Challenging the Official Story: Truth and Lies of Chinese Adoption (Part 2)

The "Grim" Reality of Nationwide Human Trafficking

In 2005, the first crack in China's "perfect" international adoption program appeared with the Hunan Scandal. The Hunan Scandal detailed a family (The Duan Family) finding babies which were already forced to be abandoned by their birthfamilies in Wuchuan, Guangdong, transporting these babies to various orphanages in Hunan province, and receiving monetary rewards from the orphanages to continue to bring in babies.

However, though the Hunan Scandal is the most well-known human trafficking system, baby-buying incentive programs from orphanages was nation-wide and not all babies who were moved even in the southern part of China were necessarily working with the Duan family. Because it was illegal for birthfamilies to keep their babies, abandon their babies, bring their babies to the orphanage, and even give birth to their babies, many different complicated scenarios happened in China which I've listed in Part 3.

What I know of human trafficking is this:

1) Midwives would help deliver babies and then offer to bring the baby to the orphanage or to a childless couple. These midwives might act alone or in a network and their promises to bring the baby to another family might be false. Sometimes birthfamilies would arrange during pregnancy to give the baby to the midwife. Other times, midwives might pressure the family into using her "services" to move the baby. The babies would then be taken to the orphanage and the "finder" would receive a finding reward.

2) Networks of baby finders were informally enlisted to source babies for the orphanage. Sometimes the babies would already be forced to be abandoned, other times they used coercive measures to obtain over quota children from birthfamilies. The orphanage would give them a finding reward.

3) The One Child Police/officials might pressure the birthfamily into giving up their babies and then might confiscate their babies anyway, bring them to the orphanage, and get a finding reward.

4) Trafficking was nationwide, but not every adoptee from a trafficking orphanage was trafficked. 

5) Birthfamilies might pay a "matchmaker" to bring the baby to the orphanage safely since they were unable to do so.

Of course, in each of these scenarios, the adoptee's finding document will hold false information because they were never "abandoned" at all, but relinquished to another person and brought to the orphanage. Keep in mind that due to the One Child Policy, babies were not allowed to be kept anyway, so there was a necessity for getting babies to the orphanage safely without being punished. In other words, though we call this "human trafficking," I do think there is a large distinction to say being kidnapped and sold for profit vs. a distraught birthfamily without any choice taking their baby to the local matchmaker and paying her to bring their baby to the orphanage, which the matchmaker will do to get a finding reward. Police confiscations also happened, and technically they were upholding the law, so while this is terrible, I fail to see what is so grievously worse about police confiscations than say pressuring a birthfamily into leaving their baby in a public place to be found and brought to the orphanage. There really was no choice for our birthparents and you need to see "human trafficking" within the context of the larger picture.

Women were dragged to the operating room and were sterilized against their wills. Women were forced to undergo abortions of their babies. What happened in China was a tragedy, which was exactly why people adopted from China in the first place: babies were in orphanages through no fault of their own, and were not allowed to be raised by their birthfamilies. It was a crisis situation and so when international adoption opened, people came.

Everyone was fed the same fairytale story of babies being "willingly" abandoned by the dozens, left on the side of the road, because boys were favored. No one questioned that something more complicated was going on. My own parents were not so naive as to think anything was "willing," and they were hopeful that one day I would be able to reunite with my birthparents. But now that my orphanage has been linked to the infamous Hunan scandal and I now know it is likely my finding documents are not truthful, my search for my birthparents is exponentially harder. 

I wonder at times, what does it all mean? 

In a way, I am thankful to know I was not simply abandoned, that "abandonment" is a terrible word that implies there was some sort of "choice" when there was none. It comforts me to know that the situation was complicated and that I was not simply cast aside. My empathy for what my birthmother had to go through has risen dramatically and I can only imagine what sort of horrors were happening to her and people she knew while she was pregnant with me.

Adoptees love sharing their finding spots. 

I was found under a bridge! Under a tree! By the market! At the police station! These finding spots were carefully chosen by the birthmom so that the babies would be found by authorities in the morning and taken to the orphanage. So we were told...

Other people have reported finding out that their finding spot was an elaborate lie and their parents actually had a connection with one of the orphanage workers and directly handed the baby off to her, but legally had to say the child was abandoned at a certain location for the baby to be adoptable. 

Other people brag about having a note with them with their birthdate and name. Yet, some orphanages threw out all notes from parents without any records because they were deemed unimportant or would lead adoptive parents to figuring out the baby was trafficked. Some people were told they had notes on them, but really didn't. There's a lot of truth and lies in Chinese adoption. There's a lot of stuff going on.

Were there finding spots? Yes! There were! But do all adoptees with "finding spots" really know if their finding spot is true for them? No, they do not. Were the majority of adoptees really abandoned? No, they weren't.

I was given a finding spot too. But now? I do not believe it. I don't really trust anything anymore. My adoptee friends have taken pictures in front of their finding spot, no longer there. All these emotional adoptee Facebook posts of going back to their finding spots...is any of it real? Is any of it true? It sounds romantic doesn't it? A baby, found in a magical, special spot! Maybe this is why we adoptees cling so much to our origin stories, bragging that our birthparents left us a blanket or some other "truth." I didn't have a note. If I did, it might have been thrown out. I didn't have a blanket. I don't know my name. I don't know my birthday. And I honestly think no one else truly knows these things either.

Whether I was or was not trafficked is something I will probably never know unless I get a DNA match with my birthparents and hear the story from them. 

Does this mean I should adjust my origin story and mourn every day for one of several possible alternative birth stories? Or mourn for a composite, a weighted average of the whole?

The thing is, a lot of stuff went on in China. China is a big place. It is hard to characterize it under generalizations that ring true for everyone in every region, yet news stories try to truncate the truth, and often times misreport it. 

Not all Chinese adoptions involved trafficking. Not all trafficking involved kidnapping. Even the orphanages involved in trafficking had babies in there who were not trafficked too, so it becomes incredibly difficult for any adoptee to guess their own fate, even knowing their orphanage was involved. 

Let me make this clear, without the communist government declaring the so-called one child policy, these babies would not have been abandoned in this magnitude in the first place. It begins and ends with the communist government. Trafficking cannot thrive where this is no niche. The one child policy amplified this niche. So it would be a mistake to assume that just because your adopted child was from an orphanage involved in trafficking that they would have lived a happy little life with their birth parents as the alternative. Not so. They would have just ended up in a different orphanage, closer to home.

This post bleeds into the next one. Why? Because as soon as my "fairytale" illusion was shattered with thousands of reports and documentaries on trafficking, abortions, and sterilizations, I was quickly introduced to the world of DNA birthfamily searches. 

So save your tears!

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Media from this "era of oh-no, what do you mean the One Child Policy involved coercion"

New York Times 2011: NYT: For Adoptive Parents, Questions Without Answers

The Atlantic 2013: Kidnapped and Sold: Inside the Dark World of Child Trafficking in China

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Part 1: The Fairytale
Part 3: The New Age of DNA Tests