Adam Minter [2] and Jeannine Ouellette [3]

Viewed from room 1238 of the White Swan Hotel, the jagged ten-story tenements of Guangzhou, China, are softened by smog. Below, the United States Consulate complex sprawls beside century-old British colonial structures. “Pretty good view, isn’t it?” asks Paul Stueber, an earnest forty-four-year-old drum instructor from Minneapolis. He packs a baby bottle into a blue backpack. Beside him, his wife, Laurel, a forty-year-old schoolteacher, holds their newly adopted daughter, Olivia Ya Qun Stueber, age approximately fourteen months.

“You have our passports, Paul?”

“Yeah, I think I’ve got everything.”

Paul makes a last, quick scan of the room where they have spent four days awaiting Olivia’s immigrant visa. The bed is covered with toys. A crib stands beside it. A folder stuffed thick with adoption-related documents is on the dresser. The Stuebers ride a dimly lit elevator car to the ground floor and join five families with whom they have spent the last two weeks traveling southern China. “Hey, Laurel,” exclaims an exuberant mother from Stillwater, her arms filled with her own infant Chinese daughter. “How’s Olivia?” The Stuebers merge into a mass group status report on feeding times, sleep schedules, colds, parent-child attachment, and current levels of apprehension regarding the transportation of the group’s six newly adopted children on long international flights.

Unnoticed, the elevator discharges a young Chinese businessman and his two elderly parents. At first they don’t hesitate at the sight of white faces (the White Swan is favored by foreign businesspeople), but when the mother notices the Chinese babies, she stops mid-step, mouth agape. She and her family whisper through astonished smiles, and begin a slow circuit of the group, gazing upon them as if they were fine statuary. “Fat and healthy,” the mother declares in Mandarin. “Very good,” she adds in English, with a thumbs-up that is reciprocated by one of the new fathers.

The elevator opens again and out walks Shirley Hu, a diminutive China-based adoption representative for Children’s Home Society and Family Services, a Minnesota-based agency providing adoption services across the U.S. “Everyone have passports?” The families fall behind her in a line out the door and into the lush colonial elegance of Shamian Island. “Families always call me Mother Duck,” confides the thirty-one-year-old Shanghai native, her voice rising into a giggle. “I hate it!” She walks in rapid, evenly paced steps, shoulders back, chin raised, and she never looks back. “They will not let me out of their sight,” she says with a confidence derived from leading hundreds of adoption groups through China.

They pass dozens of American parents strolling with newly adopted Chinese babies and bypass shops with English language signs (Jenny’s Place, Susan’s Place) jammed with overpriced souvenirs and laundry services priced to beat the White Swan’s. At a parkway, they turn left and approach a long line of visa applicants awaiting interviews at the Consulate. Shirley walks right past them and shows the guard her passport and appointment letter. Immediately, she and the group are cleared to continue into a low-slung building where bags are X-rayed and everyone walks through a metal detector before crossing a courtyard and entering the ten-story consulate building.

Inside, past another security checkpoint, a sign announces “American Citizen Section; Adoption Unit; Department Homeland Security.” Arrows point upstairs into a thirty-foot-long room dominated by a service counter and, behind it, the Adoption Unit’s office cubicles. Approximately twenty other families are already in the room, awaiting the oath that completes their adoptions. Shirley’s families are ushered to a small window where a secretary checks their passports against the consulate’s documents. When this is done, an American woman emerges from the offices with a microphone. “You are to be congratulated on completing this process and adopting your children,” she says, her voice broadcast through the room. “There’s only one last hoop to jump through. Please raise your right hand.” She pauses. “Do you swear or affirm that the information you provided the consulate is true and correct to the best of your knowledge?”

The room rumbles with unsynchronized yeses and I dos.

“Congratulations. Have a safe trip home.”

At the far end of the room Laurel smiles at Olivia and coos, “Congratulations, sweetheart.” Paul places his right index finger into Olivia’s tiny left hand. “We’re going home,” he says in a high-pitched baby-talk voice.

U.S. citizens adopt more Chinese orphans than children of any other nationality except their own, and it is a growing phenomenon. Since 1995, more than thirty-three thousand Chinese orphans have been granted visas to immigrate to the United States; in 2004 alone, 6,910 Chinese orphans, including Olivia Ya Qun Stueber, were granted immigrant status. “It seems like everyone I know happens to know somebody who wanted to talk to me about what it was like when they adopted in China,” explained a mother who was part of the Stuebers’ adoption group. “This is just not so weird anymore.”

Paul and Laurel Stueber are not unusual adoptive parents; Ya Qun Luo is not an unusual Chinese orphan. The process by which they were declared a family was long ago organized into a set of steps, particularly in China, that can be precisely charted on a timeline. But just like a healthy pregnancy, that predictable process inevitably acquired its own unique narrative and personality.

Around the corner from Southwest High School in Minneapolis is a tidy white bungalow. Solar lanterns line the straight front walkway, and directly in front of the house, hostas and lilies poke out in symmetrical rows. Though close to a school, the yard is unmarred by plastic toys or stroller wheels or sidewalk chalk.

There is, however, one small sticker affixed to the front door, reminding firefighters of the pets inside—two pampered cats. Laurel Stueber gently brushes them from the couch before joining Paul on the love seat with a cup of hot coffee and soy milk. On the coffee table are two photographs of the little girl whom the Stuebers have yet to meet but are already beginning to call their daughter. “That’s our baby, that’s our child,” says Laurel. “Now she’s real. You see her face, you know who she is,” she continues, becoming tearful. “The waiting is so much harder because you know she’s there, you want to see her and hold her and find out everything about her and all you have is what’s written on the paper. So we look at her picture every day, and we miss her. It’s hard. It’s hard to wait.”

That same anticipation permeates the small corner bedroom that awaits Olivia Ya Qun. The walls are a glowing salmon color, and the sheer appliquéd curtains grazing the oak floor are pulled back to allow the sun to shine through white mini-blinds. Two antique wooden dressers are polished to a gleam, and in the corner near the window sits the fully dressed crib. Despite the loving appointments, the room is, more than anything else, occupied by emptiness.

“We had tried for a few years to have a child,” explains Laurel, “and then I was diagnosed with endometriosis. I was thirty-eight.” After a dizzying introduction to all the options for fertility treatments, potential surgeries, and the attendant odds and risks, the Stuebers turned away. “You’re considered high-risk for pregnancy at my age, and so you’re told about everything that might go wrong,” she says. “We considered all that, and the fact that fertility treatments don’t always work. We knew it wasn’t for us. We felt more comfortable with adoption, and we were drawn to international adoption right from the start.”

The retelling is so matter-of-fact it makes it sound as if the decision to forgo childbirth was easy and painless. It wasn’t. “I didn’t have to grieve, exactly, over deciding between fertility treatments and adoption, because I did have—I did have a child that was stillborn several years before that,” says Laurel. She is staring to her left, beyond the picture window, and her eyes are filled with tears again. The cat jumps up beside her. “I just didn’t want to go through—.” Laurel stops and waits until she can speak again. “I was twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time. I had to go through birth in my fifth month, knowing. We just let it go after that, we didn’t really try. I wasn’t ready. We wanted to make sure we were stable in our careers. We just said for now we’re going to go on with our lives and so forth. Then when we were finally ready to try again, nothing happened.”

Doctors determined that the stillborn child’s kidneys had failed to develop due to a rare abnormality. “They said it wasn’t genetic, just one of those odd things. But it was such a devastating blow, and then when you hear all the scary statistics, all the things that can happen when you get pregnant at an older age—I just didn’t want to go through that again. We were ready for a child and it wasn’t that important that it be a biological child. We just wanted a child to complete our family.”

There are no reliable statistics on why Americans choose to adopt, but fertility issues play a role in the majority of adoptions, particularly among prospective first-time parents in their late thirties. “There are risks with the adoption route, too,” Paul says quietly. Indeed, there are risks of delays and of health and development problems in the adoptive child, but these are minor in comparison to the one unacceptable risk to which Laurel keeps recurring, the one that ends in childlessness. So, shortly after Laurel’s diagnosis, the Stuebers set out to investigate local adoption agencies.

Children’s Home Society and Family Services, like most larger agencies, provides parents with informational meetings that expose them to all adoption options, including American adoption and a menu of international programs. The reasons for choosing one type of program over another range from the intensely personal to the financial. American adoption is often preferred because detailed health records typically exist in regard to birth parents; conversely, international adoption is sometimes chosen precisely because there is little information on birth parents, and thus little to no risk of that birth parent contacting the child. Cost, too, plays a role: Fees for adopting in Guatemala can exceed twenty thousand dollars while China costs less than half as much.

From the start, China was the right fit for the Stuebers. Partly, this was because Laurel has taught so many Asian children as a primary school teacher. But the predictability of China adoption relative to other options was also appealing. “China is a pretty stable program,” Laurel says. “And that’s important, because when you start the adoption process with the international program, you know things could change, there could be some delays, but they always told us that in the end, you will have your child, even if there are bumps along the way.” U.S. State Department officials involved in international adoption cite China’s adoption programs as the most honest, transparent, and fair in the world. Of course, these programs are made possible by a large and uncountable population of Chinese orphans, most of whom are girls.

The reasons for China’s orphan girls are many, including China’s restrictive “One Child” population control policy, cultural preferences for male children, and simple economics. Whatever the reason, in legal terms, for a Chinese child to be eligible for adoption, that child must have literally been abandoned. That is, the child must be found in a public space and the birth parents must be untraceable. No figures exist on the number of children abandoned annually in China, nor on the number of orphans in China’s orphanages, nor on the number of orphans outside of those orphanages. What is certain is that the orphans far outnumber the thousands of foreign parents seeking to adopt in China every year.

For American families, the adoption process starts in earnest with a pre-adoptive counseling class, followed by an adoption home study in which parents write up what amounts to a study of their life, including reflections on family of origin and current relationships, as well as child-rearing philosophies and “cross-cultural ideas.” The exercise is intended to be self-reflective and is replete with family history and personal strengths and weaknesses. For example, according to the Stuebers’ homework, Laurel believes that she lacks organizational skills, and Paul would like to express thoughts and feelings without being urged. The paperwork is copious, intrusive, and serious: It is reviewed by a lawyer who specializes in Chinese adoptions, and then forwarded to Beijing for approval, translation, and “matching” in the China Center for Adoption Affairs “matching room.” Long a source of mystery and apprehension for adoptive families, the matching room and the matching process is mostly about scheduling available adoption groups with available orphanages. Typically, nine months pass from the time parents enter the China program to the time they receive a referral call from Children’s Home Society and Family Services. “That was Wednesday, and you were actually home,” Laurel reminds Paul. “Wednesday is your day off.”

“Yeah, I remember picking up the call,” says Paul, “and the social worker said, ‘We have some news for you. We’ve got your referral.’ It was real brief. I was just trying to write down the pertinent details. I was mostly thinking of Laurel, and then the social worker said she could email us a picture,” Paul recalls. “So then the picture came, and a couple days later we got to go to the office to pick up the actual packet with all the real information, the photos, the medical report, everything they know about her.”

“We miss her,” says Laurel. “We worry about her.” She is crying again. “It’s just so hard to wait. We just want to get on a plane right now.”

The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is quiet on departure day. Paul and Laurel are quiet, too, distracted in equal measures by the enormity of what lies ahead and the intensity of what they’ve left behind. All of the packing and panicking and checking their lists again and again—what about the Pedialyte? And the gifts? Documentation?—has left them wired and dazed. Especially Laurel, who considers herself disorganized in the first place. But things were as ready as they were going to be by the time Laurel’s sister dropped the couple off at the airport and drove away.

Outside the security checkpoint, anxiety and anticipation cooperate to fend off exhaustion for the sleep-deprived parents-to-be. Their nerves, however, are left woefully exposed in the process. On the waiting bench beside the escalator, Laurel is weeping again. A hurried businesswoman dressed in a navy suit veers widely past, averting her gaze from one more airport drama. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to keep doing this,” Laurel says through tears. The backpack on her shoulder suggests utter practicality and preparation, but the tissue is inaccessible. Paul struggles to find a Kleenex, a napkin, anything.

Laurel pulls herself together and smoothes back her hair, which was recently cut. Once nearly grazing her waist, it now hangs in a smooth, practical bob just below her shoulders. “Mom” length. She looks youthful and determined and, in a way, a lot like a woman in the early stages of labor after a major nesting frenzy.

“It’s hard to wait, but up until now we’ve been so busy that there’s been no time to stop and think,” Laurel says, composed once more. “But we’re lucky to have as much support as we do. My family, Paul’s family, they’re all so excited. Especially now—.”

“It’s amazing,” Paul blurts into the silence. “Even the pharmacist, when we stopped to get the medicines on the list, was incredibly positive about what we’re doing.”

Finally, flight time is less than an hour away, and it no longer seems too early to go through the security checkpoint. They gather their boarding passes and drivers’ licenses. They step into the queue to the metal detector. For a long moment, they stare at each other. Paul drapes his arm around his wife, and together, they wait their turn.

Shanghai Airlines flight 9391 from Shanghai to Changsha leaves the gate at 9 a.m. Shirley Hu slouches into aisle seat 4C, crosses her legs, and pages through a fashion magazine, blithely aware that China Air flight 1343 from Beijing to Changsha is already in the air, carrying the Stuebers and other families she has been assigned by Children’s Home Society and Family Services.

Like most Chinese who work with foreigners, Shirley adopted an English name to help foreigners who find Chinese names difficult to pronounce and remember. Her given name is Hu Siwei, and at age thirty-one her delicate complexion is still defined by apple-red cheeks. When she talks, her fine brow rises gently, but when she is hard at work, that soft complexion creases, and she sets her round mouth flat and hard. “I was awake at five a.m. today,” she says with a giggle that drops to a scratchy growl, “calling the hotel to see what kind of cooperation they could offer on a meeting room.”

Below, Shanghai’s smog gives way to mountains and rivers rendered brown by the sprawling towns and factories of China’s interior. As the flight heads south, the mountains seethe into green valleys that, though still rendered hazy by smokestacks, suggest genuine countryside. After an hour, Hunan Province’s northern mountains emerge. The hillsides are terraced by farms that drive the region’s meager agricultural economy. Soon, Changsha, a city of seven million, begins as a series of monumental factories gouged from geometric farms.

The plane lands and Shirley navigates the airport’s new steel and glass with impatient familiarity. She strides past baggage, where she claims a small suitcase that wheels behind her, and into a parking lot under a relentless sun. “Where is the bus that should be waiting for us?” she asks as she sends a cell phone text message to the driver and continues walking. “There it is,” she says, and turns hard to the right, cancels the call, and tosses her bag into the baggage holder while giving the driver precise instructions. Then she turns back to the terminal and sets herself at the center of the rail that separates baggage claim from the outside world. “The flight is late,” she says, glancing at the arrivals screen. “But not too late.”

The China Center for Adoption Affairs licenses approximately one hundred agencies worldwide to facilitate the adoption of Chinese orphans, and many of them work with Chinese nationals like Hu to guide groups through the process in China. It has not always been this way: In the late eighties and early nineties, U.S. citizens who chose to adopt in China did so without the benefit of any governing law or process (in 1991 U.S. citizens sonehow managed to adopt sixty-one Chinese orphans). In January 1994, after the establishment of formal licensing, Children’s Home Society and Family Services sent its first adoption group to the city of Hangzhou, two hours south of Shanghai by train, in Zhejiang Province, with a U.S.-based representative. Demand grew almost too quickly. In 1996, the agency coordinated 134 adoptions in Zhejiang Province and soon decided that it could no longer handle the caseload without local help.

Shirley Hu was one of ten university students recommended to the agency by a Hangzhou music teacher. “At the time it was very unusual,” she recalls with a laugh. “I remember thinking, ‘What are all of these foreigners doing with Chinese babies?’ ” In advance of her interview, a Children’s Home Society and Family Services representative observed how she and the other students related to a visiting American adoption group. The personable Hu did well, but what really impressed were the peculiar skills that she had developed as a secretary to a senior official at a food company. “I had some power,” she explains. “I could give free gifts. Of course, it was done in my company’s name, but the relationship was between you and me.” As a result of her gift-giving at the food company, Hu was able to develop a “good connection in Zhejiang government.” During her subsequent interview with Children’s Home Society and Family Services, Shirley mentioned “that I could maybe make a seven-month wait for passports into a seven-day wait.” She was hired. “Today it is much different and the process is quick and orderly,” Hu concludes. “But in those days, it was very difficult.”

The ten adults and seven children arriving from the United States via Beijing do not need any identification: They are the only white people in Changsha’s airport. Hu, however, clips a red name badge to her coat in preparation for her role as greeter. One couple carries a Chinese toddler adopted on an earlier trip led by Shirley, and they greet her as an old friend. The Stuebers are last, and they walk through the gate with tired eyes but enthusiastic smiles, climb onto the waiting bus and take second-row seats. The driver tunes the radio to new-age Chinese flute music that Shirley demands be turned off. She then grabs the tour guide’s microphone and flips the switch. “Hello, I’m Shirley.”

“Hi, Shirley,” the group drones in response.

“I will be helping you the next two weeks in Changsha and Guangzhou. If you ever have questions or problems, you know, just find me.”

“Shirley?” someone calls from the back. “Babies today?”

“Yes,” she answers. “At four we will go to the Provincial Civil Affairs building.”

Paul and Laurel glance at each other.

The bus speeds down a new expressway and the passengers drop into a murmur as they watch the passing countryside, its concrete tenements fronted by small farm plots tended by hand. The landscape is yellow, brutal, and uniform for half an hour, and then, suddenly, the traffic tightens as the expressway ends at a stoplight. Motorcycles and bicycles weave among the vehicles. Wiry men, weighed by loads hung from bamboo poles that rest across their shoulders, shuffle across the road. It is a crowded, foreign environment, scattered with trash, choked with exhaust, and filled with life. For most of the passengers, it is entirely novel, but the conversations are elsewhere. “In a couple of hours we’ll meet her,” Paul says, his gaze set out the window. “And everything changes.”

“At the hotel,” Shirley says as the bus staggers through downtown’s traffic, “pay the porter twenty yuan.”

The twenty-six-story Grand Sun City Hotel’s rooms are the most Western in Changsha, rendering it home base for the thousands of European and American families who adopt Hunanese orphans every year. The management has learned to cater to the clientele; when Paul and Laurel arrive on the eleventh floor they find a lobby covered with a rubber-padded play area and buckets of baby toys. When they open the door to room 1111, there is a crib beside their bed.

Shortly after check-in, the Stuebers venture into the hotel’s garish red and gold ballroom for a mandatory group meeting with Shirley. Paul and Laurel sit and set a folder of documents on the table in front of them. They are noticeably tense and, unlike the other couples, don’t have much to say. Shirley begins by explaining the schedule and the documents that the parents will need when they meet their children. “Please be in the lobby at three-thirty for the bus,” she says.

“What should I bring for my baby?” A parent asks. “Small toys” Shirley replies without much concern. “Diapers. Don’t worry.”

“Courage!” someone volunteers to nervous laughs.

Shirley smiles, then moves to the topic of gifts. Each couple was instructed many months ago to bring gifts for the government officials they’d be encountering. “I prefer you divide the gifts into three or four bags and keep the better gifts in separate bags for the leaders,” she says. “In China, leaders are very important. They make decisions.” A brief discussion ensues during which the group agrees that all gifts should be delivered to Shirley’s hotel room where she can sort them as she deems appropriate.

“Now we can do some paperwork.” Shirley holds up a Chinese adoption decree and patiently instructs the group on the specific information that must be written in it. “Here, the father’s passport name,” she says, then pauses. “Next, your work unit—.” She stops, smiles, and corrects herself, “Your workplace.” Another pause. “Next, write why you want to adopt a Chinese baby. You know, you like Chinese culture, whatever.” Paul listens with careful intensity while Laurel writes the answers. Her hand is so tight that it turns white around the pen. “I may look like I’m holding it together,” she says. “But inside—.” She takes a deep breath and tries to smile.

By 3:20 the group members are in a nervous cluster beside the lobby concierge desk. They carry bottles, toys, backpacks, and diaper bags. Laurel’s pulse beats visibly in her neck as she shuffles apart from the group. Paul stands beside her and takes deep breaths that rock the video camera hanging from his neck. At exactly 3:30, Shirley emerges from the elevator. Smiling, she exudes calm and ease. The group follows her out the door and into the bus. Boarding last, Paul and Laurel take the same seats that they had occupied earlier, two rows back. The bus departs and Shirley takes a front seat, arms crossed, staring straight ahead. “Excuse me, Shirley?” Laurel leans forward in her seat with the official Notice of Coming to China for Adoption. “How do we say her name?”

Shirley checks the sheet and answers, “Ya chun.”

“Ya chwin,” Laurel answers, exchanging the strange word several times with Paul until they mostly have it.

The bus navigates a warren of crowded city streets jammed with weaving lime-green taxis. Around a corner, a school lets out and the collective attention of the group turns to the teenagers streaming from the gates in identical blue and white track uniforms. Past a park where seniors are practicing tai chi, the road narrows into a commercial neighborhood where goods ranging from produce to TVs are sold from storefronts. Crowds of people move along the sidewalks and into the streets regardless of the rate or quantity of traffic. “There’s a lot going on,” Laurel says quietly.

The bus slows and turns right, then pauses while a car exits from behind a security gate. Someone asks, “Is this it?”

The bus rolls over the gate track and comes to a final stop. Shirley stands and announces, “Third floor. We’re going to the third floor.” As the group members disembark they squint upward at a dirty, thirteen-story white tile tower. Paul stops to take video before following the others into a dark lobby filled with a nasty, pungent odor. As the group waits, voices become loud and nervous and exaggerated laughter explodes at nothing in particular. Two elevator cars open simultaneously. Paul and Laurel crowd into the left one. Shirley goes to the right and calls out, “Third floor!”

When the doors open, everyone turns to an open door ten feet down the red-carpeted fluorescent hallway. The first ones who reach it stop at the sight of something to the immediate left. Shirley slides past into a stifling hot room fifty feet across and twenty feet wide. It is appointed with cheap wood paneling. A large plastic Mickey Mouse hangs on the far wall next to a clock. Across from Mickey is Minnie, and below Minnie is a bench where five women and one man hold six babies dressed in identical red satin winter pajamas and hats. They look like gifts waiting to be given.

Voices drop to excited whispers as a tittering semicircle forms around the bench, yet nobody dares venture closer than three feet from the babies and caregivers. The caregivers move their eyes between the babies, whom they bounce and coddle, and the foreigners; the foreigners stare back at the babies, some through tears, and some through camera lenses. Meanwhile, the babies stare with shocked, expressionless eyes at the white faces. They are approximately one year old.

The sole man on the bench has a little girl whose eyes are large and match those in the black-and-white photo printed on the Stuebers’ adoption license. “That’s her on that man’s knee,” Laurel whispers to Paul. “That’s her.”

The room quickly devolves into a chaos of picture requests and laughter. The babies remain serene in their shock, but the caregivers begin to shift and look toward the men and women surrounding Shirley at the door. “I want everyone on that side of the room,” Shirley demands, but the group’s attention is focused on the children. She shrugs and continues. “Okay, first I would like to introduce the provincial official in charge of the adoptions, Ms. Zhang.” She nods at a tall woman in a yellow sweater, skin-tight plaid pants, and knee-high leather boots. “And next, Mister Wang, the orphanage director.” He is fifty-ish, in a black suit, and he seems bewildered by that fact that nobody is listening. “We will call the name of your baby and you must come forward with your passport and the Notice of Coming to China for Adoption. If everything matches they will give you the baby.” Still, nobody seems to be listening.

“Okay, Ya Qun!” Shirley calls out.

The Stuebers approach with expectant smiles and shaking hands. Laurel hands over the passports and required documents while Paul films. As Zhang examines the documents, the man holding Ya Qun hands her over to a female Changsha government employee. The red cap on Ya Qun’s head is beginning to fall over her wide eyes. Still, she remains calm, her only expression being slightly parted lips and a shocked stare at the open palm of a hand she holds aloft. The passports check out and Paul and Laurel are directed to stand in front of Ya Qun. Shirley holds up the notification next to Ya Qun’s face and nods at the photo in its lower left corner. “Is it the same face?” she asks the Stuebers.

Laurel starts to cry. “Yes, yes,” she answers, tears falling over her cheeks. “We knew it when we walked in.” She holds out her arms and Zhang signals for Ya Qun to be placed into them. Laurel takes the shocked little girl tightly to her breast as tears fall onto her red cap. Paul stops filming and steps forward. “It’s me,” he says, leaning over wife and daughter. “It’s me.”

Ya Qun looks at Laurel, but the stare is empty. She looks out at the room, but her eyes are blank and confused. Her mouth is parted slightly, but without expression. Her arms hang lifelessly by her side. Flashbulbs turn her, but only momentarily.

“She’s so beautiful,” Laurel says. “I knew it was her.”

Shirley and the others are already elsewhere, introducing another family to another shocked little girl. But the Stuebers don’t notice. Laurel presses her cheek to Ya Qun’s head, and Paul stands back, smiling. “We knew it was her,” they say to anyone who comes close. “We could tell when we walked in.”

With each introduction, the room becomes a little warmer and a lot louder. Surprisingly, though, only one baby cries. The others, like Ya Qun, seem too shocked to speak. Somehow, in the chaos, everyone missed the exit of the men and women who had delivered the babies from the orphanage. “Okay, let’s go!” Shirley calls out once everyone has been united. The group arrived at 3:50. It departs at 4:30. In the elevator, through the lobby, and into the bus, voices soften and drain into simple cooing and baby talk, if anything at all. “They fed the babies before we came,” Shirley announces as the bus rolls past the gate. “So the next meal should be around 5:30.”

Laurel holds Ya Qun to her breast and watches out the window. She is smiling, even through the occasional tears. Paul leans over and smiles at his daughter, and though Laurel has yet to let him hold her, he doesn’t seem to mind. Ya Qun’s big eyes stare at everything and nothing; she hardly moves except to open her hands and gaze at them.

Outside, in an adjacent lane, the passengers on a Changsha bus demand that their driver keep pace with the bus full of foreigners holding the Chinese babies. A cabdriver notices the same strange cargo and nearly swerves into the bus as he gawks. “That was close,” Laurel comments.

Paul loosens his crossed arms and offers his left pinkie to Ya Qun’s open hands. Without looking, she wraps her palm around it.

The Stuebers’ first ten minutes alone as a family are devoted to Ya Qun’s diaper and outfit. “She was completely drenched in sweat when I changed her,” Laurel says as she lies across the bed in room 1111, her head perched upon her palm, watching Ya Qun in white cotton pajamas covered in pink hearts. Paul emerges from the bathroom with a baby bottle. Laurel stands and takes it. “I think it might be too hot,” she says confidently. As she taps the nipple on her wrist, the formula squirts across the room. There is a knock at the door and Shirley arrives with the paperwork.

“How is everything?” she asks. “The baby is happy?” Paul and Laurel nod affirmatively and Shirley sits at a small desk lodged between the window and television. The first document is an “attachment agreement” providing the Stuebers with one night to decide whether or not they Untitled Document want to keep Ya Qun. Paul takes Shirley’s place at the desk and signs.

“Usually you sign this on the second day,” Shirley explains as she sets the formal adoption agreement in front of Paul. “But to save time tomorrow, we’ll sign it today.” Paul signs without hesitation, and so does Laurel.

Shirley then places a single sheet of paper covered in numbered Chinese sentences on the desk. “These are the answers to the questions you sent to the orphanage,” she explains. Laurel watches over Paul’s left shoulder as he takes notes on Shirley’s translation. “There was no birth note, so her age is a doctor’s guess,” Shirley begins. “The orphanage named her Luo Ya Qun. The name ‘Luo’ was given to all of the babies at the orphanage. In ancient times all the people in the area had that name.”

Laurel repeats it, and so does Paul.

“It says that she gets on very well with other people,” Shirley continues. “Her personality is quiet and she’s afraid of strangers.”

Paul and Laurel look at each other. “Well ... ”

“So far, so good,” Laurel laughs.

“She likes to stand by the bed and play. If you put her in a walker she runs very fast. She likes to smile. She likes soft music. She can sleep through the night.” Shirley pauses. “She’s very healthy and never had a problem. The orphanage says it would like to know everything about her in the future. They would like you to send pictures every year.” Shirley writes down the orphanage’s address in English and then places a sheet containing care instructions on the desk. “At six-forty please feed her formula mixed with rice cereal,” she says, then waits for Paul to write the translation, repeating the process through multiple feeding times. “At eight-thirty she needs to go to sleep. She should have two naps, at nine and one.”

When she is finished Shirley gathers up the documents and moves toward the door. “Today is a big day for the baby,” she concludes. “And sometimes they refuse the bottle. I had one baby refuse for five days, so you’ll need to be patient for her to accept you.”

Laurel begins to tear up at this news.

“Don’t worry,” Shirley assures her. “She’s already started to accept you. I can see it.”

The next morning at 9:05, a group of French parents and their newly adopted Chinese daughters gather in the lobby. The staff pays them little attention, but several Chinese businessmen are shocked at white parents with Chinese babies, and so remain at a distance, watching the group until it leaves for the airport. At 9:30, Shirley strides alone out of one elevator just as two others disgorge her families. Unlike the other families, the Stuebers appear well rested. “I don’t know,” Paul says with a shrug. “She slept pretty good. Better than us.” Ya Qun wears a red hoodie over red plaid pajamas and wraps her arms around Laurel’s left shoulder. “She even has a little cold,” Laurel says as she adjusts a pink blanket around her daughter.

Shirley encourages the group to board the waiting bus. “Before we go, I want to make sure that everyone has passports, the letter of final approval, and the three thousand dollars.” There is no response.

Twenty minutes later, the group is on the third floor of Civil Affairs where yet another French adoption group is completing its paperwork. The Americans nod at the French, and the French smile at the Americans, but there is no mingling. Shirley strides down the hallway carrying gift bags stuffed with Oil of Olay, Twins caps, and Care Bear hand towels, in addition to a plastic bag jammed with adoption paperwork. Over the next two hours she will coordinate the legal adoption of the six orphans. “This will be crazy,” she concedes as she enters the airy office where Ms. Zhang sits at a desk positioned below a wall-sized watercolor landscape. “How are the babies?” Zhang asks.

Shirley sets the files on the desk and the gifts beside Zhang’s chair. “Everyone is happy.”

Zhang pointedly ignores the gifts and shuffles through the documents. “We can start with the interviews.” Shirley fetches the Stuebers and guides them into the office. They enter cautiously, even though they’ve been told in advance that the interview is perfunctory. Zhang greets them: “Come in, come in!”

They sit, and Paul hands over their passports and documents. Ya Qun settles into Laurel’s arms and stares at Zhang. “Your baby’s name is Ya Qun,” Zhang says and then leans across the desk with a big smile and speaks directly to her. “Ya Qun! Ya Qun, hello!” Ya Qun smiles for the first time that morning. “She is very beautiful,” Zhang adds. “Are you happy with her?”

“Yes, very,” Laurel answers over Paul’s answer of “absolutely.”

“Then if you have no problem with this baby, please, your thumbprints next to the signatures.” Zhang spreads out the adoption documents signed the evening before. Paul and Laurel dab their thumbs into a red ink pad and then press them, elbows raised high, into the space beside their signatures.

“Now, your baby’s footprint.”

Laurel removes Ya Qun’s left sock and holds her while Zhang gently presses her foot against the inkpad and adoption agreement. When she is done, Zhang wipes the foot clean with a tissue and Ya Qun settles back into Laurel’s lap with a blank stare. “Ya Qun! Ya Qun!” Zhang says loudly until the little girl looks at her. “Ya Qun! Bye-bye! Bye-bye, Ya Qun!”

The Stuebers return to the main room and quietly play with Ya Qun in a corner away from the other families, but the intimacy is interrupted by the chaotic entrance of orphanage workers carrying nine crying children soon to be adopted by another American adoption group. Shirley returns nonplussed and calls out, “I need one person from each family to come with me to pay the three thousand dollars.” Paul volunteers and accompanies five other parents down the hallway to a blue door hung with two signs: Revenue Dept.; Donation Room. Inside, a woman in her early twenties places her right thumb in a rubber thumb-stick and gestures for Paul to hand over the money. She counts it—thirty one-hundred-dollar bills—by hand, then runs it through a counting machine and gives Paul a “Donation Certificate.”

After the money is collected, Shirley rushes back to the stifling main room, grabs a family, and escorts them to a small white room where a photographer has arranged lights and a bench. The Stuebers are second to last, and though Paul and Laurel smile, Ya Qun doesn’t. When the photos are done, Shirley presents the families with typed adoption decrees for proofreading. “Wait!” Paul exclaims. “This isn’t ours!” Shirley taps her forehead and exchanges the Stuebers’ decree with another family’s. At the top, without explanation, is the number 1832. “That means Ya Qun was the one thousand eight hundred and thirty-second baby adopted by foreigners in Hunan Province this year,” Shirley explains. After being approved, the decrees are notarized, embossed, and complete under Chinese law. The Stuebers are parents.

For the families, there are no further requirements in Changsha, just optional trips including a silk market, the Provincial Museum (complete with mummy), and a supermarket for last-minute supplies. “I guess the big question is when to start calling her Olivia,” Paul says as he strolls the supermarket aisles carefully holding his daughter. “We’ve been using ‘Ya Qun’ just because she’s been through so much.”

“But she’s starting to get used to us,” Laurel adds as she pushes a cart filled with bottled water and baby formula. Paul slows down and Olivia holds out a hand to grab onto her mother’s sweater. They make eye contact and Laurel smiles just slightly. Behind her, two Chinese store clerks crane their necks around a rack of fruit juices and nearly fall over.

Unlike the families, Shirley’s work continues unabated. Indeed, since arriving in Changsha she has spent a significant time “encouraging” the local government to issue passports for the babies within five days of the adoptions. “I must start right away,” she says. “Because I know what would happen if I did not. If we don’t have passports,” Shirley explains, “we’ll miss our appointments in Guangzhou and the babies won’t have visas.”

There are approximately twelve hundred orphanages in China, but only a small percentage of the best are involved in international adoption. The distinction is important, but it is nearly impossible to characterize. What is certain is that during the last decade China has intensified its commitment to child welfare and as a result conditions within orphanages have improved significantly. There are many reasons for the upward trend, but certainly the most important is China’s ever-improving economic situation. However, due to sensationalized media coverage in the mid-nineties, orphanages and their conditions remain an extremely sensitive topic in China. Foreigners, particularly foreign media, have had very limited access to them over the last decade.

For adoptive parents, a visit to an orphanage is primarily an opportunity to meet and speak with caregivers familiar with the health and habits of their child. Thus, nobody in Shirley Hu’s group wants to miss the optional trip to the Xiangyin County Social Welfare Institute, even though it leaves at 8 a.m. and most of the parents haven’t slept in two days. “You will see the real China,” she says. “The countryside where people live.”

The bus travels north into smog enveloping the newly built Changsha Economic Development Zone. After half an hour, the air clears. Plains open and vast, terraced rice fields sprawl into random patterns. Occasionally, new buildings—always built from shiny white tiles—intrude into the agriculture. Olivia reclines in Laurel’s arms, her head resting against her mother’s shoulder and a tiny hand on her left breast.

Two hours north of Changsha, the highway narrows and storefronts crowd the road with signs advertising mobile phone dealerships. Abruptly, the road inclines into a valley jammed with dirty squat concrete buildings resting in a brown haze. It is the town of Xiangyin, population approximately seven hundred thousand, and as best as anyone knows, it is where the little girls riding in the arms of their American parents were born.

The bus swings left across the highway, passes a gate, and stops in front of Xiangyin County Social Welfare Institute. Girls in their mid-twenties appear in the windows, some holding infants, and look down with giggles at the foreigners. In the glass doorway is a thin, elegant woman in a white doctor’s coat. Above her, painted in bold characters, is a message: “Everything for the children.” She introduces herself as Dr. Yu, the orphanage’s vice director, and she beckons the group into a small first-floor room where oranges, apples, and bananas are set out with paper cups full of green tea on a coffee table. The group sits on sofas and Yu sits on a wooden chair next to Shirley, who serves as translator. “Thank you very much for taking care of our children,” Yu begins. “I hope that they bring much happiness to your family.”

The Xiangyin County Social Welfare Institute was built in 1998 as part of a complex that also shelters veterans of the People’s Liberation Army who fought against the United States in the Korean War. When it first opened, there were six orphans. Today there are approximately one hundred, all of whom will be adopted. In its seven years, 196 children have been adopted internationally from the institute, and “twenty to thirty” have been adopted domestically (as of December 2004). In addition to Dr. Yu, the institute employs fifteen office workers and twenty-one caregivers who provide a twenty-four-hour presence with an average seven-to-one child to caregiver ratio.

“How many babies were brought here this year?” asks one of the visiting parents. “Approximately seventy,” answers Yu. “Only babies from Xiangyin County are brought here.”

“Why so many abandoned babies?”

“The One Child policy.” Yu gestures for the group to follow around a corner and upstairs. As they do, they pass two young caregivers with babies in their arms. “They’re lucky,” one says to the other. “They have rich parents.”

At the top, windows overlook clotheslines hung with blankets, towels, and baby clothes, most of them covered with American sports logos. Through an open doorway, the group follows Yu along a short hallway lined by babies standing in individual wooden cribs and dressed in puffy winter clothes. The room is fifteen feet long, ten feet wide, and impeccably clean. Along both walls are three wooden cribs, each of which holds two babies dressed in heavy winter clothes beneath heavier blankets. Opposite the hallway is another where four additional babies sit in little wooden high chairs. One sleeps, her head leaning against the uninterested shoulder of her companion. “So cute!” bawls one of the visiting parents and begins to take pictures.

Paul stands in a corner and films. Laurel stands beside him, watching as nannies in their early twenties are reunited with the babies who had been in their care until a couple of days ago. The parents hand over the children and excitedly ask questions about personality and care. Several nannies slip into the room and whisper about which parents are good-looking and which children are lucky. Ya Qun’s face has awakened with expression. No longer blank, her lips spit and smile.

The adjoining room is slightly larger, with five cribs on both walls. Blankets are rolled up and the babies occupy themselves with small plastic toys. Two of the babies from the visiting group lived in this room, and the caregivers are waiting to show the cribs and answer questions.

Dr. Yu’s tour includes a well-maintained padded playroom complete with plastic playground equipment. “The children are brought here every morning.” Yu also shows off the simple small room that is the orphanage’s medical clinic. “There are no serious health problems here,” she says. “Mostly colds.” There is a padded examination table and two cabinets holding antibiotics.

Midway through the tour, Shirley quietly gestures for the Stuebers to follow her to the third floor. As they climb, Olivia is active in Laurel’s arms, turning her head back and forth. At the top, the Stuebers walk into a sunny bedroom like the others, except that most of the cribs are unoccupied. Waiting alone in the middle is a handsome woman in her mid-thirties. When she sees Olivia, she smiles broadly. Laurel, without hesitation, places her daughter in the woman’s arms. “Thank you for taking such good care of our daughter,” she says, tears streaming down her face.

Olivia stares into her caregiver’s eyes for a long moment and then lifts her arms over her head and pumps them in joy. The caregiver, overcome, begins to weep. “I am very happy to know that Ya Qun has such good parents,” she says. “She’s very quiet and well-behaved. She likes to be clean. And sometimes she is afraid of strangers.”

Paul and Laurel ask to see Olivia’s crib. The caregiver nods and walks to the middle crib of five against the wall. Gently, she sets Olivia into the middle of it and steps back. Olivia sits with her legs straight out as her brow furrows slightly. She looks in both directions, kicks, and does her very best to get up and out. “I’m outta here,” Paul jokes. Laurel picks her up.

“Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” exclaims the caregiver. Shirley doesn’t recognize the word, but Paul and Laurel understand and there is no need for translation. “I’m a Christian,” the caregiver reveals. “And I hope that when Ya Qun is older she will be a Christian, too.”

Laurel, deeply touched, seemingly out of breath, opens her mouth wide to say “Yes,” and it emerges as a whisper.

“Every day I pray for the babies,” the caregiver says. “I am very happy that this one has found a good home.”

Paul and Laurel thank her, again, and leave to rejoin the group on the second floor.

After a week the hotel food has grown old, the padded play area outside of the elevators has lost its novelty, and more than one parent bemoans the lack of English-language television programming. Fortunately, Shirley obtains the Chinese passports on schedule, and within hours she and the group fly south to Guangzhou, China’s third largest city. The long bus ride from the airport reveals a transition from farmland to an impromptu maze where giant shoe markets thrive beside colonial tenements that push against highway guardrails enveloped in exhaust. Initially, it does not seem to be much of a lifestyle upgrade from Changsha. But then the bus crosses the canal that separates the city from Shamian Island. Towering oaks shade wide-open boulevards and a well-preserved collection of British colonial architecture. Western restaurants and English are common. Walking paths are uncrowded and plentiful.

During a particularly gentle evening twilight stroll, the Stuebers pass a meat truck unloading animal carcasses into a Cantonese restaurant. “When we first got her I couldn’t ever put her down without her crying,” she says. Paul nods. “It’s amazing when you think about it. We’ve only had her for eight days.” Laurel removes a bottle of water from her bag and notices that she is favoring one hip, as if she is still carrying Olivia. “I guess we’re getting used to her, too.”

The families have only two required tasks during the four days in Guangzhou: an oath to certify that all documents submitted to the U.S. consulate are true, and a medical examination of their adopted baby. As they pass in front of a school, Olivia’s eyes move to the sound of children playing and she slaps her hands against Laurel’s arms. Paul moves close and she grabs at his cheeks. “Why don’t you stand by that tree over there and I’ll take a picture,” Paul suggests.

Laurel backs up against the trunk of a stately old oak and smiles, but Olivia is looking elsewhere, distracted by the soft sounds of a warm afternoon.

“Olivia!” Paul calls gently. “Olivia, look over here!”

“Olivia, look over at Daddy,” Laurel says as she turns her body to accommodate Olivia’s shifted attention.

“Look at me, Olivia,” Paul says. “Look at Daddy!”

CERTIFICATE OF ABANDONMENT

(translation)

Luo Yaqun, female, born on Oct. 30, 2003, was found to be abandoned at the gate of Xiangyin County Relief Center on Nov. 10, 2003. She was taken to Xiangyin County Social Welfare Children Institute by the Jiangdon Police Station of Xiangyin County on Nov. 10, 2003, and was raised by our Institute, her biological parents and relatives have not been found so far.

Xiangyin County Social Children Welfare Institute

Nov. 22, 2004

The streets of Olivia Ya Qun Stueber’s birth city are not clean or orderly. They rise and fall, but the topography is a mystery revealed only by turning corners around two- and three-story concrete buildings that line the narrow thoroughfares. Trash litters streets and sidewalks, spilled from open storefronts and second-story windows. Yet the streets themselves are new, well paved, and painted with bright yellow lines. Trucks loaded with produce, livestock, and construction equipment press against the thrust of pedestrians and bicycles that jam the intersections. Motorcycles zip through open spaces, exhaust trailing.

Like most of China’s small towns, Xiangyin is a poor place. There is no neon downtown, no pedestrian shopping street. Instead, in front of a shuttered shop is a pool table, awaiting players. Small tables are set next to open doors where young men in dusty three-piece suits hunch over bowls of noodles. Occasionally, they might look up at the proud stride of a young woman, leather coat tight to her torso, talking on a cell phone. Farther along, she might stop to chat with other young women, just as proud, just as busy.

The Xiangyin County Relief Center stands behind a masonry wall that opens onto a construction site. A three-story brick building rises behind scaffolding, and behind it is a terraced three-story building covered with steel bars. The driveway into the site is attended by three women on three wooden chairs: one knitting, one holding an infant, and one telling a story. So far as anyone knows, they are sitting where Olivia Ya Qun Stueber was abandoned on November 10, 2003. According to Dr. Yu, vice-director of the orphanage where Ya Qun spent her first year, it is a common abandonment site. “The baby would have been found very quickly,” she explains as she steps out of a van packed with parents and their adopted children. “The mother probably stayed and watched.”

Laurel steps out of the van with Ya Qun holding to the collar of her red V-neck sweater. She looks carefully in all directions. Paul follows with his camera and asks Laurel to stand in front of the red sign that identifies the site. A crowd of locals surrounds them. Shirley stands back and watches with a patient smile. “She was probably left in a basket,” she says. “Like that,” and she nods at a bicycle passing with a basket full of carrots attached to the back fender.

The Stuebers return to the bus followed by Dr. Yu and Shirley. The group visits two other sites. After each family has witnessed where their child was abandoned, the bus drives to the police station, where the abandoned children of Xiangyin are taken after being found. Everyone disembarks at the two-story white tile building. The first floor is a series of open storefronts, and in the middle is a gate hung with four dirty red lanterns. Through it, the families can see a courtyard, trees, and a complex of buildings. Meanwhile, an excited crowd is gathering on the other side of the driveway, pointing and whispering at the foreigners with Chinese babies.

Laurel returns to the bus with Olivia and converses with another mother about the upcoming fifteen-hour flight home. Olivia turns away from her mother and toward a group of seven women pointing at her from the other side of the driveway. They range in age from teens to late middle age, and one holds a baby. Olivia presses her left foot against the window and stares back. The women smile and point at her, but they will not come close to the bus, even though they are leaning toward it, tripping on each other to see the little girl in the window.

Shirley boards last, sits next to Dr. Yu, and the bus slowly begins to back into the street. Outside, the women look at each other with panic and then one of the younger ones breaks loose and dashes forward. When she reaches the window, she presses her hand to the glass at Olivia’s foot. The remaining women follow behind her. “Zàijiàn!” They call out as they reach the window. “Zàijiàn!” Behind them, men are laughing. “Zàijiàn!” They repeat as they follow the bus into the street. “Zàijiàn!” Then, as the bus stops to shift gears, they stop in front of the window and briefly speak English to Ya Qun, who is now smiling back at them. “Bye-bye,” they tell her. “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!”