One Child (25 page)

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 assessments 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 ori
gin. 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,” said 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.

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.