Resemblance of a chubby round-faced child to an adult, even its natural parents,
is a touchy, subjective matter at the best of times. But these officials are
confident they can match Chinese babies by appearance to the mostly Caucasian
adopters.
"Our matching personnel are very experienced," asserted an official at the
centre. "First, they will look for proper candidates on our database according
to the parents' requirements on age, sex, birthplace, health condition and so
on. Then they try to find a child who is physically best resembling one of the
parents."
Later, as the babies develop as individuals in their new homes, relatives and
friends often express amazement at how closely the children resemble their new
parents in personality. It sometimes seems as though the Chinese officials can
make a psychological match as well.
Whatever the science, parents are for the most part ecstatically happy with the
result. Hotel coffee shops in cities throughout China are sometimes full of
clucky parents from North America, Europe and, increasingly, Australia,
anxiously trying to interest their little new charges in something different
from rice porridge.
Four weeks ago in Kunming, Newcastle couple Mark and Elizabeth Rodger-Snelson
sat edgily in a bland business hotel. "Up until now it seemed like a holiday,"
Mark said. "Now we've walked into the room and seen the cot set up and it
suddenly seems real."
Two-and-a-half years ago, the couple applied to adopt a baby from China after
trying unsuccessfully to have a child and rejecting the chancy, expensive
alternative of IVF treatment. In April, they were matched with little Wuzhong -
unusually, a boy. Elizabeth wears a little badge - Mao Zedong-style - with
Wuzhong's baby photo pasted on it.
Along with four other couples, and a single woman - the latest "batch" sent to
China by NSW's Community Services - they drive to a Civil Affairs office. Six
babies and toddlers wait with "ayis" (aunties) from the local orphanage. The
couples peer at the faces, trying to match them with photos that are now six
months old. Then an official arrives, and the children are put in the arms of
their new parents. The little 12-month-olds are intrigued. Two three-year-olds
are terrified.
That evening, the babies have transformed the hotel rooms into battle- zones,
littered with nappies, formula bottles, and baby-buggies. The parents are
visibly more relaxed, the babies starting to smile. Wuzhong is living up to his
name, formed of the characters for "martial" and "loyal", by fearlessly
grasping anything within reach.
"We're happy with the result," says Michael Kas, a Chatswood real estate agent,
who with his wife Janine, had just been united with their new daughter, Xi
Biying, now Samantha, who had been abandoned at a hospital with pneumonia about
10 days after birth. "But it's still a bit scary."
Chinese are not just looming ever larger in our markets and strategic pictures,
but steadily being welcomed into our families. Already, about 50,000 Chinese
babies have been adopted into the United States since China started allowing
international adoptions in 1992. Perhaps half as many have gone to Europe.
In Australia, the numbers are still small - just 318 (as of February) since a
bilateral adoption agreement was signed with China in 1999 - but are rising
sharply.
It seems a happy match of mutual needs. In advanced countries from Sweden to
Singapore, there are rising numbers of couples unable or unwilling to have
children by natural means, because of late or second marriages, rising
infertility levels, career pressures. There are increasing numbers of
middle-aged people living on their own who yearn for children.
The domestic pool of babies and young children available for adoption is drying
up, as young women have more access to contraception and the stigma of single
motherhood fades. Australia had about 10,000 domestic adoptions in 1972. Now
the figure is a few hundred each year.
A broadening of cultural horizons is also a factor. Even in the US - the great
exception to the developed world's trend to lower fertility rates and dwindling
natural population increase - more and more couples are willing to adopt
children of markedly different racial background. In a lot of cases, couples
are adding a Chinese baby or two after having some of their own.
On the Chinese side, overseas adoption helps solve one of the country's most
embarrassing and difficult problems. China has about 500,000 orphans and
abandoned children living in institutions of one sort or another. Some
estimates say the figure could be as high as 2 million if children in other
forms of care are included.
Very few of these children are actually orphans. Most are what used to be
called "foundlings" - like babies abandoned on the doorsteps of clergymen and
orphanages in the world portrayed by Charles Dickens. More than 95 per cent are
female. Abandoned male babies often have congenital defects, even something as
easily remedied as a cleft palate.
This is not due to any particular heartlessness by Chinese parents, but the
result of pressures produced by the national one-child policy enforced in all
except the more remote and ethnic minority areas since 1978, combined with the
traditional culture of ancestor veneration that requires a male name-bearer to
tend the family graves at propitious times of the year.
In many cases, this means that girls don't make it to birth. China started
producing its own ultrasound machines in 1979, almost simultaneously with the
one-child policy's introduction, giving parents the means to detect the sex of
their baby in the womb and then decide on abortion. Since then the more
prosperous regions of the country have seen a growing imbalance in the number
of male and female babies being born - so much so that in about 15 years, there
will be 20-30 million more young unmarried men than available women partners.
Still, there are many thousands of new mothers, faced with the unbearable
censure of their husbands and in-laws and their own cultural upbringing, who
decide to abandon their new-born girls before having to register their birth so
they can try again for a boy.
A further pressure is widespread poverty and the collapse of the subsidised
state medical system since China switched to market economics. Many families
simply can't afford the huge cost of dealing with a congenital condition.
Pictures and details of the abandoned babies are advertised by the authorities
in local newspapers for two months, then the child is readied for adoption in
the local orphanage.
It would be wrong to assume that only foreigners want these babies. The number
of foreign adoptions is matched roughly by those by Chinese people. Under a
program pioneered in Shanghai by a British social worker, Robert Glover of the
Care for Children foundation, thousands of children are being placed in
long-term foster care in local homes.
Glover and Civil Affairs ministry officials hope to move half the children now
in institutional care into family homes by 2010, and put as many as possible of
the rest in smaller, home-like units with better-prepared staff than the
well-meaning but untrained ayis who mostly staff the orphanages.
About the time the newborn babies are being abandoned, would-be parents are
beginning the long paper trail of applications, home surveys by social workers,
police record checks, and financial statements needed to qualify themselves as
suitable to adopt.
China's policy puts the onus of checking the parents entirely on the
governments where they reside. From the other side, the intending parents and
their governments can be reasonably assured that the baby is genuinely
abandoned. By contrast, even official adoption programs in some other
countries, like Cambodia, are tainted by cases of child trafficking.
Child trafficking happens in China, mostly with boy babies abducted or bought
in ethnic minority areas and sold to families desperate for a son. And given
the sums that foreigners are willing to pay - as much as $US38,000 ($50,500) -
through official adoption channels, the incentive for a baby black market is
certainly there. This week a court in Quanzhou, Fujian province, sentenced a
man to death for leading a trafficking ring that shipped 44 children to an
adoption agency in Singapore over the past seven years. The children were
bought from parents for between 5000 and 10,000 yuan, and sold for at least
$S8000 ($6400) each, the court was told.
The government-to-government process between Australia and China, whatever the
bureaucratic lags involved, does at least seem to rule out this danger.
Once the parents are approved by state welfare officials in Australia, the
matching begins in Beijing. Some months later, the parents are sent brief
details and a photograph of their intended baby. There is no shopping around:
they must accept or reject.
Inevitably, the parents accept and are assigned to a batch of half a dozen
other couples from the same state, heading to pick up their children from the
same orphanage. Most probably this will be in a provincial capital like
Changsha in central China, or Kunming in the south-west.
More than 10 years ago, a TV documentary, The Dying Rooms, horrified viewers
outside China, with footage of orphanages in southern China where babies with
severe afflictions, deemed unadoptable and with limited life expectancy, were
being set aside for an early death by neglect.
China appears to have made genuine efforts to improve the physical condition of
the institutions and the care within. Increasingly, foreign welfare
organisations are being allowed to visit and help with new programs for the
children.
Jenny Bowen, an American who set up the Half the Sky Foundation in Beijing
after adopting her baby Maya in 1997, is now helping institutionalised children
in 10 provinces with projects in nutrition, staff training, stimulative
teaching in computers, English and dance for the older children.
"We could see all of the ill-effects of institutionalisation: two-year-olds
that could barely walk, couldn't speak." she said. "In a year's time we watched
an amazing transformation."
Even some of the orphanages regarded as the best run and equipped, like the one
in Fuling, a busy town on the Yangtze River, still have a long way to go,
however. A mother with some medical background who recently adopted a child
from Fuling said her little girl showed the effects of poor diet and low
stimulation.
"At 12 months she could barely turn herself over; she could not lift herself,
she didn't grab a toy if you put it in her bed, she didn't hold on if you
carried her, there was no eye contact, no fine motor skills like she couldn't
pinch, or rake things towards her and try to put them in her mouth, and she had
zero vocal skills," said the mother, who asked not to be named as she hopes to
adopt another Chinese child. "Still, it didn't take her long to catch up."
The parents spend a week or so bonding with their baby in the provincial city,
sign Chinese adoption papers, and hand over a $US3000 "donation" to the
orphanage concerned. Sometimes they visit the spot where the baby was
abandoned; sometimes they are allowed to look around the orphanage. In the case
of Australians, they then fly to Shanghai to organise an Australian visa.
The experience of earlier waves of Vietnamese and Korean children adopted by
Westerners, mostly Americans, is guiding new parents of Chinese babies towards
a closer study of Chinese culture.
Now in their 20s and 30s, many of these Asian adoptees are returning to explore
their roots. Sometimes they trace their birth parents. In grim South Korea two
or three decades ago, it was common for women to give up babies for adoption
because of poverty or the stigma of illegitimacy. Births and parents were
registered in many cases.
The world's new Chinese babies mostly won't have this connection. American
adopting mother Karin Evans writes in her book The Lost Daughters of China:
"For all the benefits of adoption into a loving family in the West there is a
loss of roots each small girl will deal with as she grows into adulthood,
coming of age halfway across the world, having lost the thread that might some
day lead her back."
Anticipating this, adopting families are trying innovative ways to build new
bonds for their children. For example, those with children from Fuling
orphanage, scattered across the US, are keeping in touch through their own
non-profit group and website, www.fulingkids.org. Another body set up by an
adopting parent, Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, runs summer courses in
Beijing in Chinese language, culture and martial arts for families to take in
their holidays.
As well as adopting a baby, the foreign parents are tending to find they have
adopted China as well, the only birth mother these children are likely to know.
Additional reporting by Liu Shuangxi
