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| Patti Waldmeir with her daughter, Grace |
We have all seen them: adorable Chinese girls holding the hands of their (usually elderly, often overweight, but definitely doting) Caucasian parents, strolling the streets from New York to New South Wales, growing up in a white, white world, far away from the land and culture where they were born.
In some ways, they are a permanent blot on the image of China: surplus daughters the country couldn’t care for, unintended consequences of the 30-year-old “one-child” policy that led to the abandonment of hundreds of thousands if not millions of female infants at birth. But now, as the balance of global economic and political power shifts subtly in favour of China, Beijing is reaching out to all these lost daughters – and welcoming them back home.
China has invited thousands of foundlings back to their birthplaces for government-sponsored “homeland tours” which, like last year’s Beijing Olympics or next year’s Shanghai World Expo, give the country a chance to show off to the world. On one level, what the Chinese adoption authorities call “root seeking tours” – filled with extravagant expressions of love and kinship and lavish gifts for the returning orphans – are a transparent public relations exercise aimed at raising money for Chinese orphanages, justifying the decision to export surplus children and countering decades of unfair international criticism that Chinese people “hate girls”.
But for the children involved – one of whom is my nine-year-old daughter, Grace Shu Min, who attended a 20-year reunion at her orphanage in March, along with two of her closest orphanage friends – their hometown trip was more like therapy. China put its best foot forward for the returning children (all girls), treating them like celebrities, showering them with presents, laying on magicians and puppet shows, kindness and warmth. It was the kind of mythical homecoming we all hope for – but few can ever achieve.
For the girls who attended the Yangzhou reunion, aged from eight to 18, it could prove a priceless boost to their self-esteem, a chance to view the dark facts of their short lives – abandonment at birth by a mother they will never know, institutionalisation and exile from their homeland – through rose-tinted spectacles handed to them by the Chinese government.
Some 36 families – from the US and the Netherlands, Sweden and Canada – made the trip last March to their girls’ hometown of Yangzhou, an elegant and increasingly prosperous city of 4.5 million in eastern China. Yangzhou greeted them with a whirlwind of banquets and traditional celebrations. Local families opened their hearts and homes to the visitors, and the orphanage greeted them with the sound of giant kettle drums and gifts of life-sized teddy bears, plus a wall plastered with their baby photos and a shower of hugs and tears from many of the same nannies who looked after them as infants. To the maudlin strains of “There’s no Place like Home”, the deputy mayor of the city told the children at a welcome banquet: “You are not guests, you are family.” The evening became more surreal and saccharine with each advancing hour, ending with a lady in a pink frock singing “Auld Lang Syne” from behind a cloud of Lawrence Welk-style bubbles.
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| Grace (pictured centre) with her friends Lily (left) and Natalie: the girls spent the first eight months of their lives together at the Yangzhou orphanage and “on some level are clearly sisters” |
The Yangzhou girls, now nearly 10, were born in the same fortnight and raised together for the first eight months of their lives, cuddling up two or three to a crib in the then-meagrely staffed and provisioned Yangzhou orphanage. Now they live in America. Nearly once a year, they have gathered together to celebrate a joint birthday or an adoption day – together with Maya O’Brien, the former Yang Xue, who could not join them on the homeland tour. (A fifth friend, Emma Raff, formerly Yang Yu Nong, lives in Paris but keeps in frequent touch by e-mail).
They are forever friends. From the moment Grace, Lily and Natalie saw each other on our return trip to Yangzhou, they were inseparable: the three girls held hands, giggled, whispered and squeezed into two seats on our massive tour bus, always together. They may not be biologically related, but on some level they are clearly sisters.
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| Grace and Lily (in a green top) at Yangzhou Zoo |
We visited the orphanage together as families when we adopted them in August 2000, but when we returned together in March 2009, we were astounded at what a difference a decade makes. The road to the orphanage had been paved; there were many more toys, and many more nannies (all clad in pink uniforms so new they still showed the creases), not to mention a brand new, nearly complete five-story baby wing that looks more like a luxury resort than an orphanage.
But those signs of prosperity are hardly a shock, given China’s explosive growth in the past decade. Much more surprising was what we did not see at the orphanage: where are all the babies? And especially, what has happened to all the healthy infant girls that made China such a Mecca of international adoption?
According to Yangzhou orphanage officials, adoptions from the orphanage have plummeted from 150 a year when our girls were born to 10 or 20 a year. There are so few healthy infants that the orphanage has even been able to find homes for nearly all its older children, many of whom are mildly disabled. There are a handful of as-yet unadopted toddlers with special needs, but the majority of Yangzhou’s 80-odd infants have special needs, roughly half boys and half girls. Most have only minor problems, like cleft lips or palates, or congenital heart disease. Many will be adopted, either domestically or by foreigners, after their disabilities are repaired.
What the orphanage does not have is a surfeit of healthy infant girls – a situation mirrored by many other orphanages throughout China. The shortage of healthy babies has led to a dramatic decline in overseas adoptions from China: in America, the biggest international home for Chinese adoptees, annual adoptions have halved since 2005, from nearly 8,000 then to less than 3,000 last year.
The stark reality of the falling numbers has great personal significance for our family: it means that, if I wanted to adopt Yang Shu Min now, I could not become her mother; nor could I be mother to her eight-year-old sister Lucy, the former Fu Xinke, from Chuzhou in Anhui Province (China has stopped single parents like me adopting, in an attempt to reduce demand for scarce orphans).
But the figures also tell a remarkable tale about a society in transition: a China where attitudes to fertility, abandonment and the value of girls have shifted dramatically in ways that could profoundly influence its future – not to mention the self-image of Natalie and Lily, Maya, Emma and Grace, as they enter the penumbra of their puberty.
Already in their short lives, our daughters have heard too often that Chinese people “hate girls”: hardly an irrational conclusion to be drawn from the fact that almost all of the 110,000 children adopted internationally from China in the past two decades are girls – but still wrong. China is never that simple. In 1999, when Yang Shu Min was born, abandoning a girl may have been the only rational thing her birthmother could do. Most of us would have done the same. In a country with only a rudimentary or non-existent system of old-age support, especially in the countryside, boys are rural China’s pension system. As in many Asian societies, girls owe fealty to their husband’s parents once they marry; parents without a son are left with no one to support them in their dotage. What rational person would not prefer a boy?
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| Grace at the spot where she was found as an infant |
One of those tough facts is the orphanage itself: every parent who takes their adopted child back for an orphanage visit in China fears a reality overdose. We Yangzhou parents need not have worried: our return to the orphanage was larded with so much fantasy, so much singing and dumpling-making and present-giving and heartfelt speeches that reality hardly made an appearance. The kids complained that the day was unseasonably hot, and some of the speeches were boring. But remarkably few showed any negative reaction to the place they called home as infants: even the teenagers among them – surely the most likely to find an orphanage hard to integrate into their blossoming self-image. Most said they liked seeing “their” nannies cuddling the babies, and appreciated such a splendid homecoming.
Several children told me afterwards that it might have been fun growing up around so many other kids – a reaction that surprised me, and made me grateful to those whose artifice had produced such a positive experience for so many of our children.
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There were tears – but not for the reasons one might imagine. I cried a lot (to the constant admonishment of Yang Shu Min); many other parents teared up from time to time; and there were inevitable meltdowns among children who had missed naps, were too hot or hungry, overexcited or simply exhausted by the gruelling timetable of our tour. Viewing our children’s orphanage files caused pain for some and joy for others: most files bear scant information about where the child was found, what police station she was taken to, whether she was born with one eyelid or two. There is no record of a birthmother’s anguish at a child carried nine months and then relinquished, no genetic information that could be useful for medical care in later life, no evidence with which to weave a life’s story.
Our daughters have birthmothers and birthfathers, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers – and almost certainly siblings whom they may never know. The lucky among us found an anonymous note from a birthparent in their child’s orphanage file, stating the date and time of birth. Others hoped to obtain the original of such a “finding note”, but were left with only a copy provided at the time of adoption. Most found nothing, an empty file. A void where other children have DNA, family trees and intimate portraits in the hospital delivery room. For some of the girls, finding that void was a difficult moment (especially if an adopted sister had a finding note, and they did not), but most moved on quickly to the next game with their Yangzhou “sisters”.
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And one American mother who visited the orphanage squat toilet with her nine-year-old Yangzhou girl reports that the child gripped her hand as she perched precariously above the evacuation hole, and proclaimed that she was glad she had not been left there forever. Those of us who live in China (as my family does) know that squat toilets are a trial for any westerner. They are a wake-up call that, to those used to western toileting ways, China is still a foreign country.
Still, everyone seemed to enjoy the visit to the babies who live at Yangzhou now. The orphanage authorities, understandably eager to put their best foot forward to the world, had spruced the place up almost beyond recognition – but not quite. It was easy to spot the room where our Yangzhou girls spent their first few months of life – the dark and dingy rooms that we photographed surreptitiously when we adopted our girls, to the manifest displeasure of orphanage authorities who back then did not want international publicity. As a journalist, I was so terrified of their disapproval that I took no photos – and burst into tears after passing the final immigration check on departure at Shanghai airport, so afraid that my daughter would be seized from me, because the visibility of my profession made me an undesirable parent.
Now the same rooms are open for international viewing: filled with colourful quilts and pastel, hand-knitted outfits for the infants, the result of an inflow of government and foreign money and an outpouring of philanthropy from a local population that, after a decade of prosperity, has started giving its time and money to the local foundlings. Our children were transfixed with the babies they found there: the infant girl with blue-tinged skin, whose nanny said she had a heart problem but would soon be adopted; the children with parts of their palate protruding through their lips; and many more infants recuperating from recent operations.
My Yang Shu Min loves babies, and she had visited the orphanage once before since we moved to China in June 2008, so she seemed to take the visit in her stride. But later that night, in our hotel room, she asked me about Ling Ling, an 18-year-old orphan, blind in one eye, who had never been adopted and has since acted as unofficial “mother” to many of the younger orphanage occupants. And with that began the tale of how China has changed since she was born: especially in its attitude to girls.
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| The handprints of the girls adopted from the Yangzhou orphanage, which will be made into a wall: government cash has now transformed the orphanage, but the number of healthy girls available for adoption has dropped dramatically |
Exact figures are impossible to come by, but most adoption professionals both within and outside the Chinese government agree that the number of healthy abandoned girls in China has declined dramatically. When I adopted Grace, the waiting took only nine months; now overseas parents seeking a healthy infant girl wait three to five years – so long that many have given up. Orphanages in Guangzhou province, temporary home to a large number of migrant workers, report a large number of healthy infants of both sexes. But in the rest of the country, the number of normal infant girls has declined significantly.
That does not necessarily mean that every female foetus is greeted with joy: China’s sex ratio at birth remains skewed strongly toward males, with 120 boys born for every 100 girls. Ironically, modern technology has made it easier to choose a boy: sex-selective abortion means parents who want a boy can choose one before birth. But nowadays, girls who are born in China are often raised by their parents or other “child-hungry” families, and only seldom abandoned, says Shang Xiaoyuan, of the University of New South Wales and Beijing Normal University, one of the few Chinese academics who has published research recently on Chinese orphanages.
Parents of disabled children still have little option but to put them in orphanage care (though the Chinese government is trying to increase incentives to raise them at home). But normal girls are much more likely to grow up in a home – theirs or that of another Chinese family.
Ji Gang, director of the China Centre for Adoption Affairs, a Chinese government body, says many more people can afford to raise children than in the past – and their mentality has changed from the traditional “more children, more lucky” to “less children, better life”. In Chinese cities, many urban people prefer daughters, arguing that they are more caring in old age and less expensive: bearing a son means buying him an expensive flat when he marries. Girls are definitely cheaper – and if they can migrate to factory jobs in export industries, their economic value is even higher.
The Chinese government is doing all it can to encourage more equal gender practices. It recognises that the so-called one-child policy – which was never a monolith, since parents in rural and minority areas were permitted more than one daughter, and the policy was selectively enforced – led to a dangerous imbalance among the sexes, and a shortage of wives for a whole generation. China’s “care for girls” policy varies by province, but parents of only girls may get as much as Rmb900 (£80) per month in old-age pension, or preferential access to land or a house. Only daughters in Hebei province will now be granted extra points on their university entrance examination – the make-or-break exam for Chinese prosperity. Beijing is doing all it can in the short term to encourage rural Chinese to bear daughters; solving the old-age support problem longer term will take time.
But for our Yangzhou girls, what matters most is that the atmospherics have changed: Chinese people have started adopting children themselves, and they have largely stopped abandoning girls: what a difference a decade makes; what a difference to our children’s self-image.
Patti Waldmeir is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent. With additional reporting by Shirley Chen.
