by Evans, Karin
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Journey to the East
Chapter 2 - From China with Love
Chapter 3 - Down the River
Chapter 4 - The One-Child, Maybe-One-More Policy
Chapter 5 - The Taming Power of the Small
Chapter 6 - Matters of Life and Death
Chapter 7 - East-West Lives
Chapter 8 - In the Light of the Autumn Moon
Chapter 9 - The Search for Roots
Chapter 10 - Double Happiness
Chapter 11 - Through the Chinese Looking Glass
A Conversation with Karin Evans
More Food for Thought
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Resources
Permissions
About the Author
PRAISE FOR The Lost Daughters of China
“An evocative memoir that will not only attract parents or would-be parents of Chinese baby girls but . . . also touch the hearts of us all.”—Chicago Tribune
“A wonderful book. Evans’s discussion of the economic and cultural pressures that affect Chinese families is well researched, intelligent, and balanced. Moreover, she provides a thoughtful view on what parents must convey with regard to the dual legacies of the adopted child.”
—AMY TAN, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter
“Perceptive and moving.” —Publishers Weekly
“There has been much press about rescuing (adopting) baby girls from China’s oppressive sociopolitical climate, but little about the women and men who are losing their daughters. Here, Evans gives us a whole story, both moving and jarring. This is the book I have been waiting to see.”
—JAN WALDRON, author of Giving Away Simone
“A bittersweet journey. Lost Daughters takes a brutal look at the Chinese bureaucracy and a confluence of harsh realities—the Chinese government’s strict population policy of one-birth-per-couple imposed in 1980, the culture’s traditional reliance on male heirs, plus untold hardships and emotionally wrenching circumstances known only to a birth mother.” —The Dallas Morning News
“Clear, interesting, thorough, fair and important. What’s finally most impressive about Evans’s feelings for her daughter is how they have led her to care about all the other little Chinese daughters who have lost their birth parents, and about the ‘lost mothers’ who feel compelled to give them up.”
—San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Book Review
“In this balanced account of the extraordinarily complex issues involving the lost daughters of China, Evans is respectful of the Chinese, of adoptive parents, and of the rights of women. She is a wise, great-hearted woman who writes from both a personal and a cultural perspective. As I read this book, I thought of many friends who would love it. I believe you will love it too.”
—MARY PIPHER, author of Reviving Ophelia and Another Country
“Suffused with the spirit of delight. A straightforward, honest, and moving book.”
—Taipei Times
“Exceptional and very well written. I feel connected to this child, an orphan adopted from China. As Chinese females, we are in the battle together.”
—ANCHEE MIN, author of Red Azalea, Wild Ginger, and Becoming Madame Mao
“The book everyone is talking about! An incredible insider look at China adoption, the reasons these children are available for adoption, the heartbreak that the social situation in China is bringing, and the heroic struggle of a proud people to manage their population.”—Celebrate the Child website
“A story of cross-cultural adoption conveyed with great narrative energy and skill—a story, really, of parental yearning and its fulfillment.”
—DR. ROBERT COLES, James Agee Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University
“A ‘superfluous girl’ myself, I was deeply moved by this book. It deserves the attention of everyone who wants to understand what the human heart cries for.”
—HONG YING, author of Daughter of the River
“Evans brings a mother’s and a reporter’s perspectives to this moving account of China’s troubling policy.” —Booklist
“Lyrically written, precisely observed, and emotionally evocative, The Lost Daughters of China is a cross-cultural adventure of the soul. Did I tear up reading it? Yeah, a little. But I laughed in equal measure. Evans is simply dazzling.”
—TIM CAHILL, author of Pass the Butterworms
“[Evans] does a wonderful job of supplementing her personal story with well-researched data concerning the plight of female children in China.”
—Holt International Book Review
“Fascinating and beautifully written. [Evans] offers commentary on the changing role of women and family in modern-day China and attempts to illuminate a glimpse into the future through the eyes of scholars studying China. Lost Daughters is an insightful, thought-provoking and touching book written with the compassion of an adoptive mother.” —Adoption Today
“As an Asian woman, I truly understand and was deeply touched by this compellingly
told, beautiful story.”—LE LY HAYSLIP,
author of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
“[Evans] eloquently assesses the conditions that force couples to abandon their offspring and chronicles the emotional anguish that accompanies the decision to give up a child. Full of questions and insights about family and the morphing of cultures, this book is essential reading for those interested in adoption, population policy, or the politics of domestic arrangements.” —Library Journal
“A fascinating statement about the cultural phenomenon of unwanted girls in China, viewed through the lens of a Caucasian adoptive parent. In this book, the personal and the political intersect in important and enlightening ways.”
—CLAIRE S . CHOW, author of Leaving Deep Water
“An important read for all who care about human rights and the lives of women and girls.”—Women’s Press website
“Finely crafted and deeply felt . . . Evans is surely right that the issue of China’s
‘lost and found’ babies will grow in cultural and political significance as the number of adoptive families in the United States rises. A compelling story, Lost Daughters is highly recommended to anyone curious about the subject.”
—Population and Development Review
“Breathtaking—an unforgettable story. The Lost Daughters of China describes not only the tragedy of social engineering, but the healing power of a mother’s love.”
—IRIS CHANG, author of The Rape of Nanking
“Evans views China from an honest and unflinching feminist perspective that has garnered praise from many Chinese women. She gives us the joyful tale of an adoption entwined with the sobering reality of millions of girls missing or uncounted from China’s population. Touching and engrossing.”
—Red Thread
“Powerful and important. The Lost Daughters of China is not simply the journey of a child, a man, and a woman, but a history of cultural mixing at the end of the millennium.”
—BELLE YANG, author of Baba: A Return to China upon My Father’s Shoulders
“Substantive and moving.”
—MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR book reviewer, in Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading
Adopted Girls,
Their Journey
to America,
and the
Search for a
Missing Past
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. ◆ New York
JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,
Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,
London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017,
India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd,
24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2008 by Karin Evans
Anchee Min letter copyright © 2000, 2008 by Anchee Min
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed
or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copy-righted
materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published
simultaneously in Canada
Pages 379 and 380 constitute a continuation of this copyright page.
Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Evans, Karin.
The lost daughters of China : adopted girls, their journey to America, and the search for a missing
past / Karin Evans.—Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-585-42676-8
1. Orphanages—China. 2. Abandoned children—China. 3. Chinese—United States.
4. Intercountry adoption—Case studies. I. Title.
HV1317.E
362.734082’0951—dc22
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
For all lost children, everywhere
Calligraphy by Anchee Min
A Letter to All the Lost Daughters of China
Anchee Min
Call me Aha-yi, aunt. I am introducing myself to you the way we do in China. You may have the honor to serve me tea.
How would I begin? I don’t get emotional easily. I lived in China for twenty-seven years; life has toughened me up, and yet I must confess that I am deeply moved by this book. For a strange reason I feel connected to you, orphans adopted from China. The Yangtze River runs in our blood, and the time dust of the yellow-earth culture frames our bones. The straight lacquer-black hair. Yes, we share a lot. Most important, we are all females, Chinese females, the kind an old saying describes as “grass born to be stepped on.”
We are in the battle together. You are my nieces.
Aunts in China are mean, at least mine are. It is because they are obligated to tell you the truth. It’s their role in the family. They tell the naked truth to their nieces and nephews. Parents and grandparents spoil the children because they would do anything to avoid hurting their feelings. But aunts are expected to care for the children in a different way. And now, if you don’t mind, I will perform my duty.
Let’s start with the whys. Why is it the girls who are lost? Don’t take it personally. Please understand that Chinese women are cultivated to suffer. Giving away a daughter to someone, a childless sibling or a great-aunt who is in need of caring, was considered a virtue. Girls were presents, companions, kitchen-hands, bed-mates, baby-making machines. Also, the tradition makes a mother feel ashamed for not being able to produce a son. China is an agricultural country where hard labor is a means of survival—a man can carry three hundred pounds of soil while a woman carries a hundred fifty. See my point?
When I was about five, my mother was pitied every time we went out. It was because she had three daughters. “Look, a string of crabs!” My mother didn’t feel sorry for herself. Despite the fact that she finally gave birth to my brother, she and my father made me the family’s favorite. “On purpose,” my father confessed later on. “I don’t want you to get any idea that girls are no good. And I don’t want your brother to get any idea that he is better because he is a boy.” Well, my parents are educators, while the majority of their countrymen are peasants.
In 1995, I was in China helping launch a movement called Mothers, Save Your Daughters. It started with a report in a paper called China’s Communist Youth League. It was an in-depth study. There was a story about a couple who murdered five of their infant daughters in the hope of gaining a son. The news shattered me to the point that I didn’t want to return to America. I wanted to help promote education in rural areas. I believe that if only that couple had had education, the killing wouldn’t have happened. They were peasants and illiterate; they were not in touch with their consciences.
There are struggles, of course. How could a mother not struggle after she carried you months in her body? You might be the result of her hesitation. She couldn’t do it; her heart opposed her and her hands shook. So she thought of an alternative. If a child is strong enough to endure, she might escape her fate.
Each of your birth mothers was not sure, but she wanted to do her best for you for the last time. She might have traveled as far as her money allowed her, to a richer area and a busier market where she would lay you down and hide you inside lotus roots or celery leaves. I am sure she would watch from a distance, hiding herself behind a crowd or in a bush. There she would experience a kind of death. She would suffer until someone picked you up and yelled. She would try, try hard not to answer the call—Whose child?—not to run toward you. She would bite her lips until they bled. For her, you will forever be a “broken arm hidden in her sleeve.”
“Many women break their nerves that way,” one foster mother I spoke with in Anhui province told me. “There are nutty-looking women who sneak around my house from time to time trying to locate the daughters they abandoned. They don’t say anything. No questions. They just wander around like ghosts. I tell them that it’s no good to linger on the pain. Let the past be gone. These children are going to live.”
Oh, how I wish your Chinese birth mothers could read this book. They would be comforted, relieved, and released from nightmares that haunt them. As a woman who grew up in China, I identify with their despair, the despair of being deprived of understanding.
I believe that I have said enough. I couldn’t say it any other way. Forgive me. The hope is that you are in America and you are loved. You are in control of creating your own future. I wish you all the best.
Introduction
Suddenly they were everywhere, the little girls from China. Found forsaken in their homeland, whisked out of orphanages by American parents, they were growing up across the United States. In the New York metropolitan area alone, there are now thousands of these adopted daughters, stroll
ing through the American Museum of Natural History or running into one another in sandboxes and Central Park. In Los Angeles, they are building castles at the beach. In Chicago, they are ice-skating and going to see Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. In Atlanta, there are now several hundred households with daughters from China.
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Portland, Oregon, and Houston, Texas, more children from China are growing up. In the San Francisco Bay Area (where the local count exceeds three thousand), they are gathering at a fancy Chinese restaurant to observe the Autumn Moon Festival, wandering outside to gaze at the moon and honor the memory of their birth parents. A Chinese-born girl from Guangdong province was growing up in Ohio’s Amish country. In one admittedly unusual family in the deep South, an American woman and her fifty-four-year-old mother traveled to China together and each came home with a Chinese daughter.
In 1997, my husband and I joined this subculture of East-West families when we traveled to southern China, walked into a social welfare home for children, and were handed an astonishingly beautiful year-old baby. In the year 2000, we began the process all over again. In the summer of 2001, we flew across the Pacific again to bring home a second daughter, almost three. Once again, we experienced a journey of transformation. We were instantly twice as busy, twice as blessed.
With those meetings, we became participants in a major cross-cultural story of our time, part of a human interaction in which people journey halfway across the globe in search of a child, where the lives of lost girls in China are linked with the lives of waiting parents from the West in a fateful moment of bureaucratic matchmaking. It’s a phenomenon that spans the gaps of distance, culture, race, language, economics, and heritage. It is a tale of twenty-first-century cultures mixing with each other in an unprecedented way. While we settled our children into their new lives, thousands and thousands of other families across the United States and in numerous foreign countries were also introducing adopted Chinese daughters (and a few sons) to a new life with a new family.
