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The following article is reprinted from the January 1996 issue of Ni Hao Ma, the newsletter of the Baltimore FCC.
I just returned from China with Daniel Ming, our second child. It seems everyone is aware of the fact that nearly all abandoned children in China are girls, and everyone wants to know how we "managed" to adopt a boy. We have now repeated Daniel's story so often, that I though it worthwhile towrite it down for the benefit of other families (and would-be families) in the support group.
Certainly we did not request a boy. The statistics would have made such a request foolhardy. From the beginning, however, our plan was to have two children. The decision to adopt from China guaranteed (we thought) that both kids would be girls.
We adopted our first child, Katy Tao, in October 1994. She was adopted from the Changzhou Children's Welfare Institute in Jiangsu province. By midsummer 1995 we felt recovered enough from the first adoption experience to start the paperwork for her sister. We naturally wanted to go back to the same orphanage, so contacted our agency and set things in motion. Near the end of the summer our facilitator called and asked us whether we were interested in a boy. After my wife and I picked each other off the floor, we asked ourselves a couple of troubling questions. Not surprisingly, these are the same two questions that everyone asks us: 1) why did someone abandon an allegedly healthy boy? and 2) why wasn't this boy adopted internally by a Chinese family? The answers to these questions shed a little light on Chinese culture. I should emphasis that the answers came from several sources we consider trustworthy and informed. Also, the answers seem plausible. Nevertheless, we cannot say with certainty that they are correct.
The documented facts are that Daniel Ming was abandoned at the Changzhou Railway Station when he was one month old and that he suffered from a serious case of pneumonia. Moreover, we understand that he was rushed to the hospital immediately upon his arrival at the orphanage and that because he was a boy, he received special treatment from the orphanage. This included the assignment of an orphanage nurse to accompany him around-the-clock at the hospital. He was sick for a long time, but was healthy by the time we found out that he existed, at age 4.5 months.
Why was he abandoned? It is possible that he was a second (or third) son and that because of this, and/or because of poverty ( he may have been brought from a rural area), his Chinese parents did not have access to the medical facilities required to treat his infection. His Chinese parents may have seen abandonment as his only chance for survival.
Why was he not adopted internally? In our previous visit the orphanage directors had told us that approximately two thirds of the infants in the orphanage were adopted internally by Chinese families (the rest are adopted by Americans, Canadians and Norwegians). Given this statistic and the fact that boys are so highly valued in China, it seemed implausible to us that Ming would not be adopted internally. The explanation appears to be that although adoption is legal in China, it is not 100% socially acceptable. Thus a family intending to adopt a child, will make the pretense that the child was born to them. This deception will work only if the child is very very young. Thus only the youngest infants have a good chance at internal adoption. Evidently, Ming was not adopted internally simply because he was too old by the time he was well enough to be adopted.
How unusual is it for a boy to be abandoned? Our facilitator in China informed me that less than 1% of abandoned infants are boys. This figure was later corroborated by Gregory Hulka of the American Consulate in Guangzhou, who informed me that of the 250 visas that are currently processed for orphaned children each month, less than 1% are for orphaned boys.
Anyway, that's his story. Daniel Ming is a another lucky little kid who beat the odds. He's also like his sister - incredibly cute! As for myself, I'm still not used to the idea that Katy has a little brother. The evidence? He's already successfully targeted me once while I was changing his diaper!