A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  ***

  After lunch at Duan’s house, Cecilia and I record another hour’s worth of interviews, take a number of photos, and prepare to return home to Shanghai. In a Chinese meeting, this is always when the key question comes.

  “Can you take my bank account information?” Duan asks. “If you come across any Americans who want to donate money, they can send it there.”

  I jot it all down, wondering to myself why Americans would send anything to this convicted baby seller. He knows what I’m thinking. “Because I helped them. I helped them get to America.”

  ***

  In the small world of Chinese adoption, Brian Stuy of Utah is a lightning rod. The adoptive father of three Chinese girls, he investigates Chinese adoptees and their origins. Stuy also writes a controversial blog, arguing the system is fundamentally flawed; he assumes that given the economic incentives, baby buying and selling by mainland orphanages is widespread.

  “There’s the potential for tremendous dark-side activity,” he said in an interview, part of which airs on the 2010 Marketplace story. “People kidnapping kids to bring them to the orphanages, people having babies simply to give them to the orphanages. If the international adoption program was not there, these children probably would not have ended up in the orphanage to begin with.”

  Stuy explained he’d just investigated twenty babies adopted from one particular orphanage. In more than half the cases, “the information as it relates to their finding was fabricated. Everything about the origin of the child was fiction.”

  For our story on Duan and the baby selling, Cecilia and I contacted the national adoption authorities in Beijing, the China Center of Adoption Affairs; they declined an interview. In the States, the US adoption industry downplayed any notion of fraud. Chuck Johnson at the National Council for Adoption in Washington agreed to be interviewed by phone. The council’s vision, according to its website, “is a world in which all children everywhere have nurturing, permanent families.”

  “China is considered one of the premier intercountry adoption programs,” Johnson told me. “They have a very strong system of laws and an extremely involved, authoritative central authority.” He added that China’s adoption ministry, the CCAA, investigated the Hunan scandal and found that “none of the children were adopted by American families.”

  I told him this conflicted with the court documents we saw, indicating at least one child was. Johnson said, “I’m not going to comment on that because I have not seen the documents. And also, we’ve had to rely on the investigation completed by the CCAA.”

  The Duan case was an exception, he said. The narrative of a onetime, local case served the interests of the US adoption industry as well as Chinese authorities. The problem is, it did not fit the evidence—or the economic incentives. When an American adoptive couple brings $3,000 (the orphanage payment has since grown to $5,000) into a local economy, that demand creates a market. It’s like walking into a shopping mall offering $40,000 for a smartphone: people will respond.

  The phenomenon of baby abductions is frequently reported on by local media on the mainland. Cecilia and I tallied eighty-eight domestic baby-trafficking convictions between the 2006 verdict and the 2010 airing of our story. She even called one orphanage director in Jiangxi province, who offered the equivalent of $150 for a healthy baby girl to be dropped off, no questions asked.

  The Duan family story faced an extra amount of scrutiny inside Marketplace. Many public radio journalists have adopted from overseas, and I assume some of my colleagues found the idea of adoption fraud distressing. The radio script was put through several rounds of edits. Yet even as many in the States were shocked, I polled ten American expats in Shanghai who’d adopted babies in China. None were surprised by the story, having lived in a still-developing country with a certain level of everyday rule bending.

  One US expat, Kentuckian Kathy Sue Smith, an international school teacher, shared her own suspicions of the system. She’d adopted two girls from Hunan. One, from the capital Changsha, turns out to have a twin sister, also adopted and living in the United States. This was based on a DNA match with 99 percent certainty. But here’s the twist: the twin sister was adopted from a different orphanage, in Guangdong province hundreds of miles south of Hunan. It dawned on me that these presumed twins were adopted at each end of the Duan family baby-smuggling route.

  No one I talked to for the story suggested that there could be an independent investigation into Chinese adoption fraud. Too many interests—on the mainland and abroad—were aligned in support the current system. One adoption executive in Holland, Ina Hut, told me she’d tried to pursue an independent inquiry after hearing from mainland colleagues that baby selling was widespread. But the Dutch government warned her to back off. “They threatened to take away our adoption license if I did,” she said in a Skype interview. Her government did not want to “upset trade relations with Beijing.”

  ***

  Ever since we learned of the China adoption scandal, Cathy and I faced an obvious set of nagging personal questions: Was Guo Shanzhen caught in the baby-trafficking economy, sold to her orphanage before we adopted her? Was her paperwork faked? Could she have been transported to Zhuzhou by a Duan family sister, perhaps by milk box on a train? Duan Yueneng said in 2010 this was a possibility, but there was no way he could really know. There was no way he could identity her from a baby-photo lineup, and his baby-selling receipts and orphanage logs did not represent every transaction. We’ll likely never know for sure.

  Still, there was one lead to pursue: the police officer who supposedly found our daughter. A few months after interviewing Duan, our family flies down to the Zhuzhou orphanage. My Shanghai assignment for Marketplace is about to end, so this is one last chance to visit before repatriating. By now, Guo Shanzhen is seven—her brothers are ten and five—and her large, bright eyes now see the world through pink spectacles.

  She wants to own this return trip. Normally a child who stays close to us in public, Guo Shanzhen now strides several paces ahead of the family through the Hunan airport. At the orphanage, the woman director greets us in the same ceremonial greeting room from six years prior. On this hot day, I’m reminded of her fancy office with air conditioning.

  The orphanage is a shadow of its former self, now run down and bereft of clucking baby sounds. None of the Tong children show interest in the playground, which is now full of holes and broken equipment. It’s the scene of an old backyard swing set of a family whose kids have long grown up and left. The courtyard is full of weeds. When we visit the orphanage children’s room, we see only special-needs children and not a single healthy child. It’s as if the supply of healthy girls desired by most Americans has run out, as has the Foreigner Price revenue.

  This comes as no surprise. Our sources and friends in the mainland adoption world have observed the same scarcity. They offer a few possible explanations: Perhaps domestic adoptions are surging, which I doubt; never in my time in China did I run into a domestic family that adopted a child outside its extended family. Or maybe parents are abandoning girls less often and keeping them instead; I also find this hard to believe, given the continued preference for boys in the countryside. These patterns don’t reverse overnight.

  Most likely: healthy girls are no longer born in the first place. By now, ultrasound and abortion are widely available to terminate a pregnancy in the case of an unwanted female. Abortion in China is not a fraught religious and moral debate, the way it is in the States. Sex-selective abandonment has given way to sex-selective abortion.

  On our second day in Zhuzhou we seek out police officer Zou Guohua, the man listed as the person who found Guo Shanzhen seven years prior. She and I arrive early at the local station, and within half an hour Zou walks in with a flat-top haircut and middle-aged paunch. He’s very tall. And he lacks the cautious hesitation of many mainland men.

  “I remember that evening clearly,” he says, delving straight into his memory bank. “It was a sprin
g night, very chilly. I got a call and found a baby in this courtyard. It was so cold.” So far, everything is accurate. Zou grabs my notebook and draws a diagram of the exact location by the train tracks. If for some reason he’s lying, he is very good at it.

  “Is this the girl?” The officer smiles and shakes hands with my daughter, and we snap a couple of pictures before saying goodbye. The story seems to check out, though it’s impossible to know. One mainland-born reporter cautioned me against overtrusting this encounter. “You don’t know,” she said. “What if he always had this fake story prepared in his head, for this exact conversation?”

  This question can make me crazy, and for a while it does. Like our biological boys, Guo Shanzhen asks frequently about her origin story. How much did I weigh at birth? How many inches long? How small was my hand? What was my favorite first toy? We have no good answers, except to cite the Zhuzhou documents as if they are reliable and accurate.

  Someday I will sit down with her and try to explain what we know. By then she’ll be old enough and certain that I don’t have all the answers, which will be helpful. First I’ll tell her how we cannot imagine life without her. And then I’ll start to detail this complicated tale: of people and money, of Americans and Chinese acting in their own self-interest. Who was looking out for the babies’ interests? I don’t know. I’ll tell her how naive and trusting Cathy and I were as we entered the process, and how cynical we emerged after it. What kind of person buys babies and flips them like houses? What kind of orphanage director traffics in human beings and can still sleep at night?

  At some point she will ask straight up if she was sold as a baby, at which point I will go with my gut—and that is to believe Mr. Zou, the policeman. He is the closest person to her origin story. That day in the police station, I looked him in the eye as he told the story, and I trusted him. Certainly I could be wrong, though my line of work requires a reasonable BS detector. In the end, we need stories to tell ourselves, and this is ours. And finally, if she’s still listening, I’ll mention the mysterious and powerful forces of globalization—forces that brought my ancestors out of China to America, and then delivered me back to the mainland to become her father.

  My friend Kathy Sue Smith from Shanghai has prepared very well for this same conversation with her adopted daughters. She tells them: Your origin story isn’t the whole story, and in fact it isn’t even the main story. It’s just the story of where you began.

  And the rest of your story after that is with me.

  ***

  Seven years after we first met, I look up Matthew Xiao again in 2011. He has left the adoption industry and moved back to his hometown of Nanning in Guangxi province. Matthew says he was fired from Holt after attempting to be a corruption whistleblower in the organization. Now outside the system, Matthew speaks much more directly.

  During the heyday of Chinese adoption, he suspected Hunan orphanages like Zhuzhou profited as part of a broader supply chain. These orphanages were approved to send babies overseas, so he suspected other orphanages around China delivered baby girls to them. The upshot: more orphanages sent more babies overseas, and they split the profits. Zhuzhou was effectively one of several storefronts for these operations. “I always assumed this was the case,” he says.

  There is no anger or moral judgment in his voice. The way he describes this, it’s a matter of simple economics. But I have to ask him: What does he make of this whole system? Is it structurally flawed? Don’t all the actors in this system deserve to know what it’s really about? Doesn’t he want to know the truth?

  Matthew takes a breath. “You cannot say the system is all good or all bad,” he begins. I’ve heard this line many times. The typical mainlander is better equipped than the average American to hold two opposing ideas at the same time. A system that is opaque, flawed, and even corrupt has also managed to deliver benefits to baby girls who would have been abandoned and discarded not long ago, he says.

  But his takeaway is bigger than that. He sees a modern China that is starting to give a message to girls they are finally valued—at school, at work, and in the home. I begin to think about my grandmother Mildred Zhao, her American Methodist teachers, and their aspirations for China more than a century ago. “You cannot believe what the situation was for abandoned girls in the 1980s and ’90s,” he says, shaking his head. “Every day, life for Chinese girls gets a little better than before.”

  Epilogue

  One of the few terrifying moments from my childhood was the time I was locked with my mother inside a gas station for hours. At least, it seemed that way. We’d stopped at a lonely filling station in New York’s Hudson Valley, “around 1973,” she recalls. On that day I was still in preschool, yet I still have a faint recollection of the bad memory—likely because we’ve replayed it a few times since then. According to my mother’s recollection, we walked around the back side of the station to enter the bathroom. There was nothing else there. As we tried to get out, the lock somehow failed, and we were trapped. I looked to my mother’s face for calm assurance, but that’s when she screamed out loud for help, and I melted down into a four-year-old panic attack.

  “I don’t remember anyone freeing us,” my mother says, trying to replay the moment. She somehow found a way to liberate us, but doesn’t recall how.

  We became trapped in the first place because she was working to help her mother pay off debt. Grandmother Mildred in Hong Kong owed a family friend $1,000, and my parents in the States had offered to pay it off. So as my father worked at IBM, my mother concocted a gig to sell coffee machines to area filling stations. In our pale-yellow Ford Gran Torino wagon, she drove from one station to another, hawking machines and refills. In the end, “it was not a good business investment,” my mother wrote in one e-mail. “We ended up bringing all the machines to the dump.” Yet somehow she zeroed out her mother’s debt.

  Borrowing is an act of faith in yourself and your ability to pay it off. This faith can be reasonable or misplaced, but Mildred had a lot of it from early on. When she was forced to drop out of Ginling Women’s College at the age of nineteen after a mental health “brokedown,” she asked her former teacher Anna Graves to locate American friends willing to lend money for Mildred’s tuition in the States, in case she ever got there. “My father still wants me to get a scholarship to go abroad at the time,” Mildred wrote. “I don’t know whether you would like to help me in this way or not.” Two decades later—after losing her parents and being washed out of Wuhan by the deadliest flood in recorded history—she started over in Shanghai, by borrowing. She took on debt to build the Light of the Sea private grade school, then again to secure funds to apply to Colorado State University, and then once more as a refugee mother in Hong Kong in the 1950s. Since most banks would have turned her away, she joined informal lending clubs, or hui. In a hui each borrower puts x dollars into the pot on a monthly basis. One member of the pool withdraws the full pot for a month, after winning an interest-rate bidding contest (highest bidder wins). Then, in month two, another member takes the money, and so on. It is a common immigrant financing scheme. Mildred scraped and owed her entire life, borrowing against a future she imagined in the United States.

  She of course never made it to America. I don’t know if she actively gave up on her dream, or whether the fatigue of supporting three children as a widow simply caught up with her. It’s clear from her letters that she measured her own worth against the achievements of her peers. In the end, “I think she lost her dignity,” my mother observed.

  As is often the case, the payoff came a generation later. My mother, Anna, graduated from Hong Kong’s Diocesan Girls’ School, the same sort of English-based, Christian education Mildred received five decades prior. After that, Anna sailed for San Francisco and eventually studied home economics at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. She worked the grill at the Big Ten Restaurant by the campus of the University of Minnesota and married an engineer from Taiwan, and their American lives began. Like many schola
r families from the days of imperial China, my parents’ families survived or escaped the reprisals of the Communist state and sent their children offshore to study. “We just knew we had to go out,” my mother said of leaving Hong Kong to study in the States. What Mildred really passed on was the promise of what she called the light of the sea. “Magic water” is what my older son, Evan, as a toddler called the shimmering Potomac in DC. His great-grandmother saw it the same way. She died of an aneurism in April 1976. In the end, Mildred had the privilege and curse of having a window seat to an outside world she never got to visit.

  Her fate was not unique. Many pioneering women saw their promises and contributions swept away in Mao’s tidying up of history. I think of the five women from her era profiled in historian Wang Zheng’s Women in the Chinese Enlightenment. Each chose not to join the Communist Party (or left it early on), and as a result had her story excluded from the party canon. The stories rhyme in certain ways with Mildred’s. One woman attended a missionary school, studied in the States, and returned to China a political activist. Things got worse from there. Her husband was executed for aiding the Japanese occupation in World War II. She herself was arrested during the score settling of the Cultural Revolution, accused of working for the CIA as a secret agent. She died in a Shanghai prison, which refused to send her ashes to her family. In a symbolic gesture, relatives buried her comb in a tomb. Another disguised herself as a boy to enter school, studied economics in Japan, and founded a school emphasizing physical education—to literally strengthen Chinese women. When the Communists nationalized the school, authorities found photos of her with Guomindang officials. They fired her. She went on to open a knitting shop on Nanjing Road. “If I were a man, I would not be in this shape,” she told Wang Zheng.