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

by Evans, Karin

  The little girl looked down, and then looked up, trying hard to grasp the information. “Va China?” she asked.

  Explanations of a child’s origins have to come again and again, presented each time in a way that’s appropriate to her stage of understanding. Along the way, more “whys” may emerge and there will be thorny issues to tackle.

  “Hundreds of ordinary questions that most people take for granted is information I’ve hungered for,” writes Nona Mock Wyman, who lost her mother at the age of two and a half. “Where was I born? What were my mother and father like? How did they meet? Did I look like my mother or did I look like my father?”

  I met Wyman, a charming Chinese American woman then in her sixties, when a friend saw an announcement of a lecture she was giving at the International House at the University of California at Berkeley. Wyman had grown up in a Chinese orphanage, the notice said, and I was eager to hear her perspective.

  As it turned out, Wyman had grown up in an orphanage not in China but in America, in an affluent area south of San Francisco. In an old mansion, the Ming Quong (“radiant light”) home had been established in the Depression years to care for young Chinese American girls who were casualties of a turbulent time. Women who’d left China searching for a better life found their plight worse, Wyman said. They were exploited, forced into prostitution, enslaved.

  Wyman, who had recently written an autobiography called Chopstick Childhood, was just old enough to remember when her mother took her to the orphanage, walked out the door, and never came back.10 It left Wyman with a lifetime hunger for answers. “I’m a second-generation Asian American woman,” Wyman said, “the product of a dark side of history.”

  Each year on Mother’s Day, it was the ritual at the Ming Quong home to pin a rose on each girl’s Sunday dress—red roses for girls whose mothers were living, white roses for those whose mothers were dead. And each year when Mother’s Day came, Wyman was left in limbo. No one could tell her whether her mother was alive or not, but she asked to wear a red rose anyway.

  “Miss Hayes paused and scanned my hopeful face,” Wyman wrote in her memoir. “Canvassing her large assortment of rose bushes, she strode over to a bush at the corner of the garden and expertly snipped a pink rose. Beaming, she handed it to me.”

  Most of the daughters of China today, I knew, would also be wearing pink roses.

  The adoption literature is full of stories chronicling the lifelong task adopted children can have of coming to terms with the loss of a birth parent. Such children often harbor a hope that somewhere, sometime, a birth mother will come looking. “The mother who abandons her daughter leaves a pile of questions behind,” wrote Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters. “Who was she? Who is she? Where is she? Why did she leave? There can be an intense feeling of grief at some point in the life of a child who has lost birth parents, for whatever reason.”

  The prevailing issue for the child is “Why did it happen?” followed closely by “Was there something wrong with me?” Adopted children are profoundly curious about how they came to be relinquished. Each child who asks such questions deserves to hear the truth from her birth mother, of course, but few of the daughters of China will ever get that gift. For this generation of adopted daughters, there will be additional questions. Why, for instance, were almost all the lost children in China girls?

  “Abandoned” is a harsh word, and it is tempting to soften the explanation, though the A word is long out of the barn, used, for instance, in the official documents each girl takes away from China. It’s worth noting, however, that parents in China who take their children to the doorstep of a police station—or even more blatantly, to the front door of the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs—with every intent of getting them to care and safety, are said to “abandon” their babies. In contrast, American women who bring their infants to the attention of a social service agency are said to “give up” or “relinquish” their children, and even that terminology now has given way to the gentler and more politically correct phrase, “make an adoption plan.”

  “The word ‘abandoned’ should be used only when it’s absolutely true,” says therapist Joyce Maguire Pavao. “When the little prom queen in this country leaves her baby in a trash can, that’s truly abandoning a baby. Here, in America,” she continues, “you can take your child to the department of social services, take yourself as a pregnant woman to an adoption attorney. In Asian countries it’s different. Leaving a child on the hospital steps or on the road en route to the hospital is as close as anyone can get to making an adoption plan.”

  Whatever words are used, there is no turning back, and eventually our daughters will want to know what happened. “Tell your daughter the truth. Tell her you don’t know where she came from,” says a young Chinese woman who has studied adoptive families in the United States. “I don’t believe we do any harm by saying ‘I don’t know’ to tough questions,” observes Jeanette Chu, who has dealt with these issues from the point of view of an adoptee as well as that of an adoptive mother.

  “Soft landing” is the phrase Chinese professor Huang Banghan uses when he talks about his hopes for the adopted daughters of China as they work their way through the questions of ethnicity, identity, cultural leanings, and the difficult explanations about their origins. One of two Chinese professors from Anhui province who has studied American adoptive families, Huang has also studied birth families in China. He talks of “building a bridge” between China and the United States, a bridge that will eventually help the children, their adoptive families, and the Chinese people, as well, understand one another and grow closer.

  According to Huang, many Chinese people don’t understand the intent of the foreigners who come to China to adopt their homeless children. He has been asked why the Americans don’t adopt babies in their own country. Might these adopted children, it is feared, be used for medical experiments or pressed into servitude or prostitution? Do childless foreigners even know how to care for Chinese children?

  As part of his research, Huang came to the United States and visited fifty adoptive families on the East Coast, including Amy DeNucci and her extended clan. He came away reassured that the current wave of East-West adoptions was beneficial for both adopted Chinese children and their American parents. He spoke of increased understanding between the two cultures, a “great experiment” in a new kind of family. And he predicted great success for the endeavor.

  Huang went on to work on a book for readers in China, attempting to provide birth parents with information about the fate of some of the children. “We want to publish this book and say, ‘Some of these girls are in America and they have happy lives and their adoptive parents are very nice to them,’” one of Professor Huang’s assistants told me. “We hope to publish many pictures, so the birth parents may know that these girls are happy.”

  As for the girls themselves, it seems clear from the experience of Korean children adopted in America that life as an Asian child, and particularly as an adopted Asian child, in a predominantly white world can be a struggle and sometimes painful. When that is the case, the best comfort of all seems to come from other young people in the same position. For adopted daughters from China, groups of peers and older children who’ve paved the way may eventually offer the greatest companionship in an ongoing journey of self-discovery.

  Kelly’s extended family includes seventeen “sisters” or “cousins”—all the other little girls adopted by the families with whom we traveled to China. This family is growing all the time as we meet other families and welcome one little girl after another into the fold. When our second daughter, Franny, came home, we added a whole new group. Just about everywhere we traveled now, there seemed to be at least one moment of recognition when we saw another family that looked like us. It happened at a restaurant in Ohio’s Amish country, it happened on a beach in Hawaii, it happened in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. Sometimes I think families whose little girls have come from China need a secret handshake. Usu
ally a gentle inquiry, out of the children’s earshot, does the trick.

  Over time, as is probably natural, Mark and I, and other families I have talked with, have come to think less about the sad and baffling background events in China and more about our astonishingly good fortune, the sheer richness of our lives together. These girls may have once been lost, but now they were clearly found, deeply and completely wanted. We may still have those blank pages in our daughters’ baby books and issues to face down the road, but we—and they—have lots of company. Beyond our small circle is the wider community of East-West families, as well as people back in China—not just Professor Huang, but orphanage caretakers, foster mothers, and Buddhist monks chanting in that Guangzhou temple—all wishing China’s daughters a soft landing.

  Just as Kelly was about to celebrate her third birthday, we received sad news, word that one of her unofficial cousins, four years old, adopted the previous year from the same orphanage, had died of cancer. We had never met this little girl, who lived in the Midwest with her adoptive parents, but Mark and I were profoundly saddened and affected by the news. We could so clearly imagine the events in her short life—the orphanage she lived in, how long her new parents waited for her, how they felt when they first held her. In part at least, this girl’s story was Kelly’s story. She was a member of our extended family, and her loss was a loss for us all.

  8

  In the Light of the Autumn Moon

  My loving mother, thread in hand,

  Mended the coat I have on now,

  Stitch by stitch, just before I left home,

  Thinking that I might be gone

  a long time.

  How can a blade of young grass

  Ever repay the warmth of the

  spring sun?

  —Meng Jia, “Traveler’s Song”1

  The full moon was high in the October sky, fat and luminous, the light casting a yellow river of reflection across the waters of San Francisco Bay. I took Kelly out to moongaze, part of ters of San Francisco Bay. I took Kelly out to moongaze, part of the observations for the Chinese Autumn Moon Festival. I thought it was a perfect time to honor my daughter’s birth parents, since they, too, might have stared at that same moon during the ceremonies in southern China.

  The Autumn Moon Festival is traditionally a time for families to reunite and pay homage to departed ancestors. Also known as the Day of Reunion, it falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month according to the Chinese calendar. That’s when the moon is said to be brightest and fullest, the moonlight most beautiful. In the part of the world where Kelly comes from, families, in the light of glowing paper lanterns, would have been eating traditional round mooncakes made of thin dough stuffed with fruit, nuts, meat, and sweet bean paste.

  The first year we were home from China, the festival fell in October, which was an auspicious month for us anyway. Kelly’s birthday came that month, and it was in October that we first met her in that orphanage waiting room. My father had also passed away in October, and one of the last sights he saw on the night he died was a full autumn moon in the Arizona sky.

  Now, as I held Kelly, saying, “See the beautiful moon?” both of us looking up at the luminescence in the vast darkness of the sky, I said a silent prayer for my father and mother, then for my daughter’s birth mother and father. It was a little too early to talk about them with Kelly, but I knew the time would come soon. Bathed in moonlight, did they sometimes think about their daughter and wonder about her fate?

  A few nights after our first try at moongazing, Kelly pointed to the door. “Moon?” she said. We’d come up with our own version of an ancient Chinese ritual, I realized. In Buddhist culture the moon can represent awakening. I couldn’t think of a better setting in which to tell a child about her faraway first family and the love that can tie all people together than to look up in the sky at that astonishing sight. “Okay, Kelly,” I said. “Let’s go look at the moon.” The moon festival, a young woman from the Pearl River Delta area had told me, was a time for families to tell one another the stories of their lives. I thought what a gift it could be if the daughters of China could someday hear a lost mother’s story, but I doubted it would happen very soon.

  I had so often tried to picture these mothers in the shadows, particularly the woman who gave birth to my daughter, wondering who she was and what her life was like. There were no real clues, just intuitive thoughts about how she must have been with this baby. Loving and desperate, I think. Loving because her daughter is sweet-natured and trusts people. Desperate because I can’t imagine any other state of mind that would accommodate the reality of giving birth, caring for a child for three months, and then laying her down in a marketplace and walking away.

  In my imagination, this mythical birth mother moves out of the shadows, comes toward me. She is beautiful and, like Kelly, when she says hello, she talks in a whisper. She carries her grief in the hollows of her cheeks, in the slump of her shoulders. She is far younger than I.

  “It is strange, but I had always wanted a daughter,” I hear her saying. I imagine this partly out of my own projection and wishful thinking, I know. I want my daughter to have been wanted. Of course, like so much else, I will never know this truth or untruth, either. But the likelihood is worth clinging to.

  I nudge her to continue. “Shortly before midnight,” she says softly, “in the light of the autumn moon, my baby was born. My girlfriend was with me, and a woman who knows about these things. I lay on a narrow cot and tried not to scream. We had to be secret. It was October and still warm outside, and the windows were open. ‘Ai,’ said the midwife when she saw I had a girl. ‘Bad news.’

  “But I took that baby to my breast. They cut the cord and said my child was healthy. ‘A Rat Year baby,’ said my friend. ‘A strong baby.’ I felt exhausted but happy. Happy. And I stayed there for a few hours but then it was daybreak and I had to go. So I wrapped up that baby in cloth and I hid her under my clothes and I went out and walked up the street.

  “I knew a place I could go to for a month, and so I did, up some long stairs and into the back hall where a friend lived and that’s where I stayed. Back in the village I would not be welcomed. I ran away when I knew this baby would be coming, and I hope no one knows where I am.

  “And the father? He might have come around for a son, but not for this. So I didn’t even tell him. I stayed and my friend brought food and I thought about what I was going to do, how I could find work in a factory and still take care of this baby. And for a few weeks we just lay there mostly, the baby and I, and I fed her and told her stories about the village where I’d come from, about the oxen and the chickens and the little boys who kept knocking over the water bowl. I longed to take her home with me, but I could not. And so we stayed until the day my friend came home and said her family was coming to stay with her and I had to leave. I walked for two days with the baby, thinking I would meet someone or see someone who could help, that there would be a little place to stay.

  “The second night I slept in an alleyway, and the third night I ran out of money and my food was gone and I knew then I couldn’t care for this baby. What chance would she have, with a wandering mother who had no milk or money? I left her near the police station, in the market, in a pile of melons.

  “I watched. After I left her, I watched, and soon a farmer settling into the stall saw her. He held up my baby and yelled at everybody around to come and tell him, please, just how this baby came to be in his fruit. There was silence. Everybody knew. The police came, and they took her. She didn’t cry yet. I wanted to scream, to run out of my hiding place and take her back. But it was too late, and I bit my knuckle and stayed. I watched as they drove away. And that is the last I saw of her.

  “I knew someone would find her and feed her, and after that, I hoped, she’d be strong enough to survive. But I don’t know what happened. I have suffered ever since. I see her eyes at night, and I feel her cheek in the morning—until I wake up and find it’s just th
e breeze on my face.”

  In my imagination, the mother leans forward. Her shoulders tremble.

  “I know the orphanage in the city. It’s big and they have many babies, and I hope that is where she went. They have food and clothing. And sometimes, foreign parents come and get the babies.

  “I have seen the buses come with the Americans,” she says. “It is my hope that someday years from now I will see a young girl get off one of those buses, a young girl who looks like me, and she will come looking. But I know it’s just a dream.”

  So was my vision of this mother. But for now, it was all we had.

  When Mark and I first began gathering what fragments of Kelly’s past that we could, the young woman from Jiangmen I’d been in touch with promised to send us some photographs of the marketplace where our daughter was said to have been found. The pictures showed huge yellow squash hanging from hooks, oranges piled on tables, honeydew melons, apples and pears, bunches of greens. Outside the market were fruit stands; inside, the stalls that sold meat and fish.

  “The market is usually the most promising and dirtiest place in China,” wrote the young woman, on paper thin as a tissue. “It is surrounded by residential apartment buildings. No one here would guess that the people living in those nice apartments would abandon their newborn baby unless the mother got pressure from the traditional idea that boys are superior to girls.”

  Very evident in the photographs were several of Kelly’s favorite items in life—oranges, grapes, and motorcycles. When I showed her the pictures, she studied them intently, then grinned and pointed at the motorcycles. “Mooms!” she said, with her usual enthusiasm. One of the thriving industries in Jiangmen, it turned out, was the manufacture of motorcycles.