The Lost Girls of China

Posters looking for her biological parents

This morning on NPR a woman named Jenna Cook told her story. She was born in China and apparently left as a foundling near a bus station in a Chinese city, was adopted by an American couple, raised here. 

For her senior thesis at Yale, she decided to try to find her biologic parents and she went to China and posted posters about the town where she was found, asking if anyone knew who her parents were. 

A long shot, to say the least. 

More than One Child in this rural family

What was surprising in her report is that despite the "One Child" law in China, she discovered some rural families have 8,  even 12 kids. But the "One Child" law often played a role in abandonment of girls. If you can have only one child, you wanted it to be a boy, for some reason.  It's the girls who wind up in a bundle outside the bus station.  There is no law about abandoning infants in China, apparently, but there is that "One Child" law.

She expected to meet guilt-wracked mothers, but fathers of the abandoned showed up, often dissolved into tears, desperate to be told the infants they had abandoned had survived and prospered.

You'd think if this is a well established practice, the culture and the people would be so different from us, they would not have these feelings for the daughters they rejected. Colin Turnbull, the anthropologist, wrote a book called "The Mountain People" who lived a barely subsistence life, who laughed when an infant crawled into an open fire--one less mouth to feed. One might assume infant girls would be regarded in this way in China, if they are abandoned. 
 But no. 
Apparently, these Chinese parents did not give up their children without torment.  One mother knitted a gown for her daughter before she abandoned her,  but she kept part of the fabric, in hopes some day to be able to match the fabric to her long lost daughter who might keep part of the gown,  in hopes of finding her mother. Mothers who abandoned their daughters convinced themselves they would some day find them again, and devised various strategies to facilitate an eventual reunion.

The reasons these parents left their daughters out as foundlings were either financial-they simply did not think they could afford them--or legal, the One Child law. Second children could find themselves "non persons" in China, unable to register to go to school, unable to get a passport, officially considered to not exist.

Got room for me?

In "Freakonomics"  the authors examined a theory which explained the precipitate drop in the murder rate across the  United States in the 1990's by pointing to the legalization of abortion.  Just about 20 years after abortion became legal the murder rate plummeted across America. The theory was that a whole generation of unwanted babies, who would have become rejected, alienated young men,  never materialized and all those murders they would have committed never happened.  This is conjecture which contains in it an explosive level of race and class denigration, but the implications ought not prevent the exploration of the idea. 

When I was growing up, I certainly heard a lot of talk about big families and parents who had too many babies, so many kids they could not afford to  pay enough attention to them, to educate, to support all these kids.  Coming from a family with only two children, I somehow instinctively doubted this talk. It was often aimed at Catholic families, and the big Catholic families I knew cared for and educated their kids just fine--usually the older sisters acted as deputy mothers, riding herd on their younger siblings and these families seemed very functional. If the mother was too busy to pay attention, an older sibling did a fine job stepping in.

But the Chinese story suggests in certain circumstances, in certain cultures, children become a burden, an unsustainable burden.  Decades ago there was talk of the "population bomb" and great concern about unsustainable population, the danger posed to society by large families. Now, with the birth rates falling in developed nations and among the upper classes in the United States, we are hearing concerns about career women not having kids, or having too few.

One wonders whether one solution might be to transport the children from societies where they are a burden to societies where they are needed and wanted.