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

by Evans, Karin

Jade for playthings.

  His cries announce his standing.

  Grown, he’ll wear red

  And be honored as the family head.

  For a daughter

  Bare ground is bed enough

  And plain clothes will suit her

  As will broken tiles for toys.

  Let her live without distinction

  And serve her family well

  Without disgracing them.

  —From The Book of Odes6

  The troubles for females in China, it seemed, went back at least as far as Confucius. During the Han dynasty, two hundred years before Christ, China’s greatest sage laid down a family system built on male lineage. In the Confucian scheme of things, control of the land and all the family fortunes was passed from father to son. A daughter’s place began at the bottom of the family hierarchy and stayed there, her lifelong status dictated by her gender. “Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with,” wrote Confucius. “If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand.”7

  The philosopher Mencius, known as China’s second sage, followed Confucius and reinforced the system of patriarchy. Of all unfilial behavior, said Mencius, the greatest was to provide no male heirs. Despite changes in government and increasing modernization, the Confucian philosophy has persisted right into the present, particularly in China’s countryside.

  While a system that so blatantly discriminates in favor of boys may seem completely skewed to the outside observer, within the context of Chinese culture, it had a practical basis. Confucian philosophy defined the relationships within the clan and dictated the fiduciary realities of the family real estate. A son was born into a position not just of respect but of family duty, expected to work his father’s land, carry the ancestral name, ensure the worshipping of the ancestral spirits, and care for his parents in their old age. For parents, having a son was simply the age-old Chinese version of a modern social security system.

  In some rural areas of old China, the placenta of a girl baby was buried outside the walls of the family home, while a boy’s placenta was buried within the house—a symbolic practice that mirrored the girl’s standing in the family. That act was just the beginning of a lifelong pattern of discrimination. Boys had first pick of the food and toys and other resources, including whatever medical care was available. Even the gods were assumed to be indifferent to girls: Boys were sometimes given a girl’s name when very small, to fool the deities into thinking the child was of no consequence, not worth taking back.

  At a month old, a son was given a formal name and carried to the temple by his father, who proudly informed the gods and the ancestral spirits that an heir had been born. The family celebrated with a “full-month” feast, breaking out red-tinted eggs and sliced pickled ginger, symbols of a new—male—birth. Daughters, when they reached a month old (and many did not), did so without celebration.

  A daughter was frequently regarded as just an extra mouth to feed until she married and joined her husband’s household. Once there, her only hope of respect was to produce a son to carry on the family name for her husband and in-laws. If she failed in this mission, she could simply be cast aside and another woman invited into the family to take her place. Among the numerous reasons that gave a husband the right to take a concubine or to divorce his spouse was a wife’s failure to produce a son. (Disrespect to the mother-in-law was also sufficient cause; as was rudeness to a husband’s mistress.) “Chinese women put up with this sexual injustice,” explained the noted Chinese scholar Lin Yutang, “as naturally as Chinese people put up with political injustice.”

  Once a daughter married, her name no longer appeared in her own family records, but became part of her husband’s lineage. Historically, wives were under great pressure to keep the husband’s name and line going, and they couldn’t do it with daughters. When a daughter married and moved to her husband’s family’s turf, she often encountered a whole new set of troubles. Many traditional Chinese stories are devoted to the unhappy lot of the daughter-in-law, who could at worst be treated as a household slave completely under the thumb of the husband’s mother, the venerable Chinese mother-in-law.

  Out of entrenched tradition grew a pervasive assumption: Having a child was not just a woman’s, or even a couple’s, private affair, but the intimate and crucial business of the husband’s family. The entire clan’s self-esteem and their fortunes depended on having a male heir. Producing that much-coveted son was a woman’s ticket to family power. The daughter-in-law who failed to produce a son failed the family.

  The poem earlier in this chapter, written before the eighth century, is indicative of such thinking. But so is this one, written by Jia Jia in the 1980s:

  Married for seven days he leaves

  Telling

  The bride to give him a son

  So she gives him a son

  But still stiffening his face

  As if she had given him a girl

  He won’t allow her to step into the house.8

  Although twelve centuries separate the writers of the two works, the descriptions of family attitudes about girls and boys are nearly identical. Even today, a wife is commonly expected to produce a son, and if she doesn’t, her husband can turn a cold shoulder to her, or worse. In the 1990s, a man in northeast China who was accused of suffocating two small daughters so that he could start a new family with a son, explained, “I was unable to continue the family line for my ancestors. What a sin!”9

  Any number of Chinese folk sayings reflect the bias against females: “Girls are maggots in the rice.” “It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.” “When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls.” Even today, daughters born into families without sons can be given names that translate to such sentiments as “Bring a little brother.”

  In her book Bound Feet and Western Dress, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang summed up the Chinese woman’s age-old destiny when she quoted her great-aunt on the subject: “I want you to remember this: in China a woman is nothing. When she is born she must obey her father. When she is married, she must obey her husband. And when she is widowed, she must obey her son.”

  “I was clearly taught how cheap a girl’s life is at a few years of age,” says another woman, who grew up in Hefei in the 1950s and now lives in the American Midwest. “Across the beautiful city moat from our home was the provincial hospital. Now and then when I was wandering around that river park, I would see abandoned babies. I soon learned that they were unwanted girls and handicapped boys.

  “As a child, whenever I felt uneasy about my parents giving most of their attention and resources to my younger brother, I was told to feel lucky. My father told me that there were no girls around my age at the villages he visited. The parents had to ‘get rid’ of them to save the boys during the three years’ starvation period. How could it happen? ‘Just throw them in the toilet,’ he said. Should I not feel lucky to be born in the city?”

  Although some women in Chinese history did better than others, it was an uphill struggle. In a prosperous family with a boy or two, there was room for a girl, though she’d traditionally take a backseat to her brothers. In fact, an older daughter and a younger son was often viewed as the perfect combination, with the girl taking on some of the parental responsibility. But when life was hard, which has been the case in Chinese history for most of the people most of the time, it was the daughters who suffered.

  And suffer they have. In times of flood and famine and war, when families struggled to stay alive, if there were too many children to care for, it was the girls who were let go. Some young girls couldn’t even be sure of waking up in their own beds in the morning. If they survived infancy, they could be sold and raised in other families as domestic servants or given to the family of a future husband, to be groomed in the submissive role of daughter-in-law from a very young age.

  “Unwanted daughters were peddled as virtual slaves, sometimes by brokers, to unknown families,” writes Ade
line Yen Mah in her memoir Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter. “Once sold, a child’s destiny was at the whim of her buyer. She had no papers and no rights. A few, perhaps more fortunate, ones were legally adopted by their owners. Many more were subjected to beatings and other abuses. Prostitution or even death were the fate of some child slaves.”

  Girls commonly didn’t make it beyond the birthing room. There is evidence throughout Chinese history of the killing of newborns, despite moral and civic injunctions against the practice. Literary accounts of Chinese life offer numerous descriptions of baby girls neglected, left behind, or killed. In the seventeenth century, an observant visitor to China, Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, reported the drowning of infants whose parents could not support them. When the character O-Lan in Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth gives birth to a second daughter in the midst of famine, she quietly strangles the newborn. Her husband carries the tiny form out to a graveyard and leaves it, while a ravenous wild dog hovers nearby. According to Buck’s biographer, the story was based on an event that Buck had witnessed as a young woman growing up in China.

  In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston recalls hearing tales of midwives who prepared boxes of clean ashes beside the birthing bed in case the baby was a girl. If so, they swiftly pressed her little face into the ashes. “It was very easy,” Kingston says her mother told her.

  China hardly stands alone in such thinking or family patterns, of course. In many parts of the world, strong patriarchies seem to have replaced female-oriented societies with the coming of literacy, according to one recently advanced theory. Leonard Shlain, in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, points out that in ancient times, the Chinese character for wife also meant “equal,” before the Confucians spread their philosophy via the printed word and the patriarchy seized power.

  One doesn’t have to travel far, of course, or scratch deep beneath the surface of numerous other cultures to find equivalent male dominance or similar suffering among children. Industrialized Europe is not that far removed from such conditions. Witness Charles Dickens’s London, filled with tales of cruelly exploited children, or John Boswell’s study “The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance,” replete with stories concerning the selling and killing of unwanted children of both sexes.10

  But China’s patriarchy nonetheless stands out as a particularly deep-rooted and destructive form. And in China, furthermore, there was a notable difference: The pressures, whether of deeply ingrained belief, poverty, or individual exploitation, fell far more heavily on girls than boys. When children were lost altogether, it was the girls, almost exclusively, who disappeared. When babies were killed at birth, girls were far more likely to die than boys.

  China being the complex place that it is, it should be noted, there were also historical exceptions to this broad picture of bias—families, certainly, who loved and cherished their daughters, and throughout Chinese history, women who wielded power, not just within their families but beyond, including women who created pockets of matriarchy.11

  The legendary heroine Fa Mulan—popularly known as Mulan—is a reflection of the flip side of disenfranchisement, a woman who became a heroine by disguising herself as a man. Numerous ancient Chinese stories include tales of filial daughters who took up a challenge to defend their families and stand up for a cause, and certain Chinese families were known for long lines of female warriors. In a patriarchal culture, women through the ages—from the Empress Dowager Cixi in the last dynasty, right down to rural activists today—have found ways to be strong.

  As writer and scholar Hu Shih explained in Chinese Women Through Chinese Eyes, “Against all shackles and fetters, the Chinese woman has exerted herself and achieved for herself a place in the family, in society, and in history. She has managed men and governed empires; she has contributed abundantly to literature and the fine arts; and above all she has taught and molded her sons to be what they have been. If she has not contributed more, it was probably because China, which certainly has treated her ill, has not deserved more of her.”12

  An astute observer of his own society, Hu Shih elaborated on this when he addressed an American Association of University Women group in Tientsin in 1931. Sketching in part of the long history of women in China, he concluded, “If there is a moral to this story, it is that it is simply impossible to suppress women—even in China.”13

  Nevertheless, the patriarchy had a long and pervasive force of its own. Even as China has changed, with more people moving to the cities and women gaining education and better jobs, in rural areas where life goes on as it has for centuries, the Confucian values are alive and well. Passed from father to son, mother to daughter, the system that favors boys over girls has permeated Chinese society from one generation to the next. Decades of Communist government haven’t altered the reliance of many families, particularly rural families, on sons. “Son preference,” it’s called simply.

  That prejudice reached right into our own living room one evening after we’d returned from China with our daughter. Kelly and I were reading through a modern version of Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes, enjoying the illustrations of dragon kites and riddles about ducks and snails, when we came upon this poem:

  We keep a dog to guard the house;

  A pig will make a feast or two;

  We keep a cat to catch a mouse;

  But what is the use of a girl like you? 14

  Infanticide, the saddest evidence of ancient prejudice, was on the wane after the Communists came to power in 1949, but severe hardship—first an agricultural disaster of unprecedented proportions, then the government’s strict population policies—soon caused a resurgence.

  In the Mao Zedong era, there were attempts to improve the lot of China’s women, to eradicate infanticide and institute other reforms. The Communists encouraged women to “join the ranks of human beings,” get involved in the party, “become officials.” “Women hold up half the sky,” Mao liked to say. Prostitution, child marriage, the taking of concubines, and the selling of brides were outlawed. Wives were given rights they had never had before. Peasant girls began going to school.

  Still, the Great Leap Forward ultimately failed China’s women, as it failed the population at large. Mao’s reforms were short-lived, and when hard times hit, it was once again the women who disproportionately paid the price. First came famine—the worst in China’s history. And then came the government’s attempts to curb its population growth. When China put into force the world’s most stringent policies dictating family size, the age-old prejudices again rose up and took their toll.

  4

  The One-Child, Maybe-One-More Policy

  One is not too few, two will perfectly do, and three are too many for you.

  —Early population-control slogan1

  Sink back into just about any period of China’s past and the achievements of an illustrious history—the scholars’ insights, the scientists’ breakthroughs, the profoundly beautiful art and literature—are shadowed by catastrophes that unsettle the soul. Just as a quick, modern example, China, in a period considerably shorter than the entire history of the United States, has endured five wars of foreign aggression (add to that carnage the infamous Rape of Nanjing) and an equal number of internal upheavals—from the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-1850s, with casualties of twenty million, to the Cultural Revolution one hundred years later. Add to that litany a lion’s share of natural disasters—earthquakes, floods, droughts, with enormous numbers of casualties—and the picture darkens further.

  So tumultuous has been the experience of this overwhelming country that it’s not surprising that the Chinese people have a long history of losing one another. While working in Hong Kong, I remember, there was talk of jade pieces cut apart like puzzle parts into two distinct and intricate shapes, so no two pieces but these would fit together. A man and a woman, a father and son, a mother and daughter who felt doomed to be se
parated might each take one piece, hoping to use it one day to identify each other after separations of years, perhaps across thousands of miles. Many old traditional Chinese stories have the theme of families losing one another, going through a long search, and eventually reuniting. Those were the happy endings. More often, people in China periodically scraped by until they could scrape no longer and then dropped in their tracks; children were left along the roadside, husbands disappeared into battle and never returned; whole families, villages, and regions dried into dust or were carried away by floodwaters.

  When I first wrote this book, there was flooding along the Yangtze, the worst in half a century. Thousands of people had been killed, millions forced to evacuate. By mid-August 1998, the river’s raging waters had destroyed five million houses, according to Chinese news reports. Upward of ten million people, possibly, had been forced from their homes. Buildings still underwater by late summer included at least two orphanages. When winter hit, some observers expected a greater than usual number of children—girls whose parents simply could not care for them—to wind up at orphanage doors. In 2008, the Sichuan earthquake killed more than eighty thousand people, destroyed three million homes, and rendered some twenty million people homeless. It also left thousands of newly orphaned children.

  In the long, sad recounting of China’s disasters and turmoil, one event in recent history still looms at the top of the list—the famine that happened fifty years ago, following Mao Zedong’s bungled attempt to reorganize China’s agricultural system as part of the Great Leap Forward. The changes he instilled—forcing peasants out of individual farms and into communal production managed by a central authority, for instance—resulted in massive crop failures and starvation for farmers in the years between 1958 and 1961. Although the immensity of the tragedy escaped serious Western attention until well after the fact, estimates are now that some thirty million people died in a three-year period.