Return to F.C.C. home page
Originally published in Good Housekeeping, December 1994 and published her with the author's permission
A Small Happiness... That's how the Chinese refer to the birth of a baby girl.But for an American woman who adopted one of China's abandoned daughters, the joy is boundless.
At my wedding last May, everyone wanted to hold my baby daughter, Maria. "Why don't you let me take her?" my cousin asked. "Come to Grandma," my mother-in-law said. My sister boogied across the dance floor with her toddler and Maria. This is what happens at any gathering I go to these days. Everybody wants Maria, and l have to wait my turn.
But my daughter's life wasn't always like this.
In the spring of 1994, on a hot, humid day in Wuhu City, China, someone-probably her birth mother- sneaked into a crawl space under a police station and left her there. She was l day old, with fat cheeks and a skinny body, weighing about six pounds. She was only one of the tens of thousands of baby girls abandoned in China every year.
On October 27, 1994, 1 got on a plane in New York City to go to China and adopt her. She'd just turned 5 months old. I had a wallet-size photo of her (at 2 months, looking a little like a Chinese Winston Churchill) and a glowing report on her health. Her Chinese name was Mei Yu, which means plum blossom" and "jade."
For weeks before the trip, I'd been too excited to sleep, but on the plane I was suddenly calm. It had been only a few months since I'd started thinking about adoption, and I was amazed at how much had happened to me in that short time. I'd always wanted to he a mother, and my first husband's lack of interest in parenthood was one of the reasons we broke up. But at 35, I was happily single, and though I hoped to remarry someday, I felt unhurried.
Then one Sunday I read a story in The New York Times Magazine about the huge number of abandoned infant girls in China and the eagerness of the Chinese government to have them adopted (by single women and men as well as married couples). The Chinese preference for boys is thousands of years old, but something happened in 1979 that made the Chinese want baby boys-and not want baby girls-even more: The government instituted strict birth control laws that allow most families to have only one child. Chinese women are much more respected if their one child is male. A son is a cultural and economic advantage. He and his wife will support his parents in their old age; a grown daughter is expected to take care of her in-laws, not her parents.
The one-child policy sounds harsh, and it is. But China has one filth of the world's population, and officially the edict is an attempt to limit births in order to prevent mass starvation. In fact, today in China a woman isn't allowed to have even one child unless she has government permission. If a woman is pregnant without permission or for a second time, she may be pressured to abort the baby or let a doctor put it to sleep immediately after birth. Many women in this situation run away, hoping to give birth in a place where they won't be known. But officials sometimes find them and force them to have an abortion, then be sterilized.
In the cities every married Chinese woman between the ages of 15 and 49 carries an ID card that lists her form of contraception. Villages keep track of menstrual cycles by posting them on a public chalkboard. If a woman with an unplanned pregnancy evades abortion and has her baby, the government may fine her family as much as I7 years' salary. If the family can't pay the fine, the police may confiscate their belongings or demolish their home. Yet it's illegal for a family to place a child up for adoption or abandon it: Only the state can arrange an adoption.
For a woman who doesn't want to lose her home or her honor but can't bear to have her baby killed, the only hope may be to abandon the child. Found infants usually end up in orphanages, where they have a chance of being adopted either by foreigners or childless Chinese couples.
The plight of these unwanted girls moved me, and the idea that adoption in China could be relatively easy for a single woman was interesting. I clipped the article to save for the future, in case I never remarried and wanted to adopt. But when I happened across it just two months later, I realized something mysterious had happened: I'd begun to want to adopt a daughter from China whether or not I ever remarried or had other children.
I don't think I'll ever be able to fully explain why. Maybe adopting an abandoned girl appealed to me because my mother had been young and not particularly ready for motherhood when she had me: Loving an unwanted baby girl would be one way to "fix" my own past. In any case, once I learned about the possibility of adopting a baby girl from China, it just seemed the right way for me to become a parent. I have a tight-knit group of women friends who I knew would support my decision. They even threw a baby shower for me and sewed a baby quilt. I also have close male friends who I knew would be good influences in my daughter's life. And as a writer working at home, I had the flexible work hours other parents only dream of.
As for dating, I figured that if a man didn't want to know me as a mother, he didn't really want to know me. As it turned out, my social life changed fast. I suddenly lost interest in men who were immature or self-involved, and fell head over heels for a writer named Steven Rinehart. Steve loved the idea of my adopting a baby this way but confessed to his closest friends (and later, to me) that he kept forgetting to picture baby in daydreams about our future together. His friends reassured him: It takes a while for any one to get used to the idea of life with a child. A few weeks before I left for China, he asked me if I'd marry him. He also wanted to adopt my daughter. What a wild year!
By the time Steve proposed, it was too late to include him officially in the adoption, so he wasn't on the plane to China with me. I went with my mother and seven other adopting families (five married couples and two other single women.)
At the beginning, Mom had been against the idea of my becoming a single parent. When I'd phoned my parents to tell them my plans, my father had been overjoyed. But my mother was upset. "How can you do it by yourself?" she said in a tone that suggested I couldn't possibly raise a child on my own. I tried to explain that I'd thought it through, but she was still skeptical.
Then something happy and unexpected happened.
The adoption agency suggested I get a sense of my parents' reaction to be coming part of an interracial family. I raised the issue with my mother.
"But why?" she asked. She didn't understand how the baby's race could trouble anyone in our family.
"Well." I said, "you might be walking down the street with my daughter one day and somebody might not like seeing a Chinese girl with a Caucasian grandmother, and they might say nasty things..."
"They'd better not!" Mom said.
And from that moment on, she was a devoted grandmother. She still didn't like the idea of my becoming a single parent, but she knew this was not the fault of her beloved (if yet unknown) granddaughter. The next thing I knew, Mom was asking if she could go to China with me. On the plane, she was eagerly learning Chinese from a tape in her Walkman.
Throughout the adoption process, I'd continued to read articles and books about the troubled situation of girls and women in China. There, the birth of a boy has always been considered "a great happiness"; the birth of a girl, "a small happiness."
Over one million newborn girls who should, statistically, be on the birth rolls each year in China are missing-aborted, raised in secret, murdered, or, if lucky, abandoned. Parents sometimes pin a note to their baby's clothes before they leave her, such as the one found on an infant in Fuyang: "She was born on May 24, 1992. Please help my daughter."
To adopt Maria, I went through an interview with the adoption agency, Spence-Chapin Services, a physical, a fingerprinting session at my neighborhood police station (so I could be checked out by the FBI), a social worker's visit to my home, and lots and lots of paperwork.
When my papers were in order, the agency sent them to China. A month later, I received Maria's medical report and photo. Two months later, I was ready to go to China. The process, from the day of my first interview to the day I had my baby in my arms, took only eight months-quicker than a pregnancy.
Even so, in the weeks after I got Maria's medical report and photo, the waiting was painful. I didn't know her and she didn't know me, but she was in an orphanage on the other side of the planet, and I wasn't able to get to her. I cried on the public bus. I cried listening to the radio. This is unnatural. I thought. For a mother to be separated from her baby is unnatural.
Finally meeting and adopting my daughter wasn't the same as giving birth, but it was a powerful experience. It was comforting to go to China with other families who were experiencing the same thing. We spent our first day in Beijing, sightseeing at Tiananmen Square, site of the 1989 freedom demonstrations, and at the Great Wall.
Our second day we flew south to the city of Hefei. Our babies were traveling, too-four bumpy hours in a van from a Wuhu City orphanage to Heifei. After we checked into our hotel, our guide told us to go to our rooms. Our babies were coming.
At first, we were all so excited we gathered in the hallway, giggling, whispering. Finally, the elevator stopped on floor and we scrambled to our rooms. The next thing Mom and I knew, a woman came to my door holding a baby in a blue sweat suit. In my photo of her, Mei Yu was fat cheeked and had a steely gaze (a tiny person with an old soul, I'd thought). This baby had the same cheeks, the same gaze. She fixed a long serious look at me, frowned, and started to bawl. Mom was crying with happiness.
I'd read up on 5-month-olds. Steve had slipped Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care into my suitcase, and according to the good doctor, a normal, healthy 5-month-old has a fear of strangers: She'll look you over, frown, then scream. How healthy and normal my daughter was!
Everyone in our group was elated. We'd all heard or read unsettling stories about sick children-including the one about a woman who learned the baby whose photo she'd carried around for weeks had died. Or another about an infant who'd been so sick that the orphanage staff had expected her to die and had stopped feeding her; when the adopting parents met their daughter, she had pulled through her illness but was suffering from starvation.
But our group had been fortunate in our choice of adoption agency and orphanage. The agency had asked the orphanage attendants to cuddle and play with our babies-even take them home at night-to help them thrive, and the strategy worked beautifully.
I loved my baby's tiny fingers first. Then her feet. The next day, while I bathed and dressed her for the meeting with orphanage officials, my heart suddenly felt like your stomach feels when you're on a roller coaster. I was falling for her completely.
The adoption proceedings took place in a conference room in the hotel. One by one, each family was called to table where a translator asked what each baby's name would be.
"It's kind of long," I said when my turn came. "Maria Frederica Mei Yu Rinehart Jones." I was naming her Maria Frederica after a friend who champions women's rights.
Our group stayed in Hefei while the orphanage officials went back to Wuhu City to finalize the adoptions. When they returned six days later, we finally got papers that told us how our daughters were found and who gave them their Chinese names. I learned that after the police had found Maria, they'd taken her to the orphanage, where a doctor examined her, estimated her age, and named her. I wanted to know more. Who brought her to the police station? Where exactly was she born? Does she have a biological brother or a sister? I still don't have those answers, but I'm glad to know she was only a day old when she was left under the police station. She was too young to know what was going on.
Another baby, Marisa Hom, was older-6 weeks-when she was found. "What went on during that time?" her mother Judy Hom asked. Of course, the Homs will never know. "Someone must have struggled to keep her," Judy said.
Fanny Xi Eaton and Leah Cummings had notes pinned to their clothes that gave their birth dates, but the government refused to say what else was written on the notes.
We new parents wanted more information-for ourselves and for our daughters. Mostly, though, we were very happy. What we'd wanted most in the world was now in our arms.
When Mom and I walked down the street in Hefei with Maria, people came up to us and asked anxiously, "Boy? Boy?" They didn't want anyone taking a boy out of the country. When we answered, "No, it's a girl," they reIaxed and said, "Lucky baby!" (Now in New York, too, people come up to Steve and me and say, "What a lucky baby!" It always strikes us as odd because we feel so keenly that we not the baby, are the lucky ones.)
On November 9, I carried Maria through a revolving door at Kennedy airport, and there was my father, holding a big poster-board sign that said, "Welcome, Maria!" Behind him stood two of my girlfriends, with cameras- and Steve, weeping with happiness. I'd never seen him cry before.
China is one of the world's oldest cultures, and we want Maria to be as proud of her Chinese heritage as of her American citizenship. We've found a wonderful Chinese woman to take care of Maria while we work, and she's teaching Maria to speak Mandarin. (Steve and I have tried to learn some of the language, too, but so far our desire exceeds our abilities!)
Maria and Fanny Eaton were born two days apart and spent their first summer in the same orphanage in China; now they live six blocks apart. They play at the same playground, swinging side by side in the baby swings. We see other babies from our group, too- on Chinese New Year's, at birthday parties, at an annual Dragon Boat picnic, which is sponsored by a national organization called Families with Children from China. There's a boom in American adoptions of Chinese children: In 1990, Americans adopted only 28 Chinese girls, but the process has gotten easier, and these babies are now leaving China for America at a rate of about 1,500 a year. Maria will always know other Chinese children with Caucasian parents.
When Maria gets older, Steve and I want to tell her everything we know about her birth parents. I believe they loved her enormously. I believe they were canny and brave-they may have avoided a forced abortion and, later, an arrest to get her to a place where someone would find and take care of her. I believe that, like me, Maria's biological parents had some faith in the world. With their faith, they reached out into the unknown; with my faith, I reached out and picked her up. Now, though, only I know how well-founded that faith was.
When I think of Maria's birth mother, I choke up. I feel I'm in a partnership with her. Yet there's so much she doesn't know-how lively and captivating her little daughter is, or how we call her "Happy Girl." When Steve and I go out walking, often with Maria riding on Steve's shoulders, everyone wants to talk to her or take her picture. Everyone *wants* her here.