The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past
By Karin Evans
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam
227 pp $23.95

In the spring of 2000, my husband and I journeyed to a small town in southern China to meet our new daughter, a beautiful 13-month-old baby girl. On that momentous occasion, we joined the thousands of Americans who are part of a growing cross-cultural phenomenon in which East meets West in unprecedented ways.

By adopting a little girl from China, we became part of a new configuration of family that crosses the divides of geography, race, language, economics, and even politics. But more significantly, we're finding our lives indelibly linked to the fates of millions of abandoned Chinese girls, whether they end up being adopted or not.

Adoption almost always involves sweeping emotional highs and lows: Prospective parents experience a tentative hopefulness at the beginning, then an anxiety-ridden waiting period, the cautious, almost disbelieving joy of finding a child, and either overwhelming ecstasy or crushing disappointment in the end. But when the adoption involves a child from a foreign country, the stakes -- and emotions -- can run even higher.

In international adoptions, parents must travel to another country where they have to navigate an unfamiliar culture, language, and government bureaucracy. Also, many adoption agencies require parents to promise that their child will retain a strong connection to his or her ancestral culture, which leaves these parents to interpret those traditions as best as they can. Americans adopting from China have the additional burden of someday explaining the country's widespread rejection of baby girls to their daughters. Unfortunately, the social science literature on this subject is scarce, and most popular articles on Chinese adoptions read more like descriptions of "How I Spent My Vacation in China" than a guide through this cultural and historical maze.

Thank God then, for Karin Evans. Her book, The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past, is the first thorough and insightful inquiry into the process of adopting in China. A journalist who spent two years as Newsweek's Hong Kong correspondent, Evans uses her reporting skills to shed light on a subject many adoptive parents of Chinese girls can barely bring themselves to think about: the fate of millions of girls cast off by a society in the grip of a repressive population control policy and a cultural preference for males.

Equally important, Evans offers a powerfully evocative memoir of her own adoption journey. She and her husband adopted their daughter Kelly, then only 1-year-old, from China in 1997. Their decision came about the same way it has for many adoptive parents these days: The demand for healthy American infants exceeds their availability. Moreover, the long and expensive search for a child in this country all too often ends when the birth mother changes her mind about giving up her baby. As a result, Americans are turning in droves to international adoptions. Many favor Chinese adoptions because they aren't tainted by stories of the trafficking of children. Nor do the orphans generally suffer from HIV, fetal alcohol syndrome, or other catastrophic illnesses.

The book opens with Evans' arrival in China. Her eloquent prose captures the reader from the first page as she recalls her view of the Chinese countryside from a bus full of anxious parents on their way to meet their new daughters. "Viewed from the bus window, a human being, small in the landscape, wearing a straw hat, stood beside a pair of yoked oxen," she writes. "Rivers ran through the mist; boats motored languidly along the rivers... there were old villages, made of red brick with tile roofs curving gracefully toward the sky. Somewhere in this landscape our daughter had been born."

For parents like Evans, the plane trip to China usually comes after a year or more of waiting. Up until then, parents may receive only the barest of information about their child, usually just a small picture and a few vital statistics: her name, an estimated birth date, height, weight, medical evaluation, and location of the orphanage where she lives. The paperwork turns into reality after the landing, as the parents begin their 12-day stay in China. Many, though not all, will travel for hours to another city to meet their child, then spend the rest of their time sightseeing and wading through paperwork and bureaucratic hurdles. All the waiting allows parents and their child the essential time to become accustomed to each other. The baby girls are often shell-shocked. They may not cry or have a bowel movement for days. Gradually, they open up, smile, reach out for a hug or kiss. Before long, a mutual love affair is in full bloom.

Kelly bonds with Evans and her husband almost immediately. "In a split second, our lives flowed together like the rivulets of water crisscrossing my daughter's native landscape. What had drawn us to this moment in China now seemed as perfectly timed and inevitable as the ebb and flow of the tides..." Evans touchingly describes all the joys, wonder, and appreciation for the Chinese adoption experience. But for the couple, as for many other adoptive parents, the trip to China also marks the beginning of a deeper, more disturbing journey.

"The fact that China can provide so many foreign parents with children... is a reflection of a darker reality," she writes. "The world's most populous nation, desperate to keep its numbers down, has in the past decade become a nation of lost daughters." Evans points out that for "all the benefits of adoption into a loving family in the West, there is a loss of roots each small girl must deal with as she grows into adulthood... halfway across the globe, having lost the thread that might someday lead her back."

Besides the many difficult questions about culture and identity, adoptive parents of Chinese girls face this dilemma: How do you explain to your daughter that she was one of the millions of girls left on China's streets, roads, and riverbeds because of cultural pressure to produce a boy? Or that she was one of the lucky few who escaped being sold into slavery or killed? Or that she was one of even fewer who were chosen to become part of a new family?

From the parents' viewpoint, these questions raise even more haunting issues. For as the bonds grow between strangers who have become an instant family, the relief and awe that the search has ended with this final miracle give way to an invisible, but very tangible, connection to the child's biological mother. In my own experience, I found myself wondering, "If I can feel such all-consuming love for this child after only two months, surely her birth mother must have felt unspeakable agony as she walked away from her infant of a few months. What insurmountable pressures forced her to give up this little creature? Who is this woman? Where is she now?"

As a journalist and parent, Evans felt an obligation to find out about life in China at the time of her daughter's birth. "I wanted to know what life was like for my child's mother, and what my daughter's future might have held had she stayed in China. I wanted to understand what life was likely to be like for the generation of adopted Chinese girls growing up in the United States." To fill in the missing pieces of her daughter's history, Evans offers an unflinching look at China's long history of female infanticide and oppression of women, the country's population problem, and the growing pains of a modernizing society.

The country's age-old practice of female infanticide arose from a feudal tradition in which females held no economic or civil rights in Chinese society. Only sons could inherit property or pass on the family name. In addition, since daughters always moved to their in-laws' homes after they married, it was the sons who were obligated to care for their parents in their old age. Female infanticide diminished greatly under Mao Tse-tung, but reared its ugly head again in 1979, when the Chinese Communist Party issued the edict that each woman could bear only one child.

The one-child policy has exceptions: for families in which the first child has a disability or in ones where both parents work in high-risk occupations. In fact, the one-child rule is only strictly enforced for those in government jobs or for people who live in urban areas. In the rural countryside where 70 percent of the population resides, the government generally allows a second child. Since contraception is universally accessible, Chinese abortion rates are relatively low at 25 percent when compared to the United States, whose abortion rate is 43 percent.

Still, this population control policy means that many families have abandoned or killed their infant daughters to preserve the option of producing a boy. The unintended consequence, however, is the loss of nearly an entire generation of females. According to Evans, "Millions of girls who would be expected to be in the population today are missing, gone -- so many lost that China is experiencing a 'gender gap.'"

Citing population reports, Evans documents the staggering abuses ushered in by China's draconian population control policy. Women need state permission to become pregnant. After a child is born, the mother is required to have a metal IUD inserted, which can be checked by x-ray. Local officials and party workers keep a close watch for unauthorized pregnancies and encourage informants. Many employers monitor their female employees for signs of pregnancy and publicly post a record of their menstrual cycles. Women who don't comply with the policy are continually hounded, lose their jobs and state benefits, or are thrown in jail.

Even ultrasound technology has contributed to China's growing gender gap: despite efforts to ban the use of the technology to determine the gender of unborn children, untold numbers of parents have sought abortions after learning they were expecting a baby girl. Evans cites one report which reveals that 97.5 percent of all aborted fetuses in China during the 1990s were female.

These troubling facts notwithstanding, Evans displays enormous compassion for parents forced by tradition and government pressure to give up their daughters. She offers numerous examples of the heart-wrenching notes and other trinkets left with abandoned babies by desperate parents who felt they had no other choice. There are moments, however, when Evans' compassion for the birth mothers appears to slide into projection. In particular, she develops a scenario of what Kelly's biological mother may have been thinking or doing at the time of the baby's abandonment that seems more contrived than reasonably speculative. But this is only one brief lapse in an otherwise elegantly written and well-grounded book.

Toward the end of the book, Evans voices concerns closer to home for adoptive parents of Chinese girls. Many were disturbed by the sight of unadopted baby girls left languishing in bare-bones orphanages. Evans describes a kind of grassroots diplomacy launched by adoptive parents to educate others about the girls of China and to help the orphans left behind. They raise funds to pay for clothing, bedding, washing machines, clothes dryers, school fees, and other basics the orphanages need.

She also deals with the most primary issue -- that of race and identity. Since most of the adoptive parents are white, they must deal with questions of bicultural childrearing as well as the racial prejudice the girls too often encounter. For many parents, prejudice may come as a rude awakening, especially in areas without a noticeable Asian population. Speaking from my own experience, these complicated racial issues are somewhat different for families with at least one Asian parent. This is an issue that Evans doesn't adequately address, perhaps because it is out of her purview. That story remains to be told by someone else.

Minor criticisms aside, Evans' book is a monumental achievement. Through this compelling memoir, she explores the complex cultural issues of orphaned Chinese girls. But the book speaks to more than just the adoptive parents; it also speaks to their families and friends, prospective parents, and to the curious among us. Told with a mother's voice, her narrative fills the hunger for information and insight felt by so many adoptive parents of China's "lost daughters."

-- Linda Jue is a freelance writer based in San Francisco and a senior director of the Independent Press Association.

Last updated April 28, 2009
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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