by Scott Tong
Chapter Fifteen
DAUGHTERS FOR SALE
I tried a few times to leave her on the street. But nobody wanted her. So I brought her back home.
—Duan Yueneng, convicted baby trafficker
“This is my daughter,” the Hunan baby seller says. “Do you want her?”
Those are the first words out of the mouth of thirty-eight-year-old Duan Yueneng. He has just been released from jail, for the offense of trafficking babies—that is, selling them to Chinese orphanages that send infants to America via international adoption. It was a family operation for the Duans, and his wife and sister remain in prison for their roles. This man, busted for selling girls, is now apparently offering to unload his own.
Neither Cecilia nor I know if he’s being serious, so we dodge the question and step into his house. We are cold and exhausted on this afternoon in February 2010. We’ve spent five rainy hours on the road—long-distance taxi, bus, pedicab—to arrive in the cheerless, rainy Hunan city of Changning. Duan motions us to a square, wooden table with an orange skirt on each side. He sticks his hands under the skirt, rubbing them together for warmth. A primitive charcoal heater burns beneath the table—the only source of heat in the house.
The daughter in question appears with tea and tangerines and a straight face. She keeps her head down throughout, her long bangs almost covering her eyes entirely. She is fifteen, the younger of two sisters, Duan explains, making her an over-quota child born illegally (this is before China’s relaxation of the one-child policy).
“I wanted to get rid of her,” Duan says matter-of-factly. “So I’d still have a chance to have a baby boy. We need boys. I tried a few times to leave her on the street. But nobody wanted her. My mother didn’t want to abandon her, so I brought her back home.”
The younger daughter presents two problems for him. First, she is a she, a liability in this backwater place, despite all the talk in today’s China about boy-girl equality. There is a joke going around I’ve heard a few times: having a son turns you into the China Construction Bank: you have to build a new home for him and his wife. But a daughter makes you the China Investment Bank: you attract money—girls are profitable enterprises. I presume the joke had yet to arrive in Changning when the second daughter was born in the mid-’90s.
Strike two: she is Daughter 2. Many Chinese couples at the time were willing to conceive a second child, and even pay the fine, if that child turned out to be a desired boy. Duan and his wife took this chance and failed.
Duan’s mother joins us at the table. I start the recorder, place the long shotgun microphone on a stand in front of them, and return my cold hands to the charcoal heater. And the Duans begin to talk about the underground adoption economy.
***
When it comes to China’s embrace of the global connected age, of modern science and technology and market forces, it is without question a remarkable economic and governance feat. In 1900, it was one of the poorest countries on earth; the late economic historian Angus Maddison estimates China’s GDP per person was below India’s, below the African continent’s, and one-seventh that of the United States. Today China has achieved a level of poverty reduction that took centuries in Western Europe and North America. There are plenty of ways to measure this progress: per capita GDP, Olympic gold medals, cumulative train tracks, stock market capitalization, space exploration trips, calorie consumption, power generation. This is how dramatic “catch-up,” in the words of development economists, can be.
Yet all this represents “the things you can see,” to quote a driver I met in Wuhan. I’ve often heard this described as the empirical “hardware” of an economy. What’s lacking is the software: Education. Transparency. Meritocracy. Innovation. Morality. Trust. And, notably, the rule of law. Show up in any Chinese city or village and tongues start wagging about corruption and public money disappearing, in some cases turning up at craps tables in Macau.
Mainlanders didn’t invent corruption, but given the opportunity, they do it well. This is particularly the case when a lot of foreign money trickles in and gets spread around, with limited oversight. Case in point: international adoption. American couples, motivated by virtue or child-rearing desperation, arrive and plop down $3,000 for a child to bring home. This naturally draws profiteers out of the woodwork. Yet it’s remarkable how China—which takes such a battering for rule bending in other areas—has long benefited from a clean image when it comes to baby girls. We don’t trust the pet food or the quality of Dollar Store goods, but somehow believe in the integrity of the supply chain for baby girls.
Certainly my wife, Cathy, and I did in 2002, when we began our paperwork to adopt a daughter from Hunan named Guo Shanzhen (to provide her a modicum of privacy—so that this story does not define the next seventy years of her life—I will use her Chinese name from the orphanage rather than the English one we use at home). We were living in Alexandria, Virginia, with our son Evan, who had just turned two. Cathy and I had no fertility issues, yet chose to adopt largely because of her own family history. The daughter of two white social workers, she was born their biological child in Canton, Ohio. Eighteen months later, her parents adopted her brother from Akron, to provide for an infant in need. He is the mixed-race biological son of a black man and white woman. Then came her sister from Saigon, the product of a black American GI and Vietnamese woman from the Vietnam War. The youngest brother was also adopted from Akron, also part black.
Soon after Cathy and I married, we talked about adopting as well. A baby from China intrigued me, not simply because of my family heritage, but because of mainlanders’ well-known abandonment of unwanted girls. I’d seen photos of babies in orphanages, left in trash cans to die overnight, and we both knew China’s one-child rule led to infanticide and abandonment. The narrative pitted heroes against villains, and we chose a side. As an added benefit, a Chinese daughter would be an easier sell to my own parents.
The process began with what’s called a home study performed by a social worker. Ours, named Vivian, asked us about our family situation, salaries, health, and reasons to adopt. When we brought up China, she described the process as if she were selling a Toyota: affordable, reliable, good quality. Chinese orphans tend not to come with fetal alcohol syndrome associated with babies from Russia and Eastern Europe. The waiting time for a Chinese kid was a predictable twelve to eighteen months—a two-term paperwork pregnancy. And the fees were competitive, relative to adopting domestically or from other countries: $20,000 ballpark included the home study, paperwork, fingerprints, fees, flights, hotel.
And the Chinese system was considered legally smooth: all cases run through the central government, so parents could avoid dealing with the small, local jurisdictions as found in some other countries. The image offered by Vivian—and virtually all the English-language websites we Googled—suggested an efficient, rules-based system. Bureaucracy, the good kind. Each Chinese girl comes with a paper trail. Her file lists where she was found and who found her. There is also an important step known as the “finding ad.” When an orphanage takes in a new child, it buys an ad in the local newspaper notifying the public of the timing, place, and description of the found child. That way, if a baby is stolen rather than abandoned, her biological parents can pick her up. Here’s a passage from the adoption organization Chinesechildren.org from the time:
During your trip to China, you will receive a certificate of abandonment that proves the biological parents have relinquished their parental rights through abandonment. There is no legal avenue for the birth parents to reclaim custody.
The message: yes, you can trust China. And in 2002, we did.
***
The Hunan provincial court in 2006 convicted Duan Yuening and four other family members of trafficking. According to the verdict, they bought eighty-five babies from Guangdong and sold them to six orphanages in the province: Hengnan, Hengdong, Hengyang, Changning, Qidong, and Hengshan. “But in reality, we transported far more babies,” he says.
“More than a thousand.” In addition to Duan, his two sisters, wife, and sister-in-law were convicted. He received the lightest sentence.
“The women did the long-distance traveling,” he explains. They transported babies north by train to Hunan, where Duan drove them by car to local orphanages. He negotiated sales.
At this point, he backs up and starts from the beginning. I take a sip of tea, crack open a few watermelon seeds, and on his direction dump the shells on the table. He and his mother Chen Zhijin explain that they stumbled into the baby-selling business. In the mid-1990s, she took Duan’s unwanted second daughter and moved to another Hunan city, Qidong, to hide the baby from local enforcers of the one-child policy. This was a common workaround; officials can’t extract fines for over-quota babies they don’t see. Chen took a job caring for babies in the local Qidong orphanage, for $2 a day.
Then, Chen says, she started finding abandoned infant girls around town and bringing them to the orphanage. “They were left on street corners to freeze.” At the time, the technology of ultrasound was just arriving into rural townships, so parents rejecting daughters did not have the option of sex-selective abortion. Instead, they resorted to sex-selective abandonment.
Duan jumps in. “When I was in my twenties, I’d ride my bike and see abandoned babies, dead. They smelled terrible. No one would bury them. Ants crawled in babies’ mouths, but no one cared for them. It was very cruel. Back then, only a fraction of the babies were adopted by foreign families.”
I must look captivated by this, because his mother eyes me and chooses this moment to say something important. “Those babies I picked up in 1990s must be sixteen, seventeen years old by now. Many are now in America. Will these well-off children hear your radio report, and then share some of their wealth with us?”
Aha. So this is why they have agreed to this interview: money. I should have thought of that. Convincing a Chinese person to speak in front of a microphone is a particular challenge in a low-trust place. In America, if I wave a mic at someone, she figures, Why not? In China, a person asks, Why? This is the reason.
Duan and his mom watch for my reaction. Could they cash in on this interview? In reality it’s preposterous to think an American couple would see the Duan family as their daughter’s savior. But I can’t say that with my outside voice, so I mumble something vague about possible payment, which is enough for his mother to continue.
“If I found a baby and it later got adopted, the orphanage paid me ten kuai [renminbi] each time.” About $1.20. This was described euphemistically as “travel reimbursement.” Sometimes, the Qidong orphanage would pay a tad more for transportation costs if a baby came from farther away, or at night.
“Sometimes an orphanage made an arrangement with my mom late at night, when it was too late to take the bus,” Duan says. “She’d get money to come by taxi. Or perhaps motorcycle taxi.” I try to picture this grandmother, cradling a wrapped newborn, balancing sidesaddle on a motor scooter.
Around 2000, demand rose, and Chen’s finding fees began to skyrocket. Word got out to local orphanages that this grandma was picking up abandoned babies. “Orphanages started asking for more babies,” she says. “They started paying one thousand kuai [$120 US]. Then two thousand. Then four thousand.” Orphanage workers came from miles away to pick up babies, very likely representing foreign demand for Chinese baby girls. Chinese local media reported workers in the Hengyang orphanage received bonuses for bringing in at least three babies a year. In 1991, 115 Chinese babies went overseas via adoption, according to official Chinese government records. The number ballooned to two thousand babies in 1995 and five thousand in 2000. The majority of those babies went to the United States. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the sight of a white parent with a Chinese kid in a suburban American mall had become less and less unusual.
***
For Cathy and me in 2002, the adoption paperwork was stifling, the equivalent of doing our taxes for six straight months. We submitted pay stubs, employer letters, recommendation letters, HIV test results, criminal background checks, and official fingerprints. We drafted wills. Every piece of paper had to be notarized, and then separately “authenticated” by the State Department. And then officially approved once again by Chinese authorities. It was all so proper. What could go wrong? Again, a passage from Chinesechildren.org:
The Chinese government and local orphanages highly value their international image and have an effective reporting and processing system to maximize the reliability and accuracy of adoptive children’s information provided to adoptive families. Our nearly 20 years of international adoption experience with China has shown us that China is doing a very commendable job!
Where our money would go was also complicated. Of the $20,000, a few thousand went to the home study, hundreds to airlines, hotels, official Washington, official Beijing. The more checks we wrote, the more we got lost in the details. Buried in the transactions was that $3,000 would go to the baby’s orphanage. In 2002, that was nine months of income for the typical Chinese person. I never even paid attention to that, treating it simply as a cost of doing business rather than a whopping amount of money on the mainland. Instead we shopped for a crib, and a daycare for our son Evan. He was two at the time, and ended up at a daycare with three adopted Chinese girls. Evan informed us that all sisters came from China.
Cathy’s parents supported us wholeheartedly, though my folks were underwhelmed. “Why do you need to adopt?” my father asked. “You have your own.” He suggested that adoption brought new risks. We’d have no control over any inherited health problems, or even know about them. This was one of those rare moments when my folks advised me on how to live. I assumed adopting from China could buy them off emotionally. Not only were my parents both born on the mainland, but China offered the closest thing to a guaranteed girl in a family that had struggled to produce a single female. My parents had two sons, and so did my brother. Now, we were in pursuit of an unwanted baby girl from mainland China. Still, they were skeptical.
It took us about a year and a half to complete our paperwork. With the help of Vivian and the Holt International adoption agency in Eugene, Oregon, we shipped off our adoption paperwork, known as a dossier, to Beijing in August 2003. And we waited for a baby match.
***
Duan Yueneng places a big stack of handwritten receipts on the table. Each documented the sale of a baby to a Hunan orphanage. The receipt on top is dated July 7, 2003—one month before Cathy and I submitted our own dossier to Beijing.
“They gave us money, and it shows clearly here,” Duan explains. He points to the receipt’s memo section: “for baby foster-care fees.” The payment amount: 4,200 yuan, or about $500. Another read 2,400 yuan, or $350. I’m stunned. In a country where so much of the economy is informal and undocumented, these black-market transactions were written down, as it was required for orphanage record keeping.
“All these deals all have receipts?” I ask.
“All have receipts,” his mother says.
In other ways, the scheme required falsifying documents. By law, a Chinese orphanage can only accept babies from its local area. Hunan orphanages had to hide any evidence of babies delivered from provinces far away. Duan finds a case to illustrate. He shows a photo of a baby girl with a round face and thick eyebrows, looking out from the top-right corner of a Changning government document. She’s identified as belonging to the Changning orphanage. Name: Ning Yucui. Date of birth: October 27, 2002. Date delivered to orphanage: November 3, 2002. Duan flips a page. A separate document from the police department lists the same girl and her finding person: Duan Zilin, younger sister of Duan Yueneng. The paper lists the place where the baby was found: the front entrance of the Changning Shengyuan Department Store, a place close to the orphanage.
That was the lie. Duan explains the false location is embedded in much of the paperwork, including the finding ads printed in local newspapers and documents shared with adopting parents overseas. Whenever a
baby arrives in an orphanage, it has to be documented. It all starts with the orphanage log, tallying each new baby’s arrival time, finding person, and finding location. He pulls out multiple logs from different orphanages—Qidong, Changing, Hengyang—all listing one of his sisters as the babies’ finding persons. Going down the handwritten lists, we keep noticing the names Duan Meilin and Duan Zilin. All those babies in fact came from Guangdong province five hundred miles to the south, he explains.
Duan pulls up one last document, called an adoption agreement. There, Ning Yucui is pictured with an American couple from New York, what the adoption community calls her “forever family.” For all the forever family knows, Ning Yucui was found at a local department store and delivered to a local orphanage
By 2003, Duan’s family was selling babies at scale. As demand rose, so did prices. “There was an old woman in Guangdong who lived on picking up rubbish,” Chen Zhijin says. “She also picked up babies. She brought babies back and took care of them.” One of Duan’s sisters lived and worked in the nearby industrial port city of Zhanjiang. Her husband worked on a chicken farm there, and he first met this old woman.
“She gave babies to whoever wanted them, not wanting them to die. She says it was good for us to take some babies, because she couldn’t care for all of them. I asked her, ‘You have this many babies, can I bring back some?’” In reality, things may not have been so simple. A local newspaper would later report the Duans once paid the old woman 720 renminbi for six babies, or roughly $15 each.
Each delivery required a five-hundred-mile, twelve-hour train ride. Chen Zhijin explains: “We put six babies in three big powdered-milk cardboard boxes. We boarded the train at Zhanjiang station. My daughter was with me. In the middle of the trip, one box fell, but they weren’t hurt. Then, I started feeding them, one after another. Each of us was holding one baby, and we had the other four babies in two boxes.”
