the lost daughters of china.

"Each of your birth mothers was not sure, but she wanted to do her best for you for the last time. She might have traveled as far as her money allowed her, to a richer area and a busier market where she would lay you down and hide you inside lotus roots or celery leaves. I am sure she would watch you from a distance, hiding herself behind a crowd or in a bush. There she would experience a kind of death. She would suffer until someone picked you up and yelled. She would try, try hard no to answer the call--Whose child?--not to run toward you. She would bite her lips until they bled. For her you will forever be a "broken arm hidden in her sleeve."

*Excerpt from Anchee Min's "A Letter to All the Lost Daughters of China"

I recently started reading Karin Evans' The Lost Daughters of China. It's a memoir about abandoned Chinese baby girls, their journey to America, and their unknown pasts. As a strong advocate of adoption (especially international adoption), I was curiously drawn to this book. But as I picked it off the shelf and paid for it, I had no idea it would have such a profound effect on me.

As the author writes, I hear my voice...I see my story unfold in the future as I read it in the present. I relate to the author's past (living in China; being adopted by my father). I feel the author's turmoil as she proceeds through two years of paperwork, bureaucratic scrutiny, and uncertainty. I feel the tingle and swelling of joy as she is handed rice paper imprinted with a perfect red foot no bigger than an index finger. I cry when the nurses thrust the warm, wrapped bundle in the author's arms. For the first time everything I have thought for so long has been put into words...translated into feelings.

But the greatest thing about this book is its brutal honesty. It teaches you about the horrors of Chinese laws and social construct. It displays the atrocities women have endured for thousands of years in China. It conveys--with great clarity and empathy--the deepest sorrow one must ever endure: the abandonment of a mother's miracle...

This baby's mother and possibly her father had held her, fed her, carried her, for at least three months before she was found and taken to the orphanage. Babies have persuasive powers to make us love them and three months is a long time. How unspeakably hard it must have been to walk away. And yet someone had. While I was in San Francisco, fretting about bureaucratic logjams, someone in south China was bundling up that beautiful three-month-old for a last trip to the marketplace.

It was an act so momentous that I'd often find myself trying to conjure the story from the few details I knew.

One day I will adopt my own little girl. I will teach her Chinese and English and help her reconcile her western upbringing with her eastern blood. I will help her understand that "the Yangtze River runs in (her) blood, and the time dust of the yellow-earth culture frames (her) bones." I will teach her both the beautiful and horrifying aspects of her culture and history. I will help her realize her worth and her beauty. And when she struggles with her past--not able to understand why her mother would abandon her--I will teach her about the greatest act of sacrifice and love: the moment her mother laid her down for the last time, praying her daughter would reach me.

I hope all abandoned girls and boys find their way into loving families. I pray that all of these children understand that the greatest love is sometimes disguised in the most horrendous situations.