by Mei Fong
It was their first and only photo as a family. While the parents were gone, officials seized the child. They convinced Ling’s grandparents, who are illiterate, to affix their thumbprints to documents putting the child up for adoption. Officials later claimed Yang signed papers giving her up. Yang was able to prove he was physically in southern China at the time and could not have signed the documents. But the damage was done. Ling disappeared into Shaoyang Orphanage. “They told me, ‘Forget about her. We’ll give you approval for a second child,’” said Yang.
When Brian Stuy read the story, he sent a note to his network of adoptive parents. He asked those who had adopted from Shaoyang to respond. A couple in Illinois replied. Looking at the timing and circumstances of when they adopted, and after comparing photos they’d sent, Stuy became convinced the Illinois girl was baby Ling. She had a birthmark that corresponded to one Ling had, said Stuy.
He exchanged e-mails and telephone conversations with the Illinois parents, who were understandably shocked. At first, said Stuy, the adoptive mother was very cooperative. But when Stuy suggested a DNA test, the frightened couple cut off contact.
Stuy refused to divulge the identity of these parents but agreed to forward a letter I composed to them. In it, I offered to pass on any messages they might have to their daughter’s possible biological parents, whom I was meeting in China. There was no reply.
In 2009, Lan Stuy met Yang. She showed him pictures of the child they believed to be Ling. She also took a sample of his DNA. “I was overjoyed. She looked just like the picture I have of her, only older,” he said. The pictures showed a four-year-old in what looked to him like a “big villa,” said Yang. “Everyone must live like that in America,” he said, daintily spitting out flecks of tobacco from between his teeth.
Things had not gone well for him. He and Chen had a son, Chengjie, but she left them three years later. “She couldn’t stand the poor life. She stopped believing I could find our daughter.”
I asked him what he would do if he discovered, and could prove, that this was his child.
“I’d want her back,” he said instantly.
“But she’d be already ten years old. She wouldn’t be used to the lifestyle in China. She wouldn’t even speak your language,” I suggested.
“Then I’d like her to at least visit me once a year. Or I could visit her. And I’d like her to learn a little Chinese so we could talk,” he said.
I tried to envision this scenario: Yang, with his thick accent and tobacco-spitting habits, not, from his own account, a hands-on parent. Chengjie was being raised by his grandparents, and Yang lightly sketched out what appeared to be a tough upbringing of his own: heavy farm chores after school, a father he didn’t see often and who had not had a steady job in years. I tried to imagine how a ten-year-old American girl with a roomful of Barbies would fit in.
None of the Shaoyang mothers and fathers I spoke to seemed like ideal parents. They barely saw their kids, for they were forced to work in faraway cities. China’s household registration system created a them-and-us caste system, and without city household registrations, they couldn’t bring their kids along, not if they wanted to educate them, or get health care.
I was angry when Yuan Mingsan told me how his third child was seized from her grandmother. Family-planning officials detained Yuan’s mother as she was taking her grandchild home from the clinic. They said she was “too old” to care for a baby and asked her to sign papers saying she was giving up the child. When Yuan’s mother refused, “they had her do airplane arms. They threatened to punch her if she put her arms down,” said Yuan. Finally, she agreed.
“What was your daughter’s name?”
She didn’t have one, he said. She was over a year old.
“When did you find out about this?”
Six months later, when he called home. I thought I’d heard wrong and asked again. Yes, six months later, he said. It was 2003 and cell phones were still beyond the reach of most migrant workers.
Once he heard, Yuan rushed home and tried to get his daughter back. He was told to pay a fine of 16,000 RMB ($2,000) for violating family-planning policies. Yuan refused. Later, he went back to work outside the village. Family-planning officials kept harassing his family. Worried that they might seize his other grandchildren, Yuan’s father pleaded with him to pay at least part of the fine. After he reluctantly paid 5,000 RMB (about $550), the harassment stopped.
I felt conflicted. Part of me burned with anger at the way these people’s children were so coolly whisked away, with no recourse. I hate bullies, and these family-planning officials seemed like some of the biggest thugs in the countryside.
But the other part of me—the part that had spoken to adoptive parents and seen adoptees on the other end of the globe—couldn’t help wondering if the adoptees were better off.
Indeed, this is the justification some adoptive parents use. A midwestern news executive I spoke to adopted two daughters from China in the early 1990s. Her daughters’ origins are a mystery, she acknowledged. But two years ago, during a rare Christmas decorating fit, “I couldn’t help looking at my daughter and thinking, ‘If she hadn’t been adopted, she might be making those decorations in the factory, not hanging them.’”
To adopt a child is almost like embracing a religion, with a particular set of beliefs and constructs, and articles of faith. A common one in the China-adoptive community is the red thread, drawn from a Chinese fable that says when a child is born, invisible red threads stretch out to connect the child to everyone who will be important in her life. It’s a message that appeals to adoptive parents, conveying a sense of destiny and inevitability. It was meant to be.
I read many accounts by adoptive parents that use religious overtones to describe the process. It demands certain leaps of faith. In her book The Lost Daughters of China, Karin Evans quotes adoptive mother Carole Sopp as saying, “If I start to disbelieve what they [China authorities] told me, I’m just perpetuating the myth that she doesn’t have a past that we can rely on, and that’s even more disconnective for the future.”
Jeff Gammage, a hard-nosed reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, says he does not believe the choice to match him and his adoptive Chinese daughter was random. In his book China Ghosts, Gammage, who is white, speculates that some faceless Chinese bureaucrat spotted a facial resemblance between him and his daughter. “If you were to take Jin Yu’s referral photo and place it beside a picture of me as a toddler—me in a crew cut, she with her head shaved—you would see a resemblance that borders on identical. Same mouth, same cheek, same ears.”
The flip side of saying some adoptions are meant to be, however, is saying some children are fated to be abandoned.
In her blog The Red Thread Is Broken, Grace Newton cuttingly observes, “It is also saying birthmothers are equally destined to be in situations in which they have to relinquish their children, and that these children are destined to lose their first families, countries, cultures, and everything they know.”
There has to be a line. And it has to be this: it’s wrong to steal children.
Yang Libing’s story developed a strange twist. Chen, his erstwhile girlfriend, confessed to Lan Stuy that Yang was not the father of her child. She had followed him back to his village for protection after getting pregnant.
Yang had known this when we met but had not said so. Later, I asked him why he lied by omission. “She is my daughter,” he stubbornly insisted. “I took care of her and her mother even before she was born. You don’t have to give birth to be a parent.”
In 2013, the Stuys sent Chen’s DNA sample to a US data bank. They don’t have the Illinois child’s DNA sample, so the entire exercise is a nod to a possible future when this girl may seek the truth of her origins. “It will be there, waiting,” said Stuy.
I think of those DNA samples as so many unexploded bombs, with the potential to fragment lives, stories, beliefs.
Babies Beyond Borders
There’s
nothing surer,
The rich get rich and the poor get children.
—Richard A. Whiting, Raymond B. Egan, and Gus Kahn, “Ain’t We Got Fun”
I
After my eggs were removed, I woke with a desperate need to pee.
The nurse wouldn’t let me. “No standing. Forty minutes.”
I tried to lie still and think fertile thoughts. I visualized dozens of plump eggs, like frog spawn or caviar, slowly suctioned out, ripe with possibilities. I should have been feeling empty but replete. Instead I had the burning conviction that years of toilet training would rapidly be undone.
“Please, I really have to go,” I pleaded. Reluctantly, the nurse fetched a bedpan. Holding the kidney-shaped dish aloft, she demanded, “Twenty kwai.”
Incredulous, I looked at her, then my hospital-gowned self. Where did she think I kept my spare cash? But that was Chinese health care for you. Cash up front or you didn’t get served—even, apparently, for something as small as a $3 bedpan.
Up to that point, every visit, every scan and injection I underwent, had been paid for up front, cash only. Since China’s largest denomination is only a 100-yuan note—about $15 at the time—I carried around brick-size chunks of currency in a shabby tote, slinking like a bagman in a bad crime movie.
That wasn’t even the biggest absurdity, of course. Here I was, having fertility treatments in the land of the one-child policy. People left China to have more babies; they didn’t go to the world’s most populous nation looking to add to it.
Nine months after my miscarriage, I was in a private hospital in Beijing undergoing IVF. I never thought I would agree to such an invasive procedure, let alone in China, with all the attendant difficulties, but the miscarriage had changed everything. I was no longer uncertain or ambivalent about motherhood. I wanted a child, I was fertility challenged, and since I lived in China, this was where I would have to seek treatment. (Given what I knew of Chinese adoptions, I was wary of taking that route, and besides, waiting times for a child had stretched to five years at that point. Trying to conceive still seemed the easier option.)
For a country with such a large population, there were surprisingly few infertility treatment choices. I lived in Beijing, where the most famous center was the Peking University Third Hospital. In 1988, China’s first test-tube baby had been born there, a decade after the world’s first test-tube baby. But the waitlist was long. Between 1983 and today, China’s infertility rate had risen threefold to 10 percent, on par with that of most developed nations. For a nation of 1.3 billion people, that translated into a lot of patients, and there weren’t enough fertility clinics to meet demand.
A friend told me about the private Jiaen Hospital. Started by a US-trained Chinese doctor, the Jiaen Hospital didn’t look very impressive. It was a small white building tucked away in Haidian, Beijing’s university district. The front entrance was dominated by the cashier’s counter, which sat behind a barrier that looked like the bulletproof counters I used to see in Bronx gas stations. The toilets were traditional squat ones, which made giving a spatter-free urine sample as easy as threading a needle in a moving vehicle. They burned sticks of incense in the toilet to mask the ammonia stench. But the driveway had a number of black Audis—the preferred ride for China’s top bureaucrats and elite.
Seeking fertility treatment in one-child-policy China had its own special issues. I showed up at Jiaen with a wad of papers: my work visa, passport, a letter from my employer, and, most important of all, my marriage certificate. My husband and I had gotten married in his hometown in Maryland, and our marriage certificate looked impressively authentic, with its shiny gold stamp. I suspect I could have gotten something similar from the local color printers, with nobody in China the wiser. But that was part of the process: you couldn’t get IVF treatment as a single unmarried woman. Under the one-child policy, advanced reproductive technologies were strictly for married couples.
The one-child policy also skewed Jiaen’s clientele: some were women like me, who’d spent their twenties and thirties focused on their careers and were nearing the end of their reproductive years. But quite a few of the women I met at the hospital were younger, without age-related fertility problems. They were looking specifically to have twins or triplets as a way to get around the one-child policy. Multiples counted as a single birth, providing a loophole to those who wanted larger families but couldn’t risk endangering their careers. I talked to a Tianjin middle-school teacher who said she’d lose her job if she had the two children she wanted in separate births. She was pregnant with twins and fervently hoped they would be a lucky “phoenix-dragon” combo, a girl and a boy.
It seemed like a lot of my time at Jiaen was spent at the cashier’s desk, pushing large wads of cash across. Some of the sums seemed ridiculously low. A consultation with a doctor—provided you didn’t request the august Dr. Liu Jiaen himself—was just 20 RMB, the same price as the bedpan I ended up needing so desperately.
After the bedpan incident, I lay in a fuzzy post-op stupor. (My hastily summoned husband coughed up the fee.) There were two other couples in the room with me, also recovering from egg retrieval. One woman was an event planner. Her husband produced music for CCTV, China’s largest broadcaster.
Sleepily, I heard him recounting a documentary he’d seen in America. It was on Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward movement, when he had tried to galvanize the country into leapfrogging from an agrarian to an industrial society by turning farms into backyard steel furnaces. Over 20 million people starved to death, but not many in China are aware of some of the Great Leap’s more drastic effects.
“People were eating babies,” said the CCTV producer, dramatically. Silence. I sensed skepticism in the room. He continued, “It’s true. I saw it on Discovery Channel!”
I drifted off, drowsily thinking of cannibals, families, and the fate of baby-devouring nations.
II
In the land of the one-child policy, the fertility wizards became kings. The number of officially licensed clinics in China offering IVF and other fertility treatments mushroomed to over two hundred, from just five in 2001, and unlicensed clinics are numerous. Sales of clomiphene—a fertility drug that causes superovulation—soared, with online prices dipping as low as $1.50 a packet.
The number of twin births in China more than doubled over the past decade to the point where one out of eighty-nine babies born would be a twin. That’s still below the rate in the United States, where it’s about one in thirty. But while rising twin rates in America are mainly due to women having children later in life, in China the one-child policy accounted for at least a third of the increase in twins, according to a study by a group of economists from Harvard and Peking University. That means many women were deliberately having “twins” as a way of getting around the one-child policy, either by using fertility drugs or by registering non-twin children as twins.
In 2000, for example, officials in Yunnan found seven hundred pairs of such “fake twins” in over three hundred villages. Provinces with higher birth fines had significantly higher incidences of twins than places with more liberal rules, researchers found. In Shanghai, by at least one estimate, one in every fifty babies born was a twin, according to one news report.
In 2010, a successful Guangzhou businesswoman tested the limits of fertility, and the family-planning commission’s tolerance, by having eight babies within a month. She did this through the use of fertility treatments and the help of two surrogate mothers, while carrying several fetuses to full term herself. The press nicknamed her babaotai muqin, or China’s Octomom. Local news reports said the mother spent close to $160,000 in fertility treatments, surrogacy, and medical fees and hired eleven nannies. The news was leaked when the photo studio the family visited splashed the pictures online. The initial public reaction was disbelief.
“Heavens. To have one family with eight kids . . . in an era of family planning where most people have just one, the contrast is just too much,” said a CCTV
commentator. “It doesn’t sound like news. It sounds more like a fairy tale.”
The family went into hiding to escape media attention. Two years later, the Guangdong Family Planning Commission said investigations into the issue had been completed and the couple would be heavily fined an unspecified sum.
Surrogacy itself is a gray area in China. The Ministry of Health bans the medical institutions and staff under its aegis from performing any surrogacy procedures. Of course, this allows intermediary agents to flourish, unregulated.
There are no official statistics available on the number of surrogate pregnancy agencies in China, but the well-respected Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Weekly newspaper estimated that around twenty-five thousand children had been birthed by surrogate mothers in China over the past three decades. Current compensation for surrogate mothers ranges from $3,000 to $6,000, about a tenth of US costs.
With the one-child policy stifling regulatory oversight of the reproductive services industry, the result was a veritable Wild West of baby making. Some surrogate agencies in China unabashedly offered services guaranteeing a boy, which involved making surrogate mothers abort female fetuses. A mediator quoted in a local news report said one client tried five surrogate mothers in a quest for a son. “It is quite embarrassing. Every time we find it’s a she, we have to change a surrogate mother.”
Surrogate mothers and birth parents were also vulnerable to crackdowns by family-planning authorities. In 2009, three surrogate mothers living in a communal flat in Guangzhou were hauled away by family-planning authorities and given abortions. “I was crying, ‘I don’t want to do this,’” a young woman called Xiao Hong, pregnant with four-month-old twins, told Reuters. “But they still dragged me in and injected my belly with a needle.”
