Chinese adoption gone wrong

I picked up my LA Times subscription this week and found a shocking story that really soured a topic that I've had mixed feelings about in the past: adoption of Chinese babies.

Yang Libing and his wife, Cao Zhimei, with their son. Their daughter was taken away in 2005. "Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products," said Yang, a migrant worker from Hunan province. He has since learned that their daughter is in the United States.

This LA Times story must be adopting parents' nightmare and one that doesn't seem possible outside of some crime fiction novel. Even though I try to cast some doubt on negative stories about China since not all the stories read on the internet are true I know there are plenty of other stories that never make it out of the country. I believe this is one of those true stories that has only just surfaced and will send shock waves across the world and hopefully where it counts - the adoption agency networks.

Something has to be fixed! What does this say about the Chinese system, the officials who hold power and the agencies that govern the adoption process? Nothing in the remedy will ever be enough for the parents that lost a child or the parents that gained one.

This is one of the saddest stories I've read and I think the last paragraphs of the article capture the reality of what has been created in the name of greed. I wonder if the author of White Swan will update her book with a new chapter.

"In Philadelphia, Wendy Mailman, who adopted in 2005 from the orphanage in Zhenyuan that took in confiscated babies, now questions everything she was told about the girl who orphanage officials said was born in September and abandoned in January.

"Why would a mother who didn't want a baby girl be so heartless as to wait until the dead of winter to abandon her?" she said. She wonders what she would do if she discovered that her daughter was one of the stolen babies. She knows she could never return the Americanized 6-year-old, who is obsessed with "SpongeBob" and hates the Chinese culture classes her mother enrolled her in. But she said, "I would certainly want to tell the birth family that your daughter is alive and happy and maybe send a picture."

"It would be up to my daughter later if she wanted to build a relationship," she said. For many birth families, that would be enough.

"We'd never make her come back, because a girl raised in the West wouldn't want to live in a poor village like this," said Yang Shuiying's mother-in-law, Yang Jinxiu.

"But we'd like to know where she is. We'd like to see a picture. And we'd like her to know that we miss her and that we didn't throw her away."