by Mei Fong
Jiayi was four months pregnant with her second child, taking advantage of the recent dandu reforms, the relaxation of the one-child policy that allowed couples to have a second child, provided one of the parents was an only child.
“Sometimes, my friends ask me, ‘You’re so old, why do you want another child?’ But I think to take care of the old is very stressful. There isn’t enough community support. Neighbors don’t get along like when I was growing up. This one,” she said, motioning gently to her chattering daughter, “will have a hard time alone.”
Jiayi’s mother was diagnosed eight years previously with Parkinson’s, the chronic movement disorder that has no cure. China already has more than 40 percent of the world’s Parkinson’s sufferers, but by 2030 this will grow to almost 60 percent, a huge amount for an affliction so new the Chinese haven’t had time to come up with their own nomenclature for it. To Jiayi, it’s Pa Jin Sen—three Chinese characters that individually mean “handkerchief,” “gold,” and “forest.”
At first, the disease was manageable. Her parents helped Jiayi with child care, picking up Little Stream from daycare every evening and making dinner. The child learned to hold on to her grandmother’s hand and support her as her balance worsened. Then Jiayi’s mother started falling down. They lived on the third floor of a seventh-floor walkup, with no elevator. For safety, she started staying in bed all day, listening to Shanghai opera and watching soap operas.
In the winter of 2013, her mother could no longer move her legs and needed someone to carry her to the toilet. She developed bedsores. Jiayi’s seventy-eight-year-old father couldn’t cope anymore. They looked at several nursing homes and hospitals, finally ending up at Kunming No. 3 as the most economical. Monthly costs are about $3,000, out of which 90 percent is covered by yibao, China’s equivalent of Medicare. Other options, such as private nursing homes, cost thrice that and were not covered by insurance. Each place had a waitlist several months long.
Her hands flashing among the threads, Jiayi said, “I feel I was lucky. So many people have sick parents, and they don’t have access to these facilities, or even know about them.”
Jiayi’s parents raised her in what she remembers as an idyllic environment, a communal housing compound for their work unit. She was aware that world no longer existed. In talking over her reasons for having a second child, she made constant reference to how urbanization and modernization had shredded ties between neighbors. She also lamented how family sizes had shrunk so drastically. Both her parents had six siblings. Her husband, Guobao, whose name means “National Treasure,” had five.
Now, the Chinese language is very precise in its definition of family ties, with numerous words to define kinship. An uncle is never just “uncle,” for example: he could be bobo if he was your father’s older brother, shushu if younger, jiujiu if he was your mother’s brother, and so on. Little Stream would never just be “sister” to Jiayi’s unborn child, for there is no plain-vanilla Chinese equivalent of that word. She would always be jiejie—“older sister”—her status locked in, never meimei, “younger sister.”
The Chinese language, with its emphasis on placing you firmly in the family pecking order, shows how much China values seniority and structure. But this elaborate taxonomy is collapsing. By the time Little Stream has her own children, many of these terms will be as archaic as Latin.
Over the weekend, I saw Jiayi again. She had brought her mother some steamed egg custard. The food at the hospice—mostly soups and rice congee—wasn’t nutritious enough, she felt. She spooned the trembling yellow curds into her mother’s unresponsive mouth.
Her mother was a tiny mound underneath a mass of blankets, her gaze hovering somewhere near the spot where a television once stood. When she first moved in, Jiayi installed a TV at the foot of the bed so that she could continue to watch her favorite soap operas. But soon after moving in, Jiayi’s mother stopped responding to stimuli.
“So, no more TV.” Jiayi shrugged.
She was dressed that day in black jeans. Her pregnancy hardly showed.
These past few years with her mother had been hard, she said. “My father is too old. There is no one but me,” said Jiayi. “I don’t want this for my daughter. Her sister or brother will live longer than we will. Probably, it will be her longest-lasting family relationship.”
Over the past year, the constant back-and-forth to the hospice, combined with child care, taxed her strength. Her hair dropped out. She started snapping at Little Stream. In the end, she decided to quit her job. With savings, and her husband’s salary, she calculated they could get by for two years without her needing to work. After that? She shrugged.
Despite this, Jiayi believed family planning in China was necessary. “The large number of people—it makes social benefits hard to implement.” Then she added the phrase almost every Chinese person brings up when I ask about family planning: “Ren tai duo. Too many people.”
Jiayi’s attitude might seem strange to people outside China, but in reality, a great many urban Chinese do support its family-planning policies, a fact that is probably easier to understand if you’ve lived there and had to fight for spots everywhere from the crowded subways to elite schools.
When I asked Jiayi, however, if she supported methods employed by family-planning officials, like forced abortions, her hand fluttered protectively to her stomach. “Of course not,” she said. “Force is never justified. Those people were really evil.”
In Jiayi’s high school class of thirty people, only four or five had a second child, she said. Most classmates were civil servants, who risked losing their jobs if they broke the rules.
“Now I feel a lot of my friends are envious of me,” she said.
Little Stream climbed onto her lap and started taking loving nips at her mother’s arm.
Jiayi tussled with her gently, speaking in a singsong voice. “Who’s going to take care of Ma-ma? Will you take care of Ma-ma?”
Perched heroically above her unborn sibling, Little Stream nodded.
The Red Thread Is Broken
China promised stability and certainty. At the end of the process, however long and demanding it might prove to be, we would have a child. And no one could take her back.
—Jeff Gammage, China Ghosts
I
If you’ve adopted a child from China, how do you trace that child’s roots?
Brian Stuy thinks he knows how. In his mid-fifties, with a shock of white hair and a showman’s sense of timing, Stuy congratulated the small group of parents who filed into a St. Paul, Minnesota, auditorium one Saturday morning. “You are a small minority of the US adoptive community,” he said. “Most families don’t care, so thank you for at least coming.”
Stuy is a controversial figure among the adoptive community. Many dislike the ex-Mormon’s crusading message about corruption within China’s adoption system. For the many parents who believe they’ve done a good deed, this is an inconvenient claim that makes Stuy about as popular as Al Gore at an OPEC convention. “Be very careful of Brian Stuy,” a journalist acquaintance and adoptive mother of a Chinese child told me. “He is a lightning rod.”
Some accuse Stuy of hypocrisy. He adopted three daughters from China, so why is he criticizing the program now? Others accuse him of profiting from his accusations, which, to some extent, he is. Since 2002, Stuy’s small outfit, Research-China, which he runs with his China-born wife, Lan, has specialized in doing background research on China adoptees.
Sweeping the room with his eyes, Stuy announced he would unveil a list of what he believed were orphanages that engaged in child trafficking. “I already know some in this room will see their orphanage mentioned,” he warned. “Don’t take it personally.”
The screen flickered. Next to me, Heather Ball bit her lip. Her daughter’s orphanage was on the list. She took a moment to absorb the shock. Shrugged. Then came ruefulness. “What can you do?”
Is the wave of Chinese adoptions, as many believe, an altruis
tic act that rescues thousands of unwanted, mostly female children from a life of penury and institutionalization—or is it really baby buying on an international scale, sanctioned and even facilitated by the Chinese government? For two decades, over 120,000 children from China have been adopted internationally. This byproduct of the one-child policy is its most international aspect, and it has significantly shaped global attitudes toward race, family, and the ethics of intercountry adoption.
In the adoptive world, where demand for healthy young children far exceeds supply, Chinese adoptions are, or were considered, the gold standard. China had almost everything adoptive parents were seeking: healthy young infants in large quantities, and an adoption process that was government run, streamlined, and relatively expansive. When China’s overseas adoption program first began, singles, retirees, and gay couples were considered eligible to adopt, which was rare elsewhere.
The one-child policy imbued the whole process with virtue: the outside world believed these girls to be unwanted and voluntarily abandoned. China’s orphanages were overflowing, and conditions were abysmal. Adoptive parents believed China was the most ethical choice among an array of suspect options. Unlike adoption in Guatemala or Ethiopia, they weren’t going to be accused of buying babies, or exploiting the poverty of birth parents.
After Beijing opened its orphanages to intercountry adoption in 1992, numbers started rising vertiginously. By 2005, its peak, Americans were adopting almost eight thousand China babies yearly. Even now, when the supply of adoptable infants has fallen sharply, China continues to be by far the largest source country for adoptions, with Americans adopting over two thousand children from China in 2014. That’s almost three times the number of adoptions from Ethiopia, the next-largest source of adoptions.
That sunny scenario changed in 2005, when six orphanages in Hunan—some of the biggest suppliers to Western adoption agencies—were accused of baby buying. Chinese authorities initially denied the reports but eventually jailed laborer Duan Yuaneng and family members for trafficking eighty-five infants. Duan’s mother, a children’s home aide, said she was initially reimbursed a few dollars for finding abandoned babies. But demand swiftly rose, for orphanages gained $3,000 for each overseas placement, not to mention donations from grateful parents.
“The orphanage asked for more babies. It started paying $120 each. Then $250. Then $500 by 2005,” said the Duan matriach. The family smuggled infants in milk powder boxes, four at a time, on the train for a six-hundred-mile journey from Guangdong to Hunan, a distance roughly equivalent to that between New York and Charlotte, North Carolina.
After serving out his prison term, Duan told Marketplace reporter Scott Tong that his trafficking operation was far broader in scope than media reports had indicated.
Showing Tong records that indicated he trafficked over a thousand infants, Duan said the orphanages falsified foreign adoption papers for each of those trafficked babies. “The documents I saw indicate at least one went to American parents,” Tong told me.
Chinese authorities said the Hunan incident was an isolated case, but in 2009, another scandal erupted. This time, family-planning officials in Guizhou Province were discovered to have seized children born in violation of the one-child policy and sold them to orphanages, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 2011, the newsmagazine Caixin reported a similar case. Some of these children ended up in American and Dutch homes, according to the magazine.
Other trafficking cases in Guizhou and Shaanxi provinces have also added question marks to the whole adoption process.
There is no reliable way to ascertain how widespread the wrongdoing is. Parties with the most to gain in the process, from Beijing to adoption agencies to adoptive parents, maintain these cases are isolated.
Melody Zhang, who runs the China operations of the St. Louis–based adoption agency Children’s Hope, acknowledges flaws in China’s international adoption system but points out it has saved the lives of many children who would otherwise have perished in China’s institutions. “Truly, conditions were bad in the early days,” said Zhang. Opening up China to the adoption market also brought increased Western support and substantially improved orphanage conditions. For example, the Berkeley-based foundation Half the Sky spent over $56 million improving orphanage conditions in China over fifteen years.
But not everyone who runs an adoption agency is as sanguine. In 2009, Ina Hut, director of World Children, the Netherlands’ biggest adoption agency, resigned in protest over the Hunan scandal. Troubled by the stories, Hut fruitlessly pressed both Chinese and Dutch authorities for answers. In 2007, she traveled to China to conduct a month-long investigation.
Hut came away with the conviction that the practice of buying babies “is much more widespread than we know.” Contacts in the adoption industry told her midwives were paid fees to spot out-of-plan babies and annex them before birth. Also, orphanages often had more information on adopted children than they disclosed to China’s Central Adoption Agency and adoptive parents, she said. Chinese authorities privately told her at least two children from the Hunan trafficking scandal had ended up in Dutch homes, she said, but Hut was unable to get either the Netherlands or Beijing to pursue this further. “As far as they were concerned, it was over and done.”
Hut does not come across like a crusader. Blond and soft-spoken, with a sunburst of smile lines on her tanned face, Hut was a successful software entrepreneur and a university administrator before she joined World Children in 2002. It was soon after her first child died at birth, a traumatic experience that made Hut decide “the next step was to make the world a little better,” she said.
Hut had initially planned to adopt herself but took her name off the waiting list after discovering firsthand the inner workings of adoption. “When I looked behind the scenes, I was shocked. I came to discover that a lot of adoptions are done in the interest of the parents, not the children. Everybody has the right to want children, but you don’t have the right to children. Children have the right to parents.”
Hut went public with her convictions and paid a price for her candor. After her 2009 resignation, she didn’t work again for five years. Employers were scared off by her reputation as a whistleblower, she thinks. Finally, in 2014 she was appointed head of CoMensha, a Dutch nonprofit that helps trafficking victims.
In the world of adoptions, domestic adoptions theoretically have priority. Called the subsidiarity principle, this is one of the best practices enshrined in the Hague Adoption Convention to which China is a signatory. The one-child policy made a mockery of this principle. To prevent families from passing off their over-quota offspring as adopted children, China’s adoption laws explicitly discriminated against local adoptive parents. For them, the bar to adopt was far higher. In 1992, the minimum age for foreigners adopting was thirty, for example, compared to thirty-five for locals. Also, adopted children were counted against the parents’ quota of children, meaning many Chinese who adopted were barred from having their own biological offspring.
Ethicists like Samford University law professor David Smolin say the high ideals espoused in the Hague Adoption Convention are constantly violated. Kay Ann Johnson, head of Asian Studies at Hampshire College, is more blunt.
Johnson and I had been discussing child trafficking in China when she abruptly said, “What is a buyer? Everyone who has adopted a child from China,” including herself in that definition. Johnson had adopted a daughter from China in the early 1990s, when she knew little about the situation there and believed domestic adoptions could not keep up with the increasing overflow in orphanages. Since then, she has come to believe that many domestic adoptions in China have been unfairly classified as child trafficking since prospective parents must pay middlemen in an unregulated system, the only way most can adopt. By contrast, Western adoptive parents like herself have paid much more, albeit through the government-regulated system. “Why are we seen as ‘adopters’ while they are denigrated as ‘buyers’?” she challenged.
(While the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ China Center for Adoption Affairs [CCA] governs adoptions out of China, there appears to be no equivalent body handling domestic adoptions; many adoptive parents in China I spoke to said their adoptions were mainly handled through private connections and networks.)
Johnson is now a strong critic of the system, arguing that China’s discrimination against domestic adoption perpetuated the myth that girls were not valued in China. In reality, many of those girls could have found loving homes within the country, she maintains.
Almost all the harshest critics of transnational adoption I spoke to are adoptive parents and beneficiaries of what they say is a broken system. Stuy acknowledges the disconnect. “You have to go down the rabbit hole before you find out,” he said. “I would say 95 percent of adoptive parents don’t want to know, and even if they know, don’t care to do anything about it. Why rock the boat?”
II
In 1995, Stuy was a thirty-six-year-old from a devout Mormon family living in Lehi, Utah, a small town that was used to represent the conservative, dance-hating community in the 1984 movie Footloose. Like many young Mormons, he spent two years on an overseas mission, in Germany. After graduating with a business degree from Brigham Young University, he began a series of office jobs that quenched his youthful idealism. “I didn’t like being a cog in a wheel. All you do is work until you retire with a gold watch. The next day, business goes on without you,” he said. “You don’t make a blind bit of difference.”
Stuy was ripe for a new purpose and mission in life when his then-wife, Jeannine, came back from church and suggested they adopt a Chinese orphan. This was a time when the airwaves were filled with stories of numerous abandoned girls in China resulting from the one-child policy. Two years before, BBC’s controversial documentary The Dying Rooms had come out, detailing inhumane and cruel practices in Chinese orphanages. A Human Rights Watch report following that characterized China’s orphanages as little more than places where children were sent to die.