One Child (24 page)

Chinese authorities said the Hunan incident was an isolated case, but in 2009, another scandal erupted.
This time, family-planning officials in Guizhou Province were discovered to have seized children born in violation of the one-child policy and sold them to orphanages, according to the
Los Angeles Times.
In 2011, the newsmagazine
Caixin
reported a similar case.
Some of these children ended up in American and Dutch homes, according to the magazine.

Other trafficking cases in Guizhou and Shaanxi provinces have also added question marks to the whole adoption process.

There is no reliable way to ascertain how widespread the wrongdoing is. Parties with the most to gain in the process, from Beijing to adoption agencies to adoptive parents, maintain these cases are isolated.

Melody Zhang, who runs the China operations of the St. Louis–based adoption agency Children’s Hope, acknowledges flaws in China’s international adoption system but points out it has saved the lives of many children who would otherwise have perished in China’s institutions. “Truly, conditions were bad in the early days,” said Zhang. Opening up China to the adoption market also brought increased Western support and substantially improved orphanage conditions.
For example, the Berkeley-based foundation Half the Sky spent over $56 million improving orphanage conditions in China over fifteen years.

But not everyone who runs an adoption agency is as sanguine. In 2009, Ina Hut, director of World Children, the Netherlands’ biggest
adoption agency, resigned in protest over the Hunan scandal. Troubled by the stories, Hut fruitlessly pressed both Chinese and Dutch authorities for answers. In 2007, she traveled to China to conduct a month-long investigation.

Hut came away with the conviction that the practice of buying babies “is much more widespread than we know.” Contacts in the adoption industry told her midwives were paid fees to spot out-of-plan babies and annex them before birth. Also, orphanages often had more information on adopted children than they disclosed to China’s Central Adoption Agency and adoptive parents, she said. Chinese authorities privately told her at least two children from the Hunan trafficking scandal had ended up in Dutch homes, she said, but Hut was unable to get either the Netherlands or Beijing to pursue this further. “As far as they were concerned, it was over and done.”

Hut does not come across like a crusader. Blond and soft-spoken, with a sunburst of smile lines on her tanned face, Hut was a successful software entrepreneur and a university administrator before she joined World Children in 2002. It was soon after her first child died at birth, a traumatic experience that made Hut decide “the next step was to make the world a little better,” she said.

Hut had initially planned to adopt herself but took her name off the waiting list after discovering firsthand the inner workings of adoption. “When I looked behind the scenes, I was shocked. I came to discover that a lot of adoptions are done in the interest of the parents, not the children. Everybody has the right to want children, but you don’t have the right
to
children.
Children
have the right to parents.”

Hut went public with her convictions and paid a price for her candor. After her 2009 resignation, she didn’t work again for five years. Employers were scared off by her reputation as a whistleblower, she thinks. Finally, in 2014 she was appointed head of CoMensha, a Dutch nonprofit that helps trafficking victims.

In the world of adoptions, domestic adoptions theoretically have priority. Called the subsidiarity principle, this is one of the best practices enshrined in the Hague Adoption Convention to which China is a signatory. The one-child policy made a mockery of this principle. To prevent families from passing off their over-quota offspring as adopted children, China’s adoption laws explicitly discriminated against local adoptive parents. For them, the bar to adopt was far higher. In 1992, the minimum age for foreigners adopting was thirty, for example, compared to thirty-five for locals. Also, adopted children were counted against the parents’ quota of children, meaning many Chinese who adopted were barred from having their own biological offspring.

Ethicists like Samford University law professor David Smolin say the high ideals espoused in the Hague Adoption Convention are constantly violated.
Kay Ann Johnson, head of Asian Studies at Hampshire College, is more blunt.

Johnson and I had been discussing child trafficking in China when she abruptly said, “What is a buyer? Everyone who has adopted a child from China,” including herself in that definition. Johnson had adopted a daughter from China in the early 1990s, when she knew little about the situation there and believed domestic adoptions could not keep up with the increasing overflow in orphanages. Since then, she has come to believe that many domestic adoptions in China have been unfairly classified as child trafficking since prospective parents must pay middlemen in an unregulated system, the only way most can adopt. By contrast, Western adoptive parents like herself have paid much more, albeit through the government-regulated system. “Why are we seen as ‘adopters’ while they are denigrated as ‘buyers’?” she challenged. (While the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ China Center for Adoption Affairs [CCA] governs adoptions out of China, there appears to be no equivalent body handling domestic adoptions;
many adoptive parents in China I spoke to said their adoptions were mainly handled through private connections and networks.)

Johnson is now a strong critic of the system, arguing that China’s discrimination against domestic adoption perpetuated the myth that girls were not valued in China.
In reality, many of those girls could have found loving homes within the country, she maintains.

Almost all the harshest critics of transnational adoption I spoke to are adoptive parents and beneficiaries of what they say is a broken system. Stuy acknowledges the disconnect. “You have to go down the rabbit hole before you find out,” he said. “I would say 95 percent of adoptive parents don’t want to know, and even if they know, don’t care to do anything about it. Why rock the boat?”

II

In 1995, Stuy was a thirty-six-year-old from a devout Mormon family living in Lehi, Utah, a small town that was used to represent the conservative, dance-hating community in the 1984 movie
Footloose.
Like many young Mormons, he spent two years on an overseas mission, in Germany. After graduating with a business degree from Brigham Young University, he began a series of office jobs that quenched his youthful idealism. “I didn’t like being a cog in a wheel. All you do is work until you retire with a gold watch. The next day, business goes on without you,” he said. “You don’t make a blind bit of difference.”

Stuy was ripe for a new purpose and mission in life when his then-wife, Jeannine, came back from church and suggested they adopt a Chinese orphan. This was a time when the airwaves were filled with stories of numerous abandoned girls in China resulting from the one-child policy.
Two years before, BBC’s controversial documentary
The Dying Rooms
had come out, detailing inhumane and cruel practices in Chinese orphanages.
A Human Rights Watch report
following that characterized China’s orphanages as little more than places where children were sent to die.

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.”