Introduction

Hope, love, and help are chiefly among other things verbs.  To understand needs some effort too and in the end that is what the following story is about.

But to begin, this is a record of my journey to Hengdong, Hunan Province, China, and there I visited the Hengdong Social Welfare Institute (SWI).  My youngest daughter Clara-Li spent her first 18 months in this orphanage before we adopted her in Changsha, Hunan's provincial capital, on August 10, 2004.

We had been unable to travel to Hengdong during her adoption trip, despite our determined lobbying at the time.  Even years later, no other adoptive parents have visited the Hengdong SWI, although several hundred other families from western countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands traveled to Changsha to adopt children from this orphanage, mostly between 2002 and 2006.  Today one rarely hears of foreign adoptions from the much smaller number of children housed in a newer facility there.

The information that follows is primarily for these families and others like them since in late 2005 and 2006 it was found that the Hengdong SWI, along with at least five other nearby orphanages in southeastern Hunan, routinely paid for abandoned children brought in by “finders” who, as it turned out, often had paid for the children too.  These practices are illegal and as a result arrests were made, many highly placed officials in the region were fired, and about a dozen people eventually went to prison, including the director of the Hengdong SWI.

The case would become widely reported by Chinese and international media and led to a temporary shut down of foreign adoptions in Hunan Province.  It has many layers and the orphanage officials involved argued that in buying abandoned children from intermediaries they were acting in the children's best interests.  For only a small portion of rural China’s abandoned children are taken in by its state controlled orphanages.  The rest are absorbed into families informally or otherwise left to find homes through a growing unregulated domestic black market, the murky realm of shadowy intermediaries and questionable safety.   Still, the case can be described but probably cannot be rationalized in full.   There is a sort of untidiness throughout. 

Moreover, each of the children who came from this orphanage has a deeper, more personal story than those jarring news reports out of China in 2006 could relay.

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In early 2005, before the news broke and just five months after we returned home with Clara-Li, the group Our Chinese Daughters Foundation (OCDF) told us in response to a chance email inquiry that it might be able to arrange a private visit to the Hengdong SWI.  OCDF had experience arranging culture-focused travel programs for adoptive families wishing to return to China with their children.  Although this trip would be outside of the norm, an OCDF representative in Beijing obligingly made some local contacts, set up an itinerary in Hunan, and recommended a visa service and travel agent for the long series of flights there and back. 

We quickly decided to go for it.  We also decided this would be a journey best made by me alone, for obvious financial reasons so soon after our last one but also because this project seemed to have a high probability for disappointment, given the non-history of previous visits. 

Why, we wondered, had Chinese officials suddenly changed their minds?  In response to our nagging pleas to be allowed to visit Hengdong during Clara-Li's adoption trip we had been supplied with all manner of official discouragement: the area was off limits to foreign travelers, some Chinese travelers had been robbed there, another intrepid foreigner had been detained in an area nearby and his camera confiscated, the area couldn't be traveled to in one day, and so on.  

But two years before something had told me to ignore similar warnings in Jiangxi Province, where I had summoned the optimism to jump in a taxi for a long but important trip to the town where my first daughter was from.  The road then, it became clear, wasn't really washed out. 

At the end of a nicely paved highway in Gao'an, Jiangxi, in 2002, I had eventually stood in front of a busy downtown market on the same spot where my first daughter as a newborn was left and found in a small cardboard box and in the flood of triggered images and understanding I made a very important connection, then wiped my tears and left. 

When we returned to China for our second daughter, our child in Hengdong, I knew I owed it to her to try to make the same connection, before too much had changed. 

I wanted to be able to honestly tell her something about where she was from.

This time, it would just require a special trip.

Comments

[Nancy Dawes]

Dear Andy,
Thank you so much for sharing the Hengdong trip with all of us. There were 5 families in our travel group and each were eager to learn more about Hengdong County and the SWI. Thanks to you and your generous time and energy we can all learn and experience with you. I am passing on your web site to all the families.

Nancy and Jeff
DD Sarah LiYan
adopted 5/03 Hengdong SWI

[Jennifer]

Your journal is beautiful. My husband and I live in rural Russia where we run programs for older orphans who are learning andemotionally disabled. You might like reading about these children as well.
www.housemagic.blogs.com

[Lisette]

Hello,

my daughter of 2 years old is from the orphanage of Hengshan. I saw a lot of photo's of the Hengshan area. Is it possible that you send me some photo's of Hengshan, so that I can show them to my daugther when she is older?

[chinamah]

Thank you for your eloquent story. And your decision to use your experience to help the orphanage is very impressive. My daughter is from Guangdong and I hope to be able to something the same. Janice

[panasianbiz]

I stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. I was really quite touched by your story. I lived in China, and, therefore, could relate to much of what you wrote.