by Jeff Gammage
They invented paper. And printing. They invented fireworks and fans, the magnetic compass and the wheelbarrow, created the planetarium, the blast furnace, and a process for casting iron. They found ways to turn long poles of bamboo into toys, baskets, and houses.
In the last decade or so, the Chinese invented something else: a world-leading adoption program.
In 2005 China set an all-time, one-year record for foreign adoptions to the United States, sending 7,906 children to new homes here. In 2006 the figure was 6,493. China has led the world in adoptions to the U.S. in each of the last seven years and in nine of the last twelve. Thousands of other Chinese kids go to households in Canada, the Netherlands, and Spain each year.
China’s ascendance is a new phenomenon.
As recently as 1990 the Middle Kingdom didn’t complete a single state-sanctioned adoption to this country—or any other. The Chinese government wasn’t interested in foreign adoptions. And for the most part, Americans didn’t think to ask. They focused their attention on other lands, particularly South Korea, then the established, traditional leader in adoptions to the United States.
People in this country started to adopt foreign-born children at the end of the Second World War, in 1945, drawn by a desire for larger families, and prodded by news images of pitiful orphans scouring the ruins of bombed-out towns and villages around the globe. Children were adopted from war-ravaged Europe, particularly Germany, and even from hated, defeated Japan. In the late 1940s, while European nations recovered and rebuilt, Greek children arrived here as their country fought a bloody civil war. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 commenced a new surge of adoptions, a migration encouraged by news coverage that publicized the children’s plight. Evangelicals Harry and Bertha Holt became well known, and emulated, after they adopted eight Korean War orphans and arranged for the adoption of scores more. For most of the next forty years, South Korea would be the top source of foreign adoptions to the United States.
That trend started to change in the early 1990s as South Korea came under criticism from its northern sister for exporting its children. By the middle of the decade the turn would be dramatic.
In 1992, South Korea, as usual, ranked first among adopter nations, delivering 1,840 children to this country. China, taking its first tentative steps in a new realm, placed tenth, with 206 adoptions, behind countries like Paraguay and Honduras. But within two years China had surged to third place. That growth occurred even as nations such as Guatemala and Russia began to rapidly enlarge their programs and places like India and the Philippines held steady. In 1995, China became this country’s leading broker of overseas adoptions. It has ranked first or second every year since.
During that span, from the early 1990s through 2006, the Asian giant sent nearly 62,000 children to the United States. The effect in this country has been extraordinary, altering not just the makeup of individual families but the common assessment of who belongs to a family and how one may be formed. Sometimes it can seem as if almost everybody knows somebody who has adopted a child from China. These biracial families represent something new on the societal landscape—no longer fully American, certainly not Chinese, but not Chinese-American either. They celebrate Christmas and Hanukah, Easter and Passover, but also the Autumn Harvest and especially Chinese New Year. In their homes, frozen dumplings share freezer space with carrots and peas, and on weekends, peewee soccer games may be followed by Mandarin lessons.
The rising wave of Chinese immigration has fueled the growth of a new industry, led by the adoption agencies. The biggest—Great Wall China Adoption among them—complete several hundred adoptions each year. Dozens of smaller, specialized businesses swim beside them like pilot fish, offering adoptive parents every product or service they could need or imagine. If you want a cookie cutter shaped like China or a silver pendant bearing the Chinese characters for “Forever Family,” if you need a map of your daughter’s hometown or a case of moon cakes shipped to an orphanage, there are companies ready to help. For a fee, of course.
The explanation for why so many people choose to adopt from China is complicated, based on the laws and characteristics of this society and that one, and in the nature and makeup of traditional families here and there. The biggest reason is perhaps the most simple and obvious: the dearth of healthy, newborn babies available for adoption in this country. Domestic adoption statistics are notoriously unreliable, but the best estimate of the National Council for Adoption is that within the United States, the number of traditional adoptions peaked thirty years ago, at a relatively small 89,000. Today the council estimates that only about 20,000 infants are placed for adoption each year. The respected Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute believes the figure is even lower, maybe 13,000 or 14,000.
Why so few? Because society has changed. Unwanted pregnancies have been curtailed by the availability of birth control and legal abortion. The social stigma that once attached to out-of-wedlock births has diminished, if not disappeared, so fewer unmarried mothers decide to place their children for adoption.
As a result, in this country the number of want-to-be parents far surpasses the number of healthy babies. In China, healthy babies abound.
No one knows how many children are living in Chinese orphanages. Not for sure. Different agencies and researchers have produced widely divergent estimates, anywhere from 20,000 to a million or more. In 2006 the Chinese government announced that its orphanages held fewer than 69,000 children, a number that seems impossibly low.
What’s certain is that China is spending millions of dollars to maintain a vast system of welfare institutes, a network that reaches across the country and is particularly extensive in the southern provinces. It’s also clear that only a fraction of the children living in the orphanages eventually leave for new homes and new families.
Why does such a system exist? How is it that a government can fund and operate a huge organization of orphanages filled with girls, in the same way it runs a highways department filled with trucks, or an army filled with soldiers? The reasons are old, new, and myriad. When Mao called on the people to build large families as a means to increase production and propel China forward, mothers and fathers obeyed—and the resulting baby boom put a serious strain on the nation’s resources. Mao died in 1976, and in 1980, frantic to reduce the growth of a population that had surged past one billion, the government introduced the one-child policy. The idea was twofold: to avoid widespread famine, which had killed millions in China as recently as the early 1960s, and to improve living standards by controlling the number of people who would be competing not merely for jobs and education but for the most basic resources—land, food, water, energy.
Problems emerged almost immediately, as the government’s strict birth-planning strategy ran into the equally firm traditions of Chinese society.
The percentages have shifted in recent years, but what was true in 1980 is still true today: most Chinese live in the countryside, where parents depend on children to help work the land and harvest crops. The parents desire sons—and not only as farm hands. In China, the son is raised to be the scion of the family. The son continues the family name and bloodline, inherits land and property, and, crucially, takes on the responsibility of caring for his parents as they grow old. Sons are considered lifelong members of their father’s family, while daughters are little more than years-long visitors, eventually to marry away and help support the parents of their husbands.
With the advent of the one-child policy, the pressure to produce sons became intense, and the risks to newborn daughters grave. Girls might be immediately put to death, smothered or drowned. Or, following the introduction of ultrasound technology, they might be aborted in the womb. By the middle of the 1980s thousands of baby girls were being abandoned, set down in parks, department stores, and markets, on the steps of hospitals and government offices, in bus stations and railway depots.
Not surprisingly, many Chinese disliked the one-child policy. And the government pa
id attention, eventually, and at least to a degree. The law came to be applied with some flexibility, becoming more of a “one-son-or-two-child” policy. That is, if a couple’s first child was a son, then their family was considered complete. They could have no more children. If their first child was a daughter, they could have a second a few years later, making another try for that elusive son.
The hope was that this new elasticity would reduce the number of abandonments.
It didn’t.
In fact, China scholar Kay Ann Johnson, a researcher at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, documented how just the opposite occurred: a slightly less onerous policy began to be much more actively enforced. Soon, the sheer numbers of girls entering the system threatened to overwhelm the orphanages. So in 1992, the government installed a kind of pressure-relief valve: it began to allow foreigners to adopt Chinese children. Within a few years Americans were going east in droves.
Today, the demand for sons is, if anything, greater than ever. With the erosion of the “Iron Rice Bowl,” the cradle-to-grave welfare provided by the socialist state, more and more Chinese face an uncertain future. A son, functioning as a built-in social security system in a country with no social security, becomes not just desirable but essential. At the same time, the government exerts relentless pressure to keep families small. People caught with “extra” children may be heavily fined or fired from their jobs. Mothers may be involuntarily sterilized. Pregnant women may undergo forced abortions, even late in their term.
Like many other aspiring American parents, Christine and I started out knowing little of this broad and tortured history, of the countless private agonies imposed by the one-child policy, of the numerous ways in which we would benefit from other people’s misfortune. When we sent off our application, all we really knew was that we wanted a child, and China seemed to have an excess of children.
We found, disturbingly, that the brutalities of the one-child policy transformed into big advantages for people like us.
The abandoned Chinese children are generally healthy. Illnesses like fetal alcohol syndrome, which plague Russian adoption, are practically unheard of. Many Chinese farmers barely earn enough money to feed themselves and their families—they certainly can’t afford to buy alcohol or drugs. Amidst chilling stories of black-market baby sales in other countries, the one-child policy gives Americans assurance as to why the Chinese children are available. And, in an age of ever-increasing litigation and information access, adoptive parents can be certain that no distraught Chinese birth mother will appear at their door—or in court—and demand the return of “her” child.
Through her interviews with Chinese families, Johnson determined that many of the abandoned children are in fact second daughters, surrendered by couples still seeking a son.
Because China has made it illegal not only for its citizens to have additional children but also to formally place a child for adoption, the girls, and the occasional boy, are surrendered in secrecy. Chinese mothers and fathers who leave a baby on a park bench may watch from a distance to be sure the police arrive, but afterward they know only that the child is in the hands of the authorities. When that child is transferred to an orphanage, the administrators there know only that another baby has been placed in their care. If the child is eventually adopted, that secrecy is extended all the way across the sea.
The birth parents in China have no way to know if their child has found a new family. And the adoptive parents in the United States have no way to tell them.
I TAKE hold of the stones on either side of the doorway and pull myself up and into the watchtower. The humid air makes it hard to breathe. My shirt is soaked with sweat. But it is cool inside the fort, the piercing summer sunlight dulled to grayness.
Below me are hundreds of steps, above me thousands more. Looking out across the vista, wall and mountain appear to combine as one, the dragony scales of the battlements leaping and diving as they snake across the peaks. Looking down through the doorway, I see small bursts of color, bright against the wall, triangular flags of gold and blue and pink mounted on the ramparts. I see Chinese children, all boys, shouting to their parents, who linger a few steps behind. The only Chinese girls I see are those holding tight to the hands of their American parents, come back to adopt new sisters.
Christine has stopped several steps below, looking out into the distance.
Back home, as our wait dragged on, as friends replaced “How are you?” with “Heard anything yet?” the distance and time between our daughter and ourselves became more and more the focus of my day. I had expected that I would like her, that sharing my house and my life with a little girl would be, well, fine. I did not expect to fall in love with her. To fall in love with a photo. In the mornings, as I began my day, in the kitchen, I would wonder how she was concluding hers, in an orphanage. If she had played with a friend. Gone outside. Gotten enough to eat.
After making the commitment to adopt, I had finally asked myself, Why not? Why not be a father? What was I doing that was so important, so vital and necessary to the world, that I was too busy to be a dad? The answer: not a thing. Not a single thing. On the days when I happened to be away from work, off on vacation or out sick, the newspaper still thudded to a stop on people’s driveways, just like always.
If I’d shed the need to stand at the pinnacle of my family, I’d retained my distaste for redundancy. And China spoke to that. The efficient matching of kids who needed parents with parents who wanted kids seemed to me the completion of a certain logical symmetry. Every child deserves a chance, and from what I could tell, the kids in the orphanages weren’t getting one. Maybe I could be a little girl’s chance. Maybe she could be mine.
Sitting there in the shade of the watchtower, the bricks of the Great Wall warm against my back, I pluck Jin Yu’s picture from my wallet. The photo is a head shot, her face big against a red background. Her hair is shorn, her expression downcast. She looks grim as a prisoner. But I also see, or think I see, an underlying determination. Chinese babies can come and go from orphanages. Six months, eight months, a year, and they’re gone. Not her. She stayed. After more than two years, she waits. She stares at the camera with glum defiance, as if to say: I’ve taken all life can throw at me. I can take more if I must.
The sun is dropping, beginning its late-afternoon slide toward the horizon. Christine and I will have to start down soon, to pick our way across the steps before fatigue and cramps overtake our legs. I am eager to get moving, to push this day forward into tomorrow.
I wonder if Jin Yu will come here someday, to the Great Wall, perhaps to this very spot, to the shady enclosure of this tower. I wonder if this greatest symbol of China, this wall that reaches from ocean to desert, will hold weight and meaning for her. Or if, after years of an American upbringing, it will seem as remote as the monuments of Greece.
Friends who had traveled here told me that walking on the Great Wall generates a sense of disbelief. That it feels like walking on the moon, so alien that even the sky seems different, a place you recognize from a thousand pictures but never expected to see in person. They talked of how they felt humbled to walk in the steps of the emperors who envisioned the wall’s creation and the laborers who made it real, many at the price of their lives.
But looking out across the Jindu Mountains, I don’t feel history’s hand on my shoulder. I can’t see the breastplates of ancient warriors gleaming in the summer haze, nor hear the ghostly whinny of their horses as they ride again to long-concluded battles. All I see are trees. And all I can think of is a child, soon to be my daughter.
The first photo of Jin Yu sent from the China Center of Adoption Affairs
3 NEW PARENTS, NEW DAUGHTER
WHENEVER I would imagine the moment that a man becomes a father—not that it was something I dwelled on—the picture that developed in my mind was straight out of a made-for-television drama: The husband in borrowed hospital scrubs, tense but triumphant. The wife, flat on her back, drenched in s
weat but delighted. It’s an event endlessly dissected in movies and parenting magazines, that transcending split-second when your new child lovingly looks into your eyes and melts your heart by cooing out a greeting or staring in speechless hello.
This moment could not be more different.
Standing in front of us is a frightened child. Not a baby, asleep and unknowing, but a toddler, aware and apprehensive. A child who awoke this morning in her usual bed in her usual home, perhaps not luxurious but at least familiar, and who was then hauled off into the unknown. A child who is now being turned over to people she’s never seen and doesn’t know, people who don’t look, smell, or speak like her. A child who, at two, can comprehend that the everyday structure and regimen of her life has disintegrated, that stability has ceded to upheaval.
Before coming to China, Christine and I had devised an elaborate plan to introduce ourselves gradually to our new daughter, a strategy to try to minimize her fear and soothe her distress. First, we would take a seat across the room, letting our child get used to our company, to the sight of these odd creatures with pale skin and big noses. After fifteen minutes or so, we would move closer, near enough to hand her a toy, to talk to her. Then, after perhaps half an hour, after she had grown comfortable with our presence and assured of our good intentions, we would attempt to actually hold her.
That plan lasts all of two seconds.
Orphanage staffers are nudging Jin Yu forward, guiding her toward us. She takes one uncertain step and stops. She is sweaty, her cheeks flushed, her hair stuck to her forehead. For a moment she stands frozen. Then she begins to rock, moving foot to foot in pink sneakers two sizes too big.
Christine and I kneel down in the hotel room doorway, each putting a hand on Jin Yu’s shoulders, telling her in broken Chinese that we are her mommy and daddy.
