by Evans, Karin
11
Through the Chinese Looking Glass
The white sun sinks behind the hills.
The Yellow River rushes to the sea.
Want to see a thousand miles further?
Let’s climb a little higher.
—Wang Zhi-Huan, “Climbing Stork Tower”1
In the fall, in the light of the autumn moon, my thoughts drift back to China. The memories of our times there still are palpable: The first time I touched the smooth dimples in a soft, small hand, the incense wafting around the Goddess of Mercy in the Buddhist temple, the faint and not-so-faint sound of babies crying. Franny in Nanjing, bravely trudging up 392 steps in the scorching heat.
In Guangzhou at this time of year, the air has lost the heaviness of summer’s heat; the Pearl River is flowing along, sparkling on the surface, bearing a burden of sludge underneath. Barges chug on the riverway; oxen plod along the muddy banks. In Changzhou the watermelons are piled high in the shade of the sycamore trees. On Shamian Island, barring any cataclysmic changes in China or unexpected turmoil in U.S.-China relations, stroller wheels are clattering over the cobblestones. Though the numbers have surged since we were there, then slowed down again, this month, if all goes well, another three to four hundred daughters of China will pass through the hole-in-the-wall passport photo studio, the medical clinic, and the adoption unit of the U.S. Consulate before heading across the Pacific to new lives. Others will fly off to Ireland or Sweden or Canada. Max will put more babies in long-waiting arms. As he wanders through the orphanages, he will occasionally pause, as he always has, put his hand on a small head, and whisper a secret: “Your mama is coming soon.”
In Kelly’s hometown at this time of year, the market would be busy as usual, the putter of motorbikes echoing through the street; shoppers crowding against one another, carrying their loads of bok choy and fish—or maybe a baby. The lychees would be ripe in Changzhou, and the hospital staff there would undoubtedly have found other infants on the doorstep.
Over time, my sense of my daughters’ fateful trips to those places has changed. No longer does it seem fair or accurate to say that they were abandoned or even left there. Rather, I think, they were “delivered” to safety in both those places, so clearly was it their birth family’s intention to save them.
When filmmaker Changfu Chang persuaded several birth families to tell their stories on camera (see page 296), he filmed stories that we found very similar to the ones we were given for our girls. One family, harassed by the authorities for having an over-quota child, left her in a market, saying they hoped she could find an adoptive family who would love her and care for her. A second family, desperate to find medical help for a baby boy with a brain tumor, took him to a hospital and left him there, hoping someone with more resources could save him.
Such deliveries will undoubtedly go on. For many baby girls in China, tough times will likely persist, though the patterns of found children have changed over time. Most observers argue that the desperate measures resorted to by women and families will continue until the one-child policy is completely lifted, the soaring economy benefits a wider portion of the population, or some kind of pension is in place for poor rural people. More of the children winding up in China’s orphanages now are the result not just of the population policy, but of unwed pregnancies and other woes common to the uprooted rural people who’ve come to the cities looking for work. A significant number of children in institutions have special medical needs.
In numerous orphanages all over China, in Hubei and Jiangxi and Hunan, more Chinese babies will wait. Those orphanages that deal with foreigners, and others infused with more than average funding or attention, will save more children than they once did. But there will be tragedies as well as happy endings.
Around the time of our first adoption, anytime I had the opportunity to talk with someone whose area of study included China, I asked this question: Has anyone in China spoken out about the missing girls or taken up the cause of all the daughters lost to infanticide and sex-selective abortion and abandonment?
“No, I haven’t heard of anyone,” an American university professor specializing in Chinese history told me. “There’s a limit to what people speak out about.”
“The need for sons is just so deeply, culturally ingrained,” said another university professor, whose field is early Chinese literature.
“People accept it as a necessary cost of economic development,” said an international business consultant active in China. “But they are making a problem for themselves with all the men who won’t be able to find wives.”
Chinese daughters themselves will one day speak up and search out the truth about their homeland, said dissident author Harry Wu. “When they are twenty-five, they’ll join together and they will tell the world what’s going on: Why are we here? We love the United States, we love our American parents, but what about the other baby girls? How many were there and why did they disappear? Under what kind of circumstances did we come to the United States? Where are our sisters?”
In the past, it was striking how little was known or acknowledged within China about the high incidence of girls lost and found. Now more and more people were becoming aware. Zhu Chuzhu, a professor of women’s studies at Xian Jiaotong University, and a former track star, has fought for an end to the coercion against women, and for education, family planning help, and increased opportunities.2 She has worked with rural women to foster economic opportunity and improve their status, and has been rewarded by seeing the birth rate for such women drop. Her program has been helped along by both China’s Family Planning Office and the U.S.-based Ford Foundation. If women can realize that there are other life goals besides having a son, Zhu believed, they could begin to change the culture.
Not far from the ancient city of Xian, women in Zhu’s program were now growing and selling apples and other crops and tending dairy cows. One part of the program is a kind of consciousness-raising session, in which women meet and talk about the pressures to produce sons and reflect on how attitudes might be changed. Government campaigns, trying to convince rural people that girls are as valuable as boys, continue. “Girls are fine descendants, too,” is their underlying refrain. One poster shows a girl and a boy both holding a good-luck fish, with the slogan “Having a girl is as good as having a boy.”
Among Zhu’s research was a look at patterns of the disappearance of girls in one rural area of Shaanxi province. Her findings: Girls in China have been at risk if they were born at home, if they were the second or third child, if the other children in the family were female, and if their parents lived in areas where the bias in favor of sons still prevailed. A primary reason for early deaths among girl babies, Zhu found, was inadequate health care.
China’s so-called gender gap, the profound demographic skewing in favor of males, continued to worsen, with some regions reporting two boys for every girl. By 2008, the most dire estimates pointed to an imbalance as many as forty million more men than women in China, a statistical bulge that some demographers referred to as the “boy bubble.”3
An increasing disparity between poor families and wealthier ones was also a fact of life. That meant that China had growing numbers of very poor children. According to a New York Times report in early 2001, “Huge numbers of China’s 800 million rural residents are in a medical free-fall, as the once-vaunted system of ‘barefoot doctors’ and free rural clinics has disintegrated over the last decade.”4 The central government had backed away from providing medical care, and infant mortality rates were up, as were deaths of women in childbirth. Many poor peasants could not afford prenatal care, much less a hospital stay during delivery. In some parts of Yunnan province, one out of every five children would die before age five.
Other social problems loomed. There were fears for the prospects of urban elderly, who must turn to a diminishing pool of grandchildren for their support, and reports of lone children feeling “unbearable pressures” of family expectations.
The sad plight of girls extended beyond China, of course. Reports from India indicated that gender ratios there were skewed even more badly in favor of boys than was the case in China. Although ultrasound testing for the purposes of selective abortion is illegal in India as in China, the law is not enforced. In India’s large cities, billboards advertise the availability of testing, and it is commonplace for families who can afford it to take advantage of the screening and then to have female fetuses aborted. The same reasons are stated as are offered in China: Because of the land and family system, boys are simply considered more necessary than girls.
Yet among China’s people as well as in its landscape, change was rampant—rapid transformation affecting some of the social welfare institutions as well as the city skylines. The institutions that dealt with foreign adoption, especially, continued to see great improvements, including a building boom. Given an infusion of interest and money—some from groups supported by adoptive parents—improvements in foster care, medical attention, and the nurturing services of extra caretakers had multiplied. At the same time, institutions were seeing more and more children needing their care who suffered from serious disabilities.
In years to come, assuming all goes well on the diplomatic front and in the offices of the Chinese adoption ministry, small miracles will continue to happen, but on their own time schedule. The pipeline between waiting parents and waiting children will probably remain narrow, with both continuing to bide their time while bureaucratic gears roll at their own speed—a pace that was slowed down considerably after new rules went into effect in 2007.
For foreigners seeking to adopt from China, the unforeseen will always loom as an added obstacle, as the United States and China continue to tiptoe their way through diplomatic mine-fields. After NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1999, angry Chinese demonstrators attacked the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and demonstrated in front of the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, which briefly closed down. American adoptive families in China at the time bit their nails as they completed their paperwork, some sequestered in the luxurious White Swan Hotel, the noise of protesters at the consulate next door drifting up to their windows.
Throughout the tense times, the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs continued to process the paperwork for foreign adoptions, but who knows what could happen should there be future problems on the same scale. The incident didn’t just harm contemporary relations, already delicate, but opened old wounds for China, the bitter legacy of a historic mistrust of Western intentions. After all, as China scholar Orville Schell has pointed out, “no large nation has been more historically aggrieved by foreigners than China.”5
In the United States, too, there were discouraging notes as well as progress. In the wake of the U.S.-China spy plane incident in April 2001, a number of U.S. media reports fell back on extremely insulting stereotypes to describe the Chinese, remarks that made me cringe for my daughter, and for us all. One radio talk-show host called for a boycott of Chinese restaurants. The American Society of Newspaper Editors convention featured a blatantly racist anti-Chinese skit, which Chinese American scholar and author Helen Zia cited as an example of the “knee-jerk racism” that can surface all too easily. As writer William Wong noted afterward, “This isn’t going to make life any easier for me and other Chinese-Americans.”6
Any future strains between China and the U.S. might produce a similar wave of negative commentary. “When racism happens, it rains down on the heads of people like our daughters,” said adoptive mother Pam Zumwalt.
By every guess, the winds of change in China will keep blowing, and the world’s most populous nation will continue to experience growing pains, as evinced especially while the nation prepared for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.7 All this growth and westernization has brought mixed blessings. “Cultural pollution” is what the Chinese called some of the instrusions. Ten percent of Beijing’s children were now obese, a condition previously unheard of. Medical experts attribute the problem to the arrival of American fast-food outlets—Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts, and other enterprises have now joined the Kentucky Colonel in China—and the increasing reliance on the automobile for transportation, rather than walking or cycling. 8 Ironically, the children feeding on fast food in China’s big cities may be less well nourished than some children in the better orphanages eating their congee and slices of banana and apple.
Several decades after the one-child policy went into effect, Washington Post foreign correspondent John Pomfret interviewed a farmer in Miaoxia, Henan province, who finally had a son after seven daughters. He named the boy Gaifeng, or “Change in the Weather,” and only then did he decide to quit having children. Along the way, the farmer was said to have given away one daughter, whom he could not feed, but he would not say where the girl had gone. Why the quest for a son after so many other births, Pomfret asked. “My girls will belong to someone else,” said the farmer. “Only [my son] will feed me rice when I am old.”9
This rural portrait was part of the reason for the mixed results of the one-child policy by the year 2000. While most urban areas had held the line at a single child, in some of China’s poorest regions, families with multiple children were the norm.
Over time there were sporadic adjustments in the population policy, indications that persuasion would replace force, that “service” to women of childbearing age would now be emphasized, rather than rigid enforcement of regulations. Some regions of China had already eased the policy, allowing families to have an additional child if they proved they had the economic means to do so. In other places, it had long been possible, with cash, to persuade officials to bend the rules.
In fact, some prosperous citizens were happily and routinely paying for the privilege of having a second, even a third, child. It had even become a status symbol. There were reports that extra children occasionally were given nicknames based on the amount of the fine their parents paid in order to keep them:
“Little Two Thousand,” for instance. A number of these hard-earned extra children were daughters, reflecting the common desire to have a son and a daughter whenever possible. In Beijing and Shanghai, the fines were stiff, as much as three years’ wages for an additional child.
Overall, if one looked just at the total numbers—and not the individual lives underscoring them—China’s stringent population control policies had worked, at least according to the government. Two decades after Premier Deng Xiaoping’s history-altering announcement putting the one-child policy into place, China’s average family size had dropped from six children per woman to two, according to Chinese government reports.10 Although there were questions of serious under-reporting, if that boast were true, China’s population growth had declined by more than 50 percent in just one generation, and the projections—for a population kept to a maximum of 1.3 billion by the millennium—had been met.
As always, there were outsiders who questioned China’s rosy reports. Traveling through the Chinese countryside, reporter Mark Hertsgaard noted how many families seemed to have two, three, even more children. “Chinese birth rates did not decline substantially during the 1980s and 1990s,” he wrote in Earth Odyssey. Hertsgaard suspected there was a flaw in the official calculations.
Whatever the true figures, since lowered population growth rates had been achieved by official pressure, some factions have feared that any relaxation of the rules or the enforcement may unleash a new growth spurt—unless, as has been the case in other countries, the status of Chinese women improved sufficiently that they themselves began voluntarily to have fewer children. More and more families, faced with the prospects of raising children in an increasingly expensive environment, were deciding themselves to have just one. Younger women, gaining independence, doing better for themselves, might hasten China’s move toward smaller families without the harsh methods of the 1980s.
There was already evidence that young women in China were more likely to want smaller families than their husbands and in-
laws want. But they still didn’t have equal say. There remained in the most traditional families that ingrained belief that a woman’s fertility is somebody else’s business, that she had a duty to produce a son. Even if the state lets up, it doesn’t mean the relatives will.
Nonetheless, China’s women are making considerable gains. As far back as 1995, a Chinese woman journalist noted that the international women’s conference in Beijing that year was an eye-opener: For the first time, Chinese women realized that their reproductive health and freedom could be their own business, could be theirs to control. “In the past,” wrote Chuan Renyan, “Chinese women either had to consider producing descendants for their husband’s family as their sacred duty or first think of sacrificing their needs to the state’s population control efforts. Now women are beginning to think about their own rights.”11 That recognition will probably continue to build (though in an atmosphere of caution). Among other changes in China, a sexual revolution is under way. In cities, contraception is increasingly available in drugstores and “adult health” stores, and consumer information is becoming more accessible. Sex education classes, certainly a new feature in China, have become available.
Chinese American scholar and author Helen Zia attended that international women’s conference, and says women have come a long way in the thirteen years since. Then, there was just one program, a telephone hotline, for victims of domestic abuse in all of China, she reported. “But feminist activists within China used the conference to create many new initiatives for women and girls, such as programs to end female infanticide and sex-selective abortions, to help rural girls get the same schooling that boys do, and to address the issue of family violence.”
