One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

by Mei Fong

  A firm believer in the zero population growth movement, Stuy jumped at his wife’s suggestion. In 1997, they returned from China with an eight-month-old infant girl they named Meikina—Mei for “beautiful” and kina, the Hawaiian word for “from China.” Three years later a group of adoptive parents raised money for a new refrigerator for Meikina’s orphanage. Stuy volunteered to deliver the money.

  While in China, he met one of two women listed on the record as having found Meikina. The woman, according to Stuy, gave him an extremely detailed account of her experience.

  “She had been walking to work with her coworker one morning, had heard a baby’s cry over the noise of the crowd, had investigated and found a cardboard box containing a small, two-day-old baby girl. As she described it, the baby was dressed in ‘countryside clothes,’ had an empty bottle lying next to her, and some cash with a red birth note.”

  Stuy was electrified by the wealth of details he’d unearthed. To him, it suggested Meikina had been abandoned on the side of the road by her birth mother, who had cared enough to leave cash and clothing for the baby. He went repeatedly to Meikina’s finding place near the Ministry of Civil Affairs and tried to visualize the scene: the crying infant, the incredulous passerby, the silent, grieving mother watching from the shadows. It was, he said, a “miraculous” experience, and he wrote about it enthusiastically to other parents in his adoptive group.

  Most parents of China adoptees are given scanty information on their children’s origins. Stuy’s experience tapped a longing to know more that many shared. Several wrote back asking him for help. Some thirty families contributed $135 each so Stuy could make a return trip to China. That was the genesis of his company, Research-China.

  Looking back on the story of Meikina’s discovery, Stuy laughed. “I can’t believe I swallowed that.”

  Ten years later Lan Stuy tracked down the other woman listed as Meikina’s finder. She reluctantly confessed she had made up the whole thing, said Lan. “She was really apologetic. She said she’d just agreed to have her name on record to help the adoption. She hadn’t actually found any babies,” she said.

  It’s a moment of revelation that Stuy talks about constantly. In St. Paul, he wryly told the audience, “I realized she was probably prepped by the orphanage. They probably told her, ‘Make him feel good,’” he said, pausing. The audience chuckled. “And that’s what she did. For ten years, she made me feel great.”

  In 2000, Brian and Jeannine Stuy’s marriage broke up while they were in the process of adopting a second child. Part of the reason for the breakup was his departure from the Mormon faith, said Stuy. He went ahead with the adoption as a single father, naming his second child Meigon (pronounced “Megan”).

  Like most American adopters, Stuy’s first port of call was Guangzhou, where the American consulate processed adoption visas on Shamian Island. Shamian is a historic sandbank filled with stately Art Deco buildings, an expat ghetto during the days of the Opium Wars.

  Later on, Shamian Island would acquire a different sort of fame as the launch point for American adoptions. Shamian’s five-star White Swan Hotel, a glass tower with lavish views of the muddy Pearl River, was nicknamed the White Stork Hotel. The hotel did so much business from adopting families, it devoted three floors purely to this group of travelers and gifted each family with a limited-edition Mattel doll called “Going Home Barbie,” a blond hausfrau clutching a tiny Chinese baby. (These days, those Barbies have $300 asking prices on eBay.)

  The new father took little Meigon to one of the numerous shops on Shamian that offered T-shirts and silky costumes, many of them in pink. There, he met the woman who would eventually become his second wife, Lan.

  Lan, a deeply tanned woman with delicate features and long, graceful fingers, sold tourist tchotchkes and did pen-and-ink sketches of America’s newest little citizens. Stuy commissioned one of his two daughters, a process that took several months. During the period, the couple struck up an e-mail correspondence.

  Later that year Stuy flew back to Guangzhou, partly to see Lan and partly to find out more information on Meigon. During Meigon’s adoption, while paying the various fees and donations, he noticed he had been billed 420 yuan, about $55 at the time, for a “finding notice.”

  He learned that finding notices are newspaper ads Chinese orphanages are required to place for children they are submitting for international adoption. On his return to Guangzhou, he tried to find out more. After visiting many area newspapers, he and Lan found a small newspaper that ran those ads. The paper had a roomful of old print copies, and Stuy eventually located Meigon’s finding ad. It listed where she had been found and, most importantly, had a picture of a four-month-old Meigon he had never seen before.

  Those finding ads became Research-China’s bread and butter. The Stuys—he and Lan married in 2004—started buying up old newspaper copies across China, usually for pennies. They sold the finding ads to adoptive families in America and Europe for a huge markup: $75 each. “The first few years were gravy,” he said. The couple adopted a third daughter, Meilon.

  By 2004 Research-China had diversified, offering customized reports on individual orphanages and analysis reports. For this, the Stuys continued to rely on information culled from the finding ads, using the information listed—finding ages, genders, health data, finding locations—to draw conclusions and discover patterns.

  In St. Paul, Stuy provided a sample of his findings, lavishly illustrated with charts and graphs. A normal Chinese orphanage, Stuy argued—one not engaged in baby buying—receives a wide spectrum of orphans of different ages, genders, and abilities, found abandoned at a variety of places.

  Retroactively analyzing data from six Hunan orphanages implicated in the baby-buying scandal, Stuy found they all showed abnormal traits: they all claimed to have found mostly girls, mostly very young infants, at only a few locations. The first two qualities suggested market demand rather than random chance. The latter suggested orphanage directors too lazy to properly cover their tracks. According to Stuy, in five years, these six orphanages claimed to have found only 17 male children out of a total of 2,202. One of the orphanages, Changning, claimed to have found almost 40 percent of its children abandoned in just two locations. From studying these ads, Stuy believes more than half of China’s orphanages are buying babies. That’s not a message any adoptive parent wants to hear.

  Not even special-needs children are exempt from suspicion, claimed Stuy, responding to a question from the audience. A woman in a brown shirt was in line to adopt a special-needs child from China. Surely, these children were really unwanted and abandoned? she asked. Stuy hesitated. “I can’t say special kids, no problem. We’ve learned the tiger changes its stripes constantly.”

  According to his data, China orphanages claimed to have found very few children with special needs abandoned between 2000 and 2005. Now they make up almost half of the findings. The year 2005 is the inflection year for Chinese adoptions, when numbers adopted fell sharply following the Hunan scandal.

  “Did it mean that before 2005, children with special needs simply didn’t survive long enough,” asked Stuy, “or that after 2005, orphanages realized these kids are adoptable, so let’s invest?”

  Then he qualified his answer, giving the woman a kind of absolution. Special-needs children, considered unlucky in China, face a very bleak future. He found it hard to condemn the practice of adopting these children, even if they had been bought, he said.

  It’s difficult to verify Stuy’s claims. I don’t know anyone else who is independently analyzing orphanage population data across China. Much of his data comes from these “finding notices” published in newspapers, and it’s quite possible they are incomplete. Stuy’s data does not cover children in orphanages who are not placed for adoption overseas, since they do not have finding ads. Stuy acknowledges these flaws. “I’d love for someone else to independently look into this. I’m just providing a starting point. But time and time again our assessm
ents have been validated by trafficking stories from inside China.”

  Stuy’s research is “an unsettling postmortem of the dead dream of China as an ethical source of unlimited numbers of adoptions of healthy young and older children,” says law professor David Smolin. “Even if no one believes Stuy, the facts are there to see, in the numbers, and in the narratives.”

  III

  Western families who adopted Chinese babies worried about how these children would adapt to mostly Caucasian environments. How would their daughters deal with the knowledge that they were abandoned because of their gender? Would all this create alienation and dislocation?

  For answers, they looked to the first major wave of Asian adoptees. Starting in the 1960s, some two hundred thousand Korean children—again, mostly girls—were adopted into American households. Some Korean adoptees reported strong feelings of anger at being raised with little to no cultural knowledge of their land of origin. They resented their adoptive families’ using a “colorblind” approach to raising them, little preparing them for racist encounters.

  A 1996 Boston Globe article entitled “The Riddle of Julia Ming Gale” hinted at the kinds of issues China-adoptive families would face. The article profiled twenty-four-year-old Julia Ming Gale, who had been adopted from Taiwan into a white family. Though her Caucasian parents were Chinese-speaking academics, Julia grew up speaking next to no Mandarin and identifying strongly with her white siblings. She visualized herself as a redhead with freckles. “I think I was always hoping I would just become white,” she was quoted as saying.

  China-adoptive families tried to inoculate their children against suffering these same issues by incorporating Chinese elements into their upbringing. It would be a sort of cultural Band-Aid. The group Families with Children from China, or FCC, became a powerful entity with over a thousand chapters across the United States. Every year, FCCs across the country planned activities around Chinese cultural events like the Lunar New Year celebrations, Mid-Autumn Festival, and Chinese language lessons.

  It helped, of course, that China was in ascendance as a global power and anxious to increase its “soft” power. Many of these events were sponsored by the Confucius Institute, the arm of China’s Ministry of Education tasked with promoting Chinese culture overseas. Cannily spotting a public diplomacy opportunity, Beijing also began sponsoring “Going Home” tours for adoptees and their families.

  Did it work? Few adoptees learned to speak Mandarin fluently or were truly comfortable in a cross-cultural environment. Some experts say the main benefits were psychological, designed to reassure the adoptees that their differences were embraced and accepted.

  Not all adoptees feel this. “People say, ‘You’re so lucky you have two cultures open to you.’ But a lot of us feel the opposite of that, not completely here nor there,” said adoptee Grace Newton. “A huge part of cultural loss feels physically grafted to my skin.”

  Many adoptees I spoke to expressed conflict. They know they are beneficiaries of a system that gave them, for the most part, loving and affluent homes. But many also want acknowledgment of the losses involved in their adoption, a desire that can cause strife with their adoptive parents.

  Newton first became aware of the troubling issues with Chinese adoption when she took a college class on transnational adoption. Her mother said she hoped Newton wouldn’t return from class “thinking we’re ‘white colonial imperialists.’ It was kind of joking, kind of not.”

  After hearing about incidences of kidnapping and trafficking, she would call her mother, crying. It created a rift. “My parents had gone in [to adoption] thinking it was good, ethical. They had good intentions,” said Newton. Toward the end of the course, she mended relations with her mother, but “it was hard for her to see my ideas change and my questioning of the system that had brought our family together.” Toward the end of the course, Newton said her mother “realized that my critiques of adoption weren’t a critique of them.”

  Echoing the sentiments of many adoptees, she said, “When a loved one dies, it’s horrible, but there is an ability to honor that person’s memory. With adoption there is a sense of ambiguous loss since most adoptees’ first families are out there somewhere. There’s always the wondering—Do they think of me? What are they doing now? What would have my life been like?”

  Like their Korean counterparts, it is likely that more China adoptees will probe their history as they grow older. Possibly, they may even become a political or social force like Korean adoptees, who successfully lobbied the South Korean government to give them dual citizenship and open up access to sealed adoption records.

  At present, the number of China adoptees who’ve shown interest in locating their birth parents is small. Most of the oldest are only in their late teens, still wrestling with school, college, and dating issues. (Experts say that adoptees’ interest in discovering their origins usually peaks in two phases, in their early twenties and when they become parents themselves.) What’s different today is they have a powerful new tool: DNA testing, a double-edged sword with an explosive potential for finding biological needles in China’s billon-strong haystack.

  I saw firsthand some of the interesting possibilities with the Stuys. While they were in St. Paul, they met a woman whom I’ll call Jane. (She did not want her name or too many details of her story disclosed.) A few weeks earlier, Jane had received a letter from China. The letter writer claimed to be writing on behalf of a man saying he is the biological father of Jane’s adopted daughter. This man had put his daughter into foster care to avoid being punished for violating family-planning policies. In the letter, which I saw, he wrote, “My uncle and his wife have spent 14 years looking for her ever since.” They obtained Jane’s address from “a government contact.”

  Jane sent a DNA kit to China. She agonized over whether to tell her daughter or not. In the end she decided against it, as her daughter was undergoing a volatile teenage phase and had “zero interest” in knowing anything of her Chinese roots. Jane concocted an elaborate subterfuge, collecting the entire family’s DNA, including her unsuspecting daughter’s, under the guise of celebrating World DNA Day. “Who knew there was even such a day?” she said, laughing. It turned out later the samples were not a match.

  Two years ago, the Stuys began conducting birth parent searches using DNA testing. First, they identify a “hot spot,” where an orphanage is reportedly trafficking children. The Stuys contact cluster groups of adoptive parents who have children from that orphanage. If they get a group together, the Stuys conduct a localized search, interviewing foster parents and orphanage workers in the area and collecting DNA samples. Adoptive parents pay $275 initially, and an additional $200 if the Stuys locate the birth parents. The Stuys say they have conducted five or six such searches and located twelve birth parents this way. To her knowledge, said Lan Stuy, only three or four adoptive families have initiated contact with these birth parents. The others presumably saved this Pandora’s box of information for the future.

  Now the Stuys are creating a small DNA bank by sending Chinese samples to a major US-based DNA research facility. “We used to just collect swabs from all these parents, and if it didn’t turn out to be a match, it was such a waste,” said Stuy. “Then I started thinking, ‘Why not bank it?’ Somewhere, sometime, some girl in the US could be searching. Maybe she will find a match.” Each sample costs under $100, and the Stuys pay for the collection and kits through donations.

  While it’s true the Stuys’ business benefits from growing concerns over the irregularities in China’s adoption system, they do not appear to be making much. Records show Research-China’s blog has about one thousand subscribers paying an annual $20 fee. The company also markets small services like Lan’s sketches, DVDs and photos of orphanages, and translation services. Aside from Lan, Research-China has no full-time employees. Stuy himself went back to full-time work last year so that he could get better insurance coverage for the family. “I’m tired of beating the drum,” sa
id Stuy.

  IV

  In 2011, the investigative magazine Caixin ran a story about family-planning officials in Hunan who had kidnapped children born in violation of the one-child policy. These children ended up in the Shaoyang Orphanage. Some were adopted overseas. Four years later, I met up with some parents of these stolen children.

  The abductions all had certain similarities. All the parents had been away, consigning their children to the care of their grandparents while they toiled long hours in distant towns. All the children seized had irregularities in their birth registration. Mostly, they were out-of-plan babies, or babies born out of wedlock, which made them fair game. Indeed, it isn’t even certain that the seizure of these children is considered a crime under Chinese law. Certainly, none of the officials were criminally charged, though some were demoted or transferred. Family-planning officials I spoke to in other parts of the country said it was widely understood that they could act with impunity in such matters.

  Yang Libing’s child, a chubby girl named Ling, had been born out of wedlock. In 2004, Yang had been a forty-year-old who’d returned home with his pregnant teenage girlfriend, Chen Zhimei. They couldn’t marry because Chen was below the legal age of marriage.

  Besides, Chen’s mother opposed the match. “She complained, ‘He’s one year older than I am!’” recalled Yang, a man with tired eyes and cheeks that resemble steep cliffs, high and caved in.

  After Ling was born, they left her in Yang’s parents’ care and went to seek work in the industrial south. Before leaving, they scraped together enough money for a studio portrait. Looking twenty years younger, Yang sat against a backdrop of blood-red spring blossoms. On his lap, baby Ling is a tiny Michelin man in a down jacket so thick her chubby arms stick out. On her feet, handmade shoes blaze a motley riot of color: pink, yellow, blue, brown. Dressed in a padded jacket, her mother hovers protectively.