by Scott Tong
It must have created a scene. Six babies on a crowded train, ferried by two women. The typical ratio in China was a single child in a stroller, escorted by a mother, father, grandparent, and perhaps a nanny. I could only imagine the staring, in a place where gawking is an approved sport.
They ended up drawing the wrong kind of attention. A local policeman took the women off the train and questioned them. “The police wanted to know if we stole the babies,” she says. “He looked into it, didn’t find a problem, and released us. He says, ‘What you’re doing is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing for these babies.’”
This is one of several times Duan and his mother declare themselves proud of what they did, that they’d taken abandoned baby girls and helped send them on to a better life abroad. In a market economy, the thinking goes, what’s wrong with charging a fee? They imply that this is simply how a supply chain works: wholesalers find an item in demand, buy it at a low price, and sell it for higher. The item changes hands a couple times, and eventually finds a retail customer domestically or overseas. It works this way for T-shirts, socks, frozen tilapia, power drills, and iPhones. Why not abandoned girls? If an orphanage can buy a baby from the Duans for $500 and “flip” her for three thousand, the return on investment is 500 percent.
“Orphanages have relatively big profit-margin space,” Duan Yueneng explains. “They wanted more babies. They kept asking us for more. They’d take our whole families out to dinner. Orphanage directors took my sister to the best restaurant in town. The director at the Qidong orphanage invited my whole family to a banquet. Hengnan County gave us rice wine every Chinese New Year.”
***
“Mom, we got our referral.”
Tears streamed down Cathy’s face as she sat up in bed and called her mom on the phone. We’d waited about two years for this. Beijing bureaucrats had “matched” us to a then eight-month-old named Guo Shanzhen. It was April 9, 2004. The news came in a manila envelope that included three small photos. In one, a child is sitting up, propped up, in an orange T-shirt, maybe five months old. She is bald. Her big, dark, round eyes look straight at the camera. In the next one she lies on her belly on a mat, a few months older, thin black hair creeping in from the back. The third shows a baby with an outright comb-over, standing in front of a playground slide. The location: Hunan province, Zhuzhou city.
I looked up Zhuzhou. Population: three million. It serves as a railway hub, the intersection of a north-south trunk line and an east-west track. There is farming, mining, and steel in Zhuzhou, where several rivers come together. “It’s the Pittsburgh of China,” I said, and Cathy groaned on cue.
The accompanying paperwork included medical information:
Height: 65 cm
Sitting height: 38 cm
Spleen: Not palpable
Deformity: No
Heart rate: 110 beats/min
The packet also included a progress report: “Guo Shan Zhen, female, was born on March 22, 2003 (based on the note she carried). On March 28, 2003, she was picked up by Jianshe Police Station of Zhuzhou City at Collecting Station. She was then sent to our institution. Because her birth parents were not found, she is thought as a foundling.” The next section was “Progressive Information”: “Guo Shan Zhen looks like a boy with a round face, black and thick hair, bright eyes and a fairly [sic] complexion.”
A separate “abandonment certificate” indicated Guo Shanzhen was six days old when she was found alone, on the doorstep of a public welfare building in an alley by the train station. The finding person was listed as Zou Guohua, a police officer. This was her origin story.
Two months later, we flew to China, joining twelve other families matched to babies from the same orphanage in Zhuzhou. They hailed from Georgia, California, Montana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota. Our group included a pilot, a pastor, and a dentist. Two families brought biological children along for the trip, though we chose to leave then-four-year-old Evan in the States with Cathy’s parents in Toledo. My parents flew to join us in China, from their home in Portland, Oregon.
The agency Holt International scheduled us all to meet first in Beijing, to do some orientation and sightseeing, before flying into Hunan’s capital city, Changsha. Holt domestic staffer Matthew Xiao met us there, ushering us to an air-conditioned coach bus to take us to our hotel. Matthew spoke English and would be our main guide. There is a thing about tour buses in China. Every single one I’ve ridden in is prewired with speakers and a plug-in microphone, for karaoke singing and announcements. There is a time for silence, but this is not it. Matthew grabbed the mic and welcomed us visitors from America.
“You people are living my dream,” he said—something my grandmother Mildred Zhao would have said ninety years ago at the Stephen L. Baldwin School for Girls in Nanchang. He had a wife, a grade school son, and a mountain bike he took on planes to ride all over China. Matthew aspired to own a single-family home in North America, with a car to drive and clean air to inhale. In a week and half, thirteen Chinese baby girls would get that life. Matthew explained he’d volunteered and worked at Chinese orphanages for more than a decade. He began in his hometown of Nanning in southwest China’s Guangxi province, just north of the Vietnam border. It’s one of the poorest corners of China.
“They used to put the weakest babies in the trash cans at night” in the ’90s, he said, “still alive. Workers assumed they would die overnight. I saw one baby put in the trash can two nights in a row. But each time, she survived. She was strong. So the next time they put her in the trash can, one orphanage worker took the baby and cared for her at home.” He said three hundred to five hundred babies were abandoned every year in Nanning.
In the decade that followed, China’s economy took off in the great capitalist resumption, the era of reform and opening. The average person’s income rose from one dollar a day to five by 2004. Still, many in our group from the United States sought to donate to the orphanage and asked Matthew how to give. Cash? Through a US intermediary? Give as a group?
“Do not give money,” Matthew said pointedly. “You don’t know where it’s going to go.” Orphanage workers might pocket the money. He suggested we instead ask the staff what supplies the babies needed—perhaps milk powder or clothes or toys—and buy those goods directly for donation. This was my first hint of fraud in the system, but at the time I totally missed it (my mother reminded me of Matthew’s warning years later). It was June 7, 2004.
***
“Let’s eat,” Duan Yueneng, the baby-trafficking ex-con, says. He stands up and beckons us to a large square table for eight. Unwanted Second Daughter emerges from the kitchen, this time to set the table. Everything we eat—pork with tofu, green beans, cabbage—is mind-bendingly spicy here in the land of red peppers, which naturally prompts Duan to ask: “Ni hui chi la ma?” Can you eat spicy?
“Sort of.”
A small boy arrives at the table, sits down, and commands attention the way an emperor does. It is Duan’s six-year-old son. He demands soup, and it appears before him. He points chopsticks in the direction of what he wants. An image appears in my mind, of a victorious contestant on the Wheel of Fortune television game show shopping with her winnings and pointing with chopsticks at her choices: a mink coat, a cruise, a gift certificate, a spoonful of tofu. The boy’s grandmother fetches what he desires; he eats, excuses himself, and runs off. The sister barely says a word.
I’ve seen his face before. This boy’s photo has been posted on several walls in the Duan home, one of them some kind of kindergarten certificate. His grandmother explains he is the product of Duan Yueneng’s second marriage. The woman in jail for her participation in the baby-selling scheme is not his first wife. Then comes the bombshell.
“The first wife committed suicide,” she says. “After she gave birth to a second daughter, local family-planning officials found out. They came to our house and confiscated our valuables.”
Often, one-child policy enforcers took things from poo
r families unable to pay fines. Officials seized sewing machines, appliances, bicycles, couches—anything to send a message—and in the process obtained something nice to personally enjoy or sell. In the Duans’ case, enforcers also went to his relatives’ homes nearby and took their items too.
“Everyone in the family blamed the first wife for this,” Duan’s mom says, “for another baby girl. So she killed herself.” The first wife faced a lifetime of shame ahead of her, but instead chose an alternative way out. Duan’s mother speaks with the characteristic Chinese detached matter-of-factness. She isn’t telling me a tragic story; it is simply a story. Everyone in China has a story like this. This is just mine.
***
On the morning of June 8, 2004, Cathy, my parents, and I waited in our hotel room for the delivery of our Zhuzhou baby. On Matthew’s suggestion, we left the door of our room open in the four-star Huatian Hotel in the Hunan provincial capital of Changsha. In the lobby below, guests and diners glided across the marble floor bisected by a stream filled with carp. An arched walking bridge led across.
The elevator dinged, followed by the sound of a baby field trip. Matthew’s voice barked out directions; adult female voices complied. Tiny voices cooed and clucked, but there was no outright wailing. It sounded as if the workers brought all the babies into a central room, then distributed them one at a time. A woman staffer walked past our door with a baby girl in a yellow dress. Large, round eyes. Pigtails.
“Guo Shanzhen?” my dad asked. “Is that her?” The worker scurried past. No.
Moments later, we heard the shrieking before we saw her. Thirteen-month-old Guo Shanzhen was carried in, crying more desperately than any of the others. She wore a pale-yellow dress that matched the other girls. Her hair had grown out from the comb-over, and was gathered atop her head and tied up in a whale spout. Already her eyes were puffy. Around her neck dangled a cheap plastic yellow name tag. Guo Shanzhen directly translated means “country walk pearl.”
Her skin color wasn’t “fairly,” as the paperwork suggested. Guo Shanzhen’s skin tone looked a shade or two darker than any of the photos, the color of my deepest summer tan. She smelled “sour,” Cathy would later say, wondering when the baby was last bathed. “You should change her clothes now,” the orphanage worker directed, explaining that Guo Shanzhen threw up on the bumpy one-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Zhuzhou. Before stepping out, the woman handed us a thin slip of torn-off paper with one handwritten line: “2003.3.22.” Her presumed date of birth. March 22, 2003.
She bellowed for more than an hour. The Holt staff a few days prior had warned us not to anticipate a baby Hallmark moment. We each attempted to hold her, set her down, change her, bribe her with snacks. Nothing worked. Each time she would look at one of us, wind up, and pitch another fit. At the end of each cry she pursed her lips and made an ooh sound. My mother eventually came to the rescue—as if often the case—pulling out a set of stacking toy cups and distracting her new granddaughter. The wailing tapered. Perhaps Guo Shanzhen found the face of an adult Chinese woman most familiar. The immediate crisis ended, and our lives together began.
For the first two days, she seemed to remain in shock. Through those deep, bright eyes, Guo Shanzhen watched us and the other girls in the group, but did not smile or play. When eating or playing, she’d put one hand on one of us, as if to prevent us from leaving. Surprisingly, she was fully toilet trained. And on the third day, after a significant bowel event on the kid potty, she began to smile and visibly relax. It was as though she came to a realization that we might be permanent in her life.
We stayed in Changsha three days, always within earshot of Matthew on a tour bus microphone. We filled out provincial papers at the local government building and shopped for strollers at an overpriced specialty shop. At local restaurants, waitresses held our daughters as we dined. Guo Shanzhen ate with a certain desperation, as if competing for crackers, or spoonfuls of steamed egg. She stuffed in one bite after another without pausing to swallow. This should have been a clue to us about the orphanage, loaded with American parents’ money yet apparently underfeeding its own babies. Where was the money actually going?
The next morning, we headed for Zhuzhou, the orphanage city. The bus ride offered sweeping views of rivers and rice paddies—this is one of China’s breadbasket regions. Situated behind a gate and a guard, like all Chinese institutions, the orphanage campus featured a grassy courtyard with the playground in the center, surrounded by administrative and residential buildings. The female orphanage director welcomed us in a large hall, when Cathy discovered something.
On her way to the bathroom, she passed through the director’s office. It was so upscale as to be out of character: air conditioner, carpet, high-end large desk. Clearly a fair bit of Foreigner Price money had gone to furnishing this CEO-type space. There was a striking contrast to the babies’ spartan quarters across the compound, three floors up with no elevator. We walked over and found a dozen babies in matching green outfits in an empty playroom. They sat and rolled around on old gymnastics mats, but we saw no toys. Across the hall was a group bedroom where Guo Shanzhen and the other adopted twelve used to sleep. Sixteen rudimentary cribs were lashed together in rows of four. We laid Guo Shanzhen down in one, to see if she might remember it or find some comfort, but she screamed and demanded out.
The next stop: the spots where our babies had been found. Holding a list of addresses, Matthew directed the driver to the respective finding spots. One of the first was a gas station, the finding spot for baby Molly, at ten months old the tiniest of the group. Her new parents stepped off with her and Matthew to look around. It seemed the person dropping her—likely Molly’s birth mother—came by car or truck, left the infant, and drove away. After a few minutes, her adoptive mother, a dentist from New Jersey with short brown hair and glasses, reboarded the bus, teary and emotional. Molly’s adoptive father—round face; short, straight brown hair—followed, as we looked at them and the gas station.
“Whenever I fill up,” he said. “I’ll think of Molly.”
Most of the finding sites were busy, public spots: a train station, a busy street corner, a supermarket entrance. When the bus stopped on a bridge over the train tracks, it was our turn. “We’ll get off and walk down,” Matthew said. The five of us plus Guo Shanzhen walked down metal steps to an alley parallel to the tracks, separated by a concrete wall. The alley was surprisingly quiet. Suddenly a man and woman emerged from a small lane to our right, gave a stare, and moved on. A third of a mile down, we turned right into a courtyard surrounded by dusty gray mid-rise apartments with laundry hanging above: white tank-top undershirts, gray pants, floral tops, boxer shorts. The finding spot.
To our right stood a drab government building, the local welfare benefits office where on March 8, 2003, police officer Zou Guohua found a six-day-old baby, according to our papers. No one else was in sight. Unless you walked this alley every day, you’d never know it existed. Why did someone abandon Guo Shanzhen here? She might not have been noticed for hours, in contrast to a busy train station. Did the drop-off person come by train? Or was she a local resident who knew the welfare office opened early in the morning? Lots of questions, no clear answers.
We spent maybe five minutes in the courtyard, gave Guo Shanzhen a few extra squeezes, snapped a couple photos, and started back toward the bus. I pulled out my video camera and started rolling and narrating in the alley, until a middle-aged woman walked into the frame from the left. She spat—not at us, but just something she needed to do. The moment was over, and we got on the karaoke bus. A week later, we flew home with our new daughter to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, where her four-year-old brother and Ohio grandparents and cousins met her for the first time. It was mid-June 2004.
***
The first members of the Duan family ring got caught on a Friday in 2005.
Previously, the baby-selling family members had had a number of close calls but managed to emerge unscathed. They’d been stopped and q
uestioned by authorities in Changning, and in Zhuzhou, the city of Guo Shanzhen’s orphanage. Chinese newspapers reported that the Duans sold three babies to Zhuzhou for a total of 6,900 renminbi, just under a thousand dollars. Police detained the women briefly and then let them go. But not in November. Two women in the Duan family operation emerged from the Hengyang train station and delivered three babies into a black car with two orphanage workers inside. The police pounced. The guilty verdicts came three months later.
Why were they busted this time? During and after reporting the story for Marketplace, I came across a few theories. By then, the local news media had reported on baby-selling rumors, so perhaps party leaders figured it was time to crack down on a story already out. Perhaps junior-level orphanage managers smelled an opportunity to nail their bosses and get promoted, so they started talking to authorities. Or maybe local police officers sought hush money from orphanage directors who refused to give it, so the cops turned on them.
After his conviction, an angry Duan stewed in the Qidong city prison, where he found the food inedible. Stir-fried dishes contained bugs. The rice was boiled excessively, so the grains broke down into an unrecognizable mush. He assumed, as many do in China, that the well-connected big fish escaped justice even as his group of low-level crooks paid a price. In this case, orphanage directors in the baby supply chain stood to profit the most, yet only one of six identified orphanages was convicted and sentenced. The others somehow got off, he said.
“What about the Zhuzhou director?” I ask during the 2010 interview at his house. “Why wasn’t she named in the trial?”
“We sold babies to so many orphanages across Hunan,” Duan says. “The trial just made examples of a few people, but not everyone involved.” The logic made sense, but Cecilia and I struggled to confirm this. Duan received a sentence of six years but was released early after four to care for his elderly mother. He emerged a bitter man and started talking to reporters.
