China Ghosts

by Jeff Gammage

  I look in Mary’s eyes for reassurance. There’s none there to be found.

  The fact is, our guide doesn’t know this child, doesn’t know anything about her. And as for Christine and me, we met Jin Yu for the first time three hours ago. We know nothing about her health or her history. For all we know, she has been lethargic and mute since the day she was born.

  But there is one thing we do know, and given the circumstances it is the most important thing of all: this silent, staring little girl is now our daughter, and she needs our help.

  Children at the Xiangtan Social Welfare Institute

  4 THE XIANGTAN SOCIAL WELFARE INSTITUTE

  NOT EVERYONE had come.

  Some believed that their new daughters, already confused, could only be further unsettled by the visit. Others couldn’t bear to see the place, to make real the ghosts of their imagination. A few wanted nothing to do with it, as they wanted nothing to do with China.

  So it was a smaller coterie of Americans who clomped down the exit stairs of the bus, parked a few paces shy of the orphanage gate.

  The Xiangtan Social Welfare Institute stands at 3 Ban Ma Road, a sprawling, low-slung facility made up of three separate compounds that house members of society’s neediest populations—the young, the elderly and the mentally ill. Officials say the older people are permitted to mingle with the children, the psychiatric patients are not.

  The orphanage houses eighty to one hundred children, the youngest days old, the eldest in their teens, the vast majority, as in all orphanages across China, female.

  No one in our group knows why we have been allowed to visit. Generally, Western travelers are not allowed inside of China’s welfare institutes. It’s not unusual for American parents, after traveling thousands of miles to China and hundreds of miles within the country, to be stopped short at an orphanage door. Everyone in our group has his own explanation for our good luck: Because the children’s section is relatively new, built in the 1990s, and its operators want to show it off. Because the people who work here are as curious about us as we are about them. They want to meet the foreigners who are taking thirteen of the “older girls,” most aged between two and three. Because we’re the first group of Americans to adopt from Xiangtan in more than a year.

  A friend told me that when she adopted her daughter from a different orphanage, she and her child were not only permitted to visit but borne onto the grounds like royalty, seated at tea with the institute director, presented with a thick scrapbook of photos and a handmade, embroidered quilt.

  Christine and I don’t expect that.

  Our hopes are much more modest. We hope that this visit will offer some insight into our daughter’s daze, perhaps even help to awaken her from her trance. We hope that someone here recognizes our child, that they know her. That we will see signs that Jin Yu was well cared for and perhaps even loved, that she was more than another in an endless procession of babies to be cleaned, fed, and bathed. We hope that however Jin Yu’s life may unfold from here, she will want to have one last look around and a chance to say good-bye.

  We have heard and read accounts of dire conditions in some Chinese orphanages, some of those stories exaggerated, some unfortunately all too true. The list of privations can be long and deadly: Malnourishment. Disease. Dehydration. Lack of clean water, heat, or the most routine medical care.

  Still, Christine and I pushed for an invitation to visit the orphanage even before we left the United States. We needed to know. We needed to be able to tell our daughter, firsthand, from our own eyes and memory, about the place where she had lived. During our wait to be matched with a child, whenever our adoption agency asked if we had questions, we replied, “Will we be allowed to visit the orphanage?” After we received Jin Yu’s name and picture, as our travel date neared, our question was transmitted to Great Wall’s office in Beijing, and from there, presumably, to the China Center of Adoption Affairs, the office that administers foreign adoptions. The reply was a pristine specimen of a non-answer answer: Decisions on whether foreigners can visit the Hunan orphanages are made by the Office of Civil Affairs in Changsha. With that, the query was deftly tossed into the lap of a government agency with whom we had little chance of making contact.

  We weren’t dissuaded.

  In China, when our guides asked what we would like to see or do, we would answer, “We want to visit the orphanage.” We repeated the phrase again and again, like a mantra.

  I don’t know if our persistence had any effect. Neither our adoption agency nor our guides had the power to authorize a visit. But they were our only avenue to Chinese officialdom, so we pushed and pleaded and oh-so-politely pestered. For some reason, our wish was granted—landing us on a cement walkway heading to a central courtyard, carrying a lethargic little girl who, until three days ago, knew this place as home.

  Our visit would be short, but it would teach us a useful lesson: be careful what you wish for, because you just may get it.

  THE GROUNDS of the orphanage look like they once could have been the estate of a wealthy landowner. Or, at least, the estate of a wealthy landowner who slowly went broke, and cut back on maintenance as his bank account shrank. In the courtyard is a pondlike fountain adjacent to several short stone buildings and a three-car garage.

  Peng Liang is waiting for us. He is thin and wiry, strong, a thick lawn of black hair topping a square face framed by rectangular glasses. Peng is the director of the institute, and he has fast become a familiar presence at the hotel and at government offices as our children have been transferred to us. He appears unfazed by the commotion produced by fourteen newly created families, a temperament that seems particularly well suited to someone running an orphanage.

  Peng speaks little or no English. He motions for us to follow, leading us toward the children’s section, toward Jin Yu’s former home.

  The building is huge: a wide, three-story structure sheathed in scaly white shingles and trimmed with bright red accents. A high stone wall guards one side, a low brick fence the other. Beyond the bricks roll the hazy green hills of the countryside. With its broad balconies and gleaming white facade, the dormitory could be mistaken for an overgrown play castle, a sort of backwater storybook theme park.

  But no children live in amusement parks. And this isn’t Disneyland.

  On the second-floor balcony, small girls totter forward on uncertain feet—not one child or two, or four, but more than half a dozen, trailing after toys or playmates. One girl stands holding the hand of a much-taller nanny. She stares at us, watching the advance of this weird-looking pack of guests. Another girl sits with her legs poking through the railing, swinging her feet in the air.

  The scene is shocking in its banality: here are small children, all without parents, all in need—and no one is hurrying. The kids don’t seem upset. It is just another day at the orphanage.

  For some reason, I’d imagined that the children would be sequestered, that we would be permitted to see the buildings but not the people. That it would be like walking into an empty stadium, staring out at the field and trying to envision what it looks like when the teams are playing and the stands are full of fans.

  All the girls on the balcony are about Jin Yu’s age. Or older. Some of them must have arrived here before Christine and I ever thought about adopting a child, and they’ll be here after we’re gone. Why is that? Why is one girl on her way to America, to a fine house, a big room of her own, more toys than she could ever need or want and—no small matter in Hunan—all she cares to eat? Why must other girls remain, waiting, aging, perhaps dying here?

  I don’t know the reasons, but I know they amount to the merest breeze of fate. A shuffle of paperwork in Beijing. A photo that didn’t quite match. Another child deemed a little too old, or a little too young.

  As far as I can tell, there is only one difference between the girls on the balcony and the child in my arms: one is my daughter, the others are not.

  THE POPULAR bookstore travel guides usu
ally don’t bother to mention Xiangtan.

  It’s not that the city is too small to warrant a few lines. It’s home to more than 500,000 people. And it’s not that it is out of the way. Like Changsha, Xiangtan sits astride the bustling Xiang River, for centuries a major north-south trade route. As recently as the 1890s, Xiangtan’s position on the river made it a hub of the provincial tea trade.

  These days Xiangtan is ignored on merit. In modern times the city has forged no world-leading industries, developed no pioneering technologies, established no legendary sports dynasties. It’s spawned few famous sons. Some residents like to claim that Mao was born here. While it’s true that as a young man the chairman spent a fair amount of time in Xiangtan, helping to foment the revolution that would lead China to communism, he was actually born to the west, in Shaoshan, and attended high school to the north, in Changsha.

  His birthplace lies within the county, and perhaps that allows him to be claimed as a native. Beyond Mao, the roster of Xiangtan luminaries is both short and, truth be told, not very luminous.

  The famed military strategist Peng Dehuai was born in Xiangtan. He rose to become China’s defense minister before making the mistake of criticizing Mao during the Great Leap Forward. The government arrested him in 1967. Better known is Qi Baishi, the painter whose most popular works portray the everyday tools and creatures of the rural farms he saw all around him—hoes, rakes, flowers, birds, mice, insects. Many of his works are displayed at the Qi Baishi Memorial Hall. Others of his paintings—or what purport to be his paintings—are for sale on eBay.

  Xiangtan was founded about 1,300 years ago, in an earlier age recognized for its massive crops of rice and its steady production of medicinal herbs. Today the city may be best known for breeding a particular strain of lean-meat pig, and for its abundance of Xiang lotus, a lily the local governments hope to turn into a moneymaker by processing the flower to make juice, tea, and paste. A few specialized health researchers know Xiangtan as the epicenter of a precancerous condition called oral submucous fibrosis, caused by the habitual chewing of betel nuts and aggravated by the heavy use of hot peppers on foods. A relatively high percentage of local citizens are afflicted.

  Xiangtan remains a busy commercial port, and it’s emerging as something of an educational center, home to several colleges including the Xiangtan Mining Institute, Xiangtan Teachers College, Xiangtan Normal University, and Xiangtan University. But the biggest and most influential businesses in Xiangtan are those en-gaged in the lucrative, age-old enterprise of turning big rocks into little rocks—cement, gravel, sand, ore. In Xiangtan they dig coal and marble and especially manganese, an alloy used to make steel and aluminum, found in everything from soda cans to dry-cell batteries.

  If the modern history of Xiangtan is unremarkable, then the history of the orphanage is opaque. That history mostly exists as an intermittent series of photos, videotapes and fragmentary conversations recorded by families who managed to document their impressions during what were invariably short and affecting visits. It’s not as if the orphanage is a boarding school, or a university. It doesn’t have its own website. It doesn’t publish an alumni magazine, or distribute lists of distinguished graduates.

  When was an orphanage established in Xiangtan? How many children have entered its gates? How many have left for new homes? And what happens to those who remain? No one seems to know, or be willing to say, at least not with certainty or in any detail. The orphanage is at least the second children’s institution on the site. And it represents a vast improvement over the previous model.

  The first families to adopt from Xiangtan in the early 1990s recall the orphanage as a red-brick building with cement floors and cinder-block walls. For some, their most vivid memory is of a row of children confined in green chairs, wailing as they aggressively rocked back and forth—a common developmental response to a lack of stimulation. The children’s faces were sunburned, indicating they had been outside for some time.

  Today that red-brick building is nowhere in evidence, in its stead the new white-shingled dorm.

  The biggest event in the orphanage’s recent history occurred in the winter of 2001, an event that would hold serious repercussions for the staff, the administration, and most of all for the children who lived there, including the girl who would become my daughter. That year several American families who were adopting from Xiangtan noticed that their children were feverish. They were told the kids were fine, just getting over the chicken pox. But one child failed a physical, and by the time the families arrived home several of the kids were sick and getting worse.

  A baby in Texas was the first to be taken to a hospital. Other children began falling ill in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota. Only then did the true reason for the children’s sickness emerge: measles, a contagious disease that if left untreated can cause deafness, retardation, or even death. By the time that diagnosis was made, hundreds of people had been exposed—including sixty-three families who had traveled to China, representatives from sixteen adoption agencies, the staffs at the U.S. consulate and a Chinese medical facility, along with the pilots, passengers, and crews on the airplanes that bore the families back to cities across the United States.

  Whether the orphanage administration was simply ignorant of the contagion or had actively tried to hide it, the repercussions were serious. American parents were upset, Chinese officials embarrassed. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention became involved. Public-health investigators eventually tracked cases into eight states, confirming fourteen cases of measles among the newly adopted children and their families.

  In China the consequences were swift and severe. Changes were made in the orphanage leadership. Either as a health measure or, more likely, as the institute’s punishment for causing such an international humiliation, the government imposed a one-year moratorium on foreign adoptions from Xiangtan.

  The ban imposed its harshest discipline on those who bore no responsibility: the children. Every family who adopts from China is required to make a $3,000 donation directly to their child’s orphanage, so halting the process cut off a crucial source of funding. It also cut off the flow of toys, clothes, and major appliances, like air-conditioners and washing machines, that adopting families often purchase for the orphanage.

  In early 2002 Chinese authorities cleared the orphanage to resume international adoptions. And in August of that year, our travel group, knowing little of this troubled history, marched through the front gates. Later, some of us would glimpse official government photos of our children that had been taken around the time of the measles outbreak, the kind of pictures routinely sent to families waiting to adopt. Apparently our girls had been next in line, ready to be matched with new families and sent off to new homes, just as Xiangtan closed to the world.

  They would have to wait another year.

  TWO OF the children are wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts, another the jersey of the German national soccer team. A girl of six or seven is dressed in a faded pink party gown, as if she is headed to a prom. Several of the kids are boys, and it’s obvious why they’re here, why they were abandoned by their Chinese parents, their exaggerated facial features signaling potential disabilities.

  All of the kids are thin. But their lean frames and hand-me-down clothes do nothing to diminish their enthusiasm. The children approach us, unafraid, excited to welcome us into their home.

  Our awkward procession of American families comes to a halt beneath the arched entranceway of the children’s dorm, where a dozen nannies have gathered on the steps. Most are wearing white lab coats, though several of the women—all of the caretakers are women—are dressed in street clothes, come in on their day off to say good-bye. The Americans cluster in small groups, not quite sure whom to talk to or whom to approach, unable to say much more than Hello and How are you?, helpless to understand the replies.

  If the new parents are nervous, the nannies are relaxed, calling out to our children in their distinctive Hunan
dialect. They know all of our girls by name, and they seem to have their favorites, different women heading straight for certain children. Visitors from across the sea? Americans come to Xiangtan? Big deal. Theirs is the informality of people who spend their lives around small children, who see scores of infants and toddlers every day and will see scores more when those are grown, people for whom troublesome questions of chance and fate are best left to others not nearly so busy.

  Older children crowd close to us, one of them a boy who speaks animatedly to the sluggish girl in Christine’s arms. Jin Yu does not answer or even look at him. If our child has registered that she has returned to the orphanage, if she realizes she is back on familiar ground, it doesn’t show. Another little boy runs up, grabs Jin Yu’s dangling arm, and kisses her on the back of the hand. Jin Yu pays him no notice.

  “Maybe she thinks we’re leaving her here,” Christine says.

  Mary, standing beside us, tries to be comforting. “I don’t think she will think that,” she says.

  We venture a few steps inside the building. It is a place without frills, sparingly furnished. Not a place you would want to raise a child. But someone has tried to make it cheery, or at least cheerier, posting cutouts of children’s cartoon characters on the walls and tying a length of colored flags across the playroom. The dormitory is clean. Much of it looks freshly painted. I’m sure it’s been recently scrubbed.