by Evans, Karin
The next decade would reveal otherwise. By 2008, in fact, the picture had changed dramatically in enough instances that the prospect of locating birth parents—even having birth parents seek out the adoptive family—was no longer an impossible scenario. Filmmaker Changfu Chang could tell you that every July 7 a birth family in Hangzhou made a trip to the famous West Lake bridge, in hopes that the American family who had adopted their lost daughter would show up for a long-wished-for reunion.
All along, there had been a few adoptive families who had learned detailed information about birth families. There were older adopted children who remembered a specific family, children who had, in fact, even reconnected with those families. Then, too, a number of adoptive families had found that their children had siblings, some who remained in China, and others who had been adopted by different families.
Some families had met birth families when they traveled back to China for a trip with their daughters. Jane Liedtke, an adoptive mother who runs the Our Chinese Daughters Foundation in Beijing and puts together tours for adoptive families, says at least eleven families who’ve traveled with her groups have met birth parents—including families who weren’t necessarily looking to have that happen.
Dutch television filmed an account of an intentional search for birth family in a program that was aired in 2006 and made its way through the American adoption community. It told the story of a young girl adopted from China and living in the Netherlands, whose adoptive parents hired an investigator to look for her birth family. They succeeded, and the birth family agreed to appear on camera, talking about the reasons for their decision and its emotional repercussions. A reunion between the birth parents and their daughter was the next step in the story.
Chang, a professor at Millersville College in Pennsylvania, managed to get several birth families to tell their stories on camera for his film Long Wait for Home, released in 2008. It wasn’t easy to get birth parents to agree to be filmed, said Chang. “Due to mostly cultural reasons, birth parents don’t want others to know the experience they have had.” Chang persevered, and the stories told through his lens offer rare face-to-face insight into the reasons Chinese birth families might have had to relinquish a child, including poverty, government harassment, and medical needs that went far beyond a family’s resources.
Chang, sometimes called “the professor of adoption films,” has made a number of documentaries about Chinese adoption. Raised in Fujian province, he came to this country in 1995, got his doctorate from Purdue University, and set out to do documentaries. When he heard from a friend about all the children from China who’d been adopted by Americans, he knew he had a subject. “I started to realize the future of this world of adoption,” he told me. “I knew Chinese people were in the dark about it, and that many adoptive parents were left with fundamental questions.”
Chang’s first idea was to make films that could be shown on Chinese television, but he encountered barriers. The station managers liked the films, but weren’t ready to show them. Chang decided to proceed on his own, and has by now made several films that have aired on U.S. PBS stations. Peer in the Distance is Professor Chang’s film for adopted girls who wonder what their lives might have been like had they grown up in China. The film profiles Wan Wan, a girl being raised in the affluence of the city, and Xing Ping, growing up in the hard-pressed countryside. Another film follows a group of American families as they travel to China to adopt children. Even after a string of films on China adoption, the good professor is not through yet. One current project is to document the experience of older adopted Chinese children as they grow into their own identities.
In Long Wait for Home, Chang’s film about birth parents, a tearful father tells how he and his wife left their infant son, suffering from a brain tumor, in a hospital elevator because the family had no resources to pay for treatment. Like millions of migrant workers who have come to the city seeking jobs, Tang and his wife could not support themselves farming their small plot in a remote part of Sichuan province. Having moved to Fuzhou, Tang felt he was making pretty good money, less than four dollars a day. But there was no way he could pay for the mounting hospital bills when their ten-month-old child was diagnosed with a malignancy. When they left their baby son at the hospital, it was the couple’s hope that some wealthy people could provide treatment and a cure. Sadly, five days after the boy was found, he died.
Another couple, the Xu family from Jiangsu province, recounted how the wife became pregnant with an over-quota child. They decided against abortion, but paid dearly: Their house was demolished and they had to flee their village. Lacking a birth permit, they could not go to a hospital and had to deliver the child themselves. Knowing they could not keep their daughter without further harassment by the government, they took her to a vegetable market, where they hoped she would be found, taken to an orphanage, and cared for. Along with some powdered milk, clothing, and what little money they could muster, they left a note for the hoped-for adoptive parents: They would like to meet in ten years on the West Lake bridge in Hangzhou on July 7, “Double Seventh,” the traditional Chinese day of reunion, they said, to see their dear daughter again and to thank the adoptive parents in person. The filmmaker says this meeting hasn’t come to pass, but the birth family has returned to that bridge each year. They have also given Professor Chang some gifts, hoping he could pass them on to the adoptive family.
The third family who told their story to Chang described the dilemma they faced when they delivered a second child and were under intense pressure from the authorities and community to give her up. They arranged a private local adoption, only to hear that the Chinese couple to whom they gave their daughter had changed their minds and taken the child to an orphanage. Before the birth father could get to the orphanage and reclaim the child, he said, she was adopted by another Chinese family. Nearly twenty years later, the birth parents were able to search for their daughter and her adoptive family, but were reluctant to approach the girl, afraid of upsetting her.
The filmmaker says he has never been so shaken as he was watching the faces of these birth parents and hearing their stories. Their faces showed a “sadness so palpable, and profound love so indescribable,” he says. “Please take good care of these children,” said one birth father on camera. “Don’t let them forget their roots.” Another says he has thought of his daughter every day, and added, “Please don’t worry about us.” Each of the birth parents Chang filmed turned out to be ordinary parents caught in a cruel bind of one kind or another, people who have agonized and grieved, people who hope their lost children have found happiness. Meanwhile, from time to time, other accounts about birth parents surfaced, presenting a far less caring picture.
Chang went on to film numerous interviews with people on the streets of China, asking them how they felt about abandoned children and adoption by foreigners. Though some expressed doubt about the intentions of foreign parents, others were compassionate. “In speaking with hundreds of ordinary Chinese, I found that almost all of them had a strong sympathy for the birth parents,” said Chang. “To a certain extent, all of the Chinese feel as though they are ‘birth parents’ of these children, whom they care about and hope live a happy life in forever homes.”
When I last checked with him, Chang was at work on yet another film—a look at adoption within China. He’d already interviewed a custodian in Kunming who had found twenty babies. He’d cared for them all and had also tried to track down their families.
If a number of birth families already have been located, undoubtedly there will be more who will be found or who will step forward, especially if the fears of reprisal ease, especially if the word gets around about other families being willing to identify themselves—although the illegality of abandoning a child still stands, and birth parents may fear getting into some sort of trouble should they come forth, said Chang. And, he added, they may feel such shame about abandoning a child that they continue to keep the secret to themselves.
My daughters watched in fascination as old men in thickly quilted jackets wielded three-foot-long brushes that looked like giant Q-tips. The men dipped the padded ends in water, and then swished beautiful calligraphy onto the dark slabs of sidewalk stone. The characters shone brightly for a few moments, then began to evaporate and fade away.
We were in Beijing at the Summer Palace. It was our first trip back to China with both girls. When I had a conference to attend in China that fall, Mark and I decided to make it a family trip. It was a chance to reacquaint our daughters—Kelly was then seven and Franny was five—with the land of their birth. Yet such pilgrimages, I knew, could be uncertain journeys at best. Our children had no known relatives to look up, no family homes to return to, and we weren’t sure what their reaction would be if we visited an orphanage. With children this age, I knew from brief experience that it was hard to predict what they would find meaningful or fun. When we asked Kelly what she had liked best on our previous visit to China when we adopted Franny, she said her favorite thing had been the yogurt that came in tiny containers with Chinese cartoons on them.
On this trip, we tried to keep our expectations low. We knew the desire for a genuine feeling of connection might be overly optimistic. Still, there was plenty to do and see, and we hoped the trip would help our daughters begin to gain a feeling of ease and familiarity with China, a connection they could build on throughout their lives.
On the promenade along the lake, we found the old calligraphers. “They’re writing poems,” our Chinese companion told us, as we stepped gingerly through the disappearing messages. “See this character? It means ‘mountain,’ and this one means ‘cloud.’” Our daughters were rapt. The calligraphers smiled at them and went on writing. As one poem faded, another came to life. “Could we do that when we get home, Mom?” Franny wanted to know. “Ni hao,” said the old calligrapher, looking up. “Ni hao,” the girls repeated, suddenly shy.
While the girls were tentative at first about saying the few words of Chinese they knew, they were soon tossing their limited vocabulary about with élan, ni hao-ing everyone they saw and thanking people right and left. “Xie xie,” they chorused to the waiters in dumpling houses, the staff in the hotels, the ticket takers at the monuments. People on the street stared at us, a pair of Westerners with two small Chinese girls. “Are they Chinese?” they would ask, pointing to the girls, perplexed. “Do they speak Chinese?”
“We were born in China, but we don’t know Chinese,” Kelly said to one curious onlooker. “Except maybe a little.”
“I was born in China, but I got adopted,” announced Franny with her usual exuberance.
We saw the sights in Shanghai and Beijing, the modern sky-scrapers, the restaurants and stores. The girls tried Peking duck and dozens of kinds of dumplings. We visited a number of temples, where the girls lighted incense and bowed to the Buddhas and Guan Yin, smoke curling up into the air. They spent time with an old man in a park, watching his small trained bird peck for seeds. They tried all the athletic equipment in the park that had been set up for elders, and they quietly watched the tai chi practitioners. We found the tiny yogurt containers with the cartoon characters on them.
Eventually, we tired of playing tourist, and not quite sure where we were headed, we accepted a friend’s invitation to take a drive in the country. We looked out at the small roadside businesses—old-fashioned brooms and plastic tubs lined up in front of storefronts, simple outdoor noodle stands, men repairing bicycles.
We stopped on a tiny dirt road and walked into an old village. It was just a cluster of dwellings off the road, surrounded by a checkerboard of small family vegetable plots. In the pale winter light, the fields were tinted in strips of russet, feathery yellow, and muted green.
As we walked down the dirt path, a woman came along, dragging a load of dried cotton stalks. She smiled broadly, plucked a few remaining cotton balls off the stalks and gave them to the girls. Then we walked past the rows of bok choy, past mounds of hay, to find a water buffalo and her baby standing tethered and placid.
It was like stepping back a century. The houses plastered with mud, the fields watered by hand. Our daughters were enchanted.
A row of plucked and gutted ducks, rubbed with red chili, had been hung to dry on a fence in the sun. “I see ducks, but they aren’t flapping their wings,” said Franny. Dogs sat on the stoops, and people strolled out to greet us with curiosity. In the inner courtyards of the houses, chickens were kept in coops, and a pig snorted and came up to rub its nose on the bars of a small enclosure. Through the open doors, we could see that inside the homes the furnishings were minimal—a stove, a table. On one wall were family photos, flanked by a picture of a young Mao Zedong, cigarette dangling from his lips.
People in the area, we were told, get by on $1,000 or less a year. And children who grow up here aren’t likely to stay. They head for the cities where there is work. One family was raising a daughter who had been found as an infant.
As we passed one doorway, an older woman motioned for us to come inside. Her face was deeply etched, lines following the contours of her smile. She was small and agile. I could not have guessed her age—she could have been sixty, or eighty.
Taking Kelly by the hand, she led us into a bare room with a concrete floor. She pulled out small wooden stools for us, and we all sat beaming at one another, wondering what was next. She held a hand at the level of Kelly’s head and then held up fingers. Seven? Eight? We worked out the children’s ages with our fingers. She gestured at me, and then at the girls, talking all the while, a sweet quizzical look on her face. I think she was wondering how we’d gotten ourselves together into a family. But when I tried to tell her, my night-school Mandarin fell apart. It didn’t seem to matter.
“Where do you sleep?” Kelly asked the woman, trying to make herself understood by folding her hands and laying her cheek on them. The woman smiled and motioned with her hand to a place over her shoulder.
Then the woman leaned forward and put her hands on my knee and made the gesture of taking chopsticks from bowl to mouth. “Have you eaten,” she asked, and she made it clear she wanted to feed us. ‘’Yes, yes, eat,” she said in Chinese, and rose as if to bustle off to the kitchen.
I wanted to stay, but outside the door I could see our friends waiting by the minivan. So we got up, saying we were sorry, that we had already eaten, and that we had to get back to the city. We thanked her as profusely as we could. As we reluctantly walked away, my daughters said their good-byes over and over, in two languages, to the woman and the water buffalo.
“That woman was so nice,” my older daughter said, bouncing along in the car. “She was really nice, but her hands were rough. She didn’t seem like she had much money.”
“She was like a grandma,” Franny said. “She liked us.”
Whatever memories might eventually fade like the calligraphy on the sidewalk, I knew then that this visit had touched some deeper place. As we drove away, Kelly clutched her cotton ball, staring back at the village. “Zai jian, zai jian,” yelled Franny, waving good-bye.
Later on this trip, Franny got to visit with her orphanage director. She was shy at first, but soon was sitting in the woman’s lap, happily listening to a rush of Mandarin. Afterward, Franny started singing her old songs in Chinese again.
Not Quite Home
By 2008, as predicted, homeland trips were the latest movement. Various groups, including adoption agencies and commercial travel ventures, had begun offering excursions back home to China for adoptive families. Peggy Scott, who traveled with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Abby, on one of the Our Chinese Daughters Foundation’s Panda Tours, said the kids had a blast. “They got to love this fantastic land where they look like everyone. They got to fall in love with China before they had to deal with it psychologically.”
Along with such trips, more news and speculation about birth parents began to emerge. A trip back to an institution
often produced more information than had been offered the first time around. Sometimes a clue led someplace specific, and by now, a number of adoptive families had been in contact with their Chinese counterparts. Birth families had been interviewed in print and film and a few, hearing that Americans with adopted daughters had come to town, had emerged from the shadows to say hello. The assumptions about the impossibilities of finding Chinese families had begun to shift—not for every adopted child, certainly, but for some.
As I was thinking about such things—in the kind of uncanny coincidence I’ve almost come to expect—my nine-year-old came into my office to tell me she’d written a letter to her birth mother. She had it all folded up, tucked in her T-shirt. She said she did not want me to read it, but wanted me to come out in the backyard and help her burn it, so that the smoke would carry her message to China. I hit “Save” on the computer and we went outside. Franny picked up a small blue and white Chinese pot and placed her letter in it. She set the pot in front of our stone Guan Yin. I helped her light the letter and she closed her eyes and made a wish as the paper burned to ash. She waved her hand at the trail of smoke. “Go to China,” Franny said.
I entertained the thought, far more than I used to, that someday we might have a more specific address. Maybe not. But surprising things seemed to be happening all the time.
Sisters, Sisters
After we came home with Kelly and met the twins who’d been adopted by two different single women and then reunited (see page 157), we began to hear other, similar stories. Over time, stories emerged about a number of siblings who’d been separated and then subsequently found each other, even though it had been the Chinese ministry’s stated position that known sets of twins be kept together and the same family assigned both.
