
AFTER WE returned to the United States, I located a man who has created a small business by traveling to China and collecting what are known as “finding ads.” These are small, classified ad–like notices published in Chinese newspapers to announce the discovery of an abandoned baby. In the late 1990s, the U.S. government began urging China to do more to try to locate the birth parents of abandoned children. There was a sense, at least among the American authorities, that the children were being offered for adoption too quickly, that a fuller attempt to locate their families needed to be undertaken. That doing so would make the adoption process more systematic and, I suppose, more legitimate. One of the ways China responded was by publishing ads in the local newspapers, notifying the public that a child had been found at a certain place on a certain day.
In theory, someone might come forward to claim the baby.
No one ever has.
The more recent ads include thumbnail-sized photographs, often a child’s first picture, taken when they were but days old—an unimaginable find to the adoptive parents. The earlier ads contain only a few words, the orphanage equivalent of name, rank, and serial number. They’re written with all the flowery imagery and heartfelt sentiment of an eviction notice.
Jin Yu’s ad appeared at the bottom of page 11 in the Jiating Dao Bao, a sporadically published Hunan newspaper, on February 15, 2001, six months after she was abandoned. Her name was sixth on a list of twenty-seven children who had been found between July and February. Every one was a girl. Each was granted a single thin line of type.
But within those few words, for Christine and me, was an unexpected gift.
Beyond the routine recitation of the date and place of discovery, the ad contained a description of the clothes Jin Yu was wearing: a velour, two-piece outfit, shirt and pants, ragged and dirty. To learn the style of the clothes Jin Yu was wearing provided a new detail about the most significant day of her life. To grasp the extent to which her clothes were soiled was to understand the economic status of her birth parents, which is to say, they were probably as poor as could be. Most crucially, that line of type tells me my daughter almost certainly has a biological sister or brother living in China. Her parents didn’t go next door and borrow a set of dirty baby clothes so they could abandon their child. They had children’s clothes at hand. Clothes that had been worn by an earlier, older son or daughter.
The journalist in me can easily dismiss the publication of this ad—of all these ads—as little more than an exercise in bureaucratic compliance. A child’s ad appears only once, in a small-circulation newspaper. The chance that anyone will notice is remote. No mother or father could recognize their child under a name bestowed in an orphanage, and there seems little point in publishing a notice so late—months after some of the girls were found. Surely if anyone was going to go looking, they’d have done so long before.
It’s puzzling to me that, in Jin Yu’s case, the ad contained no description of identifying marks on her body. How could the writer have missed the round black mole on the outside of her left heel? It stands out like a drop of ink on parchment. Why didn’t they mention the pale, smile-shaped birthmark on the back of her calf? Both are signs by which I will always be able to identify my child. By which her birth mother could identify her now.
At the same time, the ad is proof, in black-and-white newspaper type, that Jin Yu was found where the authorities said she was found, on the day they said was the day. It shows that the Chinese government made an effort, however half-hearted, to locate her parents. Perhaps most of all, the ad’s existence is a tangible reminder that Jin Yu’s life did not begin when she was urged forward and into our arms. She came to us with a past, from a different family, from people battered by law and circumstance.
Emboldened by the information in the ad, I started searching for details that might have been embedded in the public record, information that didn’t require the luck of finding a Western businessman devoted to combing the back issues of obscure Chinese newspapers. I located an Internet website that gathers and stores weather data from cities around the world. I could search its archives for free, and by doing so I learned something extraordinary:
It rained on the day Jin Yu was born.
Not a lot. Just a trace. And that night, a sliver of moon shone in the sky.
Three days later, on the day Jin Yu was discovered in Guangxin Alley, a thunderstorm roared through the region. Knowing that bit of information allows me to more fully imagine that day, that moment when her mother set her down and walked away. The woman wouldn’t have left her child out in the rain. Not on purpose. But what if the storm came up suddenly? What if my child was lying there alone, sopping wet, exposed to the pounding rain, terrified by explosions of thunder?
Maybe that’s not how it happened. Maybe the storm was a good thing. Maybe Jin Yu cried out at the first distant crack of clouds, and that cry brought someone to her aid.
Why do I care whether it rained on the day Jin Yu was born? Why should it be of any importance that on the day she was found, local visibility was down to seven miles instead of the usual twelve? Or that the moon was one-third of the way toward fullness?
It matters because that is all I have.
The thick catalog of details that other parents take for granted—place of birth, time of birth, attending family and friends—is lost to Christine and me, and more important they are lost to our daughter. Where American kids have birth certificates and baby pictures, my child has a blank space. She has lost the very foundation of her personal history, lost all connection to the timeless roll call of her ancestry.
I am frustrated by the dearth of inf
ormation. Not because it’s been lost. Because I believe it exists. I am certain that chunks of Jin Yu’s story lie within state files in China.
The Chinese love bureaucracy. Perhaps only the Americans love it more. The discovery of a baby in a bus station or market square may not be an extraordinary event, but neither is it an everyday event. It creates disruption, attracts bystanders, interferes with the order of the day.
It involves the authorities. And in China the authorities document their work.
When Jin Yu was found in Guangxin Alley, I am sure that somebody called a police officer to the scene. And that this officer wrote up a report. He probably took down the names of witnesses, maybe sketched a description of the alley. He may have interviewed the person who found Jin Yu, jotting down that individual’s fresh recollection of how he came to notice the baby. It’s possible the officer or his supervisor might even have tried to locate the birth parents.
All of that would have been recorded on paper.
What would it be worth? To have a police diagram of the exact location where Jin Yu was found? To know the name of the person who plucked her from her alley bed? For the chance to try to find him, to say thank you, thank you for reaching down and taking my child into your arms, for offering her a gentle touch and soothing voice when she was scared and alone?
Everything. It would be worth everything.
Across the ocean, somewhere in the reaches of east-central Hunan, is a woman who lives her life in want of answers to the opposite questions. A woman cut off from the story of her daughter’s future as completely as I am blocked from the story of her past. She wonders if her baby is cared for, healthy, loved, if she goes to school, has nice friends, pretty clothes. But in her anguish she’s willing to settle for much less: To know that her baby is warm at night. To know she has enough to eat. To know she’s alive.
What would she give, this woman? What would she give—not for the privilege of holding her child one more time, of kissing her face and hands, for these things are beyond her now. What would she give to know that her baby is safe and well? What would she give to know that, against all odds, her child has landed in a country where an abundance of food is taken for granted, in a home where two enthusiastic parents cater to her wishes, in a family where a loving swarm of grandmothers, aunts, uncles, and friends is devoted to her happiness? I know what she’d give: