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

by Evans, Karin

  He said our names first. Mark and I shot out of our chairs, hearts pounding. As if walking to a church altar, we approached the front of the room. We faced the door, and in a blur of motion, two women rushed toward us and gently thrust a baby into my arms.

  Suddenly we were looking into our daughter’s tiny face. Just a year old, Jiang Xiao Yu had soft brown hair, clipped close to her scalp, and she was very sleepy. She was dressed in a pale green jumper and on her small feet were bright yellow, brand-new corduroy shoes. In the fingers of one hand she clutched a green plastic cup. “Hi,” we said softly. She opened her brown eyes wide, stared at us for a moment with a look of mild alarm, and then put her head against my chest. Her eyelashes fluttered and she fell asleep.

  I gazed at her in wonder and disbelief. More names were called in the next few minutes, and ten more babies were carried in and put in waiting arms, until the small room rang with laughing and crying and the high hum of profound emotional release.

  It was like some otherworldly mass birth. Within twenty minutes, there were eleven babies being rocked, cradled, cried over, carried around, and stared at in awe by their new parents. The babies were all girls, all beguilingly beautiful, all under a year old.

  Here we all were, a bunch of Chinese babies and a band of parents from half a world away and all our lives had changed at once. That morning these children had been orphans waking up in a high-rise in south China, and soon we were about to carry them aboard a tour bus heading out of town. One minute Mark and I didn’t have a baby, and the next moment we did. The same, I realize, can be said of any woman in labor, by any father in the delivery room—and no wonder the moment of birth is so awesome. Those of us who stood in that orphanage waiting room didn’t have quite the same physical buildup, the expanding womb, birth pains. Instead we carried around a load of anxieties for a couple of years and met our new babies with butterflies in our stomachs. We were in China. We were sipping tea. We were standing up on shaky legs. We were holding someone very soft with short hair who felt warm and smelled sweet. We were breathless—as if we’d been plunged into a cold ocean or hauled up into thin air. We were scared to death. We were floating on some unfamiliar joyful current. We were, after all these long years, parents.

  It was an event so much bigger than we were that we could barely stay in our senses. Later, it would occur to us both—despite eighteen pounds of wiggling affirmation: Were we really in that room in south China? Did this really happen? Just as that story of eggs and semen and gestation hardly gets at the miracle of birth, an account of babies being handed to new parents in an orphanage waiting room does not capture the essence of the adoption experience, either. Something unfathomable is at work—quite impossible to describe, but at around eleven-thirty one fall morning in China, my husband, my daughter, and I became a family. Mark ran his hand softly over the tufts of her hair. We stared at her sleeping face.

  In a split second, our lives flowed together like the rivulets of water crisscrossing my daughter’s native landscape. What had drawn us to this moment in China now seemed as perfectly timed and inevitable as the ebb and flow of the tides, as if we, too, had been pulled to this place by some invisible force of the earth-moon system. The universe shifted. And not just for us, but for all the other parents with us in that room that day and for all the others in different orphanages and hotel rooms at different times in provinces all over China. In that moment, the lost daughters of China were transformed into miracles.

  Several of the orphanage caretakers began mingling with us, talking and playing with the little girls. They had stories about each one—what she liked, what she didn’t, how she slept, what she ate. Some of the babies, they told us, had been crib mates; they might miss each other. Our daughter, being a bit older than some of the others, had slept alone.

  There were questions from the new parents to the orphanage staff, halting translations of English into Cantonese and back again. What does she eat? Has she been healthy? When does she sleep? And from us, Does she sleep all the time? Two smiling Chinese women immediately tried to wake our little girl, enthusiastically smacking her chubby legs and singing, “Hoya, hoya, hoya.”

  They pointed to me and said, “Mama, Mama.” The child in my arms opened her eyes and closed them again. I began to worry that she had slipped into some kind of trance, perhaps an avoidance mechanism brought on by being handed to strangers. No, a caretaker said, “she just plays hard and sleeps hard.” Still, they seemed worried that I was worried, and again tried to rouse her, talking loudly, encouraging her to clap her hands, blow a kiss. She finally woke, mustered a smile, and put her little hands together, which caused the caretakers to exclaim and redouble their efforts. “She can crawl and walk,” they told me through the translator. “She eats rice cereal and likes little pieces of apple and banana. And sometimes she’s a little mischievous.”

  And then we all carried our new daughters onto the bus, held them up to the windows, and waved good-bye to the caretakers. I can still picture one of the women, smiling widely, a gold front tooth showing, waving bye-bye over and over to little Xiao Yu. In my lap, the baby responded by blowing a kiss and waving, palm turned up, fingers moving toward her palm, as is the Chinese way. I wondered later which of the women waving good-bye had dressed my baby that day, who had picked out her yellow shoes.

  It was wrenching to say good-bye and yet we were eager to go. We left the social welfare home in an altered state. Beautiful, warm, perfect Xiao Yu—now Kelly Xiao Yu—had the brightest brown eyes, eight perfect teeth, strong little legs, and an impish smile.

  Who might have been left behind in our daughter’s orphanage, how many other babies or children of any age, we couldn’t guess. Aside from the eleven babies our group carried out the door, we saw no other children, heard no other laughter, no other cries. I looked up at the nine-story building, but I didn’t see any little faces pressed against the windows. One building on the grounds housed elderly people, and a few had come out to see us off. In today’s China, baby girls were not the only casualties. Older people, too, wound up rootless and uncared for.

  Our bus pulled out and the babies bounced along on new laps. From this moment on, we knew, everything in our child’s world—smells, sights, sounds, touch, what she ate and drank, what and who she heard and saw, where she slept—was about to change. We rode through the dusty streets and then turned onto the freeway. With the droning of the ride, some of the babies fell asleep. But little Xiao Yu was wide awake now, looking around, seemingly content. With one hand, she kept a firm grip on her green cup.

  Her hometown—presumably—was fast disappearing behind us, its government bureaus, its factories, its seven hundred thousand men, women, and children; its bustle and troubles; its secrets, floating away into the general haze that blankets south China. We were leaving our daughter’s homeland behind. I longed for a chance to stop for a while, wander through town, talk to someone, get a sense of the place. But there was no getting off the bus. We traveled the rest of the way insulated, looking out through dust-flecked windows.

  We were brief visitors who swooped in and left with one of the greatest blessings one person could offer another, but the gifts were anonymous. Peering out at the edges of town and the outlying fields, I struggled for clues, trying to imagine the lives lived there. Was a mother secretly watching somewhere when we stepped out of the orphanage and onto the bus, hoping for a last glimpse of her daughter? A father?

  Our last stop before the orphanage that day had been a provincial government bureau where we went to get the final notarization of the papers that would allow us to adopt. While we sat in a small plain waiting room, decorated with a map of Guangdong province on the wall, we were told, one by one, where our daughters had been found. “Under a bridge,” the facilitator told one couple. “Beside a freeway,” he said to another. “In a market,” he told us.

  The lost parents remained nameless—unmentioned and apparently unknown. Did any walk by the orphanage, see the forei
gners come and go, know that their daughters had been picked up and were on their way to the United States? Did anyone harbor a secret hope that someday a daughter would return, looking for a lost family?

  On the ride back to Guangzhou, I tried to memorize my daughter’s landscape so someday I could tell her how green the countryside was, how carefully tended; how the ridges of the rice terraces curved against the hills, how the old villages were laid out, how the oxen stood so still in the fields. Xiao Yu was holding my finger now, dimples on her smooth, sweet hands. She drank her bottle as we looked out at the blur of the countryside. I tucked away what sights and facts I had gathered about Jiangmen, whose name translates as “River Gate.”

  The urban bustle had spilled into the surrounding countryside. In a small village that had been a simple farming community ten years earlier, a lamp factory had bloomed, manufacturing high-quality brass fixtures for the European decorator trade. Aside from prosperous factories that made blankets, washing machines, chemical products, and electronics, Jiangmen City had its own stock exchange, where people could stand around and watch their paper fortunes ebb and flow. Yet piecemeal workers in the factories, turning out electronic goods or chemicals, could earn less in a month than I had paid for my “Made in China” walking shoes.

  In an earlier time, the young women of this area were frequently exiled from their families at an early age and sent to live in the households of their future husbands. But some of them rebelled. Early-twentieth-century scholars noted reports of a “startling phenomenon: wives who refused to live with their husbands and young women who refused to marry at all.” Instead, these women ran off and took vows of spinsterhood. In traditional Chinese society—a society shaped and constrained by a strong patriarchy and Confucian values—this was very unorthodox behavior.7

  This Guangdong area of China has always been a restless place, peopled by widely disparate minority tribes (some fifty of them, including Zhang, Yao, Hui), peppered with a spirit of independence. The Cantonese historically have been scrappers, the upstarts holding out against the people of the north. “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” went an old saying. The region’s history was filled with insurrection and revolt. People born here were quick to look outward, and when hard-pressed, to go looking elsewhere for fortune—or for sheer survival. In the nineteenth century, streams of people from this area of southern China left their homeland, many of them heading for America and the Gold Rush, working on the railroads, and eventually settling in the United States and elsewhere in huge tight-knit communities.

  One group found its way to Mexico. My brother’s wife, who is one-quarter Chinese, is the granddaughter of a man who left Guangdong province and settled in Mexico in the 1920s. Today, more than twenty million Chinese, scattered all over the world, trace their roots to this region. In San Francisco, three-quarters of the Chinese Americans are Cantonese, with roots in Guangdong province. The California agricultural industry owes a huge debt to these immigrant farmers from the Pearl River Delta, who built networks of irrigation canals by hand, drained marshes to reclaim the land, and taught local landowners how to grow fruit trees. Many of the first Chinese women who came to America arrived as virtual slaves, forced into prostitution to pay off their travel debts.

  In Guangdong today, there are enough people to make up roughly one-third the entire population of the United States—all tucked into an area slightly smaller than North Dakota. The province is one of the fastest-growing economic areas in the world, a hotbed of entrepreneurship and capitalism, fully exercising the economic freedom that has come with the “To get rich is glorious” rationale of modern China. “One country, two systems,” the pragmatic philosophy is sometimes called, a handy accommodation between Chinese communism and Western capitalism. Yet there are still small villages where minority dialects are spoken and no one has heard of the stock market.

  Jiangmen City had gotten its first American fast-food outlet a few years earlier. Tucked away in this territory, I had heard, were lavish houses with swimming pools, used by wealthy businessmen as weekend getaways. Elsewhere, drab, hastily built factories spit out tired workers and streams of pollutants. Yet the age-old cultivation of mulberry trees for silk was still a big industry. Silkworms, fried, were also a delicacy. “Like peanuts, very good,” a local woman told me.

  During the Ming dynasty, one of China’s most famous Confucian scholars, poets, and calligraphers, Chen Baisha, was born in this area. Today, there’s a regional university, Wuyi University, with four thousand pupils, where students are warned that “falling in love” is not part of the curriculum. When a delegation from Jiangmen’s American sister city, Riverside, California, came to visit this area, they were taken to a model village. It had been selected, they noted, based upon seven criteria: a quality water supply, a sanitary system, having a concrete village square, having a sign and gate leading to the village, keeping animals in pens, no crimes in the village, and having shown exemplary attention to family planning, payment of taxes, military service, and “villagers caring for one another.”

  Yet for rural women, who constitute 70 percent of China’s populace, life is desperately hard, even in boom times and model villages. The suicide rate among women in the countryside is the highest in the world. China is, in fact, the only nation where the suicide rates for women top those for men. Most victims are young. The means of self-destruction, most often, is a lethal gulp of the poison closest at hand, agricultural pesticide.8

  There were other indications that life could be a struggle for women in rural China. An American professor traveling in the area where my daughter was born visited a kindergarten in Jiangmen City and watched the girls and boys, roughly an equal number of each, at play. Not long afterward, he went to a kindergarten in the countryside. “There were twenty-eight kids—but just three girls,” he says. Just as the social pressure to produce sons has endured, so, too, has the preference to educate sons over daughters.

  As we motored along on the bus back toward Guangzhou, we could see the movement of the river’s glassy water, but peering beneath its dark surface was just as hard as grasping the reality of life here in this part of southern China, where people went about their business, hopeful or scared, connected or lost. Aside from whatever general explanations we’d heard, I wondered about the other currents that had swept those little girls to that orphanage. I kept thinking about my baby’s birth mother—where she might have fit, or not fit, into this landscape.

  By the time we reached the hotel, the finest moment of Max’s mission as a transcontinental midwife for our group was complete. Our entourage now included eighteen baby girls—eleven from Kelly’s orphanage and seven babies from two other institutions. Two little girls previously adopted from China had been given little sisters, and all the adults who’d come to China with us hoping to be parents had fulfilled their dream. The youngest child was probably three or four months, the oldest around eighteen months.

  When we got back to our room and began changing our new daughter’s clothes, Mark and I peeled off several layers.

  Though the weather was mild, the children were well bundled, as is the Chinese tendency. (Had it been cooler, the babies would have been dressed in layer after layer until their little arms stood straight out at the sides and they looked like small versions of the Michelin man.) While Kelly Xiao Yu giggled, we removed her green jumper and a sweatshirt with a little red schoolhouse on the front (made in the United Arab Emirates), and a lighter undershirt printed with elephants (made in the USA). When we reached the last layer, our new baby was wearing a bright red T-shirt imprinted with yellow lettering and a picture of a building with turrets. “Trump’s Castle Casino Resort,” it read.

  “Oh lord, sweet baby,” I said, laughing back at her, “where on earth did you come from?”

  3

  Down the River

  Raindrops fall upon my eyelashes

  Like a child’s tears at parting.

  I carefully tap them
off

  Into the quiet tiny mouths of the spring

  blossoms.

  Child, Mama is leaving

  For lovelier blooming.

  —Luo Xiaoge, “Drizzling Rain”1

  Each daughter adopted from China is a gift beyond measure, and each comes with her own little mystery. “Just think, here are all these beautiful children, and they are just waiting there, waiting for someone to come and pick them up and say, ‘You’re mine,’” said one adoptive father. “How could this be?” That question is one that absorbs—and sometimes haunts—the mothers and fathers who have come home with Chinese children.

  What most adoptive families know of their daughters’ lives before the orphanage is written on the thin pages of official paperwork from the People’s Republic of China. The documents are signed and dated and bound into booklets with official seals and red stars stamped on the covers. The papers are beautiful: pale ivory in color, crinkly in texture, and covered with elegant Chinese writing in rich dark ink. The characters strut boldly across the pages, but they reveal very little.

  Translated, one document says simply that this little girl was “found forsaken” on a winter day in a local market when she was about three months old. The local police delivered her to the social welfare institute. Her birth parents and her place of birth were unknown.

  Found forsaken. The daughters of China come away with those two words, summing up their short lives. Our daughter, like so many other baby girls in China, was found with no note that we know of, no name, and no family clues. Once these children arrived at the orphanage, the people there guessed at their ages and someone assigned them a birth date and a name. All the little girls in this particular institution were given the surname Jiang, meaning “river,” because of the location of the orphanage. “The name Jiang is the same as the Chinese president’s,” our adoption facilitator told us one day, with a sly smile, “but it doesn’t mean these are all his children.” All the girls in the group had first names that began with Xiao, meaning “little.”