by Evans, Karin
I tucked away the photographs so she could look at them again over the years.
For every daughter lost, somewhere there was once a mother and a father, and grandparents, perhaps an aunt or uncle or two. But who, really, are these families left behind? Though any number of adoptive parents have asked that question, it’s a query that remained, until the fall of 1998, largely unanswered. Theories had been advanced, anecdotes and occasional clues passed around, but the Chinese government had not volunteered any information about abandoning families. No research had been released that sharpened the portrait of these people or added to a general understanding of their circumstances or their motives. Nor were abandoning families—faced with their own fears of government reprisal, public shame, or both—likely to come forward on their own.
But beginning in 1995, Kay Johnson, professor of Asian studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts (also an adoptive mother) and two Chinese professors from Anhui University, Huang Banghan (he of the wish for “soft landings”) and Wang Liyao, began studying infant abandonment in China. They managed to persuade 237 families, mostly married couples living in rural areas, to tell their stories. The researchers published their report in the September 1998 issue of Population and Development Review and later in Johnson’s book Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son.2
In about half the cases, they found, the decision to abandon a daughter was made by the father. Another 40 percent of the time, the decision was made jointly by both parents, and in only a small portion of cases did the mother act alone. Most parents at the time were in their mid-twenties to late thirties. Most had an average education, primary school or junior middle school, for people of their age living in that particular region.
“In most cases where the father was the primary decision-maker,” reported Johnson, “the birth mother knew about and at least reluctantly concurred in the father’s decision, although birth mothers frequently expressed emotional pain and remorse for the act.” Of the families studied, sixty-nine had abandoned a second daughter, sixty-two a third daughter, twenty-six a fourth daughter, and three a fifth daughter. The vast majority of children were abandoned within six months of their birth.
Most of the daughters in the sample, admittedly a small one, were abandoned close to home, and about half the parents claimed to know what happened to the child. It was extremely rare for an older sibling, rather than the youngest, to be abandoned. Parents were likely to keep a firstborn daughter, as well as sons who exceeded the birth quota.
Thus, the typical abandoned child was a healthy newborn girl who had one or more older sisters and no brothers as yet. She was let go because her birth parents already had at least one other daughter and wanted a son.
The researchers also looked into the adoption of abandoned girls within China. They found this a common practice, although discouraged at the time of the study by government policies. Whereas adoptive Chinese parents named practical and economic reasons for taking in sons, they took in daughters for more emotional reasons—to “increase the joy of life,” for instance.
Johnson and her colleagues had done what no one had done before—given parents like me a peek behind closed doors, a glimpse at the circumstances that surrounded some of the mothers and fathers back in China.
If what Johnson found in her study can be applied broadly, perhaps the most important finding to have emerged from the interviews is the fact that it’s likely that a fair portion of adopted daughters have a sister (or two) somewhere back in China, and if the family hopes were realized, a brother. To the equation of lost daughters and lost mothers, we could now add another element: lost siblings.
The revelation that half the parents believed they knew what had happened to their daughters made me wonder anew if someone might have been watching the market that fateful day in Kelly’s life, or keeping an eye on the orphanage door when I walked away with a child in my arms.
Just after the great film director Akira Kurosawa’s death, there was a screening of Rashomon on our local movie channel. The Japanese classic is a reminder, of course, of how many conflicting realities can be spun out of a single event. But I had forgotten the scene at the end where the cries of a small abandoned baby catch the attention of one of the characters, who picks up the child. “What evil people,” says a bystander. “They have their fun and then throw the child away.”
“Oh, no,” says the man rocking the child in his arms. “Don’t you see the amulet they left with her, trying to protect her? Who knows how they suffered?”
Of course, that was Japan and a scene from a film. But in China, in real life and real times, similar scenes had occurred in provinces east and west, north and south, in probably every village and city in the country. A powerful combination of events had simply collided to produce untold suffering among young and old alike, though the cries of China’s lost girls—millions of them—as well as the cries of all their mothers had been largely drowned out.
I still wanted to know more about how the mothers felt, but I was of course viewing everything through the lens of my own experience. A Chinese friend who grew up in Beijing and had to leave after being involved in the student protest movement there, listened one afternoon while I speculated what Kelly’s mother might be thinking. She shook her head. “You know,” she said, “I think there is not the looking inward in China that you imagine, especially for those in poverty. People are too busy surviving.”
Although parents like myself now know more than we used to about some of the lost parents of China, information about particular mothers or fathers remains hard to come by, perhaps impossible. Maybe someday DNA testing and matching might reunite some families, but it was also likely that the majority of birth mothers in China would keep their secrets.
Uncertainty is where we began, and uncertainty may be where we end.
A day or two after I’d been thinking about all this, I woke in the night, stuck by something in the quilt on my bed. As I fumbled about in the covers, I felt another sharp stab. Digging at the tufts of fabric, I found a thin needle. The quilt is hand-stitched, made in China, yet one more item in my household that fills me with uncomfortable ambivalence. It’s a beautiful copy of an old wedding-ring pattern, meant to appeal to American buyers, but like the soapstone Buddha on my altar, too much sacrifice undoubtedly went into it.
When I pulled out the needle—a hair-thin shaft with an almost invisible, impossible-to-thread eye—it was as if the quilt’s anonymous seamstress had poked me. Someone threaded that needle, sewed the stitches, lost her place in the cotton batting, and lost the needle. I found it, though it had to prick me in the night to get my attention.
It was easy to see how anyone could let such a tiny needle slip through her tired fingers. But what were my chances of finding that needle on the other side of the planet in the middle of the night, just as I was at work on a book concerning my daughter’s life back in China? Just as I was trying to fathom the lives of the lost mothers of adopted Chinese babies—the philosophical equivalent, perhaps, of searching for a needle in a haystack.
The needle in the quilt seemed a rather pointed clue to my inquiry. First, it suggested to me that some things are impossible to trace, but second, that nothing comes completely anonymously. The hand of the maker is always there. The stitches in my quilt have their story to tell: They are precise, likely made by small, deft hands flying like birds across the fabric. Intent—probably weary—eyes followed the pattern. A human being, most likely a woman (or women? Were there quilting bees in China?) worked for hours on this quilt, poking and pulling this thin needle through the fabric.
The Navajo always weave some intentional bit of imperfection into their rugs, a flaw through which the spirits can move. So do Amish women, in their quilts. In Chinese art, an empty spot is known as a fertile void. That’s what I seem to have ended up with for now, a gap ripe for imaginings. Through the needle in my quilt came the spirit of the seamstress. Someone with careful hands. Someone with a sense of beauty. S
omeone working way too hard. And through the poke in the night came a new way of looking at the birth mothers of China.
The daughters of China, set down in public places, found and cared for, had blessed thousands of families thousands of miles away. But by necessity in most cases, the blessings came as secret offerings. The vast majority of the birth mothers of China had for their own reasons faded into the distance, an unfortunate fact of life not only for the lost daughters, but for the women themselves. “I’m sad my daughter’s mother will never know her child,” said adoptive mother Stephanie Chan, “but I’m happy she was brave enough to give birth to her.”
“One thing I know in defense of these women who abandon their babies,” said an American adoptive mother who lives and works in China, “is that they must have some special kind of love for these unborn souls because it is very easy, and encouraged, to have an abortion here.”
Do these Chinese mothers suffer? How could they not? They may be busy surviving, but there is no way they can forget. Grief, pushed beneath the surface, still bubbles up. Shadowing such questions concerning the feelings of birth parents, there’s sometimes a dark undercurrent of prejudice among non-Chinese, a supposition that life in China and other parts of Asia is somehow cheap and that people somehow suffer less, and that mothers are less likely to mourn. It’s an opinion that was thrown about casually during the Vietnam War and that hovers below the surface of some conversations today. Robert Shaplen, the eloquent journalist who covered Vietnam for The New Yorker, put such odious comparisons down very succinctly. Asian mothers hugged their children as tenderly as did any other mothers, he wrote, and if there is more fatalism among Asians because death is more common and more sudden, there is also ample compassion and love.3
Furthermore, any woman who gives birth and then loses that infant, by whatever means, still has all the original physiological attachment. As Natalie Angier observes in Woman: An Intimate Geography: “There are the stimuli of attachment that we know of, and those that slip in unsung and unknowable. Years and years after a woman has delivered a child, she continues to carry vestiges of that child in her body.” A woman who is separated from her child after just a few days or weeks has very specific physical reminders of that infant. A nursing mother who sets down a child will have strong physical nudges from that child for some time to come.
Where did this wonderful daughter of mine come from? From whose flesh, I can’t say. Nor at this point can I tell my daughter any more than a generalized story about her origins. Even the geography is a bit loose, vaguer than I used to think. I like to believe the scene I have conjured up of the winter melons, but she might have been found near the flowers for sale, or even miles away in another place altogether. The harder we poke at such information, the vaguer it can become.
This unknown mother’s story could be any number of stories. She could have suffered in countless, unfathomable ways. She could have faced the kind of poverty that took her down to her last dried yam or used bus ticket. She could have found herself carrying a child to the public square, sobbing all the way, and have seen no other way out. But with that gesture, as she set her baby down, she probably wished her daughter a future better than her own.
This baby was found; she was meant to be found—that is the important point here. The story that Kelly’s mother had to offer, I realized, was closer than we thought. The best evidence was Kelly herself. Her sweetness and courage, her humor and grace. Her mother left the biggest clue of all in this baby’s ready smile. Her mother loved her. If I know nothing else about this woman who gave me the gift of this beautiful child, I believe this: When she cared for this baby, she cared wholeheartedly. When she set her down, she set her down gently.
During an appearance of Thich Nhat Hanh’s that I attended in Berkeley, the Vietnamese monk took questions from the audience. One man raised a hand and said that he just could not forgive his father, who had abandoned him at a young age. The serene monk gave the most beautiful answer. All humans, he said, are born to love and cherish their children. When they are unable to do that, some sort of overwhelming cause or condition must have interfered with that ability. It seemed such a compassionate explanation—and so close to that phrase in one of the notes found with a Chinese child—“heavy pressures that are too difficult to explain.”
9
The Search for Roots
You’ve just come from my old hometown.
You must have some news of home.
The day you left, was the plum tree
By my window in bloom yet?
—Wang Wei, “News of Home”1
The people all rushed out to meet me,” said May Wong. A young woman of Chinese heritage who grew up in northern California, Wong was speaking about a trip she took to southern China when she was twenty-five. She walked into the tiny village her father had left forty years before. I spoke with May Wong one afternoon because I wanted to know what it was like for someone Chinese American who’d grown up in this country to go to China in search of her familial roots. “You start to question why you were brought up the way you were,” said Wong, a lively young woman with short dark hair. “There’s a feeling that you’ve missed something. Here in America, everyone is always working for the future and there’s not much emphasis on where you’ve been. In China, the focus is on where the family has been.”
Wong described feelings that by now sounded familiar. She said her aim growing up in northern California’s wine country, was to assimilate, to blend in. “It wasn’t until I went off to college at the University of California at Berkeley that I looked around and saw that the population was one-third Asian.” Although she’d grown up speaking the dialect of her father’s native village with her family at home, she didn’t speak or understand the area’s more widely spoken Cantonese dialect, and by her own admission, she hadn’t paid much attention to the traditions her family had tried to pass down as she was growing up. “Going to college was a turning point,” she said. “I realized how little I knew about being Chinese, and I wanted to change that.”
She heard about a program at San Francisco’s Chinese Culture Center called In Search of Roots, and was drawn to it. “I think it happened the year it did because my parents are getting older,” she said. “I knew that anything that hadn’t been passed along wouldn’t be.” The Chinese Culture Center leads thoughtfully planned trips to southern China each year for young people like May Wong. A handful of interns, aged sixteen to twenty-five, spend a year researching their individual family trees, the history of Chinese people in America, and background about Guangdong province and China.
As part of the program, the interns take a ferry trip to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, a beautiful spot now run by the National Park Service but clouded by a regrettable past. A sort of Ellis Island West, Angel Island was the port of entry (and sometimes the point of non-entry) for thousands of Chinese who came to California between 1910 and 1940. After a boat trip from China, which itself often lasted a month, the new arrivals were interrogated, examined for infectious diseases, and made to wait. Over the years, some 175,000 immigrants were detained here, for weeks, for months. Some were sent back to China.
The old barracks and immigration detention center still stand today, and the children of immigrants come here to get a sense of what their ancestors went through, to confront a time of discrimination and suffering. Young Chinese Americans who grew up in America tour the buildings where many of their relatives whiled away their days and nights, often in despair.
May Wong knew that her grandfather had spent time on Angel Island, but when she actually saw the old buildings, read the reflections of those who’d been held here, she found it more distressing than she expected. She had assumed her grandfather entered America just as immigrants of other ethnicities had and was shocked to learn about the discrimination against the Chinese. In the old barracks, where immigrants slept on triple bunk beds, sad poems penned by Cantonese villagers from the Pearl River Delta still decorate
the walls. “Nights are long and the pillow cold; who can pity my loneliness?” reads one. “After experiencing such loneliness and sorrow, why not just return home and learn to plow the fields?”
Her eyes opened, Wong went off to China with the other interns to visit the old villages and cemeteries, to search for ancestral tablets bearing their family names. In a tiny village in southern China, Wong was shown the way to her father’s family home. “It felt like a window back in time,” she said. “There was the family altar, and there on the wall was a picture of my grandparents and of my three eldest sisters. The village was pretty much preserved as it was. They had electricity; that was a change, but everything else had remained simple.
“Everyone wanted to know how my parents were,” said Wong. “The people in the village know they’re the keepers of history. They know what’s going on with my family. We looked at genealogy that went back thirty-six generations.
“I told them I wanted to do the ancestral worship,” Wong said. She lighted three sticks of incense and bowed, to unite the past, the present, and the future. “I reflected on the many generations that had preceded me and realized that my family’s experience in the United States was a mere visit compared to our history in China. I could understand why they said to me, ‘Oh, you’ve come back.’ We’d only been gone a generation.”
Not everyone who traveled with her found such close links. “Some were four generations removed from the village,” Wong told me. “In past years, people have gone on the trips and not found anything. But even then, going halfway around the world, some found the answers were at home. One person, having gone to China, found a great-uncle in Oakland, California.”
