One Child (23 page)

Aside from festivals to honor ancestors, we also celebrated Ghost Month, where offerings were made not just for our own clan, but for all spirits. During this month, it is believed that the gates of hell open and ghosts are free to roam the Earth seeking food. These unfortunate ghosts are ones who no longer have people paying tribute to them.

Ghost Month is therefore rife with superstition, a month when nobody gets married or starts a business. As a child, I loved to wander with my mother into the religious shops in the weeks ahead of Ghost Month, for they had paper models of houses, cars, and people, looking exactly like toys. I longed to touch and play with them but was never allowed to, of course, for this would have been extremely bad luck.

These offerings have kept up with the times: I’ve seen paper Louis Vuitton handbags, paper iPhones, and, of course, the all-purpose afterlife accessory, a paper Amex Black card.
In 2006, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs even went to the trouble of imposing a ban on the burning of “messy sacrificial items” such as paper replicas of Viagra, luxury villas, and karaoke hostesses.

All this shows that, while most religious and cultural systems stress that you can’t take it with you, the Chinese eminently believe you can, as long as you have descendants, the more the better. To die without issue is to
duanzi, juesun
—one of the worst curses you can visit upon someone Chinese, for it means an eternity as a Hungry Ghost.

VII

The Kunming hospice has a smell I’ve come to associate with institutional life in China: pork bone soup and instant noodles mingled with the occasional waft of urine from the toilets and a fug of cigarette smoke.

Patients sleep two to a room. There are no showers, so residents have to make do with sponge baths or, if they are able-bodied, go home to bathe. There is just a narrow space between beds, enough for a person to sidle through sideways. To compensate for the rooms’ lack of space, large communal seating areas dot the floor, with raftlike wooden chairs and couches in peeling vinyl. Small food tins, scrubbed clean of their labels, serve as ashtrays. Here, residents and visitors linger, smoking, sewing, chatting on the phone.

In one of the sitting rooms, I met Li Jiayi placidly embroidering flowers on shoe soles. Li’s mother had been an inmate for the past seven months, hit with both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Jiayi was thirty-five, with a cloud of long, dark hair and a serene face without a speck of makeup. With her was her five-year-
old daughter, Qingxue—“Little Stream”—an engaging sprite with a gappy smile. A tiny tiara was perched on her braids. They were the hospice’s youngest regulars.

Jiayi was four months pregnant with her second child, taking advantage of the recent
dandu
reforms, the relaxation of the one-child policy that allowed couples to have a second child, provided one of the parents was an only child.

“Sometimes, my friends ask me, ‘You’re so old, why do you want another child?’ But I think to take care of the old is very stressful. There isn’t enough community support. Neighbors don’t get along like when I was growing up. This one,” she said, motioning gently to her chattering daughter, “will have a hard time alone.”

Jiayi’s mother was diagnosed eight years previously with Parkinson’s, the chronic movement disorder that has no cure. China already has more than 40 percent of the world’s Parkinson’s sufferers, but by 2030 this will grow to almost 60 percent, a huge amount for an affliction so new the Chinese haven’t had time to come up with their own nomenclature for it.
To Jiayi, it’s
Pa Jin Sen
—three Chinese characters that individually mean “handkerchief,” “gold,” and “forest.”

At first, the disease was manageable. Her parents helped Jiayi with child care, picking up Little Stream from daycare every evening and making dinner. The child learned to hold on to her grandmother’s hand and support her as her balance worsened. Then Jiayi’s mother started falling down. They lived on the third floor of a seventh-floor walkup, with no elevator. For safety, she started staying in bed all day, listening to Shanghai opera and watching soap operas.

In the winter of 2013, her mother could no longer move her legs and needed someone to carry her to the toilet. She developed bedsores. Jiayi’s seventy-eight-year-old father couldn’t cope anymore. They looked at several nursing homes and hospitals, finally ending up at Kunming No. 3 as the most economical. Monthly costs are about $3,000, out of which 90 percent is covered by
yibao
, China’s
equivalent of Medicare. Other options, such as private nursing homes, cost thrice that and were not covered by insurance. Each place had a waitlist several months long.

Her hands flashing among the threads, Jiayi said, “I feel I was lucky. So many people have sick parents, and they don’t have access to these facilities, or even know about them.”

Jiayi’s parents raised her in what she remembers as an idyllic environment, a communal housing compound for their work unit. She was aware that world no longer existed. In talking over her reasons for having a second child, she made constant reference to how urbanization and modernization had shredded ties between neighbors. She also lamented how family sizes had shrunk so drastically. Both her parents had six siblings. Her husband, Guobao, whose name means “National Treasure,” had five.

Now, the Chinese language is very precise in its definition of family ties, with numerous words to define kinship. An uncle is never just “uncle,” for example: he could be
bobo
if he was your father’s older brother,
shushu
if younger,
jiujiu
if he was your mother’s brother, and so on. Little Stream would never just be “sister” to Jiayi’s unborn child, for there is no plain-vanilla Chinese equivalent of that word. She would always be
jiejie
—“older sister”—her status locked in, never
meimei
, “younger sister.”

The Chinese language, with its emphasis on placing you firmly in the family pecking order, shows how much China values seniority and structure. But this elaborate taxonomy is collapsing. By the time Little Stream has her own children, many of these terms will be as archaic as Latin.

Over the weekend, I saw Jiayi again. She had brought her mother some steamed egg custard. The food at the hospice—mostly soups and rice congee—wasn’t nutritious enough, she felt. She spooned the trembling yellow curds into her mother’s unresponsive mouth.

Her mother was a tiny mound underneath a mass of blankets, her gaze hovering somewhere near the spot where a television once stood. When she first moved in, Jiayi installed a TV at the foot of the bed so that she could continue to watch her favorite soap operas. But soon after moving in, Jiayi’s mother stopped responding to stimuli.

“So, no more TV.” Jiayi shrugged.

She was dressed that day in black jeans. Her pregnancy hardly showed.

These past few years with her mother had been hard, she said. “My father is too old. There is no one but me,” said Jiayi. “I don’t want this for my daughter. Her sister or brother will live longer than we will. Probably, it will be her longest-lasting family relationship.”

Over the past year, the constant back-and-forth to the hospice, combined with child care, taxed her strength. Her hair dropped out. She started snapping at Little Stream. In the end, she decided to quit her job. With savings, and her husband’s salary, she calculated they could get by for two years without her needing to work. After that? She shrugged.

Despite this, Jiayi believed family planning in China was necessary. “The large number of people—it makes social benefits hard to implement.” Then she added the phrase almost every Chinese person brings up when I ask about family planning: “
Ren tai duo.
Too many people.”

Jiayi’s attitude might seem strange to people outside China, but in reality, a great many urban Chinese do support its family-planning policies, a fact that is probably easier to understand if you’ve lived there and had to fight for spots everywhere from the crowded subways to elite schools.

When I asked Jiayi, however, if she supported methods employed by family-planning officials, like forced abortions, her hand fluttered protectively to her stomach. “Of course not,” she said. “Force is never justified. Those people were really evil.”

In Jiayi’s high school class of thirty people, only four or five had a second child, she said. Most classmates were civil servants, who risked losing their jobs if they broke the rules.

“Now I feel a lot of my friends are envious of me,” she said.

Little Stream climbed onto her lap and started taking loving nips at her mother’s arm.

Jiayi tussled with her gently, speaking in a singsong voice. “Who’s going to take care of Ma-ma? Will you take care of Ma-ma?”

Perched heroically above her unborn sibling, Little Stream nodded.

China promised stability and certainty. At the end of the process, however long and demanding it might prove to be, we would have a child. And no one could take her back.

—
Jeff Gammage
, China Ghosts

I

If you’ve adopted a child from China, how do you trace that child’s roots?

Brian Stuy thinks he knows how. In his mid-fifties, with a shock of white hair and a showman’s sense of timing, Stuy congratulated the small group of parents who filed into a St. Paul, Minnesota, auditorium one Saturday morning. “You are a small minority of the US adoptive community,” he said. “Most families don’t care, so thank you for at least coming.”

Stuy is a controversial figure among the adoptive community. Many dislike the ex-Mormon’s crusading message about corruption within China’s adoption system. For the many parents who believe
they’ve done a good deed, this is an inconvenient claim that makes Stuy about as popular as Al Gore at an OPEC convention. “Be very careful of Brian Stuy,” a journalist acquaintance and adoptive mother of a Chinese child told me. “He is a lightning rod.”

Some accuse Stuy of hypocrisy. He adopted three daughters from China, so why is he criticizing the program now? Others accuse him of profiting from his accusations, which, to some extent, he is. Since 2002, Stuy’s small outfit, Research-China, which he runs with his China-born wife, Lan, has specialized in doing background research on China adoptees.

Sweeping the room with his eyes, Stuy announced he would unveil a list of what he believed were orphanages that engaged in child trafficking. “I already know some in this room will see their orphanage mentioned,” he warned. “Don’t take it personally.”

The screen flickered. Next to me, Heather Ball bit her lip. Her daughter’s orphanage was on the list. She took a moment to absorb the shock. Shrugged. Then came ruefulness. “What can you do?”

Is the wave of Chinese adoptions, as many believe, an altruistic act that rescues thousands of unwanted, mostly female children from a life of penury and institutionalization—or is it really baby buying on an international scale, sanctioned and even facilitated by the Chinese government? For two decades, over 120,000 children from China have been adopted internationally. This byproduct of the one-child policy is its most international aspect, and it has significantly shaped global attitudes toward race, family, and the ethics of intercountry adoption.

In the adoptive world, where demand for healthy young children far exceeds supply, Chinese adoptions are, or were considered, the gold standard. China had almost everything adoptive parents were seeking: healthy young infants in large quantities, and an adoption process that was government run, streamlined, and relatively expansive. When China’s overseas adoption program first began, singles,
retirees, and gay couples were considered eligible to adopt, which was rare elsewhere.

The one-child policy imbued the whole process with virtue: the outside world believed these girls to be unwanted and voluntarily abandoned. China’s orphanages were overflowing, and conditions were abysmal. Adoptive parents believed China was the most ethical choice among an array of suspect options. Unlike adoption in Guatemala or Ethiopia, they weren’t going to be accused of buying babies, or exploiting the poverty of birth parents.

After Beijing opened its orphanages to intercountry adoption in 1992, numbers started rising vertiginously.
By 2005, its peak, Americans were adopting almost eight thousand China babies yearly.
Even now, when the supply of adoptable infants has fallen sharply, China continues to be by far the largest source country for adoptions, with Americans adopting over two thousand children from China in 2014. That’s almost three times the number of adoptions from Ethiopia, the next-largest source of adoptions.

That sunny scenario changed in 2005, when six orphanages in Hunan—some of the biggest suppliers to Western adoption agencies—were accused of baby buying. Chinese authorities initially denied the reports but eventually jailed laborer Duan Yuaneng and family members for trafficking eighty-five infants. Duan’s mother, a children’s home aide, said she was initially reimbursed a few dollars for finding abandoned babies. But demand swiftly rose, for orphanages gained $3,000 for each overseas placement, not to mention donations from grateful parents.

“The orphanage asked for more babies.
It started paying $120 each. Then $250. Then $500 by 2005,” said the Duan matriach. The family smuggled infants in milk powder boxes, four at a time, on the train for a six-hundred-mile journey from Guangdong to Hunan, a distance roughly equivalent to that between New York and Charlotte, North Carolina.

After serving out his prison term, Duan told
Marketplace
reporter Scott Tong that his trafficking operation was far broader in scope than media reports had indicated.

Showing Tong records that indicated he trafficked over a thousand infants, Duan said the orphanages falsified foreign adoption papers for each of those trafficked babies. “The documents I saw indicate at least one went to American parents,” Tong told me.