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

by Evans, Karin

  There are several reasons that the backgrounds of little girls from China remain sketchy. First, there’s usually very little information to begin with, so the recordkeeping that does go on begins with guesswork and remains relatively casual. Then, in a sort of catch-22, particular to the rules of international adoption, children must be certified as “orphaned” in order to be eligible to immigrate to the United States. Under U.S. immigration law, the definition of “orphan” is liberal enough to include children whose parents have disappeared as well as those whose parents have died.2 To be given orphan status, a child must be officially on her own in the world. Thus, the parents of abandoned children need to have unconditionally abandoned the child and given up all control over the child or the child’s future. The intent of the law, according to U.S. immigration, is to guard against “the splitting of intact, functioning foreign families.”

  A Chinese parent who wants to give a child a chance at being adopted, then, must conveniently disappear, and so must the rest of the family, if anybody else is around. It’s the Chinese equivalent to what’s known in this country as “making an adoption plan.” Thus, a birth parent who disappears is often intentionally creating a chance for her child to find a new home.

  Abandoning a child is against the law in China, another reason why parents are usually careful to leave no traces. A specific provision of the 1992 Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests forbids “forsaking” baby girls,3 although no one has reported any substantial pattern of prosecution.

  Overall, a mix of good intentions, legal hazards, fear, and shame has made birth parents elusive and difficult to identify. One American couple did see a man carry an infant into a park and set her down, while a weeping woman followed, but most parents come and go unseen, leaving no traces at all. Once a child is found in China, the orphanages hold her for a couple of months, until it can be established that no parents or relatives have stepped forward or otherwise been identified. To spread the word, “finding” ads, photos of the babies and details on when and where they were discovered, are published in local papers.

  The only time a birth date is really certain for these children is when a woman delivers in a hospital, giving a false name usually, and then disappears, leaving the baby behind, or when birth parents leave a note with the child containing basic information. Otherwise the birthday is an estimate, picked at random or assigned for convenience. It’s not at all unusual for pediatricians in this country to disagree substantially with the reported age of an adopted child from China. Occasionally, adopted Chinese girls come away with paperwork that belongs to other children altogether.

  When the child and the age don’t match up, some adoptive parents change the birth date to one that more closely reflects a child’s age, which they are allowed to do when they go through a follow-up adoption procedure in the United States. Others cling to the pieces of the story they are given. “We’ll be celebrating our daughter’s first birthday this month, even though she is probably younger than the given date,” said one mother. “I figure that birthday is about the only tangible past she has, and we better hold on to it.” Another friend with a daughter from China told me she felt the same way. “I’ve chosen to believe the information we had,” said southern California mother Carole Sopp. “That’s the main reason I didn’t change my daughter’s birth date. She deserves the validity. If I start to disbelieve what they told me, I’m just perpetuating the myth that she doesn’t have a past that we can rely on, and that’s even more disconnective for the future.”

  In a realm of such uncertainty even the barest information becomes precious—a description of the place a child was found, the name given by the orphanage, connection with anyone who might know something, the child’s photo from the “finding” ad in the local paper. At one orphanage where the doorkeeper had been the first to pick up a dozen children who’d been left on the doorstep, parents who came to adopt took photographs of the doorkeeper.

  Some agencies make a practice of taking adopting parents to the spot where their baby was discovered so that they have some sense of their child’s brief history. But those hospital steps, office doorways, and police stations are as far back as most short histories go—and even those stories remain sketchy and open to question. Adopting parents are left trying to put together a life story from the sparest of details. An East Coast mother was told by an orphanage worker that her little daughter’s parents had perished in a flood, but a second caretaker said the child had been discovered in a post office. The mother of another child, said to have been found in a restaurant in a midsized southern Chinese city, went back looking for the restaurant. “But there was no such restaurant as far as anyone knew,” she says, “so we went to the police station where she was taken. It still brings tears to my eyes that we weren’t able to see her place.”

  Some parents have found the hospital or street where their daughter was discovered and have videotaped the scene to show her one day. Susan August-Brown, who adopted a fifteen-month-old child from southern China, did this and explains, “She’ll hear the words from us, but have the chance to see the place with her own eyes. What struck me most as I retraced the steps some thirteen months after the day our daughter had been found in this place was how much I believe her mother had wanted her to be discovered right away. The baby was left in the doorway of a storefront. It was a spot where a small crying baby would be instantly discovered.”

  Mark and I rolled out of town without getting to see the market where Kelly was said to have been found. Later, when I talked with people in the area, I was led to a young woman at the local university who offered to go to the market and describe it for us. It was a generous gesture. She knew nothing about us, really, just the fact that we had been introduced through an e-mail connection. But she seemed genuinely touched to hear that we wanted to see where our baby had been discovered. Like many other parents, we were trying to piece together a collection of memories.

  By the time Mark and I met our baby, she had smiled her first smile, cut her first tooth (and seven more), and taken her first step. According to her birth date, she would have had her first birthday just nine days before we met her, but I doubt there had been any fanfare. We don’t know what she was called before she became Xiao Yu. A Chinese woman from the area told us later that the English translation we were first given for our daughter’s name—Little Education—was perplexing. “No one is called ‘Education,’” she said. “We don’t use that word for a name.” The word yu, depending on the tone used and how it’s written, could also mean “jade,” she said. “Little Jade—now, that’s a beautiful name for a girl.” According to Bette Bao Lord, author of Legacies, Xiao Yu—pronounced and written yet another way—has yet another meaning: “Slight Change.” That’s what a relative of Lord’s was called, after a magistrate made a mistake about her birth date.

  Like most other parents who’ve adopted children from China, we know nothing about the circumstances of our daughter’s birth or about her birth parents. Once we were home, I asked a pediatrician whether our child’s belly button would offer a clue as to whether she’d been born in a hospital or not. It didn’t. Not that that particular information would have told us much, but I was straining to picture all the events in her life that I’d missed. I also wanted to gather all the information I could to answer all the questions I knew she would have as she grew up.

  Whoever had first cared for our child had given her a good start at life. She was in robust health (“Strong baby!” exclaimed the doctor at the government clinic we were required to visit). She’d been well nourished. She had a predilection for crawling on top of me and laying her cheek on my breast, so I think she had been nursed. She sought out that warm spot as if she’d known it well, nestled, nudged me like a kitten. And by all indications—her trust of people, her displays of affection, her rather gleeful outlook on life—she seems to have been treated with love and kindness. From someone she had inherited her long, delicate fingers,
her easy, beautiful smile—perhaps a “risk gene” that might explain the enthusiasm she seemed to have for motorcycles. But from whom?

  This baby’s mother and possibly her father had held her, fed her, carried her, for at least three months before she was found and taken to the orphanage. Babies have persuasive powers to make us love them and three months is a long time. How unspeakably hard it must have been to walk away. And yet someone had. While I was at home in San Francisco, fretting about bureaucratic logjams, someone in south China was bundling up that beautiful three-month-old girl for a last trip to the marketplace.

  It was an act so momentous that I’d often find myself trying to conjure such a story from the few details I knew.

  It was midwinter, a season of mild weather, I’d been told, but likely to be wet and the market would have been crawling—filled with buckets of squirming local shrimp, live frogs in bamboo cages, and thin shiny eels swimming in tubs. There would have been rice for sale, of course, and just about everything else from turtles to water beetles. Bok choy and long beans tied in neat bunches. Piles of oranges. And somewhere in that large, bustling place, tucked among the rice barrels, maybe, or near the winter melons, was a baby.

  Who discovered the child, or just how or when she was noticed we don’t know. Perhaps it was a farmer, reaching for a melon. He would have been startled at first, but after the cry went up—“Wait! There’s a baby here!”—probably no one was surprised. The baby was a girl. Enough said. Someone called the police and they came, as they’d done any number of times in any number of places before, and took the child off to one of the nearby orphanages, where there was food and warmth, care and lots of company. If this baby girl was crying, it would have been a loud, full-out, heartbreaking wail, mouth wide open, chest trembling, huge tears soaking both cheeks. (I know this child well by now, and this is how she cries.)

  Someone fed her, dressed her, and put her in a crowded nursery. And so the second part of her life began, the nine months in an institution, surrounded by an unknown number of other little girls, sleeping two (or sometimes more) to a crib, covered with padded quilts in winter, playing on straw mats in the summer. Eventually she tried her first bite of banana, and learned to clap her hands and blow kisses.

  But how had this little child wound up lying alone in a marketplace? She had obviously come into this world with everything a parent could want, and more. She was sweet and strong, bright and beautiful, with an irresistible smile and a laugh that shook her little body. Despite this little girl’s exquisite nature, something had gone terribly wrong—and not only to her, but to all the little girls found forsaken in China.

  I thought about our daughter’s short, mysterious life and tried to imagine all the possible identities for her elusive mother. Motoring through southern China we’d passed farm-workers in the fields and factory workers in the towns. Elsewhere, I knew, were university students bent over their books, teenagers on the run, mothers on the nightshift coming home at dawn. Each life in all its complexity and difficulty flowing along, hitting obstacles. What circumstances could make any of these women leave a three-month-old baby? Did a girl from the local university deviate from the curriculum, fall in love, and get pregnant? I had heard a story of a single woman student there who had conceived a child, and who was then subjected to immense pressures to leave the school, hounded by the officials, the water in her living quarters turned off, her life made miserable. To say that single mothers did not fare well in China at the time is a massive understatement.

  When whole villages fall to the wrecker’s ball, when floods turn river deltas into inland seas, families can come untied. Daughters who might have been cared for in tough times may be let go to fend for themselves when circumstances get even harder. If southern China’s boomtowns offered jobs to rural women, they also offered new dangers.

  Had a poor rural woman come to the city looking for work and found herself instead with an unexpected child? Was my daughter’s mother what Chinese officials called a “birth guerrilla”—a woman who fled the hometown authorities to have her child? Did she hope to save this daughter and then realize the only way to save her was to give her up? Did she run for a while and then quit running? Did something happen suddenly to turn her life upside down? Was she a rootless factory worker who had lost her job? Did a woman from one of the outlying farms have a second or third daughter and become squeezed between the family pressures to try again for a son and the government’s edict to have no more children? Was she sixteen? Or twenty-two? Or forty?

  Just as the rivers in my daughter’s homeland defined the physical landscape—how marked the channels were where the water had cut deep or wandered shallow, what currents and crosscurrents might be at play, what rivulets had dried to mud, what swells had pushed and gushed, flooding, over the fields—there was an invisible human current at work. A rippling flow of people, poor and prosperous, riding to and from the city on motorbikes, bicycles, in trucks and cars. Somewhere back in the Pearl River Delta, I knew, I had a counterpart.

  Children who are older when they are discovered or older when they are adopted and have therefore stayed in the orphanage longer, may come away from China with information of their own, of course—the recollection, perhaps, of a mother’s face, or some words spoken long ago in Mandarin or Cantonese. But the majority of children adopted from China are aged one year or less, with no easily understood memories of life before the institution in which they ended up. They come away with just their sheets of elegant but iffy paperwork—and whatever tokens or good wishes their caretakers might pass along.

  A little girl from near Hangzhou was handed to her new mother wearing thin string bracelets on her wrists and ankles, tied on by the orphanage staff to bring her luck. Other babies in other places have been sent away with red dots on their foreheads for good fortune, stuffed panda bears, or small bags of Chinese soil to remind them of their homeland. The babies from an orphanage north of Guangzhou were given tiny pieces of jade as they left with their new parents, and “lucky money” in red envelopes. On the other hand, a child adopted by a friend from a city in the north of China lacked even a shirt on her back. In the hotel where my friend was handed her child, she had to undress the baby, redress her in the clothes she had brought, and return the original clothes to the orphanage caretakers. It’s understandable, given that some of the orphanages are in dire straits.

  Occasionally, a handmade bit of clothing or a small trinket left with an infant and passed along to the adoptive parents bespeaks some attempt at a going-away present by the birth parent or parents. A baby in Hefei, the provincial capital of Anhui province in the north, was found with a yam tucked under her arm. “The parents wanted to show some love for the baby and they were very poor, and they left it with the poorest food of China, a dry yam,” said a woman who grew up in Hefei. “And once,” she says, “a friend of mine found a baby and instead of money the parents had left a bunch of used bus tickets with the baby. The tickets weren’t worth anything. The parents didn’t even have a penny to leave. It was very sad.”

  When notes do appear, they are apt to be heartwrenching. They come scrawled on scraps of paper, often written in obvious haste—jotted in crayon on a restaurant bill, for instance. Some birth parents in rural areas can’t write at all, but others have tried to spell out the reasons for what happened, accounts that can amount to a kind of impromptu social commentary. One scrap of paper indicated a little girl’s name and time of birth, and then said, “I am heartbroken to give her up. But in China women have no power, and I have no choice. I hope someone will care for her.” Another was addressed to the child herself: “In this life, in this world, I am not able to provide for you,” it said. “I am giving you up so you can have a life. Good luck and be well.”

  A Catholic priest quoted this note, found with a baby girl lying in an empty field: “Kindhearted people, we are abandoning our child not because we cannot care for her, but because of the official one-child policy. ‘Dear daughte
r, we do not have bad hearts. We couldn’t keep you.’ Friendly people who take her up, we cannot repay the debt in this life. But perhaps in the next life.”4

  A day-old baby, found in Beijing in front of the Chinese government office that handles international adoptions, was accompanied by a note that said: “This little girl was born and we can’t take care of her.” The parents begged the people in the orphanage to care for their baby and asked their daughter herself for forgiveness.

  A note found pinned to a tiny abandoned girl in Hunan read: “This baby girl is now 100 days old. She is in good health and has never suffered any illness. Due to the current political situation and heavy pressures that are difficult to explain, we, who were her parents for these first days, cannot continue taking care of her. We can only hope that in this world there is a kindhearted person who will care for her. Thank you. In regret and shame, your father and mother.”5

  Heavy pressures that are difficult to explain. If there’s a core phrase that gets at the heart of the matter for the birth parents of China’s lost daughters, that may be it. What led to that fateful moment for our daughter and for thousands and thousands of other tiny girls discovered in parks and doorways all over that vast country lay buried in centuries of Chinese history—part of a long, hard, complex past and a very difficult present.

  The newborn boy

  Deserves a bed,

  Fine clothes, and