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

by Evans, Karin

  At her first doctor’s appointment, Kelly was pronounced in good health. When they drew blood for a test, it took two nurses to hold her down. She put every muscle into the battle, screamed more loudly than I would have thought a small child capable of. And the minute it was over, her face still red and wet, she was happily clapping her hands for the nurses.

  She took to feeding Maddy, who’s been “Mah-Mah” to all of us ever since, cookies under the dining room table. The two were a perfect match. Kelly was bigger, but Maddy was faster. The dog, who’d been so scared of strangers that she hid under the upstairs bed anytime guests came to our house, now mustered a kind of noble courage. When the first visitors walked into the living room to see the baby, Maddy crept down the stairs from her hiding place. Shaking slightly, she crossed the room and sat down beside Kelly on the rug and stayed there, eyes straight ahead, standing firm, as if she had just been waiting to take up her duties. Twelve quaking pounds of guard dog.

  Kelly, in turn, was remarkably sweet to the dog, hugging her, softly cooing at her. These small beings seemed meant for each other. Both clearly knew what love was all about, as did our wonderful old husky, who waited just long enough for us to get home from China. Then, sixteen years old and weak as a kitten, Annie slipped out of our lives.

  I often looked at my little daughter now and thanked the stars for whatever saved her—most likely the courage of her birth parents; certainly the fortune to land in a good orphanage, the blessings of a sturdy constitution, Max’s intercession. I also wondered what survival instincts she might have quickly learned on her own behalf. When we put her to bed one night, she cried to be picked up, and then seemed to swallow her sobs. I thought she’d fallen asleep, but as I peeked into her room, I saw first one little hand come out from between the crib slats, then the other. Silently she pressed her hands together and began playing patty-cake. Did this melt someone else’s heart as it melted mine that night? Did she succeed in attracting the attention of the orphanage caretakers when so many other little girls were vying for care? When she was hungry now she would stand beside me in the kitchen, howling and pointing to her open mouth. What happened to more sickly children, to the children who just gave up?

  Our concerns soon became the common challenges of any parent of a toddler—how to childproof the house (and childproof it again; she learned so quickly), how to keep her engaged while we cooked dinner or tried to grocery shop. We were figuring things out moment by moment and building a life together. I’d never felt quite so happy or quite so tired or quite so aware of the responsibility I had to another human being. And I knew in my bones that waiting for Kelly Xiao Yu was the best thing I’d ever done in my life.

  An old Chinese story describes how lovers are predestined to meet: An invisible red thread leads from one person to another, no matter how far apart the two may be. Maxine Hong Kingston writes of hearing the legend from her mother: “A red string around your ankle ties you to the person you’ll marry. He’s already been born, and he’s on the other end of the string.”6

  Lately, the red thread idea has been taken up by the Chinese American adoption community, to include parents and children who are destined to be together—even though an ocean may lie between them initially. Some adoptive parents attribute the perfect fullness of the match to God or the Buddha or the Great Spirit or Guan Yin. Others give credit to the China Center of Adoption Affairs in Beijing.

  “I feel as if the whole connection was there from the beginning,” said Carole Sopp, who adopted a little girl in 1997.

  “When I first heard about adoption in China, I knew without a doubt that’s where I was going and that’s where she was, whoever she was going to be and whatever she was going to look like.

  “Interestingly enough, I started the process just about the time my daughter was conceived,” she said, “and when I first chose to go to China I chose the name May, spelled in the Chinese way, Mei, and I thought that will be her middle name, no matter what her first name was. When the facilitator called me to say I had a child waiting, he said her middle name was Mei. Even he took a deep breath and said, ‘Wow,’ when I told him the name I had had in mind.

  “Everything fit,” said Sopp, a single mother who works as a school nurse in southern California. “I look at my daughter and see myself. We have the same hair color, the same eye color. I’m actually amazed with how alike we are in many ways—what things we like and what things we do and what things comfort us. She loves to lie in bed and be covered with a blanket like I do. She shakes her leg to fall asleep and so do I.”

  For many people who adopt, the reality of a child in their lives is, in and of itself, a miracle, a gift of grace after numerous miscarriages, perhaps, or failed infertility treatments, or, simply, after too much time gone by. But, as so many parents have told me, it’s not just a child that’s crucial, but this child. “I knew she was the one we were waiting for,” said a father from Texas. “I pictured her long before I saw her,” said a mother from Washington state.

  Susan August-Brown, who adopted a little girl fifteen months old from south China and took her home to Maine, said, “She was my daughter from the moment I laid eyes on her. Her caretaker said, ‘This baby knows who her mommy is.’ It was true. It was magical. We had finally found each other and there was no doubt in either of us. We belonged to each other from this day forward. In my heart I believe from the moment she had been conceived, her little soul was on the journey into my life.”

  In trying to explain all this, I realize we enter some strange emotional territory, but it’s ground shared by any number of adoptive parents I have heard from. Although people certainly exist who view the process with a matter-of-fact, perhaps even a cynical, eye, one after another adoptive parent I have talked with has echoed a consistent conviction: The child they were matched with was the perfect child for them. They knew it the moment they saw the tiny photograph; they knew it the first time they held the baby; they’ve known it every day of their lives together. “It sounds almost biblical,” said a friend, listening to some of the accounts. He was thinking, he said, of baby Moses tucked in the rushes. Bonds were sealed, sometimes in minutes. “It defies reason,” said a father in northern California, “but you do feel as if something is at work you don’t quite understand.”

  On a sunny midwinter morning not long after our return from China, I was standing in the kitchen holding Kelly, when I was struck by one of those bolts of clear realization that seem to come out of nowhere. As I pressed her chest against mine, her soft cheek brushing my face, I suddenly, absolutely, knew that I could not love this child any more than I did right then. I loved her without condition, without reservation, forever. There was simply no room left in my heart to love her more.

  I can’t explain how or why this has happened, but I knew then, just as I have known every moment since, that I am holding nothing back, that there are no other circumstances of birth or fate that could make me love this child any more—not if I’d conceived her myself in some specific and memorable moment (accompanied by fireworks, stardust, or Mozart), not if I’d carried her in my body for nine months, not if I’d held her in my arms any sooner in her young life. No fact of genealogy or physiology or of actual fleshly attachment could add to my certainty that we were fated to be together, that we are completely, whatever the differences in our physical makeup or our ethnic or cultural origins, mother and daughter.

  When I mentioned this to Mark, he said he felt the same way: overwhelmed by feelings of love, surprised by how deep the currents were, how quickly he’d been taken over by them. While we were waiting and trying to picture our future child, we wanted to get to China as quickly as possible, pick her up—whoever she was—and bring her home. But the minute we stood in that orphanage and looked into little Xiao Yu’s sleepy eyes, I realized that everything had fallen into place perfectly. The memories of the long wait faded away; in fact we were glad for it. Had we traveled to China any sooner, or just a little bit later, we would h
ave missed her. And, had we traveled a month earlier, I would have missed those last days with my father. Had we brought our daughter home earlier, before my father got sick, we might not have named her Kelly. Which of course was the name she was meant to have.

  Why such feelings of perfection, emerging from what on the surface seems a rather bureaucratic shuffling of the cosmic deck?

  “Who picks these babies, anyway?” asks a woman waiting to go to China. It’s a good question. Most people who adopt from China can’t walk into an orphanage, look through the cribs, and choose a child. I say “most” because as in everything else in that immense nation, there have been exceptions. Particularly among Americans working in China in the 1980s, there were cases where people visited orphanages and had some say in the selection of a child. And in the case of older children, adoptive parents have on occasion asked for a particular child whose picture may have been posted by an adoption agency.

  For a while, a number of adoptive parents alluded to some hypothetical mystical matching room somewhere within the Chinese government adoption bureau in Beijing, the China Center of Adoption Affairs. Early in the process, I myself imagined such a place, where sensitive officials went through dossier after dossier from American parents, looking at the photographs of the applicants, noting certain traits and interests, and then turned to the list of available children, finding one who seemed just right.

  In this scenario, I suppose, a professor of music might be matched with a toddler who artfully banged plates, or an athletic couple might be given a child who turned somersaults on the orphanage’s straw mats. About the time Mark and I were leaving for China, a rumor went around that sometimes there was even a bit of mischief at work: Parents who’d been pains in the butt to deal with might just be paired up with an equally demanding child; whiny applicants might find themselves with an infant who more than matched their fussing.

  According to more reliable accounts at the time, the process by which the Chinese bureaucracy matched a particular child to a foreign applicant was considerably less personal and quite variable—depending on province, orphanage, momentary circumstances, local whim, and the relative clout of various adoption agencies and liaison workers. Parents’ hopes and children’s futures were negotiated by a variety of people, including provincial officials, orphanage directors, and foreign adoption workers. Though there is a central Chinese government adoption ministry, most pairings were made at the local level, rather than in Beijing. Some foreign agency staff may have sufficient influence to occasionally handpick children, but most referrals were a combination of several factors, including how many children a particular orphanage had available at a particular moment.

  That doesn’t mean that the matches aren’t perfect, or that some unknown hand wasn’t at work. I’d seen at least two mothers and adopted daughters, as well as a father-daughter pair, who looked so much alike it was uncanny. Had the facilitator planned this? Had the local officials had a hand in matching the photographs of the parents to the photos of the babies? Was it blind chance?

  When Tony Xing Tan, director of the China Adoption Research Program at the University of South Florida, had the opportunity to visit the legendary matching room, long after we’d adopted our daughters, some of the intentional matchmaking was confirmed. “The Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs’ matching procedure involves scanning the children and parents’ headshots and placing them side-by-side on the computer screen to see if they visually match,” Tan reported. “I watched as a staff member tried to find, from a pool of eligible children, a child with curly hair to match the potential adoptive father’s curly hair. She was very relieved when she finally found one with a full head of curly hair.”

  But this being the real world—and not an easy one for small, frail children—there were also times when the red thread seemed to fray. Mixed with all the miracles, there have been sad mix-ups and profound tragedies in the matching process, too. Some babies designated for adoption have died before their intended parents have gotten to China to pick them up. Older children have sobbed uncontrollably when first presented with their foreign parents. Occasionally, after parents have been referred one child, a healthier child has been substituted for an ailing one. Some parents have had to make an agonizing decision on the spot in China of whether to take on the responsibility of a child with health or adjustment problems more serious than they had expected. Some people have said yes and others have said no.

  But whatever the bumps on the road, just about every Chinese adoption story I have heard seemed to have its own element of coincidence, sheer magic, or surprise.

  Take Amy DeNucci’s tale. An insurance agent who works with her father in Atlanta, DeNucci told me how she came to go to China: “I come from a family where my mother had my brother and me and then adopted four children,” she said in a soft drawl. “So we pretty much realized that adoption was a natural way of adding members to your family. When I grew up, I always knew I would have an adopted child.”

  Unfortunately, of her adopted siblings, DeNucci noted, one had been diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, one had suffered the effects of maternal deprivation, and the other two had had their birth mothers attempt to reclaim them. “Of the horror stories you hear about adoption,” said DeNucci, “we had one of each in our family.”

  But eventually, when DeNucci and her husband, Daniel, were living with two young sons in a five-bedroom house, the time seemed ripe for another child, and she particularly wanted a daughter. Through a friend, DeNucci heard about the girls available in China and she sent off her paperwork. At the time DeNucci and her husband didn’t fit the parameters, since applicants at the time had to be over thirty-five to adopt a healthy infant. “I was only thirty-one and my husband was thirty-four,” she recalled, “but I said, ‘I don’t care. I want you to do it anyway, because I feel this is what I need to do.’”

  DeNucci asked her mother, Jerilyn Burman, to travel to China with her. Burman agreed, and they were waiting for the paperwork to be finished when Valentine’s Day brought a surprise. “My parents asked, ‘How would you feel if we adopted a baby, too?’” said DeNucci. “They said, ‘What a waste it would be to go to China and come back empty-handed.’

  “My mother was fifty-four,” said DeNucci. “She said the reason she was asking me was that we’d have to take care of the child if anything happened to her and my father.” Mother and daughter left for China together in September 1996. DeNucci went to Zhanjiang in Guangdong province in the south of China, her mother went to Hangzhou in the north. DeNucci picked up a seven-month-old daughter whom she named Meredith. Her mother adopted a two-year-old girl who had a severe cleft palate and lip. Sarah, she named her. Meredith had been found on a street corner; Sarah in a shipyard.

  Not long after the two women came home with their new children, they were visited by a pair of Chinese officials who were making a tour of adoptive families in the United States. “They wanted to find out why there was so much interest in adopting their children,” DeNucci told me, “and they wanted to know how the children were doing.

  “They wanted to know how I thought I had the right to apply when I wasn’t the right age,” DeNucci recalled. “I said I did it because all they could say was no, and if they said no, well then, at least I had asked. Then I asked them, which surprised them, I think, ‘Look, you’re the ones who gave me the baby. Why did you do it?’ And they said, ‘Well, if you asked, you must have really wanted her.’”

  Since coming home to Atlanta, Sarah had undergone three major surgeries to repair her lip and palate, followed by intensive speech therapy, and was doing well. Her “niece” Meredith was also thriving. When I last spoke with DeNucci, she was taking care of both little girls because her mother was off to China again, this time to bring home a sister for Sarah and another “auntie” for Meredith—a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, whom they named Caitlin.

  It is out of such desire, persistence, courage, and luck that the subculture of adopted daughters
of China has grown, that the red thread has kept winding itself around one family after another.

  Sometimes, in strange twists, the thread has tangled itself around a couple of families at once. When two baby girls from one orphanage were put into two waiting sets of arms, the parents, both single mothers, noticed that the two looked remarkably alike, enough alike to be twins. However, the girls had been found separately, each in a different place at a different time, so according to the intricacies of Chinese adoption protocol, they couldn’t be classified as siblings—even if they were, in fact, related. So the families just spent time together while they were in China and kept in close touch once they were back in the United States.

  Eventually, they decided to have their daughters’ DNA tested, which proved the girls to be fraternal twins. Though the two began life in the United States in separate households— Rachel living in southern California, her twin, Madison, living in the north—the two families soon chose to link destinies, joining each other for trips to Disneyland and family reunions. “The girls have a special relationship,” said Madison’s mother, Cheri Hutchins. “Madison gets together with other children who were adopted at the same time, but she and Rachel have a different relationship. They are more physical, holding hands, hugging. They stay very close.” By the time the girls turned four, the southern California mother had moved north, closer to her daughter’s twin. The result was one big, loving extended family, with the grandparents claiming not one granddaughter, but two. In years since, a number of other twins have been discovered, living in two different adoptive households.