Hengdong SWI

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 it begins with a record of my journey to Hengdong, Hunan Province, China, where I visited the Hengdong Social Welfare Institute (SWI).  My youngest daughter 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.  No other adoptive parents had been able to visit the Hengdong SWI, although several hundred other families from western countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands had traveled to Changsha to adopt children from this same orphanage, mostly between 2002 and 2006.  Today one rarely hears of foreign adoptions from the much smaller number of children housed in a newer Hengdong social welfare facility.

In late 2005 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, and in a neighboring province. These practices were illegal and as a result arrests were made, highly placed officials were fired, and about a dozen people eventually went to prison, including the director of the Hengdong SWI.

The case would be 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 said 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 were taken in by its state controlled orphanages.  The rest were 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.

China had 1.3 billion citizens, strictly enforced population restrictions, and astonishing numbers of abandoned children.  During China's peak foreign adoption years (roughly 1995-2005), these children were most often infant girls left by roadsides, in marketplaces, or at other locations usually described in local police reports.  In addition, news of the Hunan case and other later ones showed how orphanages in several regions of south central China sometimes fabricated police reports to hide instances in which children were brought to them directly, against government rules that emphasized zero tolerance for over-quota births.

Strict family planning rules left no provision for birth parents to formally give up over-quota children to orphanages or through government approved adoption.  Instead, admitting to having over-quota children made parents subject to harsh fines or other penalties. 

It may have been much better for an over-quota child to have been secretly abandoned directly to an orphanage or to someone promising to bring her to one, rather than for her to have been physically just left somewhere with varying odds she might be found by someone responsible and kind.  Still, the Hunan case and that of the Hengdong SWI, as a specific example, offer less in straightforward rationale and more in a maze of contradictions.  In this sense it may help at the start of this story to consider that many Asian traditions hold to the idea of relative truth; that most things can be true in one sense and false in another. In other words, the only thing that is certain outside our immediate experience is that there is no certain knowledge outside of our immediate experience.

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In early 2005, before the news broke and just five months after we returned home with our Hengdong daughter, we sent an offhand email inquiry to a charitable organization, active at the time, called Our Chinese Daughters Foundation (OCDF), and asked if the organization might be able to arrange a private visit to the Hengdong SWI.  An eventual reply said that OCDF's staff would at least be glad to try, using its experience gained from 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 the required official 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 trip to China 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 our 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 earlier I had decided to ignore similar warnings in Jiangxi Province, and summoned the optimism to jump in a taxi for an 80-mile trip to the town where my first daughter was from.  The road then, it became clear, wasn't really washed out.  Indeed, 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 that daughter was said to have been left and found as a newborn infant, in a small cardboard box. In a flood of triggered images and understanding I had 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.

"Where Did I Come From?"

Historically, life in China was hard for people lacking wealth or status and so hard that, frankly, from ancient times and well into the modern era it was common for families of little means to think of daughters as requiring a greater investment of scarce resources than they would be able to return to their families.

Daughters were believed to be less suited for heavy labor and kinship ties were passed only through sons. Surplus baby daughters or sons born with challenging physical defects were sometimes, but commonly, abandoned and left with the hope that someone else might be able to give them a second chance. Alternately, poor families would sometimes raise little girls for a few years and then sell them to other families as child brides (tongyangxi), who would go to work in their new households usually as very young children. This tradition was formally banned in 1950, but had a very long tail.

It had been traditionally accepted too that families would sometimes decide not to keep female newborns at birth. In ancient Chinese ritual, recognition of the beginning of life was delayed until a child’s third day to allow for the practice of “not lifting up” (buju or fuiju) in which a rejected infant could be left to expire. By the 19th century, it was common to hasten this practice with a bucket of water or ashes, or other means, when a family's choice was strictly a healthy son.

Consequently, the choices that modern families had to make under China’s strict family planning rules were informed by a deep background different from our own experience in the United States. By this I don’t mean to suggest that my children should try to apply some sort of value neutrality when thinking about what happened to them. But they already know that in China even the fundamental ways that written words are formed are different than what we are used to. In other words, China is a very different place.

In China’s past, brutal wars including the Lushan Rebellion, the Taiping Civil War, and the Japanese invasion in World War II routinely killed within the country’s borders more than 20 million people at a time and sometimes twice that many. Cyclical famine did the same. China’s most fertile regions have generally been its most populated and for millennia annual flooding in these areas has often uprooted thousands. Not long ago in western China an earthquake killed 70,000 people and left millions temporarily homeless. In nearby Gansu Province, an earthquake killed 70,000 in 1932 and an an earlier quake in 1920 killed around 250,000 people.

Moreover, for most of the past 75 years China has convulsed through a long and difficult seismic cultural upheaval that followed the communist revolution. So despite what we hear today about China’s churning economy, I would like my children to consider what happened to them with some understanding of the acceptance of sacrifice that would have been customary, at the time they were given up, among millions of Chinese families whose adult members were likely to have been at least somewhat affected by an inherited familiarity with loss on a grand scale.

It would be too easy to assume based on the evidence of so many girls abandoned that today daughters are not generally loved by their parents in China as much as they are, on average, loved by their parents here. China is way too complicated to apply that sort of simple reasoning.

“Where did I come from?” Aside from the Hengdong SWI, we probably cannot say exactly.  But it is safe to say that strange things were bound to happen in an astonishingly crowded, rigidly authoritarian country where sacrifice could still be synonymous with hope and where birth limits were strictly enforced in the midst of a hyper-speed transition to a loosely capitalist economy.

You were a soft feather carried aloft by swirling, powerful winds.

About Hengdong

Hengdong, the small city, is the county town or local government center for Hengdong County, which is in the southeastern part of Hunan Province. 

In 2004, the year we adopted our Hengdong daughter, this was a place mostly rural and agricultural in that populous way unique to central China.  It was filled with tiny farms and farm cooperatives.  It was also home to a fair number of small factories including ones that produced plastic mats, metals, porcelain, and tea.  One variety of locally produced tea was a popular mixture of green tea and herbal medicine promised to "reduce fat and treat cancer."  In character the area seemed a bit like a cup of optimism too, but of a very old and chipped porcelain that had been through a lot.

The large city of Hengyang was only about 40 miles to the southwest and the second largest city in Hunan.  Hengyang was an administrative district with more than 6 million residents. But in China places could be distinct from one another even if separated by only short distances.

Notably, Hengdong County lay within sight of the mountain peaks of Hengshan, home to a group of temples that were well known throughout Hunan and much of central China.  The temples were very old, specially honored, and the mountain area surrounding them was carefully preserved.

Most of the county's residents were still living in small villages and struggling to get by, working tiny plots of adjacent land by hand. Like other areas of the countryside throughout China, this one was losing many of its younger people in a general migration to large cities either within Hunan itself or to factory towns in the economic development zones of its neighboring provinces, especially the southern and coastal provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang.  However, while Hengdong and most of the six other counties within the Hengyang administrative district were still very rural, they were decidedly not remote, which is likely an important point in this story.

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At its western border Hengdong County was set alongside the middle reaches of the Xiang River, which flows through the center of Hunan Province. It was intersected by a large number of smaller rivers including the Mui Shui, which gently curled around the edges of the city of Hengdong.  Following the route of the Xiang River in 2004 was a highway and rail line that served Central China as a major north-south artery.  The county itself was served by the Jingguang railroad and a relatively new main roadway large enough for steady truck traffic, both traversing east to west.

This part of Hunan was characteristic of the province’s reputation for productive agriculture. Indeed the province historically had produced so many staples that, beginning long ago, it provided surpluses in commodities such as pigs, oranges, grain, vegetables, and tea to many other parts of China.  Success, however, eventually led to overpopulation, which led to waves of peasant uprisings.

Fittingly then, Hunan was Mao Zedong's home province and birthplace to much of China's early communist movement. It strictly adopted Mao's grand social experiments and was relatively slow in adopting the reforms put forward by Deng Xiaoping in the years that followed Mao's death.  Mao's hometown, the once-tiny village of Shaoshan, was only about 50 miles from Hengdong, to the north and about halfway between Hengdong and Changsha.

In ancient times, early inhabitants in the area discovered they were located at the heart of an extremely fertile region that relatively early on became firmly established as an economic center with a large exported agricultural output that could be distributed to other parts of China over well established trade routes.  By the end of the Qing dynasty in the 19th century,most valleys or hillsides in the region that could serve as cropland were cleared and populations had ballooned.  Landlords and peasant farmers pressed each other over ever-smaller plots of this land in a competition that continued into the early 20th century, even after the abdication of the last Chinese emperor in 1912. 

This was the period in Hunan during which Mao studied at the Fourth Normal School of Changsha.  There he was introduced to western views of science and philosophy, and the republican political ideas of Sun Yat-sen. Later he would move on to Beijing and then join and eventually lead the communists against the broader nationalist Kuomintang government. In the late 1920s and early 1930s communist forces often fought with Kuomintang forces in the mountains just east of Hengdong County along the Hunan-Jiangxi border, on the western edge of the revolution's Jiangxi Soviet base.  Then in 1934 the communist forces began their famous long march out of the region, eventually north to Shaanxi Province.

The later communist central government under Mao hardly solved the area’s land shortage and ecological issues, however. By 1957 only 20 percent of the Xiang River Basin, which includes Hengdong County, was forested and more than 20 percent was barren land.

In the following year as Mao prepared to launch his calamitous Great Leap Forward campaign of collective agricultural and industrial reform, he rejected as unpatriotic an early attempt at population control begun in 1955 in response to inadequate food supplies and a very low standard of living nationally.  The campaign produced waves of famine and unimaginable hardship. More than 36 million Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962, with Hunan among the provinces that suffered profoundly.

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In 2004, Buddhist and Taoist traditions were still very strong in Hengdong County, probably influenced by the close proximity of the Nanyue Shan mountain temples in Hengshan nearby to the west.  A different kind of shrine lay about 30 miles in the other direction, just on the other side of the Luoxian Shan range and technically in Jiangxi Province. This was Jinggangshan, historically considered the birthplace of the Red Army, but which during the Cultural Revolution became a place of pilgrimage for young Red Guards who often journeyed there on foot to relive the experiences of their revolutionary forebears. At its peak, more than 30,000 Red Guards arrived daily without food, housing, and sanitation facilities there to supply them.

More than 30 years later Jinggangshan hosted a more benign brand of Chinese tourist, but the Cultural Revolution (officially 1966-1976) left few families untouched and still strongly reverberated, usually painfully so, in the Chinese collective memory. 

During the Cultural Revolution traditional education was halted. Countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books, and paintings were destroyed. Young "intellectuals" living in cities were ordered to the countryside. Most were simply recently graduated middle school students and because of their education were deemed guilty by their association with an elite social class. Alleged minor crimes against the government often resulted in public punishment of the accused.  People branded as political enemies were sent to forced labor camps, one of which was located in Hengdong County (a place called the Xuantang Tree Farm). It was disbanded in July 1986, according the human rights group Laogai Research Foundation, which monitors forced labor in China. But according to this group, in 2004 prisoners were still toiling nearby in prison factories including the Hengyang Prison Provincial No. 2 that produced automobiles and Provincial No. 5, also in Hengyang, that produced auto parts.

Like much of China, Hengdong County could be seen as struggling through sometimes drastic economic and social reforms to emerge in incremental steps from a long period during which bad things could often happen to good people.

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Hengdong County in 2004, according to Chinese census data, had 660,000 residents living in 187,094 households and 610,000 of the county's residents were considered to be living in a rural area. It was divided into 24 districts over about 1,925 square miles. The people of this area had traditionally spoken the older southern Xiang dialect but Mandarin (or Putonghua), being the language of commerce and commerce being the turbulent force then transforming nearly all of China, was now commonly understood. Still, it was said that even Mao struggled with Mandarin.

Typically the climate of the region was blistering hot and tropically humid during the long summers. Temperatures during the winter months could still be chilly, with average highs in the 40s and morning frosts on occasion from mid November through February. Winter snow often topped the mountain peaks of Hengshan.

Topographically the county was a mixture of forested hills and flat agricultural spaces. Occasional cut-away hillsides could reveal a deep red color to the earth underneath. Several of the county’s districts contained midsized towns, some of which stood out as clusters of block-like cement buildings visible in the distance from its main highway.

Xintang Zhen (town) was one example and near there on a small lake visitors could ride tour boats and fish from the shore line at the Wild Duck Vacation Village.  Its proprietor, Luo Guohua, first cultivated fish in the lake, later tried raising farm animals on its banks, and in recent years, in the spirit of the times, had transformed his property into a local tourist attraction. On the outskirts of Xintang was the large Ouyang Yu Experimental Middle School, which in 2004 served about 2500 students between the ages of 11 and 17.  The school was built with funds pledged in 1986 by a man named C.J. Huang who had left the Hengdong area in the 1940s and eventually became a successful businessman in the U.S.  He had established a fellowship in Asian studies at Stanford University that in the years surrounding 2004 occasionally sent young research fellows to live and work at the Ouyang Yu middle school, and to teach English to students and teachers there.

Hunan Province had been reestablished as a modern agricultural model for China and farmers' average annual incomes there increased from 558 yuan ($67 USD) in 1989 to 2,299 yuan ($277 USD) in 2001. The online archives of China's People's Daily includes article from 2004 about the resourceful farmer Liu Aiping from Daqiao, one of Hengdong County's rural villages. After taking a correspondence course in animal husbandry, he formed the Aiping Group, which helped some 3,600 other local farmers to raise their standard of living by establishing pig farms linked by his breeding and marketing services. Hengdong County's Aiping Group had been singled out as a national success story.

But while farm wages doubled during the 1990s, a resulting average $277 USD a year for most farm workers still did not provide much disposable income in 2004. Moreover, in China's new market economy there were more basic services to be paid for and many more consumer items to buy.

The small city of Hengdong in the center of Hengdong County was the county's bustling hub.  In 2004 it was home to several large agricultural markets and hundreds of small shops and businesses. Its residents lived mostly in tall apartment-style buildings separated by grid-like alleys and dusty narrow streets off its main thoroughfares. Near its main intersection was a brand new two-story shopping mall of modest size but with glassed-in jewelry shops and fashionable clothing stores, and a modern escalator between floors. Not far away were the official-looking offices of the Hengdong County Civil Affairs Bureau and, in the other direction, the People’s Hospital of Hengdong County. Across from the county headquarters was a small park with a busy playground.

Hunan Province in 2004 had a current projected birth rate of 12.2 per 1000 population. The average life expectancy in the province was a healthy 69 years. Its overall rate of population growth was about 5% annually. The latest detailed census figures then available, from 2000, showed that gender imbalance among official (legal) births in Hunan was represented by an annually widening ratio of 126.9 male births to every 100 female births. Gender imbalance measured in recorded births was typically even greater in mostly rural areas like Hengdong County.

Then as today researchers debated over the probable causes of gender imbalance. A lot had been written about underreporting of births but also about the high prevalence of selective abortion made easier by medical technologies relatively affordable even in rural areas, a practice the Chinese had begun trying to control. One theory even suggested that disease might have played a major role in gender imbalance not just in China but across southern and central Asia, more specifically highly prevalent diseases such as Hepatitis B that had been shown to markedly decrease the chances of female births among infected birth mothers.

But, generally, it could be said that families in rural villages wanted sons.

Historians had written that family preference for male births and female infanticide were part of eastern and south Asian cultures throughout the ancient period, but it was doubtful that anywhere in China could still be considered stuck in that era, given what China came through during the second half of the 20th century.  Social researchers linked family preference for male births in China’s modern era to economic reasons and the lack of a social safety net for those reaching old age, especially in poor rural areas.  By 2004 some were suggesting that in China's new economic climate this was less a determinate than pressure on young parents from paternal grandparents, whose beliefs on the subject may have reflected an older Chinese reality.

Population policies with birth quota restrictions added fuel to the flame, although China's population problem was at the time, and still is, truly staggering. If you are reading this in the U.S. you might envision six people for every one of those around you. Then imagine the resulting effects.

The Hengdong SWI was in many ways on the outer edge of the city of Hengdong and one of a large number of county level orphanages overseen by the Hunan Provincial Civil Affairs Bureau. In 2004 there were 74 counties in Hunan.  Each had one and some had more than one orphanage. There were also 12 municipal level orphanages in this province and these were said to generally house larger numbers of children. Most adoptions in China even then were domestic adoptions, albeit within the limitations of the country's strict population controls. Researchers suspected that most of China's abandoned baby girls, especially in rural villages, were adopted informally.

Supply still appeared to exceed demand.

In 1999 the U.S. State Department requested that Chinese orphanages wishing to make orphaned children eligible for adoption place "child abandonment ads" in newspapers to assist birth parents in deciding to somehow claim them. The Chinese government complied and these have become known as "finding ads." Catch 22 was that abandoning a child is illegal, and birth parents were penalized when the birth of a child exceeded the population control limits set in their region. Each ad was run in a local newspaper for 60 days after which, if no one came forward, the child was officially determined to be abandoned and eligible for adoption. As a result, newspapers throughout China, in 2004 and during the heaviest foreign adoption years preceding, collectively announced the recent abandonment of thousands of baby girls daily.

Very little was known then about child abandonment in China other than generalized assumptions. However, in one instance researchers were able to interview 237 families in central China who abandoned children in the 1980s and 1990s. Within this sample, 88% were from rural areas, most had average incomes and education levels for the areas in which they lived, and most had been in their middle to late child bearing years when they had abandoned a child. Gender, birth order, and the lack of a male sibling were indeed the major determinants of abandonment in these cases. But only 11 of these families had abandoned first daughters, and in these few cases there were extenuating circumstances including three in which difficult birth defects were cited. The study found this contradiction: that population restriction led some families to abandon newborn daughters after they exceeded birth quotas, and that most families wanted to have and keep at least one daughter (see Johnson, K.; Banghan, H. and Liyao, W. (1998) "Infant Abandonment and Adoption in China." Population & Development Review, Vol. 24 Issue 3, p469-510.)

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Foreign adoption in China was and still is centrally managed by the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), a branch of the Civil Affairs Ministry in Beijing. This is where dossiers from foreign parents wishing to bring abandoned children into their families were matched with dossiers for children sent in by authorized state-controlled orphanages in provinces throughout the country. In other words, children in foreign adoptions were not adopted directly from orphanages. Nonetheless, distributed adoption fees were an attractive revenue source for desperate orphanages, greedy officials, or a complicated mixture. Money changing hands anywhere within China’s bureaucratic system was historically a ripe target for corruption and this was commonly said to be especially true in Hunan Province.

But the topic of corruption can divert attention from the greater problem that was child abandonment overall, which seemed to receive very little Chinese media coverage. The astonishing number of baby girls abandoned in China during the 1990s and the early part of the following decade each year typically resembled in size the population of a typical small Chinese city, although the CCAA has now begun to report that abandonment of non special needs children has been very steadily decreasing.

Foreign adoptions in China took place in provincial capitals like Changsha rather than in the individual locations that hosted orphanages throughout each province. This made it easier to process both the adoption paperwork and the application for a Chinese passport each child needed to exit the country. It also served to limit the visibility of foreign adoptions. Still, some orphanages accommodated visits from families during adoption trips and others did not.  Our family has seen this variance firsthand during the course of our [three] adoptions.

The CCAA formally prohibited orphanage visits from adoptive families during adoption trips in its guidelines to orphanages involved in the foreign adoption program while allowing for return visits later, according to the director of one private foundation working in China. She said the CCAA was worried that families visiting orphanages during adoption trips might have been be tempted to compare children or unfairly compare orphanage conditions to those in wealthy countries. The policy was a means of limiting visits overall.

In 2004 only 24 of more than 85 orphanages in Hunan's provincial welfare system placed children in foreign adoptions.  Foreigners seeking to adopt in China paid an orphanage fee of about $3000 USD, and in Hunan most of this fee was said to go directly to the orphanage and, by law, only for the purpose of capital improvements.  Between 2002 and 2004 a large number of foreign adoptions in Hunan had been from the Hengdong SWI, prompting some speculation among local Chinese then working with adoption agencies in the area that provincial officials had singled out the orphanage as a high priority target for renovations.

Undeniably, photos from disposable cameras sent to the Hengdong SWI and returned to adoptive families had shown a very humble facility. In my daughter's photos, some scenes from the orphanage had seemed unusually grim, a few even unsettling, in comparison to orphanage scenes I had seen firsthand in China previously.

January 24: Trip Confirmed

[Original post from Jan. 24, 2005]  Over the weekend, I finalized my Hunan itinerary with an OCDF representative in Beijing and early this morning booked my flights. The trip is on. The itinerary will begin in Changsha and then allow me at least two days in Hengdong near the start, just in case something gets delayed. I'll stay close by in Hengshan while exploring the area where my daughter is from and spend a day in Shaoshan on my way back to Changsha and its airport. Beyond this, I'll know very little until the trip unfolds.

I'll leave on February 18. My next posts will be either during the trip or immediately after. Zai jian.

February 18-19: Departure and Travel

[Original Post from Feb. 19, 2005]  I am writing this from China, in the business center at the good ol’ Grand Sun City Hotel in Changsha.  This was a difficult trip to prepare for since this time I had no adoption agency travel info packets, and there was little prior communication with my contacts here due to the Chinese New Year.  If there was a loose plan for the first part of my trip, it didn't quite work out and my itinerary for the rest of the trip has been sort of reversed.  Today I am still working on revisions. 

But I'm here.

Very early on departure day, my wife and I crept from our daughters’ room where because of some post-orphanage sleep issues our whole family has camped each night since we brought our Hengdong daughter home in August.  We dressed, fidgeted with my bags, and went over our checklist of last minute items.  The day before had been her second birthday and remnants from our little celebration were still strewn around the house along with the usual toys and children’s socks.  We woke the girls, packed them into their car seats, and headed off to the airport, running late.

I will admit that for several weeks I'd been quietly nervous about the moment when we would pull up to the curb at our municipal airport in New Orleans for this trip, which seems like a fairly large leap into the unknown.  When the moment came, I kissed everyone with my heart pounding and then quickly hopped out of the car.  As I slung my small knapsack over my shoulder and dragged my one larger bag inside, I remember also carrying what seemed like a lot of weight in matters to think about.

Still, the weight would be balanced by the secret to happiness, which lies in giving something up--like your safe position, your predictable routine, often your money--for the courage of your convictions.  So I could smile at least a little bit at the ticket counter when I learned my first flight to Chicago was canceled and that I would be rerouted to China through San Francisco, which would eventually put me on a different and much later flight into Changsha. 

Whoever might be meeting me in Changsha wouldn't find me on the original flight and would have to wait an extra four and a half hours to see if I could be on the next flight arriving from Beijing.  Late for my new flight to San Francisco, I quickly boarded and borrowed a cell phone from a nice guy in the seat next to me and, as we taxied toward the runway, called home to see if we could get a message to OCDF.  Then I hoped for the best.

In San Francisco the different United Air flight to Beijing was very crowded and the plane itself had seen better days.  I sat next to a Chinese man who had been living in the U.S. but now was planning to start a business in Beijing, a car buying guide for new Chinese motorists.   We compared optimistic anecdotes from our recent trips to China and he was a cheerful complement to a long flight. 

I arrived in Beijing at 6 pm on the 19th, where the airport was crowded with New Year's travelers and where I almost lost my luggage for good.  In New Orleans and San Francisco I had been told at each flight counter that my bag would be checked all the way to Changsha.  When I finally got to the domestic terminal in Beijing I thought I would ask again.  Nope, we determined through sign language, my bag was probably back at the international terminal baggage claim.  I had 10 minutes to board.  So I ran back through both terminals and customs in reverse, which caused some audible gasps, and found my lonely bag at the claim area.   Then I ran back in the other direction, through customs, and unbelievably they waved me through security.  At the gate for the Changsha flight, they almost wouldn't let me on, but I was persistent.

There were no other foreigners on the Changsha flight.  I sat among a rough looking group of men who were alternately laughing and arguing over something written in a newspaper that one man kept slapping against the back of the seat in front of him.   Another in the group lit a cigarette in defiance of the airline's no smoking rule and the whole scene was out of place on the brand new China South plane with its cheery and earnest young flight attendants, who weren't quite sure how to handle this group.  I tried to sleep.

It was already late at night and the air was very cold as we stepped off the plane in Changsha.  Inside the terminal I cleared customs, claimed my one checked bag with no small amount of relief, and headed toward the main lobby into the New Year traveling crowd.  Among the faces lining the railing after the entrance to the public area I spied someone waving a sign with my name.  This was Song Xuefeng, my guide assigned just in the past day or so, and now my good friend who goes by the English name Leon.  He is a tall young man in his mid 20s, who speaks English well and has a quick smile and an easy, confident demeanor. 

When no foreigners had gotten off my originally scheduled flight from Beijing, Leon had simply decided to wait it out for the next one.  No problem, he said, smiling like he meant it.   He'd brought a book.

Outside the airport we climbed into a small Korean-built van driven by an amiable man named Chen and this little vehicle will eventually take us south toward Hengdong in a day or so, if all goes according to plan.

It’s good to be back, I found myself thinking as we drove through dark streets to downtown Changsha, yet I was struck by how different the city felt without the comfort and diversion of a travel group. Even the Grand Sun City Hotel felt different when we finally pushed through the big revolving entrance door into its familiar lobby, although I had been among eight adoptive families living at this same location for about two weeks just six months ago.  The difference was that this time I was no longer part of a grand collective effort.  Instead I was just there on business, the nature of which was very important to me, but not particularly obvious to anyone else.

Leon told me more details of my permission to travel to the Hengdong SWI.  He confirmed that I would be the first outsider to visit there and said he was very surprised that provincial civil affairs officials had okayed the trip.  It was a civil affairs [provincial government] decision and not the orphanage's, he said.  Anyway, he said he thought this was a kind of experiment, and advised that I not mention the trip at the hotel.  With this I should note for Hengdong adoptive families that I am fully aware of my ad hoc ambassador status and will do nothing that would jeopardize trips for future Hengdong travelers.  There will be no sneaking of photos at the orphanage if photos are not allowed, for instance.       

My body had no idea what time zone it was in and there was a dull throb in my head after I checked in at the Grand Sun.  I've had about 6 hours of sleep since Wednesday and it's Sunday morning now. 

I find myself hoping that I can hold up through the rest of the trip and somehow pull this off.

By the way, there are at least three adoption groups at the Grand Sun, one from the U.S. and the others from Europe, I believe.  At least one more arrives tonight.

February 20: Changsha

[Original Post from Feb. 20, 2005]  Here in Changsha they're still celebrating Chinese New Year, a term that is really sort of a western expression for what the Chinese call Spring Festival. 

The Spring Festival starts in the early days of each 12th lunar month, lasts until the middle of the first month of the new lunar year, and its end is marked by the full moon of the Lantern Festival, which is celebrated with paper lanterns and yuanxiao dumplings for good luck. Within this period the Chinese government asks businesses to give workers seven vacation days off and Spring Festival is by far the biggest holiday in China.  

It's like our Christmas, New Year, and Labor Day Weekend holidays all rolled into one.  Except the Spring Festival produces the biggest annual migration of human beings on the planet as a mass exodus of Chinese travelers—migrant factory workers, students, and new capitalists—travel home to their families.  It is said that several hundred million people can be on the move in China during the Spring Festival; clogging airports, train stations, bus depots, ferries, and roadways with travelers often desperate for a once a year chance to see home. 

Today here the streets, stores, and restaurants are filled with big red paper lanterns, China braids, and other festival decorations.  Firecrackers and fireworks are a constant and can be heard at just about at any hour of the day.

One side effect of the Spring Festival is its celebratory imbibing.  Last night in the room next to mine a group of men that reminded me of that rowdy group from the airplane could be heard carrying on in an inebriated way until about 5 a.m., when instead of going to sleep they all just seemed to say goodbye and go home.  Actually, my wife and I had noticed a little of this sort of competitive Ralph Cramdenizing in China before during our earlier trips, putting us in mind of the drinking contests in Fulong that Peter Hessler described in River Town, his memoir about the two years he spent living in Fuling (in Sichuan) in the late 1990s.

Of course not all Chinese men do this, but it's interesting.  It was interesting too to hear a bunch of guys coarsely shouting to one another over their apparently preferred accompaniment of soft ballads and that beautiful, lilting, almost new age music that is popular here in Changsha, the kind with no drums, electronic backgrounds, and mellow wooden flutes--and ethereal voices singing about things that are lite. 

In the morning after breakfast I walked behind the hotel to the familiar Whacko Market (yes, this is the name on the sign out front) for a few supplies, almost reaching for disposable diapers from force of habit as I passed them on the shelves.

Later I walked up the main street, Furong Zhonglu, for a few miles to get some more air, which was still chilly in the upper 30s.  The wide street is lined with fascinating little shops and food vendors and occasional larger stores.  Walking in Chinese cities is very safe, with street crime and police usually invisible.  Generally accepted or generally imposed, there are strictly enforced rules here, legal and otherwise, but this is not at all obvious. 

The larger stores I explored were crammed with people, products and flashy advertising, the dominant theme being a highly stylized happiness.  In fact, this seems to be the dominant theme in Chinese urban popular culture overall.   I've been asked several times in China what is it, exactly, that Americans see entertaining in horror, murder, crime, and mayhem.  Good question.

It's worth noting for this trip and before heading off for the rural countryside that women and girls are hardly ignored in Chinese urban popular culture.  Quite to the contrary, smart women broadcasters seem to be the norm on TV and the very large number of cable channels in China feature a varied array of shows about teen girls and little girls who are very cute, in serials and in game shows.  One very interesting game show even features beauty contest winners who rate older women on the warmth of their smiles and other personal qualities, the things that should really matter.

In Changsha little girls on the street and in stores seem hugged and pampered by their parents, equally as much as parents' little princes.

Back at the hotel, I watched a growing number of adoption travel groups coming and going, and it was interesting to be an observer of this rather than a participant.  The Grand Sun is the busiest of three "international" hotels in the city authorized for use by foreign travelers and adoption groups.  For years now, in the case of the Grand Sun, adoption groups have been staying for a week or so with their adopted babies nearly nonstop,  yet the hotel is not a baby hotel.  While its staff are uniformly kind and more than helpful to adoptive families, the hotel continues to primarily serve its Chinese clientele, to host local banquets and parties, and to cater to locals through its several interior restaurants and smoky lounges, especially the lounges.  In this terrarium, Chinese foreign adoption and routine everyday life simply coexist.

Next it was time to run a few errands around the city in our little van.  The broad walkways of Martyrs' Park in the city's center were draped overhead with literally thousands of bright red and yellow Spring Festival banners. As in other Chinese cities, in busy Changsha there are no traffic signals, stop signs, or crosswalks at even the largest or busiest intersections.  This along with a lack of seatbelts adds an element of high drama to road travel.  Common scenes that call for pedestrians or heavily laden carts or bicycles to cross multi-lane streets or highways can be especially gripping.

My primary road trip that is now set to begin very early tomorrow morning looks to be an epic nail biter, although its twisting route that I've traced on a local map of Hunan also looks fascinating.  With the temperatures hovering around freezing and rain mixed with sleet or snow in the forecast, it's hard not to envision some slippery roads in the days and long miles ahead.  I've decided not to think about this too much.

..........

My guide Leon does not actually work directly for OCDF.  Instead, he works for a general guide service that is based in Changsha.  Although he is relatively new to the profession, his job has already taken him to Yunnan Province and to a six-month stint in Tibet.   Earlier, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering at a college in Hubei Province, but rather than resign himself to a career behind a desk, he took a quick English language training course and became a guide.  He is originally from Yueyang, which is north of Changsha and where he grew up with his grandfather while his parents, as is common in China, moved on to a different and distant location to find work, factory work. 

Driver Chen Xi Yun is my age (in his 40s) and lives in Changsha with his wife and their 18-year old son, when he isn't ferrying people around the province in his small van.   Despite our separate languages, Chen and I hit it off instantly.  The man clearly has a sense of humor.

..........

In the evening I met up with my Chinese friends who use the English names Daphne and Ellen, local representatives from our adoption agency and sisters who helped us so much during our last adoption trip.  I had emailed them in advance of my arrival and they were  a sight for sore eyes as they came through the revolving lobby door.  They had two new adoption groups in tow, with 15 families representing a total of about 40 people including the children and travel companions that often accompany adoptive parents on these trips.   

When they were free, they pressed me for news of my oldest daughter, with whom they fell in love during our trip last summer.  They asked about my Hengdong daughter too, and were curious about my pending trip to Hengdong.  I told them everything I knew.  They genuinely wished me luck, although in a way that reflected the subtle complexity of the project.  Based on their considerable experience, the situation at the Hengdong orphanage had some odd aspects that we had discussed privately a few times during my last visit here, prior to which they themselves had had difficulty arrranging to visit the orphanage or even to establish contact with someone there to check on the significant medical issues that were outlined in my daughter's brief medical reports and updates.

Once we had caught up, I gave them the gifts we had packed for them, mostly photos of our girls.   

Because of their genuine devotion to the abandoned baby girls for who Daphne and Ellen work so continuously hard to place in homes, they seem at times like older sisters to my daughters.  I know that these two unusually kind souls, native to Hunan, feel strongly about their personal role in helping to take these children out of orphanages into far better situations of opportunity.  In their work, which is independent from the government's official social welfare apparatus, they have seen too many institutionalized children in too many different orphanage settings, always less than ideal, and across several provinces. 

As I watched Daphne get the large new group settled, I felt so proud of her and of Ellen. It's not just what they do, it's how they do it: with so much respect and care for the families wise enough to be open to them.

Yet from my new outside perspective I could observe that not all of these adoptive families seemed to see Daphne and Ellen as much more than local tour guides,  at this point.  Brief visitors to the birth country of their new children who had tragically wound up in a careworn orphanage, these foreign guests were staying at one of the best hotels in all of Hunan Province, yet there were complaints, mostly about the size of the rooms and unfamiliar food.  A few families noticeably seemed to view the length of their relatively brief stay as an inconvenience.  One soon to be first-time father rushed into Daphne and Ellen's room without knocking to express his dissatisfaction with having found a crib placed in his room when he and his wife were absolutely sure that their new daughter would want to sleep between them on the hotel bed.   Eventually he left. 

..........

We headed downstairs to a dining room to continue catching up.  Tomorrow before dawn we would have breakfast then I would be off to Shaoshan, Hengshan, and to Hengdong. 

"You better take down my cell phone number," Daphne sternly told me several times, finally borrowing a pen and just writing it down herself. 

"I don't want you to get lost in China."

February 21: Shaoshan and Hengshan

[Original Post from Feb. 21, 2005]   What a remarkable day.  I write this nine miles from Hengdong County at night upstairs in a strange sort of Internet cafe in an ancient building in an alley in Hengshan, some 100 miles south of Changsha.   

I suppose it's not really a cafe since they don't serve anything here except Internet access to young locals, male and female, ranging in age from about 15 to 25.  There are no lights in the place other than the glow of the old but functional computers that line each wall, and the walls are so old they look like the walls of a cave.  The rates for visitors seemed cheap enough at 4 yuan an hour, which is about 48 cents.

Leon, Chen (or Chenge for "Brother Chen"), and I have just finished a dinner of hotpot nearby, sitting around a battered wooden table in the center of which was a boiling pot of broth with a fire underneath.  Into this contraption we dipped sliced mutton, tofu, pork blood tofu, spinach, and potatoes, then dipped them into the spiciest sauces imaginable.  This washed down with Chinese beer.

We left Changsha this morning after picking up an official letter at the downtown office of the Hunan Provincial Social Welfare Department.  The letter will permit us to visit the Hengdong SWI.   

There as we started out, Leon and I were fumbling around in the van trying to find a good secure place to stash this important document when Chen whistled and drew our attention to what seemed like a huge group of people that slowly had begun to file out of the same government building and into a very large bus we had parked next to, and that loomed like a mountain over our tiny van.   This turned out to be a Scandinavian adoption group, families that had just completed their adoption paperwork, even though the early morning sun had not yet completely cleared the horizon.

Deciding we had better get out of the way of this oncoming crowd, we stuffed our letter into Leon's knapsack and then we were off toward Shaoshan.  Outside Changsha the city is surrounded by an astounding number of new construction projects: industrial parks, residential areas, etc.  But not far past the outer edge is rural China, which is a far different place from new urban China.

The area is hilly with steep valleys, at the bottom of which are usually ponds, rice paddies, or ancient terraced plots of land for growing grain or vegetables.  Square two- and occasionally three-story, tile-fronted houses are perched in small villages on the hillsides or beside the road, and are almost universally the same except for the occasional mud brick variety that are generally in poorer condition.  Overall the homes in this region are solid structures and large in comparison to the tiny apartment-style units packed into the high-rise residential buildings that are the norm in cities and towns.

Here each rural house may serve as home to three or four generations of one family, and sometimes their animals on the ground floor although this seems to be a tradition that is becoming less common.  With roadside dwellings the ground floor is usually converted to a garage housing a shop or some other type of business.

Gazing out the window of our little van, most of the countryside flew by in timeless scenes that would have looked pretty much the same 100 or 500 years ago.  Then we would careen around a corner and suddenly come upon a modern-era factory, a small government complex of indeterminate use, or a roadside village filled with tiny shops bustling with commercial activity.  Every small roadside village seemed to have at least one outlet for the company China Mobile, whose ubiquitous white and blue signs announce cell phones for sale.

The winding road was filled with cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, carts, and pedestrians.  All of them seemed to compete for the center.

Hours of fascinating roadside scenes then unfolded. 

Once in Shaoshan our first stop was for lunch at an old mountain restaurant owned by relatives of Mao Zedong.  Actually, more than half the residents of Shaoshan are said to have the name Mao.  There was no heat in the restaurant and a kerosene burner was placed under our table to keep us warm, plus a thick tablecloth (blanket) draped across our laps.  There was snow on the mountains above us, and it was about 30 degrees inside and outside the building.  Chen knows the owners and he got to sit at their table, and toss spicy bits from his plate to two friendly restaurant dogs. 

Although the restaurant has several dining rooms today we appeared to be its only paying customers so we were seated in the entrance room and our table was near a small bar with a television set hanging above it.  From their table nearby the Mao family was watching the NBA All Star basketball game. 

After lunch a large procession of townspeople came marching up the road, women wearing red and black uniforms and waving bright yellow scarves.  They had come to perform a drum dance.  Today was apparently the first day the restaurant had opened after a winter break and the drum dance will ensure good fortune during the season ahead.   

Eventually we headed down the road a short distance to what is now the shrine.  Shaoshan is more accurately the name of the mountain on the side of which sits the small village of Shaoshanchong, where on December 26, 1893, a bouncing little Mao Zedong was born to a relatively well to do peasant couple.  But the birthplace has popularly become known throughout China as just Shaoshan.

Mao grew up in this picturesque Shaoshanchong village, attended school there, and helped his father in the fields until he moved to Changsha in 1911.  There he briefly served as a soldier in the Republican army that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and, once settled in the big city, started to read works of western philosophy as well as the progressive newspapers and revolutionary journals that were then becoming available in Changsha.  In 1918, after graduating from the Hunan Teachers College, Mao traveled to Beijing and worked in the Beijing University library under its head librarian Li Dazhao.  Mao joined Li’s Marxist study group and the rest is history.  Mao's "mistakes" cost China as many as 30 million lives in his ironically named Great Leap Forward campaign alone, but he bonded the people of China together to a degree that no other leader had or has since, and he made them proud to be Chinese.

During the Cult of Mao, at the height of Mao's reign, the government carved the aforementioned winding roadway and also built a special passenger railway both leading from Changsha to Shaoshan for party faithful to make the pilgrimage to his birthplace.  In 1966 more than 3 million Chinese put down their shovels or factory tools to make the trip, with permission from their supervisors of course.  Today the area is far less popular, and the small gravel parking lots there were mostly empty.  The highlight of this relatively modest historical communist theme park is the Mao family residence, which was dubbed for a while the Ancestral Temple of the Mao Family and is now just called Comrade Mao's Museum.  There are stone markers etched with Mao's poems along the walkways surrounding the residence and nearby at an adjacent site is a very tall and famous statue of Mao, with mountain peaks as a backdrop.

The former residence seemed surprisingly large and sturdy.  The house is tan colored, with mud brick walls, and nicely tiled and thatched roofs.  It's on a wooded hillside, above some ponds.  One can tour all of the dozen or so rooms inside, including a kitchen, a dining room, three family bedrooms, a guest room and a common room at the entrance.  Within the rooms are various personal effects of Mao and his family, as well as a few family photos—Maomerabilia if you will. 

Is there significance to my daughter's place of origin being so close to Mao's? 

Not very much, I easily decided.  The history of revolutionary China has too broad a base.  Still, in my travels I have noticed some truth to the saying that Hunan produces people as spicy as its famous cuisine, laced as it is with those fiery chili peppers.  Even at 24 months, my daughter from Hunan has a way of letting us know what she wants and doesn't want that is surprisingly emphatic.

But she is a sweetie and we have a special bond.  On our Gotcha Day in Changsha, I was handed her amidst the shuffle of families in the crowded reception room on the second floor of the Hunan Provincial Social Welfare Department.  She melted into my arms then quickly looked me straight in the eye as if to say, simply, where have you been and what took you so long.  Then she nestled back into my shoulder. Around us the other Hengdong babies were freaking out.  She had one brief episode later that day back at the hotel room where I think she got a little scared by her new surroundings.   Eventually, with a little help from her new big sister, we were able to distract her and later she was fine.  Sort of.  Children who spend their first 18 months in a beleaguered orphanage generally have some issues and my Hengdong daughter is no exception, but she is a very special child, which I knew from the start.

This, I realized today, is why I now found myself standing alone 10,000 miles from home, in central China, unable to speak or understand Chinese, at one of the world's most presupposedly unappealing tourist sites, the birthplace of Mao Zedong.  It's because I love my daughters, both of them, that much.  The thought had never entered my mind that I wouldn't try to make this trip that somehow brought me here.  It was like comforting a night terror in the wee hours or smiling through endless videotapes of Barney or, more surprising, My Little Pony.  It's just what I do. 

Of course I'm really only alone for brief periods, as Leon and Chen have turned out to be excellent travel companions.   Chen has been having stomach issues, due to his penchant for eating the spiciest foods he can find, and so he sometimes discreetly disappears.

Neither is well versed in the general facts surrounding the object of our mission, but I am beginning to understand that Leon and Chen were each subtly intrigued to discover how I came to be father to two Chinese daughters, and why I am traveling to Hengdong of all places.  In fact, they no longer seem like guide and driver since both often appear to be preoccupied, very much like I am, with the unusual tasks in our plan.  It's all for one and one for all.

Next stop Hengshan.  To be a driver in Hunan is to be a race driver, I've discovered.  Chen is a madman at the wheel of our little van but very good.  There are very few road rules in China and a lane is a loose concept.  To be a driver is also to be engaged in a constant game of chicken with your oncoming opponents and once the roadway opens up one must drive one's vehicle as fast as it will possibly go. 

The countryside between Shaoshan and Hengshan is fascinating.  I know I cannot adequately describe it tonight.  It is very poor, but this is an ancient subsistence poverty under which the people in the area have been living for thousands of years.  Many homes are as well kept as the small plots of land in front of them that families rely on for most of their income and livelihood.  Success seems to be a tenuous matter and other homes barely seem to provide their inhabitants with decent shelter.

The small city of Hengshan is also very poor, at its outskirts.  But the old part of the downtown where we are at the foot of the mountain is in much better shape and makes its livelihood off the Buddhist and Taoist travelers to the area, Chinese travelers.  Foreigners are extremely rare.

Hengshan the mountain is also known as Southern Heights Mountain (Nanyue Shan) and is one of the five sacred Buddhist mountains in China.  It has more than a dozen temples.  Although only about 4,000 feet at its highest peak, Nanyue Shan extends more than 30 miles in width and its spine includes a total of 72 peaks, the highest of which is the Wishing for Harmony Peak.  At the foot of the mountain stands the biggest temple in southern China, the Grand Southern Heights Temple (Nanyue Damiao).

The original temple there is said to have been built as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), although it has been damaged by fire and rebuilt several times.  The present temple dates back to the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 AD) and its design is patterned after the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing.  It has nine courtyards and its main hall is 66 feet high, floor to ceiling, and supported by 72 giant stone pillars.  The main building, painted with red and yellow, is connected to a maze of other buildings in a very large temple complex. 

Along the streets surrounding the complex are hundreds of small open-front shops selling a huge variety of incense, prayer objects, and firecrackers.  In this region of China, temple incense is tossed, often by the armload, into ovens large enough to be free standing buildings and it is believed that the rising smoke from these ovens carries prayers, wishes, and messages to the heavens.  During Spring Festival, many worshippers also lob big strings of firecrackers into these ovens, perhaps as an exclamation point. 

Leon and I hiked around the Grand Southern Heights Temple today, explored its maze of temple buildings within, and in the main temple shook sticks in front of the large Buddha for our fortunes. 

Mine looks good.

Tomorrow morning we go to Hengdong where I've a full day planned.  On the next day we plan to go to the orphanage.  Leon just spoke with the director on his cell phone.  We're set.

Tonight I hope to finally get some sleep.

February 22: Hengdong at Last

[Original Post from Feb. 22, 2005]   At our base in Hengshan we are staying at the modest Nanyue Telecom Hotel, which is near the foot of the mountain and just a short walk along old streets made of stone from the Grand Southern Heights Temple.   The Telecom is much like the hotel I imagined we might be staying at while my wife and I were daydreaming a long time ago about making our first adoption trip.  I wasn't really expecting the strange cylindrical rocket ship that is the Lakeview Hotel in Nanchang or the big businesslike Grand Sun in Changsha, four stars each. 

I am comfortable at the Telecom, which makes no visible claim to be international.  The people who work there let their little kids run around in the halls and play in the elevator.

Early in the morning I watched as daylight slowly gathered over the top of the hotel to gradually fill in the outline of the mountain peaks to the west outside my window.  I'd made some black tea in the room and I sipped this to keep warm while leaning out the window for a better view.   At that hour the air was still and the town very quiet, except for what sounded like a low droning horn coming from the direction of the temple at regular intervals.  When it seemed suitably late enough I quietly slipped out into the hallway and headed downstairs on my own to the ground floor, to a dining area where I correctly assumed that breakfast was being served.

To be surprised by a foreigner at an early breakfast in Hengshan apparently can be somewhat of a shock.  The dining area was decorated in red and its big round tables covered with white tablecloths were each already mostly occupied.  I sat down at one of these tables and the three occupants on its opposite end quickly grabbed their plates and fled, not in a really unfriendly way but just with very puzzled expressions on their faces.  This seemed to cause the entire room to stare in my direction, to which I responded with a small wave.  Hello.

My eyes scanned unsuccessfully for coffee, then equally so for cups for tea.  I didn't see any teapots either.  Leon would later explain to me that, except in places used to foreign visitors, here hot drinks like tea or coffee aren't generally served with breakfast.  I got up and headed for the two buffet tables and found little there that resembled breakfast as I understood it.  Instead there were noodles and steamed dishes, including a very large carp steamed with head and scales intact.  I did see some tiny black-shelled bird eggs, so I put a few on my plate with a steamed bun and a cookie that looked sort of close to being a pastry and returned to my seat, which seemed to signal the other diners to return to the buffet. 

Here in the middle of the Middle Kingdom I'm a complete outsider. 

Back at my otherwise empty table I picked at my plate and basked in weary wonderment that I had somehow made it this far and to this place, such a short hop from the destination that last summer was so off limits during what we'd hopelessly thought would be my last chance.

A tap on my shoulder turned out to be a smiling Chen, who placed a tall glass of warmed milk in front of me and motioned for me to drink.  He gave the room full of diners a similarly gracious smile showing that everything was okay, that I was with him. 

..........

Settled in the van and on the road it took only about 15 minutes for us to reach and cross the wide Xiang River, then follow the road into Hengdong County.  I am still unable to sleep more than a few hours at night and this morning found myself staring haggardly ahead, with Leon periodically asking if I was okay.  Although I climb into a change of mostly clean clothes each day, I know I have the general appearance of a small graying man who a crowd has only recently been standing on.

So we chew betel nuts, flavored with mint oil or sesame.  These little nutshells taste like flavored garden mulch but have a stimulant effect sort of like drinking concentrated espresso.  Chen says drivers chew them to stay alert.

Hengdong County looks much like the area surrounding Hengshan, maybe even a bit more prosperous owing to the new highway that runs through it.  The roadside is typically dusty and lined with standard roadside homes and businesses.  About three miles into the county we passed a large funeral procession, the mourners in traditional white.  Chen quickly backed up the van so I could try to get a photo.  Then we were back on the road and to the right (south) the land flattened out into a wide series of fields and rice paddies.  There are very few other roads that connect to the highway and most of the houses in the area appear to be within walking distance of this main artery.

Eventually, the roadside buildings began to get larger and closer together.  Then soon the road flowed into the center of the small city of Hengdong, whose streets were packed with people, owing to the much improved weather (sunny and in the upper 40s) and the tail end of Spring Festival. 

Our primary goal for the morning was to find the Hengdong County Farmer's Market, where my daughter was reported to have been been left and found just two years ago, eerily almost to the day.   At first this appeared to be relatively easy.  Chen simply stopped in the middle of traffic, flagged a passerby and asked.  We were directed to the center of town just past its largest intersection and on the right we saw a big crowd hovering around the entrance to a large covered alley, both sides of which were lined with tables for people selling fresh vegetables, meat, dried fish, rice, flour, and the like.  Leon and I jumped out of the van and headed over.

A scant summary of a February 2003 police report in my daughter's referral papers said she was found inside the market near its entrance. We took our time as we scanned the scene in front of this place from the street, looked around the surrounding area carefully and, as inconspicuously as we could, took some photos.  Then we proceeded into and through the alleys of the market to do the same, quickly enfolded by its crowds and its mysterious, frenetic activity.  I had brought along a wrinkled copy of a photo of the Hengdong County Farmer's Market that had been taken for our family last summer and this turned out to be invaluable because the entrance to the market in the photo didn't really look like any of the six entrances to this one that we eventually found. 

Having finally run out of options in this huge but enthralling maze, Leon and I stopped and explained our problem to a woman selling candied fruits from big sacks.  She told us there were two farmer's markets in Hengdong and the entrance in our photo looked like the entrance to the other market. 

We followed her directions all the way back out of the alleys that we had traveled, turned left on the main street, and after about four blocks we found the three large half circle entrance ways in our photo.

I felt that I knew this place, which was a little unnerving.

Each of these entrance ways carried through a brick building like tunnels for about 40 feet before intersecting with a series of alleys where market vendors were selling domestic products such as clothes, household gadgets, and small gifts.  There was a large area for selling farm produce, but it was further in.  Just past the largest of those three main entrance ways I knew I had found the site I'd been looking for and I will confirm this with the Hengdong SWI director tomorrow.

..........

This is the second time I have stood at the location where one of my children is said to have been abandoned as a tiny infant.  It does not get easier and the experience left me temporarily stunned with an intensely hollow feeling and profound sense that while I have searched widely to find a lot of historical, cultural, economic, and bureaucratic reasons why what happened actually happened, I will find no excuses.  That's because my two children are my daughters and in my heart could not be more so.  That's how I know them, in that basic human paternal way. 

I know I could never have abandoned them.

Then it dawned on me that this is likely as was hoped or intended and how the red thread that connects me to my daughters' birth parents really works in painful, practical terms.  I took a long moment to gaze at the marketplace around me and to listen to its voices and sounds. 

On this spot in this shadowed stone pathway was a whirlpool of immeasurable sadness, invisible to everyone else, and to which I'd been drawn as if by its own gravity for the special chance to see it, to peer inside its dizzying depths.  But I couldn't really see far enough in.

She's safe and more than loved was the dire message that I tried through concentrated will to send across the void.

Then when I was finally ready I whispered a quiet thank you and I moved on.

..........

It took at least a few seconds to reorient myself to the tasks at hand and I noticed that Leon was standing behind me in the center of the alley and had apparently been quietly suggesting to a few curious onlookers that they give me some space for a few minutes.  I gave him a smile and he gave me a look of concern.  "You okay?" he asked as he came over, repeating his mantra for the morning.

Throughout the past few hours in Hengdong we had heard holiday firecrackers wherever we walked.  As we had hurried alongside the crowded main street on our way to this place we had even dodged a few.  Suddenly we noticed a new commotion outside the market and a dragon dance procession was parading down the main street in front of the main entrance way, where several vendors were cooking meat and boiling tofu in fat.  We watched the dragon dance through the crowds and the smoke. 

By then Chen had joined us.  We set about taking a few photos at this spot and explored the surrounding area.  Then I shrugged and Leon and Chen took my elbows when we crossed the main street to find the van.  I am hardly feeble, but they've taken to doing this.  I think it's just a way of showing they appreciate what I'm up to.

Back in the van we were immediately off to find the orphanage.  I didn't have to ask.  It was at the end of a comparatively wide street, with a median down the center, and that intersected the main street just past that first big farmer's market.  After about a half mile, the street just simply ended amidst a jumble of piles of wood and bricks, and there were some relatively poor looking houses surrounding us.  Then we spied a gate, indicating an alleyway.  At the end of the alley was the Hengdong SWI.  My appointment wasn't until the next day, but Leon and Chen went down the alley and knocked at the front entrance just to double check that everything was set.

I am not sure that I can describe my first look at the orphanage down this narrow alley.  But time seemed to stop and I was transported home though a rush of memories from the weeks before we adopted our Hengdong daughter, during a period in which we had been very worried about a treatable medical problem in her health reports and so much wanted to somehow just pull her out of the orphanage without any more waiting.   For a moment, gazing toward this structure, that awful feeling returned.

I went back near the van and watched a family try to build a cart from old pieces of wood they had probably pulled from the piles of surrounding debris.  Nearby a woman was washing some clothes in a bucket and her little boy waddled out of their home to play in the street in front of her.  He was cute.  I snapped a picture and the woman smiled.

When Leon and Chen returned, we decided to have some lunch and found a suitable restaurant on a side street back near the second market. 

We ordered our usual lunch, mainly of tofu fried in green chilies.  This we washed down with beer.  We have become, I am finding, a bit like those guys who had been in the room next to mine back in Changsha and we are quite a team, although we skip the drinking contests.  When we're not solemnly planning or carrying out our mission, we're basically yucking it up.  That I don't speak but a dozen phrases in Chinese is just something else that's kind of funny.  Chen speaks not a word of English except "hello."

I find too that I've mastered the common practice of spitting chopped bones onto the table next to my plate with decent accuracy.  Leon and Chen think that this and my proficiency with chopsticks is intriguing.  Chen has been feeding me spicy tests for the past several days and now seems happily satisfied with the results.

After lunch we took care of some more business, a search for eight small identical gifts that I could bring back for each of the Hengdong SWI children in our travel group from last summer.  These turned out to be pretty elusive, but eventually we found something suitable after combing most of Hengdong's central business district.

Then we headed outside of town in the van for our next assignment.  Because the rural countryside is commonly said to be where babies come from, we had agreed that we would find a rural side road, drive down it aways, select a village at random and then Leon would approach its inhabitants and ask if I could come up for a visit. 

This we did. 

..........

Villages in central China are a different type of arrangement than the small townships with the same label in western countries.  Chinese villages very often seem like little islands of clustered dwellings surrounded by the small plots of land assigned to each resident family unit.  Some small villages can represent single extended families. 

For millennia villagers reported to landowners and toiled in hardship--suffering cruel taxes, unpredictable growing seasons, and periodic famine.  Then 65 years ago the revolution flipped Chinese society on its end.  For a period the rural village became idealized as the purest form of collective effort and honest work.  Educated classes from the cities eventually were sent to rural areas to absorb lessons in hard simplicity.  This was a disaster of course, but the period can be viewed from the countryside as a brief heyday when schools and clinics were built. 

Today rural China seems to have suffered a backlash.   In cities and towns the term "country people" is at least mildly derogatory, and almost any line of work other than farming provides a better income.   Young people are often forced by necessity to either leave their villages and send money home to their families from a distance or stay to scrape an increasingly meager living from the land.  I saw this two years ago in neighboring Jiangxi Province.  It seems the case in Hengdong County also. 

Even the Chinese government now estimates that overall about 150 million people have given up their household registration (hukuo) qualifying them for state benefits in the countryside to become part of China's "floating" or transient population, most of which has migrated to China's larger cities or its coastal zones targeted for economic development.  One of every four residents of Beijing, for example, is among this group.

Still, a rural-urban interconnectedness can be seen in the countryside if you look closely.  There are many subtle examples, but the monk staffing the Hengshan mountain temple or the Hengdong farmer resting by the side of a field can, either one, also be talking on a cell phone.  Or the farmer, admittedly more often than not, can be dirt poor, but the rural peasant stereotype still seems imbalanced. 

..........

As we hunted for our village, once again the road we picked simply ended.  Chen was turning the van around when we spied a cluster of three houses nearby with a family sitting outside in front of the house in the center.  Leon went up the path, came back down with a smile, and Chen and I piled out of the van with my two small cameras, and a bag of gifts.  We spent a few hours with the family, all four generations, talking with them, and touring their home and property.  They were gracious hosts.  Their house had a very traditional design but had been completely rebuilt only a few years ago, very likely with simple hand tools but also with impressively solid workmanship.   It was laid out in function and style much like Mao's old family home in Shaoshan.  It was spare, but clean and very well cared for.  The family's name was Chen.

The main family--father and mother--had three young daughters, and the oldest had a daughter of her own.  Most children in the area attend school until the sixth grade, but the oldest daughter was proud of having also completed middle school [a rigorous equivalent to high school in the U.S.].  The rest of the family was proud of this too, perhaps in part because in China school costs money and often tuition for one child can represent a significant portion of a rural family's annual earnings.  Each of the Chen family members old enough to do so works in the small rice and vegetable plots in the valley below their home.  Lately there has been only one growing season, so family members sometimes supplement their income by walking into town, about four miles, to find temporary work.

It's interesting that this rural family we had chosen at random had no sons and comfortably relied on its daughters.  They appeared to be doing relatively well.

The kitchen was separated from the main part of the home and used a wood fire for cooking, much in the way that has been used for centuries.  A few small cuts of fresh meat hung from twine nearby.  Vegetables lying near the stove had likely come direct from the ground, since like many families in the area the Chens kept a small garden during the winter months that could be covered with a plastic sheet.  A number of shelves in the kitchen and an adjoining room were empty.   Water was pumped by hand from a well out front.  A power line was connected to the house, but no outlets were installed, since the monthly cost of electricity would be too expensive.  Several small hens roamed the village between its buildings.

Yet in this rural Chinese setting, I found nothing about this family or village that could fairly be described as backward.   Instead I found wry humor, proficiency, and self-reliance.

Everyone seemed to accept this sudden alien encounter with just the right amount of friendly skepticism.  They were surprised but certainly not overwhelmed. 

The women were dressed in a mix of store-bought jackets, traditional hand-sewn tops, and modern jeans or pants.  The men and boys, who mostly watched us from a safer distance, looked not much different in their black jackets and dark shirts than those I had seen on the main streets in downtown Hengdong or Hengshan--just dustier.  One young man, a cousin, was visiting from his new job in the city of Hengyang, and had parked his shiny red motor scooter at the entrance to the common room on the ground floor of the Chen family's home.

The oldest members of the family, grandparents, had rooms adjacent to the common room and these were furnished very traditionally.  Upstairs the home had a more modern look, with a polished tile floor and freshly painted white walls.  In each room throughout the home the few objects owned by each occupant looked carefully maintained.  Beds were made.  Clothes were neatly folded.

Nothing was taken for granted here, everything hard-earned and the Chens clearly relied heavily on organization and teamwork.

While I had brought gifts, the family quickly produced a small table and chair which they positioned in a sunny location outside for warmth, and filled the table top with small plates of nuts, fruits, and homemade candy for me.  Then they brought me a fine glass of hot tea, green with strong herbs.  After I asked most of my questions, all which seemed to sound pretty dumb, we all just lounged in the sun and enjoyed the afternoon.

Eventually the men from the village had to leave, apparently for some type of income-producing project they had been discussing and the four of them headed down the road on foot.  It pays to be flexible for a little extra income.  For example, we had seen families moving rocks by hand on a hillside building site not far away near the main roadway to Hengdong.

We stayed a little while longer, watching the children play with a little tan puppy.  They were basically taking turns hugging him, and we all thought this was very endearing.  When the women remaining with us asked if I had children also, we replied simply that I had two little girls.

That's good, they smiled.

We were grateful for the family's hospitality and they had been very pleased to have met a foreigner.  I felt that it was good to have found a family that represented such a proud picture of rural Chinese life and, because of this, the digital video we recorded would be much better for my daughters to view when they get older.  But nearby and elsewhere were many, many homes with families who clearly were not doing so well.

Back in the van we kidded Chen that he was the master of coincidence, since yesterday he knew the owners of the restaurant in Shaoshan and this family we had chosen today just happened to have his same name. 

Chen laughed and flogged the van back to Hengshan, scaring us half to death several times.   He is obviously much practiced, however.  At one point we sped between two long rows of vehicles that were heading in opposite directions at the entrance to the Xiang River bridge.  Engine whining, Chen calmly hit the brakes and, seemingly within just a few feet of slamming into the bridge's center abutment, swung the van safely in between two old military-style trucks heading across. 

Chen even has a fake police siren that he uses when the horn he pounds constantly doesn't seem enough.  The siren, Leon and I must admit, is pretty funny.

..........

But outside the window of the van, edgy scenes of daily life in Hengdong County were rushing by and competing with thoughts and images stamped into my memory from the morning, of the marketplace with its alleys ... and the faint, muffled imagined sound of a newborn baby crying.

Abandonment in China is complicated, as any adoptive parent who has visited their child’s abandonment site can attest.   There is a tendency in this to project one's own values into the mix, to imagine birth parents as plagued by regret and heartbreak.  But here staring out at these dreary roadside images I am forced to consider the idea that these birth parents view the birth of children through a set of cultural, societal, and economic filters that are entirely different from my own.  On the other hand, abandonment here is usually a choice that aims for the chance at some perceived optimum: to try again for a son or a child with fewer perceived defects.  All cultural relativity aside, when either of my daughters asks what exactly about her wasn't good enough I know the answer is truly not a thing.  So I wondered whose crushing sadness it really was that I felt so deeply back in that marketplace alley this morning.   

With a few hours of daylight still left when we returned to Hengshan, Leon and I headed up the mountain to look at some of the upper temples.  On the way we saw two more drum dances.  Drum dancers in this town prowl the streets and perform in front of stores which apparently supplies good fortune.  However, the dancers want donations from the stores in return and can be seen as a mixed blessing by the store proprietors. 

A trail made of heavy stones wound up the mountain past temples, monuments, and valleys with terraced vegetable plots.  We saw tumbling alpine streams, and occasional clear water springs bubbling up out of the good earth beside us.  Surrounding pine and hardwood tree stands were free of blown down branches and meticulously maintained.  At one point we surprised an old woman coming down the trail who was sweeping the path of sticks and leaves with an old broom made of rice straw.  Several times we rounded a bend to find a small house of stone or brick perched on the side of the trail.  The inhabitants of these little hobbit dwellings sell incense or offerings for use at the temples to occasional passersby.  Most had placed a small table or two out front and Leon told me they would make us dinner if we asked.

We passed through an area with stone markers next to newly planted trees that families had donated to this hallowed forest, often as memorials to loved ones. On one of several shortcut paths that followed as the trail got steeper we happened upon one large stone memorial that surprised me.  For here in what is perhaps one of the few remaining regions in China where Mao Zedong is still so openly revered was a memorial, albeit a very modest one located some distance from the side of the path, to Chiang Chung Cheng, otherwise known as Chiang Kai Shek, head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949, and subsequently head of the Chinese Nationalist government in exile on Taiwan. 

This reminded me of a newspaper article I read once that attempted to illuminate differences in Asian cultures by focusing on differences in feelings toward national identity.  The article said that while the Japanese can regard expatriates as not quite as Japanese as those who have never left Japan, a Chinese is always regarded as Chinese--even emigrants generations removed.   Here was certainly quiet proof.

The last of the afternoon sun, the warmest in several days, was shimmering through the trees on this tranquil spot and there was a soft, mountain-scented breeze around us.  As we stared at this memorial, I began to understand that my daughters would likely always be welcomed in China as Chinese, despite the accompanying baggage that China handed them in the process that formed our family that lives elsewhere.   

For my children, eventually choosing how to feel about this probably won't be easy, but I hope they choose to assert their Chinese identities somehow and embrace the ethnically varied names we gave them as representative of the remarkable differences each of us can make on this small planet.

Climbing higher, we talked about our families and Leon asked about pronunciations of English slang terms and greetings.  We joked about my total inability to correctly memorize Chinese language tones.  At one point we stood on a big rock ledge and faced east looking back toward Hengdong.  Leon asked seriously for a moment what I thought of China, remembering the earlier events of our day.  As I fished for a short answer he finished my thought.  I'm glad you came here, he said.

Halfway up the mountain we found a tramway that provides a shortcut to the top.  The mountain even has a dangerous looking toll road on which small buses and taxis negotiate tight turns and treacherous angles for pilgrims who choose not to walk.  It seemed odd to see a tram in this area, however, and especially one built in the communist era for a spiritual purpose, but the tram is a testament to the regional importance of the ancient temple at the top of the mountain's highest peak.  Although it was already getting late when we started our hike, we took the tram up, saw the snowy temple that had been used since the Tang Dynasty, then quickly headed back down the tram and finished our hike in the dark.

We met Chen very late for another spicy dinner when we returned.

..........

As we were finishing, Leon left the restaurant for a while to retrieve something from the hotel.  This left Chen and I at the table.   The place was otherwise empty of customers, I was so tired, and for the first time there was a gaping, awkward moment between us. 

The three of us together would visit the Hengdong SWI tomorrow and Chen looked like he very much wanted to tell me something he felt was really important and that he'd obviously been stuck thinking about while Leon and I were on the mountain.   I've guessed that part of the strange chemistry that connects us is that we are both fathers.  But as master of coincidence, Chen noted earlier tonight that this is the tenth lunar new year in a row that he has found himself in Hengshan near the Grand Southern Heights Temple.  Less obvious symbols have been read as prophetic and Leon has said that Chen is "very loyal to the Buddha."

We tried our usual gestures and sounds, but to no avail.  Geography and cultures and languages were finally defeating us.

Eventually Chen came over from the other side of the table, sat down next to me, and gripped me by both shoulders.  He nodded with urgency and filled our two small glasses from the large green bottle of beer on the table.  We toasted.  This he did again soberly and his eyes started to fill with tears, which he wiped and then fumbled for his driver's sunglasses to quickly put them on, although the restaurant lighting was pretty dim. 

He shook his head and we both grinned. 

Then I punched him in the arm and we repeated these toasts until Leon returned.

..........

Tomorrow we go back to the orphanage.

February 23: The Orphanage

[Original Post from Feb. 23, 2005]   I have a confession that some of you may find odd and some of you I'm sure will understand.  It's that I didn't come here to visit the orphanage and there is a part of me that would've preferred to just leave it be.  The main reason I am here is to see where my daughter was from and to try to reach some understanding of it, for when she asks.   You see, the orphanage is where she happened to wind up in a twist of circumstance but in a larger sense both the orphanage and her relationship to it are products of Hengdong County, Hunan Province, People's Republic of China. 

Then again, my daughter spent her first year and a half at the Hengdong SWI, which for her was probably pushing the envelope in such a setting.  I now know more about what that setting was like for her and for so many other children.  It's good that I was somehow propelled to go there and henceforth I will always look at my Hengdong daughter with a certain unique sense of astonishment.

The day began with a light drizzle of rain and a return to more seasonable weather.  It was cold again.  In my room I'd spent much of the night packing the small red bags of gifts that my wife and I had planned that I would try to give to the nurses who had looked after our daughter.  Into them I carefully doled out chocolates and pictures of our family and of our home.  In doing so, I thought about the things that had led me to this point, mostly about fate and responsibility.  A lot of hours passed by rather quickly.

As we prepared to leave the Telecom, Chen and I stood watching our breath under the entrance awning out front next to the van, while Leon paced off to the side and fielded a series of calls on his cell phone, periodically glancing over at us with a look of desperation that said he didn't need the distraction.  Chen too seemed nervous, standing nearby and occasionally patting me on the shoulder but mostly staring ahead absently.  When we were ready, we huddled for a moment before piling into the van, eyes on me to say something. 

"Thanks," I managed.  "Really.  Thanks." 

Then with a grip on the shoulder of his big blue winter coat, "Chenge, xiexie.  Hao pengyou."

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When we arrived at the Hengdong SWI, we were greeted by Director Chen Ming, Assistant Director Ding Qi Hui, Secretary Xiang Zhen Xin, and several dignitaries from the Hengdong County Bureau of Civil Affairs.   The building is a three-story square structure of about 12,000 sq. ft..  The three of us were quickly waved inside, where it was very cold.   Heat was provided within only by some small portable heaters. 

We gathered inside the entrance way and cement stairwell on the ground floor for a moment, and then were directed upstairs to a 2nd floor meeting room not far from the stairwell.  On the stairs we passed a nurse holding a bundled infant, which I instinctively stopped to peek at.  I looked into that little sleeping face then glanced at the nurse.  We both smiled.

The meeting room was small and filled at the center with a huge black-finished wooden table surrounded by benches with the same finish that were placed against each wall.  Leon and I were seated at the far end of the table near a window that had one panel open, since the air was warmer outside.  Chen found a seat on the other side of the table with Xiang Zhen Xin and the county officials.  Chen Ming, the orphanage director, was seated next to me and he would be the spokesman.

As the talk began around the table, with Leon acting as our interpreter, it became apparent that this visit was more than a granted request.  Among this group it had been planned and anticipated for some time with a mixture of hope and no small amount of apprehension.  The room crackled with tension that the frigid temperature didn't help and that our Chen, thankfully, attempted to ease by periodically inserting humorous asides into the conversation and laughing mostly on his own.

But having our words interpreted provided opportunity on both sides for careful scrutiny of speaker's intent and the listener's reaction.  I found that I was being presented not with a tour description, but a serious explanation of a number of difficult problems that daily engulfed each of these people in what appeared to be a very personal way.  This was a meeting that seemed very important to them.

Chen Ming began by explaining that the building was first constructed in 1986 as the Glory Social Welfare Institute for war veterans but quickly began to take on abandoned children as the demand grew, especially in the early 1990s when population rules became more strictly enforced outside the major cities.

Although several adoption groups had adopted Hengdong children in just the past few months including 10 children earlier this same week, the Hengdong SWI was still taking care of about 70 children between the ages of one and two, two older children severely "disabled," and two 12-year-old girls who were living with the families of two orphanage staff.   Seven to eight babies between one and three were living outside the orphanage with other local families in a situation sounding like a temporary arrangement rather than formal foster care. 

In addition, the Hengdong SWI on its ground floor still cared for about a dozen seniors, several who were veterans.  It had 18 full time staff including its administrators and about 30 part-time employees to function as nurses or nannies. 

There were so few older children at the facility because Chen Ming and his staff, very likely with assistance at the provincial level, had been so successful in arranging domestic and foreign adoptions for the children in their care.  Most were now being placed in families within a year. Families from the United States alone had adopted more than 100 Hengdong SWI children. 

This seemed remarkable, maybe even inexplicable, given the more lottery-like nature of foreign adoptions in China generally and that many children living in SWIs are often said to be ineligible for adoption either because of communicable diseases, especially Hepatitus B, disabilities that are often severe, or nontreatable medical conditions.

However, a half dozen or so newly abandoned babies arrived at the Hengdong SWI each month, making the work of the orphanage appear to be very difficult.  This also appeared to show on Chen Ming's face.  Neither the SWI nor county officials said they saw an end to this on the horizon, explaining that the children, nearly all of them infant girls, were abandoned because of a continuing preference among families of little means for sons.  Instead, they said it is very important that a new orphanage be built.  The sooner the better.

The reason was obvious.  The building was in very bad shape, although the staff was doing the best it could in it.  Several adoption groups had made donations of equipment to the orphanage; ours last August bought a few air conditioner units and washing machines.  But too much was wrong with the basic structure of the building. 

Even its interior looked battered by the elements.  Windows and many of their frames were not weather tight.  Indeed many of the glass panes were missing.  There were cracks in the walls and ceilings and the interior paint looked original.  Electrical wiring was very scarce and old and I found myself wondering where the gift of an air conditioner or washing machine could be safely plugged in.  Cribs and other furniture pieces also were old.  Even the donated walkers that looked okay in photos taken a year or so ago, for families who had sent the orphanage disposable cameras, now looked worn.

In contrast, the bedding was fairly clean and the staff I met directly seemed solidly competent.  I spoke with each of the nurses who had looked after my daughter.  They said they remembered her and it was obvious they had cared for her with a great depth of feeling. 

The children I saw in the same room my daughter had lived in were being given the same sympathetic attention and most of the children I saw during my visit looked okay, in relative terms.  There were children who looked very thin or not well, but it has to be remembered that these children were physically abandoned as infants generally not much older than a few days or a few weeks, which is a significant trauma.  Most very likely had poor prenatal care.  Some had obvious medical needs at this point.  One tiny child with beautiful eyes and skin nearly translucent, who could not grip in her hand the finger I offered through the opening in her blankets, stays in my memory.

Each day following that first trauma of being abandoned involves a certain degree of catching up, which I sensed that some infants handle well and others do not for many reasons.  The stress of an institutional setting is an added hurdle for them.  Subtract any number of basic resources from the institution and the result is a pretty steep uphill climb.

I did not get information on mortality among these children but, again, the staff seemed to be doing the best they could with the few resources they had at hand.

In the small room adjacent to the one that had been my daughter's there were eight small metal cribs with eight small bundles of blankets holding babies.  This room seemed typical, with its grimy bare walls and somberly functional appearance.  At the center of the room a small portable heater was glowing.   It threw some warmth if you stood in front of it but didn't really warm the air very much.

While the immediate challenge was the cold, I couldn't help wondering what conditions in this building might be like during Hengdong's much longer season of intense heat and humidity.

----------

Ding Qi Hui, the SWI's assistant director, is the middle-aged woman who generally accompanies Chen Ming when he brings babies to Changsha for foreign adoptions and we remembered our meeting there.  At the orphanage a head nurse was actually in general charge of the nursing staff, but Ding has the air of a fine nurse, along with a warm smile, and both she and Chen Ming were obviously familiar with the children.  They explained that the administrative staff have distributed their offices throughout the building and everyone expects that when a baby needs attention nearby the nearest person will respond.

It was Ding who guided us to the room that had been my daughter's and who proudly introduced the staff there, not especially worried what I might think of its battered walls or the old Chinese army coat that rested for good measure over the top of one bundled sleeping baby.  She guessed correctly that I'd see past this, at least for the moment, and understand that these nurses were very dedicated to their work.  As Leon translated, she helped them to answer my questions and held my arm all the while.  More than anyone there she seemed to understand why I'd made such a long and complicated trip to Hengdong.

-----------

While the children I saw were cared for, most if not all will have problems that could have been avoided in a better facility.  In the winter the children are bundled in many layers of clothes for warmth and spend most of the time in their cribs under warm blankets.  This keeps them snug but hinders their physical movement and will encourage developmental delays.   Chen Ming and Ding Qi Hui told me they suspect and are concerned that Hengdong SWI children might have trouble crawling and learning to walk after they are adopted because at the orphanage the children spend so much time in walkers when not in their cribs. 

The floors in the orphanage were made of hard concrete and were either very cold or damp, depending on the season.  They were not good for putting babies down upon.  Chen Ming said they very much wanted to renovate a large empty room at one end of the second floor to a suitable baby room, with a soft floor and toys.  I made a monetary contribution toward this effort.

In the meantime the babies in their walkers at least looked happy in them. 

Many adoptive parents of Hengdong SWI children have reported that it seemed like their children came to them familiar with being loved.  Indeed I saw nurses on duty routinely pick up children to hold and soothe with loving attention, but there seemed to be a fair number of children in relation to the number of staff on duty and this was during the day.  In the absence of bright colors and the scarcity of all but the barest of furnishings, I realized that a periodic allotment of brief nurse interaction was probably the only satisfying cognitive stimulation my child received in her first year and a half of development and that she almost always had to wait her turn. 

This helped to explain a lot, about the lack of a sense of safety that I've seen in the eyes of orphanage children and about my Hengdong daughter and what in her terrible nights she will slowly overcome.  There really is great strength in adversity; she has this built in.  Each month gets a little better.

Someone once wisely told us to look for those inner things in our children that enabled each of them to get by on their own during a difficult infancy.  My Hengdong daughter has so many of these fine inner traits, not the least of which is a full-body smile that seems to begin in her feet and causes her little shoulders to hunch in delight as each grin blossoms.  She seems to have a natural tendency to look for happiness and find it in the simplest things.

It's quite remarkable.

Chen Ming and the other officials asked that I not take pictures inside the Hengdong SWI because they freely admit that its conditions are poor.  They worried that any photos I might take would be viewed out of context.   I agreed and didn't take any inside.

----------

Mostly, the building inside was dark.  It was laid out like a dormitory with small rooms of equal size accessible from central hallways that ran the length of the building on each floor.  The hallways were not lit and light filtered in only through the windows in each small room or from the wide main stairwell at the center of the building, which can be seen from the entrance.  The ceilings were very high and sounds, like the occasional baby crying, echoed down these long, dim and empty caverns.

Looking into the sparsely furnished rooms as we toured the halls, more of the rickety wooden window panels were open in the hope that the daytime air outside might warm the cold interior.  The windows to the outside were in fact the life that fed the place and seemed to offer the only real break from its dreariness.  In this dull light interior colors were reduced to monochrome shades of gray.  Darker colored doors and door frames were weathered and chipped.  The doors in particular were banged up in a way that suggested they had been very roughly used at least at some point.

Except for the cribs and babies in its rooms, the building looked much like an aging version of its original intention, a simple roof and walls built by grateful citizens for former soldiers of the Chinese army.

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A few years ago a Wisconsin couple came to Changsha with one of the earliest foreign groups to adopt children from the Hengdong SWI, and went home deeply committed to a new 9-month-old baby daughter.  Just after her first birthday at home she became very ill and at the hospital was eventually diagnosed with tubercular meningitis.  She died not quite a month later in February 2003.

A few other Hengdong SWI children later tested positive for tuberculosis after they were adopted and brought home, enough to serve as a notice for new adoptive families with Hengdong SWI children to have them tested.  Tubercular meningitis is rare and tuberculosis infection can easily be treated to greatly decrease the chance that an infected person will ever become sick with tuberculosis.  But active tuberculosis in children can be very serious.

As we walked about the building, Chen Ming and at least one other county official made a special point to tell me that the seniors who live on the first floor of the building are no longer allowed upstairs to play or help with the children, although many of the seniors are unhappy with this.  This rule is strictly enforced because some of these older residents "have sickness and the situation was not good."

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I passed an office bathed in soft yellow light from a desk lamp and where three typically white coated nurses on a break were huddled around a very small glowing heater.  They looked up and laughed shyly, a little embarrassed.  No problem and please carry on, I motioned. 

From the doorway across, a tiny bundle in a walker came wheeling out into the hall.  When the little vehicle came to a stop, a round-headed baby gazed up at me with a look of great surprise.

A nurse from inside the doorway quickly retrieved this escapee, to rejoin two other children in her room who were also in walkers.  They each looked to be about a year and a half old.  I knelt down among them for a while, as they bobbed about, looking like teddy bears in their many puffy layers.  All the while they stared at me transfixed through the dim, hazy light.  If you think I look interesting, I thought hopefully, just wait until you see the Grand Sun City Hotel.

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To summarize, one county official told me he believed that Chen Ming and his staff are the best in the province in their care for and dedication to the children in the Hengdong SWI, but that the orphanage itself, in its physical condition and lack of resources, may be the worst.  I saw nothing during my visit that would lead me to doubt the latter part of this observation, and the staff did appear to genuinely care for the children.

While conditions at Hengdong SWI were very difficult, there were fundamental differences between the situation I found there and, say, the popular reports about Chinese orphanages from the mid 1990s such as the widely circulated Human Rights Watch/Asia report Death by Default in 1996 and the BBC documentary The Dying Rooms in 1995 that are still way too often cited as current indicators of orphanage conditions.  Most researchers and private agencies working directly with orphanages in China would likely agree that conditions have vastly improved during the past decade and especially among orphanages that have been involved in China's foreign adoption program. 

Throughout China, even today, there are many places where life can seem dreary or hopeless and an under funded, crowded, state-controlled orphanage in such a setting can be full of sights and sounds that are disturbing.  But it helps to weigh a variety of factors when thinking about the orphanage.  While the Hengdong SWI has no heating or cooling system, this is the standard nearby in homes, shops, restaurants, and other buildings.  Common too is a very sparing use of electricity and especially during the day, which makes sense in a developing country with a billion and a half population. 

So on one level conditions in the orphanage approximated ones that these children might have experienced living in a typical home in the area.  On another level, an orphanage should be a health care facility, especially if it must largely focus on infant care. 

Mostly, the Hengdong SWI seemed like rough temporary shelter.

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The officials explained that they agreed to my visit after much discussion and the decision was eventually made by Director Zhou Liqun of the Hengdong County Civil Affairs Bureau.  He is the head government official in the county.   Hearing of my efforts to make the trip, they decided they would seek approval for the foreign parent of one of the adopted Hengdong children to come to see the orphanage and to carry back a message about what was happening there, to somehow encourage support.  They hoped the situation would be accurately presented and figured this was worth a try as an experiment.   

As we later stood outside I looked up and caught a haunting glimpse of a nurse holding tightly to a baby and standing at an open window above me.  In the gray daylight they were half in shadow and the room behind them appeared much darker than it probably would have seemed inside.  Our eyes met and the grief in hers really startled me.  I do not know what this meant.  This might also be said of much of what I had seen there.

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As for my daughter's finding site, Chen Ming confirmed that she was found at the second market we had located.  She was discovered there within its alleyways, generally in the area that I had sensed.  The man who reported the incident to the local police had found her wrapped in an old black skirt and unwrapping the skirt discovered she had been dressed with a little pink hat and a tiny red vest.  Pinned to her was a typical note, painted in black ink on a swatch of red cloth that indicated only her birth date on the lunar calendar. 

Red for luck.  There was nothing else on the note. 

Beside her was half a packet of formula. 

She was nine days old at the time.

Xiang Zhen Xin had brought this information into the meeting room for me, later after we all had walked about the building.   It was gathered in a folder full of documents, which Chen Ming and Leon patiently helped me to sift through. 

Then I sat in the room holding and looking at the red cloth note for a long time, before it was returned to its folder.

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After the tour of the Hengdong SWI we packed in several cars and drove to the site of what Chen Ming and the county officials hope will be a new orphanage.  There they planned to build a large facility for children only.  They hoped to complete this new building in three to five years.   They had raised 1.5 million yuan toward this effort so far, needed 3.5 million yuan to start construction, and 10 million yuan to complete the project.  Ten million yuan is about $1.2 million USD. They had commitments for some additional assistance from China's Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Hunan Department of Social Welfare.  They said they also needed support from foreign adoptive families, but stated no specific expectations beyond the continuing receipt of adoption fees.

The amount raised for the new orphanage appeared to roughly match the total revenue that the Hengdong SWI would have seen from foreign adoption fees over the past few years.  It seemed legitimate to question why more of this money isn't being directed to more immediate improvements.  The brief debate that followed on this point wasn't very conclusive or especially illuminating.

Local officials were clearly committed to the project and this could be seen in their faces as they looked out over the projected building site.  It was obvious too, however, that no one was satisfied with current conditions in the present building.

On the new building site was a series of large ponds bordered by some watery vegetable plots, and these were adjacent to and hemmed in by several rows of tall apartment-style residential buildings.  The edges of the ponds were lined with piles of dirt and litter.  On their far side was the edge of town.  In the other direction, the alleys between the buildings had the same gray disheveled look as those that surrounded the marketplaces that I had searched the day before.

Next we all went to a restaurant where we were met in a special meeting room by Director Zhou Liqun, who apparently is much esteemed.   There was more serious discussion of the orphanage.   

I sensed that the county government did not have a lot of revenue of its own to work with, but that it had a large list of basic priorities largely focused on infrastructure and creating conditions for economic development: roads, dams, power, sewerage, and water.   It was used to focusing its actions to benefit the broadest portion of well over a half million people. 

The Hengdong SWI, with its comparatively tiny number of inhabitants and hidden at the edge of the county town, for many years had likely been a back burner issue easy to ignore as a possible agenda item, if it had been anywhere on the stove at all.  Somehow, in just the past few years, county officials had obviously become concerned about the SWI.  Several seemed to have donated a great deal of time there.  But inherent to the SWI is an array of dismaying issues and challenges and in its attempts to address them the county was clearly struggling.

The discussion finally drifted toward its inevitable conclusion that if nothing else this had been a remarkable day, an unlikely meeting in Hengdong between two vastly different cultures 10,000 miles apart, all sparked by love for a child.  In the end we agreed that at home, nestled within our own families, maybe we're really not that different.   

Eventually we were presented with a dinner around a large round table that seated more than a dozen of us.  During the dinner there was much toasting and many humble expressions of thanks. 

For my part, I thanked my travel companions Leon (Song Xuefeng) and Chen.  When we clinked our glasses and then embraced in friendship, and in dawning recognition of an extraordinary mission accomplished, everyone including the restaurant staff stood and cheered. 

Perhaps there is something that, collectively, Hengdong adoptive families or others reading this could do to help. 

Yet I was able to learn a very important lesson on this trip, probably the one I came here seeking.  I was mistaken in the way I was attempting to explain why my daughters were abandoned.   I know now that it is useless to try to understand what happened within the context of my own life, even if I have understood something about life's challenges from working for several years with schools in rural Appalachian West Virginia or if the city of New Orleans where I live offers many examples of bad urban American blight and poverty. 

Poverty in China is actually a relative concept, one factor among many in a severely overcrowded country with 80 percent of its population living an ancient agrarian lifestyle out of balance with a growing modern urban population struggling to compete in a new market economy.  This is the land of contradiction, a graceful chaos that one out of every five people on the planet calls home, yet a mystery for almost everyone else.

The lesson is that for those struggling to get along in Chinese society, simple poverty aside, life can sometimes be hard in ways that can't be understood from a distance, if at all, by us. 

February 26: Notes on the Way Home

[Original Post from Feb. 26, 2005]   There is no modern equivalent to what has happened to more than a million baby girls in China.  However, while there have now been well over 50,000 abandoned Chinese children adopted into the United States alone since the mid-1990s, there has been, as Kay Johnson’s valuable work has pointed out, surprisingly little hard data published about child abandonment in China or about China’s social welfare system.

Researcher Kay Johnson estimated in the late 1990s that the number of children (generally baby girls) annually abandoned in China had climbed into the hundreds of thousands.  Government statistics showed about 50,000 brought into orphanages each year; Johnson cited officials who estimated that number was likely to be only about 20 percent of those abandoned.  Actual numbers are still unavailable.  Today the numbers of children brought into orphanages have begun to decline.

It’s probably healthy then to question some of the basic assumptions we have about these things.  Is abandonment only a rural problem?  Take a walk off the main street in almost any small city in China and you’ll likely find challenges as difficult as those in the surrounding countryside where there seems to be less pressure to strictly adhere to population controls.  While good work has been done in the past decade by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), and many private groups, how much has orphanage care really improved overall?  Given that child abandonment has practices that are so standard such as leaving those red birth date notes, might it be possible to identify a standard set of conditions that lead to abandonment so that these conditions could be more closely addressed?  Given the tragic scope of China's abandonment problem, why is domestic adoption in China so often decribed as too cumbersome or too expensive or too often less valued by orphanages than foreign adoption?

We simply don’t have much to go on.

That’s too bad because through my journey to the Hengdong SWI I have come to more fully understand that there is so much more to Chinese foreign adoption than children needing homes and families wanting children.  I know that am blessed to be an adoptive parent, but I also wish with all my heart for the day when there would no longer be foreign adoptions in China because children there would no longer be abandoned.  It is my greatest hope, even if that day seems such a long way off.

Meanwhile, please support Chinese foreign adoption and look for ways to support positive change in China's domestic adoption system.   Support established public and private efforts to help the Chinese improve orphanage and foster care, especially for infants and for children with special needs.

I spent a couple more days in Hunan following my visit to the Hengdong SWI, mostly focused on returning safely.   But all in all, I have come to treasure every minute that I've ever spent in China and I carry with me many special moments from those last days as well.  On my final day in Changsha, I found it difficult to say goodbye to my friends.

While it will be good to be home, to be camped out once again in our daughters' room, I know that our family will somehow return to China again eventually, since despite its immense challenges it is equally such a wondrous and powerfully compelling place.  This and the fact that our kids are each irrefutably Chinese.

Still, they are ours in a very special way that comes with all they've been through and two unforgettable promises, each made between sniffles in a far away land, that everything will be okay from now on.

First News of the Trials

[Original Post from March 3, 2006]  Exactly one year after I returned from Hunan and the Hengdong SWI, both Chinese and western news agencies began carrying reports that named Hengdong SWI Director Chen Ming a fugitive after being sentenced with at least nine others in what became known as the Hunan "baby trafficking" trials.

The basic news story went like this: a group of relatives in Hunan Province allegedly acquired 78 infants between 2002 and 2005 from people in Guangdong Province identified in media accounts at first only as "traffickers".  The relatives, members of a family named Duan from Changning city in Hunan, were said to have sold the babies at 3,200 yuan ($398 USD) to 4,300 yuan each to county-level orphanages in Hengnan, Hengyang, Hengshan, Hengdong, Changning and Qidong. All are under the prefecture jurisdiction of Hengyang City in Hunan.

The case unfolded in a series of court trials based in Qidong and in which Chen Ming and nine other individuals charged with trafficking were said to have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from one year (Chen Ming) to 15 years. More than 20 county and orphanage officials were reported to be "punished" or fired, including Hengdong County Civil Affairs Bureau Director Zhou Liqun.

Implied in the news reports was that the orphanages had paid for the children as a means for then obtaining larger "donations" for them, but this aspect of the case was not clearly explained since at the time the news reports did not directly link the children to Chinese or foreign adoptions.  A few of the reports said this was still under investigation, although the actual investigation had begun months before the trials, which had already concluded.  No instances of foreign adoptive parents being contacted as a result of the investigation were reported.

Early accounts varied. But eventually, National Public Radio (NPR) and other western sources began to trace the children involved in the case to Liang Gui Hong, a 56 year-old woman from city of Wuchuan, who families with unwanted children would commonly approach because of her well-known connections for finding children homes (something she had apparently been facilitating for more than 10 years).  In return, families would give Mrs. Liang a "Lucky Money" envelope with 20 or 30 yuan.

A spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou quickly responded to the news reports by trying to offer assurances that the case was limited.  It was announced that the U.S. Embassy in Beijing had contacted Chinese authorities to seek details.  The Ministry of Civil Affairs and China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA)assured the Embassy that the case was being properly handled.  Chinese officials first said they could not discuss its details because it was still being investigated and processed through the Chinese judicial system. Then CCAA representatives went to Hunan to be briefed and finally issued a statement declaring that all of the children involved had initially been abandoned in Guangdong as the defendants in the case had pleaded and that none had been placed in foreign adoptions.

Meanwhile, the situation at the Hengdong SWI appeared unsteady.  Our family attempted to call the orphanage several times using a translator service.  In each call an unnamed woman answered and said she did not know the exact whereabouts of Director Chen Ming or any of the other administrative staff.  She weakly offered only that Chen Ming was "traveling on business." She did not know when he would return. Apologizing, she could not say who was in charge in their absence or provide anyone's mobile phone number.

From the outset, the conditions I found at the Hengdong SWI seemed out of sync in relation to the substantial amount of revenue from adoption fees I knew must have been generated there. But there were no red flags that would have indicated that local orphanage staff members, who were at the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder, would have been able to benefit directly from this revenue.  Also, direct local support for orphanages was otherwise obviously lacking.

When I visited the orphanage, Hengdong county officials had openly discussed a RMB figure close to what would have been raised there from foreign adoption fees and said these funds had been set aside as part of their plan to eventually build a new orphanage facility that was obviously needed. In other words, that money had been raised from a large number of foreign adoptions in Hengdong was hardly concealed during my visit. In the months following, as a plan for an emergency renovation of the old building progressed into a sped up plan to begin the new orphanage, it appeared that at each stage in which funds were to be expended permission was needed and obtained on behalf of the orphanage, at the request of county officials, from the Hunan Department of Social Welfare.

What a shame, it seemed, that Chen Ming might have been jailed and his assistants disgraced because, in the end, in another way that most of us never quite imagined, they were trying to find homes and families for more abandoned children. Still, one could wonder, then and now, how Chen Ming and his colleagues could really have been sure the children they paid for were not obtained through nefarious means.

But as the news story from Hunan unraveled, it seemed useful to remember that Chen Ming and his staff had spent most of their days and nights working under the same poor conditions as the children in their care.  And that they obviously had worked very hard to find families for those children.

In a realm apart from the media accounts, social researchers were estimating in reports published in academic journals that only about 10-20% of the several hundred thousand children abandoned in China each year actually wound up in orphanages, while the rest were adopted informally, absorbed into hidden families. In that 80-90% of abandoned children absorbed into hidden families was the obvious fact that many childless Chinese families wished to have children.  One way that this was often accomplished was via the exchange of fees to people who could commonly arrange this or to the birth parents themselves. For many families this was just far easier and realistically more affordable than navigating the bureaucratic domestic adoption process and, after all, there was no open adoption option in China.

Thus a market had obviously formed, creating a niche for intermediaries or match-makers who for a fee would find a home for a child born to parents who for any number of personal, cultural, legal, or economic reasons sadly decided they could not keep her. What if a match-maker could guarantee that a child who could not legally be kept would be placed in an orphanage where children had a good chance of eventually being adopted by comparatively wealthy families who could afford to pay adoption fees equal to more than a year's salary?  If Chen Ming went along with a scheme like this, perhaps it was with the idea that he would be helping the children he was taking in, maybe with additional goal of helping to fund construction of the new social welfare and orphanage facility that between 2002 and 2005 was a distant goal.

In the case of my Hengdong daughter, I still suspected that the police report of her being found abandoned at the Hengdong County Farmer's Market was real, as were the other papers with dates from various local agencies that I sifted through in her file at the Hengdong SWI. So appeared her red cloth abandonment note.  In my travels through southern Hunan in February 2005 too many disinterested parties—cab drivers, restaurant workers, hotel workers--had said that abandoned children were commonly found locally.  

But if she had been sold or given up with the gift of a fee by any family who could not keep her, in the hope that she would eventually find a good home, clearly she landed first in a bad spot.  There are some things that no developing child should have to go through for nearly two years and one of them is to wait in the queue each day for almost everything in a struggling state-run orphanage, especially a crumbling, poorly-supported facility like the Hengdong SWI.  At least she eventually found that good home. 

The Partial Accounting

In the additional information accumulated since the news of the trials and Chen Ming’s conviction, it began to emerge that, sure enough, many children adopted by foreign families in Hunan were paid for by their orphanages, while the orphanages plausibly claimed that their ultimate aim was to serve the best interests of the children involved.

The evidence eventually indicated that the children involved were abandoned but mostly abandoned to intermediaries promising to find them homes.  In fact, as at least one study found, intermediaries who received fees for finding homes for unwanted children may have been the de facto informal adoption system generally for rural China.  In this system of informal adoption, over-quota children were commonly given up to these shadowy go-betweens by birth parents as an alternative to physically abandoning them. During the trials it was argued that the orphanages in this case were simply providing the safe means for these children to be formally adopted through a government regulated system.

However, the orphanages involved appeared willing to fabricate reports to the police that served to falsely document that children were abandoned locally.  In Changsha, Hunan’s capital, provincial social welfare officials responsible for managing and facilitating foreign adoptions, as well as for collecting and disbursing foreign adoption fees, failed to investigate obvious spikes in the numbers of children coming from the Hengyang area orphanages that paid for children even though the people later arrested in this case had been picked up while attempting to sell children to orphanages in the region twice before--once in Zhuzhou in 2002 and again in Changning in 2003.

While the use of intermediaries in this case did provide a safe means for birth families to secretly abandon over-quota children to an orphanage, in the end large numbers of foreign adoptive families from across the globe were lied to in the process and one wonders whether any today can with certainty identify even the province from which their adopted child was really from, although if not Hunan Province then Guangdong Province seems likely. 

Early news reports about the case said that the Hengnan County SWI had paid for 22 female infants, the Hengdong County SWI 18, the Qidong County SWI 15, the Hengyang County SWI and Guangrong SWI both 11, and the Hengshan County SWI 10.  Later news reports indicated that those numbers reported early on were limited just to the specific charges filed and therefore incomplete.   One report published in the Los Angeles Times included information obtained directly from members of the Duan family who supplied children to the orphanages.  The Duans claimed they supplied the orphanages with hundreds of children, and the orphanages were alleged to have obtained children from other intermediaries as well.  

The original source of those children was said to be a woman named Liang Gui Hong in Wuchuan in Guangdong Province, which borders Hunan at its southern end.  Mrs. Liang was a former garbage collector and for years she had also been taking in abandoned babies.

One of the Duan family members arrested for providing children to orphanages in Hunan had apparently met Mrs. Liang after he moved from Hunan to Wuchuan in 2001 to work on a poultry farm nearby.  Mrs. Liang sometimes had more than 20 abandoned newborns at a time lined up on beds in her home, according to the Los Angeles Times article.  The Duan family saw in this an opportunity, since another family member had worked in the Hengyang County orphanage back in Hunan.  While in her job at there, that family member learned that orphanages in the Hengyang area would commonly pay small amounts to those who might bring in abandoned children directly, a measure preferable to coping with children left exposed to the elements in public places or otherwise cast aside.  This practice was pursued despite official rules that prohibit orphanages from directly accepting children.

The Duan family began to pay Mrs. Liang for babies to sell to orphanages in Hunan that would be able to provide the children with homes among families screened under government rules for their ability to provide for them.  For whatever reasons, eventually the orphanages became willing to pay the Duans and other intermediaries higher fees for the children, and then to do so for more and more children.  The family saw their role as altruistic, although over time as the scale of their operation increased, and with more money changing hands, they admitted it came to resemble a business.  The Duan family soon easily found other sources like Mrs. Liang for more babies. 

"Many of those babies would have died if nobody took them in. I took good care of the babies," said one of the Duans, interviewed in the Los Angeles Times article. "You can be the judge. Am I a bad person for what I did?"

A three-part article series published in China about the case was based primarily on evidence submitted to the court during the trials in Qidong and its second part focused in detail on how the Duan family began collecting children in Guangdong Province and how they began supplying large numbers of children to the Hengyang area orphanages.  The series, from the magazine Fenghuang Weekly published in Shenzhen in coastal Guangdong Province, and posted in translation by adoption investigator Brian Stuy, described how the orphanages also employed other means of obtaining abandoned children aside from waiting for the police to bring them in.  These included incentives or rewards for orphanage employees who might serve as intermediaries, bringing in children found through their own contacts. 

Copies of Hengdong orphanage admittance logs since obtained by foreign adoptive families from a couple of sources list from May 2004-on both a person paid and an amount paid alongside the names of the children received at the orphanage.  Information from the trials would indicate that many if not all of the names of people receiving payment were pseudonyms.  In other words, the logs themselves very likely do not accurately identify who, or how many people, brought children directly to the orphanage in return for payment.  But they do show that remuneration was routine.

After visiting the Hengdong SWI in February of 2005 I wrote that it seemed “remarkable” that almost all of its 70 or so children were between the ages of one and two and that its staff managed to place as many children in adoptions as the large numbers of children it was taking in, remarkable especially given that many children living in other orphanages at that time were said to be unlikely candidates for adoption either because of communicable diseases, other medical conditions, or severe disabilities. What was remarkable then at least seems more curious now.

Later news reports also addressed the status of Hengdong SWI Director Chen Ming. In those first Chinese news service reports, he had been quickly identified as among those charged and was said to be "on the run," fleeing authorities. That Chen Ming was a fugitive was then repeated by other Internet news services and even the BBC.  The first article in the Fenghuang Weekly series identified Chen Ming and Guangrong SWI Director He Yun as the two orphanage directors charged in the case. "Upon hearing this news He Yun fled the area in secret. Chen Ming was the only welfare center head to stand trial," it stated.

It seems now that the widespread reports of Chen Ming fleeing arrest were the result of a widely repeated error. In other words, He Yun may have been the fugitive in question. Chen Ming was clearly the only orphanage director to stand trial in this case and it has seemed incongruous that the trial could have taken place without him. Sentences were quickly meted out, with Chen Ming receiving a year in prison and the traffickers in the case up to 15 years. Chen Ming's attorney in Hunan has since confirmed that Chen Ming stood for trial and went to prison for a year. The attorney is still trying as yet unsuccessfully to appeal the sentence to clear his client's name.

The evidence reported seemed to show that the epicenter of this case was the Hengyang County SWI. It was unclear why Chen Ming was tried rather than, say, Hengyang County SWI Director Jiang Jianhua. 

Persons close to the case have since alleged that the other orphanage directors paid large sums of money to the Qidong Police in order to avoid trouble.  Chen Ming apparently refused.

In court documents Chen Ming argued that the Hengdong SWI decided to offer fees to those who would bring in abandoned children as a matter of social policy and on the children's behalf.  “"The program of buying those abandoned babies … was instituted as a result of a decision that was made after our orphanage performed collective research," testified Chen Ming. "The decision instituting this program was made by the collective group of employees of the orphanage."

"It’s the orphanage’s duty to foster abandoned babies,"  he offered in explanation. 

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In 2011, data from a separate set of logs became available to families who sought them.  These were said to list more than 1,000 children brought to the six Hunan orphanages by the Duan family and had been prepared by authorities for making a case against the defendants in the trials. The logs were said to have been released by the family members, who believed that the large numbers of children represented by the list supported their argument that the orphanages were dependent on their services and that, because of this, the orphanages had somehow pressured the family members into continuing to supply children. They say all of the children were abandoned and nearly all came from the area around Wuchuan in Guangdong Province where Mrs. Liang had been based, although Mrs. Liang was not their sole source.

Yet, one could reasonably wonder how it would be physically possible within only a few years for one small group of family members to locate that many abandoned children in one province and transport them inconspicuously to orphanages in another while often using public transportation in one-child China.  One could also reasonably wonder why the orphanages would feel dependent on providing homes for children from Guangdong Province when birth rates were higher in Hunan during the same period and when people I spoke to in the Hengdong area in 2005 said it was still common for abandoned children to be found locally.

Most of the details about the case since the trials came from members of the Duan family presenting their side of the story to western reporters or investigators.  Little if any information was offered by anyone officially connected to the orphanages.  China's National Bureau of Statistics collects a variety of demographic data each year at the county level and these can be searched through the University of Michigan's China Data Center. Figures collected in Hengdong County for the number of beds at its single "social welfare nursing center" that was very likely the Hengdong SWI show that its number of beds spiked from 50 to about 80 in 2001 a year before the orphanage became involved in China's foreign adoption program. This provides some evidence that the orphanage was managing substantial numbers of locally abandoned children prior to that point. 

One of the central mysteries in this case is simply that it exists at all alongside the historical presence of large numbers orphanages in Hunan: in 2004 including one in each of 74 counties and 12 more municipal level facilities while overall only 24 were placing children in foreign adoptions.  The large number of orphanages in Hunan, which implies large numbers of abandoned children, in fact predates not just foreign adoption but also the introduction of China’s family planning policy that includes the so-called one child rule.  

Still, following the trials and a one-year ban on participating in the foreign adoption program, the number of children taken in by the Hengdong SWI began to decline.  

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To speculate where the money went is an exercise hampered by distance, unfamiliarity with local costs, and the huge chance of hidden intervening circumstance. But at the Hengdong SWI, 288 foreign adoptions from 2002-2005 would appear to have produced $820,800 USD, cumulatively, from each $3,000 foreign adoption fee minus a reported 5% for a provincial share. We know the new building planned there included a total base construction cost (minus finishes and furnishings) of 4 million yuan, at current exchanges rates about $506,200.  Subtracting the local portion of the construction costs from the total adoption revenue collected leaves $314,600 and dividing this amount by 288, the number of foreign adoptions, produces a figure of $1,092 available per child to help with expenses such as food, diapers, medicine, medical care, adoption-related costs, salaries for additional care givers, administrative overhead, etc.  My daughter was there for 18 months, a period that seems about average.  Orphanage officials may have needed to dip into this revenue to defray other social welfare expenses, and there were those payments (around $400 USD for each child after 2004) made to intermediaries in return for bringing in more abandoned children. 

For each of the children paid for, the orphanage would seem to have had only about $690 for expenses such as food, diapers, medicine, medical care, adoption-related costs, salaries for additional care givers, administrative overhead, etc.  If payments were indeed made for a large number of children, it is hard to see in this much opportunity for profit.

Obviously little was invested in capital costs beyond the barest essentials at the Hengdong SWI in the meantime.  One important aspect of the Hunan baby buying case is its context within the Chinese Adoption Law, which apparently stipulates that revenue collected by orphanages from adoption fees “must be treated as a designated fund and can only be used for improving orphanage conditions.”  This seems to have been the most obvious potential motive in the case of the Hengdong SWI, which had  clearly laid plans, announced before the news of the trials, for a much needed new orphanage building, and which indeed was eventually built.  

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Prior to the Hunan baby buying case the popular narrative for Chinese foreign adoption centered on the idea that thousands of birth parents were harshly discarding their children in places such as roadsides or marketplaces due to government enforced birth restrictions.  It was a premise that seemed contradictory to the seemingly loving families we would commonly meet throughout China during our trips there. That simple narrative was probably based partly in myth.

The more complicated reality was more likely that in a practical reaction to government enforced population restrictions many Chinese birth parents would obviously search for alternatives to physically abandoning over-quota children.  In one of these alternatives some orphanage staffs would be open to means that, although against the rules, would safely deliver infants to them directly, and enterprising individuals would find ways to assist, for a fee.

Had There Been Much Research On All This?

In 1979, it became illegal in China for couples to have more than one or sometimes two children but no legal avenue was provided for birth parents to openly place over-quota children in adoptions.  In this way child abandonment and foreign adoption in China were connected to China’s family planning birth restrictions, i.e., its so-called one child rule. 

In the ensuing decades, China's family planning rules were very strictly enforced, usually through the use of heavy fines. Other punishments such as child confiscation or sterilization were often been reported, although they were not mandated by law. The primary method of population control was contraception, but China’s family planning program  included both female and male sterilization as well as induced abortion among its contraceptive programs (see “Trends in contraceptive use and determinants of choice in China: 1980–2010” by Wang Cuntong in Contraception, (2012) 85: 570–579).

In some rural regions where the rules where loosened to allow for second children, the length of time between a first and second birth was subject to regulation and permission for a second child needed to be applied for and approved. A child born under conditions that violated birth quotas could not as in western countries simply be formally “put up” for adoption, since legally the child was not supposed to exist.  Nonetheless, family planning goals aimed at limiting the size of families were not necessarily unpopular in China, which in 2005 had a population of 1.3 billion people, largely clustered in teeming urban districts. Data from a National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Survey in 2001 showed that 35 percent of Chinese women questioned preferred having only one child and 57 percent preferred having two children, but very few women wanted more than two. A summary of this research can be seen in the article "The Effect of China's One-Child Family Policy after 25 Years" by Therese Hesketh, Li Lu, and Zhu Wei Xing in New England Journal of Medicine (2005) 353:1171-1176.

What follows is a review of some research from roughly the same period that may help to provide more context for what happened at the Hengdong SWI by presenting findings in the following areas.

• The historical record of child abandonment in Hunan Province
• Birth rates and gender gaps; attempts to measure child abandonment
• Orphanage counts and orphanage populations
• International law and inter-country adoption
• Informal adoption in rural China; the principle means through which most abandoned children find homes

A History of Child Abandonment in Hunan

In 2004 it had been quite a while since Kay Ann Johnson published her important treatise "The Politics of the Revival of Infant Abandonment in China, with Special Reference to Hunan" in the journal Population and Development Review (1996) 22 (2): 77-98).  Much had changed since then, but her article was still illuminating, and perhaps especially so in light of the attention brought upon Hunan by the baby buying trials. 

Johnson had pointed out that there was a long history of child abandonment in Hunan even before population controls were introduced in the last quarter of the last century.

She cited a provincial history which said that, prior to 1949 and the communist period, child abandonment "was widespread and that it involved almost entirely girls. ... The widespread nature of infant infanticide and child abandonment led to the criminalization of these acts by the late 17th century and to the creation of a provincial network of foundling homes. By 1849 there were 68 county-run establishments to care for foundlings. In 1934, a provincial official told a national meeting of charity organizations that the largest of these institutions, the Foundling Institute of the Provincial City (Changsha) Salvation Center, had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of baby girls in its 220-year history."

In news reports of the trials in the case that sent Hengdong SWI Director Chen Ming to prison, much was made of the large number of children that had been brought from Guangdong Province to six Hengyang area orphanages between the years 2002-2005. Yet Johnson cited figures from early in the period after population controls began to be strictly enforced, and when abandonment rates first began to rise, that showed 233 children found abandoned in Hengyang city alone in 1988, rising to 352 in 1989, then to 854 in 1990.  Thus the historical record shows that Hengyang area social welfare officials were likely long used to seeing large numbers of abandoned children found locally.

Johnson's essay also provided a valuable and detailed description of the means through which population controls were practically enforced locally in Hunan during the early 1990s and how this might have then exacerbated the problem of abandonment.  Local officials charged with enforcing these policies uncomfortably found themselves in the position of risking the anger of fellow citizens, their neighbors, who desired to have children beyond set limits for popular reasons such as to try to have a son. They also risked trouble from higher authorities if limits were not enforced. The easiest way out was to monitor the sizes of families after children were born rather than to more closely monitor early pregnancies or focus on effective family planning.

Thus it became even more probable that, in the mid 1990s and until more effective family planning measures could take hold, over quota children were a very common accurance, with quota enforement logically leading to high numbers of children abandoned.

The view presented by the essay was one in which, by the end of the 1990s, against difficult pressures from population controls, child abandonment had been commonplace for at least two generations. Prior to this there was a relatively brief period of a few generations during which Mao Zedong encouraged families to have as many children as possible in what is now considered throughout China as pretty much of a disaster. But prior to that, against the difficult pressures of daily life in rural Hunan, child abandonment was sad but also, unfortunately, relatively normal.

A half dozen or so abandoned infants arriving monthly at the Hengdong SWI, which served a rural county with a population exceeding 660,000, might not have been seen locally as especially unusual, perhaps even if beginning around 2002 many were readily supplied to the orphanage by intermediaries who had found in this a market.

Gender Gaps and Birth Rates

There was a substantial body of research literature addressing the problem of China’s “missing girls,” a term linking child abandonment with China’s growing gender imbalance among reported births.  The studies reported produced a wealth of data, but their conclusions were sometimes debated.

Daniel Goodkind's article "China's Missing Children: the 2000 Census Underreporting Surprise"  in Population Studies (2004) 58: p281-295) was a good example of the studies that focused on the demographic, statistical aspects of the problem and perhaps as a result tended to produce huge numbers. Goodkind looked closely at China's 2000 population census to estimate a total of nearly 37 million children "missing" in these census figures, this from comparing the census results to data from the previous census in 1990 and China's own population projections based on the previous data available. His analysis attributed missing children on the census rolls to under reporting of children of both sexes born in violation of state-enforced birth quotas.

Others focused on wide gaps between recorded male and female births. The under reporting of children within these gender gaps logically could have represented abandoned girls. However, social researchers collecting visible data on the ground, especially in rural villages, documented observed gender imbalance and not just among children, which fueled reasonable skepticism about the frighteningly large abandonment figures that couldhave been be related to under reporting.

Moreover, there were at least two potential causes of gender imbalance other than unreported abandoned girls discussed in the literature. For instance, a lot had been written about the high prevalence of selective abortion made easier by medical technologies relatively affordable even in rural areas, a widespread practice the Chinese eventually began to try to bring under control. Another theory debated by Monica Das Gupta, Emily Oster and others suggested that disease played a major role in gender imbalance not just in China but across southern and central Asia, more specifically highly prevalent diseases such as Hepatitis B that had been shown to markedly decrease the chances of female births among infected birth mothers. (Example: Oster, Emily. 2005. “Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women,” Harvard University Center for International Development Working Paper 7, Cambridge, MA.)

It seemed likely that what may have been at work were a number of factors—including under reporting of female births linked to abandonment, sex selective abortion, and disease related inhibitors to female births—all serving to indicate a reality with fewer “missing girls” than the most drastic figures suggested. In other words, the actual number of China's abandoned children still appears undetermined.

But lest anyone doubt the staggering scale of the problem, a graphical map entitled China’s Missing Girls created by cartography specialist Mathew Bloch using information from the China Data Center at the University of Michigan, showed gender ratios in specific regions throughout China for both first born and second born children using data from China’s detailed 2000 census. Foreign adoptive parents would have quickly recognized that the widest gender gaps occured in regions typically said to produce the largest numbers of abandoned children as well as in provinces with the highest numbers of foreign adoptions. This seemed to offer at least some support for those attributing gender imbalance to under reporting at least to a substantial degree and so would also seem to support estimates for very large numbers of abandoned children. The map was coldly fascinating.

So, areas of China with the widest childhood gender gaps have traditionally matched those areas producing the largest number of children in orphanages and foreign adoptions.  This had been especially true for Hunan and Guangdong provinces.   But the data most often cited for this were collected in the late 1990s for China’s 2000 census, causing one to wonder whether the sale of children to orphanages in Hunan in subsequent years could have been due to a marked decrease in child abandonment there. 

To the contrary, sampling later reported for 2005 showed that gender disparity in Guangdong actually increased slightly in comparison to 2000 and in Hunan it increased even more.   Also, birth rates in Guangdong, while higher, decreased between 2002 and 2005, but in Hunan they increased.  The newer gender ratio data were discussed in a report of a study by Monica Das Gupta, and others, called “Evidence for an Incipient Decline in Numbers of Missing Girls in China and India” in Population and Development Review, (2009) 33: 401-416.

In other words, during the peak foreign adoption years in Hengdong between 2002 and 2005 there were, statistically, more “missing girls” in the population of Hunan Province than in Guangdong, the source of the children provided to the Hengdong SWI by the Duan family prosecuted in the trials.  Hengdong SWI Director Chen Ming’s matter of fact explanation: “It is the orphanage’s duty to foster abandoned babies,” before describing how the orphanage staff as a whole voted to pay fees for abandoned children offered by intermediaries, was maybe a more complicated statement than it appeared on its face.

Orphanage Counts and Orphanage Populations

Many published reports seemed to agree that between the late 1990s and around 2005 there were usually about 50,000 to 60,000 children in government care in China. The number was a moving target, given its ebb and flow due to steady demands for both domestic and foreign adoptions. Some reports referred to about 1,000 state controlled orphanages housing children. A 2004 white paper issued by China's State Council counted "192 special welfare institutions for children and 600 comprehensive welfare institutions with a children's department, accommodating a total of 54,000 orphans and disabled children. There are also nearly 10,000 community services around China for orphans and disabled people, such as rehabilitation centers and training classes for mentally retarded children."

Only a selected subset of state controlled orphanages were involved in the foreign adoption program managed by the China Center for Adoption Affairs, which was a department of the larger Ministry of Civil Affairs.  The Chinese government issued a news release in fall 2005 that referred to a large-scale survey on orphaned children commissioned by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, Beijing Normal University, and the Save the Children Foundation. The survey indicated the presence of a large group of abandoned or orphaned children t independent of the large number of abandoned infants commonly said to be absorbed into hidden families. It identified more than 500,000 "orphaned minors," mostly in rural areas, with more than half lacking government support. It was said to have shown that Henan Province had more than 50,000 orphaned children, more than any other province. The provinces of Hunan, Anhui and Jiangxi each were said to have more than 40,000.

A similar group of children was referred to by Shang Xiaoyuan and Wu Xiaoming in their 2005 report "Welfare Provision for Vulnerable Children: The Missing Role of the State" published in the peer-reviewed journal China Quarterly (Issue 181). They estimated a total of 300,000 to 400,000 "orphaned" children, 95 percent of them initially abandoned, in rural areas living outside state controlled institutions. They also discussed two additional groups of China's vulnerable children who needed to be considered and addressed. One was comprised of perhaps several hundred thousand children of prisoners with long-term or death sentences who are incarcerated in the country's vast prison system, by far the largest in the world. The other smaller group included street children commonly represented as victims in government statistics on child kidnapping.

As a matter of policy, the state was the sole welfare provider for vulnerable children in China, according Shang and Wu. But this policy set up sort of a rural-urban double standard. "Only state-run welfare institutes are legally permitted to be the guardians of orphans and abandoned children found in urban areas ... Children who are registered urban residents are entitled to minimum living security benefits, that is, income support to the urban poor, which is provided in cash. They are also entitled to the care services provided by [state controlled orphanages]. In rural areas, the state policy is not to take direct responsibility for supporting these children. The situation of China's rural orphans has never been systematically examined, and theoretically, they are protected by traditional family and kinship networks, and wubao. "

Wubao was "the five guarantees," a rural community based social protection system that in theory provided free food, fuel, clothes and health care to orphans, senior citizens, and disabled people unable to support themselves and who had no one legally responsible for their well-being. Free education for children and funeral services for senior citizens werealso provided. But for rural abandoned children the wubao system had functional barriers, Shang and Wu wrote that, "Abandoned children are clearly not entitled to wubao: if the parents are known, they are not entitled to wubao because their parents continue to be responsible for them; but if the parents are not known, they are not local orphans and hence not entitled to wubao as it is a community based system which provides protection to orphans in the relevant community only. In both cases, the safety net for abandoned children in rural areas is missing."

Foreign adoptions are coordinated nationally by the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA).  But social welfare institutes like Hengdong’s are part of the civil affairs system of each province and managed locally.  Their only legal responsibility, says a study cited here, may be to those with claim to local residency (such as orphans, senior citizens, and the disabled), which would not technically include abandoned children.  Many local governments obviously allow their SWIs to accept abandoned children but the system appears to be ad hoc rather than official policy.  This confusing state of affairs may actually explain a lot.

Within this apparently unrealistic national social welfare system, Shang and Wu said in a footnote that local civil affairs officials told them that communities were given the latitude to choose on their own to provide financial assistance or social services to abandoned children. This may help to explain why it was so difficult to determine the number of state controlled orphanages with adoption programs for abandoned children.

It may also explain why local adoption agency representatives and local officials told us when we adopted our daughters separately in Jiangxi and Hunan provinces that it would be difficult to say exactly where our daughters were from. We were told in each case that while she was found in the small city that was home to her state controlled orphanage she was more likely to have come from a village in the rural countryside, but not necessarily a village close by.

I find this interesting: the idea that some orphanages may have accepted large numbers of abandoned children with no clear claim to legal local residency (children unrecognized by the state) basically because they chose to. Perhaps it is a small wonder that these orphanages would become dependent on adoption fees.

In China the children in high demand for domestic and foreign adoptions were generally those deemed free of health problems or physical defects. Shang and Wu warned that, "The number of orphans may increase rapidly in the next five to ten years due to the spread of HIV/AIDS. It is estimated that the number of HIV/AIDS orphans will be around 160,000 to 200,000 by 2010. More than 80 per cent of HIV/AIDS orphans will be living in rural areas."

The decline in the numbers of abandoned children housed in China's state controlled orphanages after 2005 could have been influenced by many factors including two documented trends: (a) a welcome acceptance by the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) of the introduction of foster care within the state social welfare system and (b) a steady increase in the number of Chinese couples, in both urban and rural areas, who sought to have a child through adoption.

Of course there may also simply have been declines in the numbers of abandoned children found within some of the communities served by the subset of state controlled orphanages approved to participate in the foreign adoption program, especially if many of these communities were in regions likely to have experienced socioeconomic development.  Around 2005, the CCAA cited declines in the numbers of healthy abandoned children arriving at its partner orphanages in announcing new, more restrictive rules for foreign adoptions.

Shang Xiaoyuan described the quiet policy shift toward the use of foster care in an article published in Social Services Review (June 2002) titled "Looking for a Better Way to Care for Children: Cooperation Between the State and Civil Society in China." The main drive for the shift came not from the central government, according to Shang, but from local officials who are directly facing huge challenges in managing institutional care. The local officials were also responding to the lobbying and support activities of various non-government organizations, both domestic and foreign.

The use of foster care by many orphanages was a counter to the greedy orphanage stereotype encouraged in some reporting of the Hunan "baby traffficking" cases. In adjacent Jiangxi Province for example many orphanages had relied on foster care for more than a decade to improve conditions for their children. My oldest daughter came to us through an orphanage in the small city of Gao'an there, but she been living with a family who lived nearby. As early as 1994 her orphanage began a program in which nannies would take children home each night so that the children could sleep beside them in small basket-like cribs. In 1998 the orphanage began to seek more foster mothers in the area and initially paid them 200 RMB per month. Today most of these foster mothers care for two or three children from the orphanage at a time for about 480 RMB per month. In contrast, the large new orphanage building that opened on the outskirts of town in 2007 is mostly empty of children. Assisted by a private foundation working cooperatively with the orphanage, my family has paid for school tuition and other support for a child in one of these foster families, a girl with Hepatitis B.

At the Nanchang Municipal SWI about 75 miles to the northeast I once watched an extraordinary meeting between four foster families and the foreign adoptive parents who had come to adopt babies these foster parents had nurtured. It was an emotional meeting to say the least but a lot of hope, love, and good will were passed between them. I learned something important that day that I still can't put words to. The two directors at this large urban area orphanage were very active locally in their public support of foster care, more effective family planning and child care.

International Law

A substantial body of literature examined the Hunan baby buying trials within the context of international law.  Patricia Meier and Xiaole Zhang examined this aspect of the trials in a 2008 article published in the Cumberland Law Review titled Sold into Adoption: The Hunan Baby Trafficking Scandal Exposes Vulnerabilities in Chinese Adoptions to the United States.  The article reviewed what was then known about the Hunan case, carefully discussed China’s regulations meant to prohibit human trafficking, and argued that China was not applying its regulations consistently when it came to trafficking children for adoption.  They concluded with five specific recommendations that China: (a) revise its laws to make buying children a serious offense, (b) create mechanisms to more closely monitor local-level orphanages, (c) provide better funding for orphanages to reduce their dependence on adoption revenue, (d) encourage private domestic adoption, and (e) create a penalty-free way for parents to offer children for adoption.  They recommended that the U.S. government more strictly regulate U.S. adoption agencies and encourage other countries to provide documented histories of the children to be adopted by U.S. families. 

David Smolin, a law professor, wrote extensively on inter-country adoption and its legal and ethical considerations, beginning with a paper written in 2005 titled Child Laundering. In 1998 he and his wife adopted two adolescent girls from India, having been told by an experienced U.S. adoption agency that the girls had been waiting a long time and were eager to be adopted.  Instead the girls had essentially been sold for adoption by an orphanage in which their mother had meant to place them only temporarily.  His 2010 article, also published in the Cumberland Law Review, titled The Missing Girls of China: Population, Policy, Culture, Gender, Abortion, Abandonment, and Adoption in East-Asian Perspective is an overview of the literature and scholarly discussion about these complex, interwoven issues in China and their implications for public policy. 

Yet, even in the black and white field of law, one sensed the difficulty of finding or articulating absolute certainties on this topic.   

Informal Domestic Adoption in China

In the principal study to be published at the time on the subject of domestic adoption in China, Zhang Weiguo produced a very detailed examination of adoption trends and practices in contemporary rural China. Zhang's is an important study because, in dealing with domestic adoption in rural China, it largely focuses on the practice of informal adoption, which seems to be the generally murky process through which by far most abandoned children find families.

Zhang's report was titled "Child Adoption in Contemporary Rural China" and published in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Family Issues. Based on interviews and quantitative data from a survey of 425 adoptive families conducted in the summer of 2001, Zhang found that rural Chinese families are willing to adopt girls, although strong son preference persists, and that adoptions of children in rural China are increasingly the result of individual desires rather than state promotion.

But where this study veered toward remarkable relevance to the issue at hand was in indicating that the news story breathlessly uncovered and pursued by the Xinhua news agency in Hunan, with its baby traffickers and intermediaries like Liang Guihong in Guangdong Province, was in Chinese society probably less real news than the norm--the troubling but commonplace means through which informal adoption occured in the absence of a state policy to address hundreds of thousands of rural abandoned children. For within the study's sample of rural adoptive families, half or 50 percent obtained their children through intermediaries (including so-called traffickers), 26 percent from birth parents who were family members, and 23 percent obtained abandoned children who were found directly or found by family, friends or neighbors. Less than one percent of the children covered in the study were adopted from state controlled orphanages.

Moreover, it appeared from Zhang's research that the widespread practice of informal adoption was actually promoted by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs as a primary means of dealing with the problem of rural child abandonment. This squared with the description of separate urban and rural social welfare systems from Shang's and Wu's study discussed above.

Zhang's study described who adopted in rural China, why, and how. It discussed the related common practices of child trafficking and drew only a minor distinction between traffickers and simple intermediaries. It described how obtaining a child from either usually involved some negotiated payment. It discussed the costs of these payments, usually ranging from 2,000 to 8,000 yuan for a boy and less for a girl. These costs tended to vary significantly by region.

Unexplored was the extent to which this market demand for children filled informally by intermediaries and traffickers might also have influenced the decline in number of abandoned children arriving at the state-controlled orphanages. While this method of obtaining children may have served to provide homes for more children than state-controlled orphanages, it was also unregulated. Who assured the safety and well-being of these children or guaranteed that they would wind up in families at all?

In the Year of the Rooster

[Original Post from Sept. 14, 2006]   As time has elapsed, one or two of my previous posts have noted anniversaries in this story and I may have mentioned too that we live in New Orleans.   So it was that a little over a year ago I was regrouping in Texas with my wife and daughters after a harrowing series of events following Hurricane Katrina.   We had been separated at first after they had flown out early on a hastily arranged trip to visit relatives a safe distance and several states away, our wise pre-storm plan.  Two days later I was sticking to a work-related commitment and had managed to board one of the last flights out, with a closed but still chaotic airport disappearing below and a terrifying wall of black sky looming just a few miles to the south. 

In the following days I watched an already hurricane-battered New Orleans, my home, slowly fill with water, this on BBC television from a hotel in central Europe between my work-related tasks and while my Hungarian hosts helped me to try to book a return trip to somewhere, anywhere near my uncertain address.  My return destination turned out to be Texas, where our family regrouped, and from which I quickly headed back to New Orleans to sneak past military check points to try to rescue our important papers, especially our adoption-related documents, but, really, most importantly, to try to save Mr. Cat, our feline friend of 14 years and beloved companion for my oldest daughter.

At that point Orleans Parish was a strange otherworldly landscape, the view in every direction like terrible scenes from an apocalyptic science fiction film.  At our house, Mr. Cat was sadly gone.  The only sign of him was an ominous pile of loose fur on the floor in our tilting central hallway.  Nearby was a huge gaping hole in the wall and roof where a giant oak tree had crashed through the back of our house.  But in a sunny spot perched against a limb from this same tree, in an area near what used to be our den, was the plastic bin that held our documents, miraculously unscathed.

It took a while to organize our repairs but I realize now that we were far ahead of most and very lucky to have begun this work so early.   Still, my wife and daughters stayed in Texas for four months until last December .  In hindsight neither our house nor its immediate surroundings were quite ready when they returned.  We were still camping.  Eventually, over the next several months, the house came together.  Power and phone connections were returned, albeit tenuously.  Stores, restaurants, and schools began to open.  Slowly the city collectively began an ongoing attempt to clear its debris.

This is the fortunate perspective from which I've tried to weigh the difficult situation far across the globe at the Hengdong SWI in central China during the same period.   For here between the levees in New Orleans, especially early on, was a broad view of the human condition from which to draw upon in remarkable examples of bravery, cruelty, compassion, greed, ingenuity, and indifference.   

There were great lessons in the importance of government programs and also in their inherent weaknesses.  The storm and the collapse of the canal flood walls that led to so much death and destruction made strong individuals tragically frail while occasionally uncovering remarkable strengths among the otherwise helpless.  In the end, the storm produced a vast wreckage that stands today as a monument to befuddlement over problems usually discussed now as being way too big or way too deep.  It has been interesting to consider this against China's attempts to work through its colossal challenges.

There is no denying that the storm was awful in its consequences, but to families like ours it was also a precious reminder of the beauty and resilience of our children and how each smile is a gift, each hug returned is a soft treasure, and each tiny hurdle overcome is a magical triumph.  Everything else is just stuff.

I don't know for certain why so many children are abandoned in China, aside from what we know about China's attempts to control its huge population and the other factors described in previous posts.  I sure know it doesn't make much sense.  Yet, there are a lot of things that don't make a lick of sense and sometimes you don't have to stray too far from home to find them.   

My children happen to have been born in China and the story here of the Hengdong SWI is also just about all that we know of my youngest daughter's important Chinese heritage.  But it's interesting that since we live in New Orleans most of the sense of real loss and tragedy that my kids have most keenly felt thus far is very clearly one step removed from their birth country, which is okay since there are good lessons in that.   

We are who are and very often become much more than we may seem.   

The Hengdong Charity Fund

The Hengdong Charity Fund (2005-2007) was a simple, direct means through which parents who had adopted children from the Hengdong orphanage could help improve conditions there.  The base for this effort was a yahoo newsgroup for Hengdong SWI foreign adoptive families that in those days was busy with messages from dozens of active members in several countries.  There were messages between families from the same adoption travel groups.  There were messages from new members just matched to Hengdong children and who were seeking advice as they prepared to travel.  Some messages just reported cute things that children, once home, were doing as they grew within their new families. But occasionally there were messages from parents warning others to look out for orphanage-related health issues, including the sobering discussion of several children from the Hengdong SWI who had tested positive for childhood tuberculosis.  News from my trip about the poor conditions for children at the orphanage probably also served as a motivator to get the fund started. 

The fund was organized in July 2005 as a special Hengdong account set up as part of the larger Chinese Children Charities Fund (CCCF).   This larger fund was affiliated with the non-profit agency Chinese Children Adoption International (CCAI), which was among the most reliable and reputable groups then working with Chinese foreign adoption.  In this way donations would be tax deductible and 100% of each donation would be able to be allocated for orphanage help, since CCCF administrative costs were covered from other sources.  

The first charity fund project raised a small amount of contributions by selling through CafePress some t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other items with a Hengdong SWI logo.   Later that summer we organized a calendar project with families sending in photos of their children post-adoption, for each month of the calendar.  The project quickly raised $2,800.  

From the start, proceeds from the Hengdong Charity Fund were carefully intended not to go directly to orphanage or local officials. Rather the goal was to fund projects at the orphanage that would have direct benefit to children and that could be tracked on site by CCAI local representatives in Hunan. The first project was planned as bricks and mortar assistance: paint and building supplies that would be targeted for badly needed building repairs. Behind the project was the thought that offering international assistance might encourage local officials to begin to take some necessary action, rather than continue to focus on their longer term plans.

The painting project was proposed through a third party contact in Hunan to officials in Hengdong.  In a few weeks news came back that officials had agreed to the project, but then the date on which they promised to provide a cost estimate came and went with no further contact. Eventually,  a response arrived from my Hunan contact.  In the attempt to determine the costs for the interior painting project, Hengdong county officials had determined that too much was wrong with the basic structure of the building that painting and patching wouldn't address. Therefore, they had sought and obtained a permit from the Hunan Provincial Civil Affairs Bureau for a more complete renovation of the entire building, a much larger project that would begin almost immediately. 

The more complete renovation was to begin in June 2005 with seven planned phases, all to be finished by a target date of January 1, 2006. The building's interior space would be remodeled to accommodate as many as 150 children. While families in several adoption travel groups had recently adopted more Hengdong SWI children, the renovation plan also said there were 87 children presently housed at the orphanage, a net increase of more than a dozen since my visit there three months before.

A few months later another message arrived that described another turnaround decision. It said that officials in Hengdong had decided not to renovate the present Hengdong SWI building as an orphanage. Instead they had decided to begin the construction of the entirely new orphanage building, their original goal, and before the end the year. The present building would still be renovated but only to eventually house the seniors and war veterans for who it was built.  Hengdong officials likely determined as work began that renovating the present building to house so many children simply wasn't the best use of their funds, given its structural condition.  To further encourage local commitment to complete the new building, we proposed an ambitious project that would raise funds to furnish within the new orphanage two activity rooms, 30 new wooden beds and cribs, a kitchen, and a dining area for the children. The calendar project had raised $2,800 and the charity fund quickly raised another $7,550 toward the new orphanage assistance project.

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By that November, however, Hengdong SWI Director Chen Ming was in jail and a few months later news of the trials was being reported internationally. In the following spring of 2006 no more messages were coming from Hengdong.  The construction project was stuck and so, obviously, were the children still living in the old orphanage building with its staff in obvious disarray.   

Over the summer that year many adoptive parents with children from the Hengdong SWI wrote to the district court of appeals in central Hunan province, to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, or to offices of the Chinese government, on behalf Chen Ming who had been sentenced to a year in prison.

Chinese news agencies were no longer reporting on this case and there had been no other word about Chen Ming, except through some careful communications with his local attorney, who by contacting parties outside China was treading on relatively thin ice.  Among Hengdong adoptive families it seemed that Chen Ming was remembered as a kind and gracious man and many seemed to regard him as a tragic figure in the trials.  

In early August 2006, after a long delay, things appeared to be moving forward again at the Hengdong SWI.  There was news that the plan to build the new orphanage building would finally go ahead, a new four-story structure that would replace the old crumbling facility.   A permanent director of the orphanage had not yet been named by the provincial Hunan Civil Affairs Bureau, but a temporary director was reported to be ably handling the orphanage's daily affairs in the meantime.   This person was said to be Xiang Zhen Xin, a seemingly competent young man who was the orphanage's secretary, a sort of third-in-charge position at the time of my visit there. 

There was also the news that the Hengdong SWI was no longer allowed to place children in foreign adoptions.

In September a reorganized administrative staff at the orphanage quickly responded to a renewed charity fund offer of help with an itemized request for $8,490 to fund the construction and furnishing of the activity rooms and other portions of the new building for which we had earlier offered support.  The offer would cover a mix of basic structural and equipment costs for the rooms: windows, window safety bars, paint, and wood flooring.  Among the equipment furnished would be wall padding, air conditioning units, heating units, and toys.   In response to our pledge to supply the assistance, local officials promised that construction would begin the next month.

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In January 2007, two major developments surfaced at roughly the same time.  The biggest surprise of these came from the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), the central government agency in Beijing that issues batches of adoption referrals for China's foreign adoption program.  Its latest batch included referrals for children housed at the Hengdong SWI and several of the other orphanages in the same region that had been involved in the Hunan baby buying trials, indicating that dropping these orphanages from the program was a one-year temporary measure.

The second development came in the form of a direct message from the administrative staff at the Hengdong SWI about the status of the plan to build a new orphanage.  The message said the project had started roughly on schedule that fall as had been promised.  The basic structure of the project's main building, for the children, would be completed before the Spring Festival the next month.  In nearly completing the first phase of the building project, officials in Hengdong had shown that their building plan was real.  Xiang Xin Zhen had formally taken over as the new director.  It was now apparent that Assistant Director Ding Qi Hui had been able to remain in her position.

It was Ding who next responded to our questions about the building plan, which were sent through a translator.   She said there were about 55 children still living at the orphanage, which represented a decline from the 70 reported a year earlier.  The orphanage was still accepting abandoned children and indeed the new building appeared to be slightly larger than an earlier plan had described it in fall 2005.  The building was now set to house up to 180 children, an increase in scale that seemed odd, considering all that had happened. 

With the news that the CCAA had resumed foreign adoptions for children from southeastern Hunan orphanages, it was unclear what if any accompanying reforms had been made to the foreign adoption process or to any rules governing the practice of admitting abandoned children to state controlled orphanages since the six Hengyang area orphanages were found to be paying for infants in November 2005.   Simply pulling the plug on foreign adoption would not necessarily have helped these children and alone would not have helped China's state controlled orphanages.  One demographic consequence of China's "one child" policy was that China had become one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world.  Its market-driven economic policies had created wealth for some but also a disproportionately large new economic underclass.  These and other shifting conditions created competing challenges for the country's social welfare system, which focused most of its assistance on only a small segment of the population.  In other words, child abandonment was one social problem on a very long list and could easily be overshadowed by the huge challenges of broadly addressing basic needs such as health care and education for a citizenry that was one fifth of the world's population, most of which was still struggling to emerge from poverty.

Hope, Love, and Help

[Original Post from Dec. 11, 2007]   In the later part of October this year, Xiang Xin Zhen, the new director of the Hengdong SWI, reported that he and his staff had packed up the children remaining in the old, crumbling orphanage building and transported them a short distance to a new home, a just completed (although long awaited) modern, multi-story facility.

The new orphanage is said to be built to house children on its ground and upper floors.  On the floors in between a variety of administrative social welfare offices are planned as well as a "recovery center" health care unit for children newly accepted at the orphanage and for seniors.  The seniors, most of them military veterans, would still be housed in the old building.

Foreign parents who adopted Hengdong children had contributed through the Hengdong Charity Fund to the new orphanage by raising funds for new cribs, two furnished activity rooms, and furnishings for a kitchen and dining area.  There is some comfort in the knowledge that children there will no longer be housed under conditions acknowledged as substandard even in mostly rural, south central China.

An open question seemed to be how exactly will this large new facility be used?  In January 2007 orphanage officials reported that the number of children housed at the Hengdong SWI had dropped from 70 to 55; in April the number dropped to 30 children; in September to 15.  The latest report indicated there were only ten children still housed there.

Why did the numbers decline so dramatically? With no legal requirement to accept orphaned children with no established hukuo or local residency, the orphanage may have simply decided to give up on its program of arranging homes for abandoned children.  

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Looking back, I am often struck by how many aspects of of the Hengdong SWI always seemed contradictory.  Early on, former director Chen Ming and his staff appeared genuinely kind both at first during our adoption trip and later when I visited the orphanage.  But in our family we had immediately noticed things about this daughter that made us really wonder about what she had gone through under their care.  After all, it had been the photos from the disposable camera we had sent in advance of our adoption trip that originally helped convince me to try to return to see the orphanage first hand.  Several of those photos were so grim and the children in them so unhappy that some scenes in them bordered on being offensive.  One typically odd-angled picture showed our daughter holding a wadded up diaper in front of a room full of crying children in walkers.  Tears were streaming down and the frustrated, frightened look on her face was heart breaking.  I have often wondered who had taken those photos and more so why on earth would the orphanage staff have given them to us.

Undoubtedly these are children who needed a lot of hope, love and help.

But time heals.  My Hengdong daughter and I went through a stage a while ago when we would go "fishing" at home by our swimming pool after dinner.  We would just sit together and quietly dangle our feet lazily over the side while holding onto our fish poles with our lines in the water.  I know the look she would give me as we reeled in occasionally to see if we caught a fish is a pretty strong indicator that our special bond endures, the one we shared when she first melted into my arms on our Gotcha Day in Changsha, amidst the other tiny children who were crying in that reception room on the second floor of the Hunan Provincial Social Welfare Department.  I'll tell her everything I know about Hengdong when she thinks she is ready, but I suspect there will be other things she and I will be interested in too.

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I suppose a reader might wonder whether this writer and his family would still adopt a child through China's foreign adoption program.  Children continue to be abandoned in China but for a mix of reasons fewer children are finding their way to orphanages in some provinces.  Moreover, thousands of children in orphanages who have birth defects, medical issues, or who are beyond the common age for adoption will not so easily find families.  So we will soon return to China for a "waiting child," one already identified as having special medical needs and our third adoption.  The first time I visited a Chinese orphanage I was profoundly affected by how here in the United States the discovery of an abandoned child is a major news event and yet in developing China child abandonment is quietly matter-of-fact.  Of course there are American families who also struggle to get by and several hundred thousand U.S. children in foster care, including those in temporary care.  But the millions of orphaned or abandoned children in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America--most of them older children or children with special needs--seem to me apples to oranges.  Each time I have visited a Chinese orphanage, I have found myself at one point or another hovering over a very sick or malformed child in a rickety crib and promising that I would be back, maybe not soon enough for that particular child, or realistically probably not even to the same orphanage.  But if I had the means to someday return for a child with special needs, I felt that I should. 

So, next stop for us: northwest China, Gansu Province.  China's waiting program, managed through its China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), seeks to find homes internationally for orphaned or abandoned children with the types of special needs that might otherwise make finding a family highly unlikely.  These can include treatable medical issues such as congenital heart disease, Hepatitis B, cleft anomalies, or spina bifuda.  Some waiting children have more severe issues.  Older children not placed through the CCAA's regular foreign adoption program are sometimes also referred to the waiting child program.  Not all children in the waiting child program find homes.

For These Lessons

Some time ago, I woke in the middle of the night and, unable to fall back to sleep, did something I hadn’t done in a very long time.  I sat down at the computer and returned to this blog.  Rather than posting as in the old days I started to read, beginning at the top introduction and slowly scrolling downward.  I found myself absorbed by post after post in succession, especially the narratives from the trip. Somehow I had forgotten about having watched an NBA All Star game with Mao's relatives on a mountainside in Shaoshan. 

The story pulled me along with each piece falling into place behind the next, despite turns that must have been surprises.  Finishing the last entry, I found myself relieved that I had posted each time with care.  I had laid out a lot of detail but also tried to be clear about the story’s inherent mystery.  In other words, this was a story about a difficult search, less so about any conclusive discovery.  

Until then I had thought about the blog only occasionally and even wondered whether I should delete it.  It was originally intended only as a travel journal for friends and family, but word spread through cyberspace to many thousands of eventual visitors.  Perhaps it should disappear like an intricate Tibetan circle mandala composed from colored grains of sand and delicately crafted by monks sometimes over the course of several weeks or months, only to be brushed away when complete, to illustrate how ideas like reality are by nature impermanent.  

The benefit of time has allowed me to see this blog more for what it is: mostly just a story about me and my youngest daughter, who came from the Hengdong SWI.   This makes me appreciate even more so today the story’s not so subtle complexity.  So I've returned again occasionally, most recently to add some posts ("Where Did I Come From?" ) near the start to give the story more context and also to consolidate and update a couple of other posts near the end.  All original posts start with an identifying dateline in red.

I worry about families still stepping blindly into Chinese foreign adoption without a full understanding of its ongoing transition and I am today firmly among those who believe there is ample reason for the U.S. and other governments to begin to pressure China to limit foreign adoptions now to special needs adoptions. 

On the other hand, I worry about the sweeping generalizations that crop up in discussions of this.  Not all orphanage officials are corrupt as can be implied.  These social welfare homes have operated within a society that has had no equivalent to legally giving a child up for adoption.  Revenue from foreign adoptions may be seen locally as helping to address the social challenges of caring for growing numbers of children with special needs as well as indigent seniors in a rapidly aging population.  In the absence of a free press or broad public discussion, it may be harder for these officials to connect the dots between actions such as offering incentives for those (including birth parents) who bring them abandoned children and problems such as organized baby trafficking--especially since "informal" adoption through intermediaries has been the standard practice in surrounding rural areas for many years.  

And one could see no evidence of ill advised practices at the orphanage I visited in June 2008 in Gansu Province in western China. 

At the time it housed about 80 children with an even ratio of boys to girls.  Nearly all had special needs and the orphanage took in relatively little in foreign adoption revenue.  It was housed in a modest facility that had just been damaged by an earthquake but it had a doctor and trained nurses on the staff.   The children had toys donated locally.   Children with developmental special needs were given daily physical therapy.  The orphanage director had arranged for art students at a nearby college to paint colorful posters for the walls of each room.  The few older children who were able were sent to school, including a school for the blind.  Local farmers regularly donated fresh milk to the orphanage.  It was a part of the community.

The children there have since been moved to a newly built facility, but there are more than 140 of them now and still nearly all have special needs.  Most are between the ages of 3 and 16 years old.  Cleft issues and other birth anomolies including acute vision and hearing impairments are common among them.  Many have difficult treatment issues resulting from cerebral palsy or any of a range of developmental disorders.   This year the orphanage hasn't submitted files for any of its children to be considered for adoption, foreign or domestic, because its administrative staff feel so few would be adopted. At present, there are about 10 children still there whose files were submitted last year, some matched to families but others not.  This is a very different situation from the one in Hengdong.

We discovered our son, who was cared for at the orphanage described above, through China's waiting child program for children with special medical needs.  In simple terms he had been born with a hole in the center of his face (a severe cleft anomaly) and then left by a roadside dumpster.  A charity-sponsored team of American surgeons had tried to fashion an outer repair, but the result had torn open on one side and inside was still a gaping hole instead of separate oral and nasal cavities.  Once home he required a quick succession of extensive surgeries and will need more in the years ahead, although it's worth noting that today he is probably the least fragile child we know and a very happy little guy. 

But our daughter from Hengdong also had special needs that, while less visible, were in many ways no less challenging: severe night terrors associated neurologically with the anterior fontanel portion of her skull remaining unclosed until she was about five years old; early acute problems with physical balance and motor development; frustrating visual and auditory processing disorders that made it difficult for her to make the same kind of learning connections as her classmates at school.

At this point in my lengthy search for understanding, I know now that I’m not going to find a blog post, transcript, or other document that is going to show that she didn’t desperately need us—her dad and mom.  The Hengdong orphanage in 2004, it is obvious now, was a bad place to be for a child.  We gave her love and hope of course, but once home she needed our help to find the right help.

She has come a very long way; from the Hengdong SWI but also from the noodle-limbed child of 18 months whose synapses were firing so erratically that doctors in China were sure she had concomitant esotropia (crossed eyes).  Today her eyes are fine, which is a change that her doctors say is highly unusual.  We had encouraged her to follow her muse; whatever it took to learn to focus on something.  In this way she became a very hard worker who, against considerable odds, learned to excel at things like swimming, biking, scooter riding, and jumping rope.  With help, she worked very hard to rewire her own circuits again so that she could more easily link sounds, syllables, and mental images for use in her speech and to begin to learn to read.  This was a painstaking process—but slowly it started to click, which we had seen happen in her before.

This past year she turned a corner and ended her school year solidly with above average grades in every subject, which is probably the most important incredible journey in her story.  It was a hard-fought win in what will be a continuing contest.

She is our tender free spirit, with a very sensitive heart. Yet she is still gifted with that full body grin that begins in her feet and causes her little shoulders to hunch in delight as each smile blossoms.  It's funny the things that parents sometimes pick up from their children. 

So for these lessons, I'll leave this blog here a little while longer.

Web site updated: June 2012]