One Child At A Time -- A Young Girl's Journey Lights The Way To Hope

A CHILD with a damaged heart, abandoned on the streets of a Chinese city, has gotten a new start, as part of a family in Boise, Idaho. She is one of 15,000 Chinese children adopted by Americans since 1992, and one of the reasons more Chinese children now have a future in China.

HANGZHOU, China - She was born Oct. 20, 1995, somewhere near Wenzhou, a city of 7 million on China's southeastern coast.

Nothing is known about the first two years and one day of her life. Not how much she weighed, who her parents were or what she was called.

After that, she was found on the streets of Wenzhou, with nothing but the clothes she was wearing and a note giving the date of her birth. She was brought to the local orphanage, where the director gave her a name, Jiang Guo Xie, and sent it to Beijing to be placed on a list of children available for adoption.

This much was known: She had a broken heart. Not a metaphor, but a broken heart, with a small hole, about three or four millimeters, in the wall between the left and right ventricles.

It may have been what led her parents to abandon her. Perhaps the heart murmur sounded an alarm of a lifetime of illness and expense. Or perhaps she was followed by a little brother, and given up in exchange for the preferred male heir.

Whatever came before, the hole in Guo Xie's heart was a loophole of sorts, setting her on course here, to Hangzhou, China's honeymoon capital in Zhejiang Province, to wait for her new American

family, the Devines of Boise, Idaho.

Small burdens

There is nothing remarkable about how Guo Xie became a part of China's child-welfare system. She was abandoned, just like thousands of children a year.

In the Philippines, unwanted babies are slipped into convents or given up to adoption. In Korea, babies were once delivered to police stations; now parents can receive counseling and, if they choose, legally relinquish their child to the state.

In China, it is a crime to abandon a baby, and there is no legal way to give one up for adoption. Often, children are found at the train station, like so much lost luggage.

Families who adopt Chinese babies sometimes report finding "brands" on their children - cuts or indelible marks etched on thighs or other hidden places that allow relatives to identify them if they later want them back.

In a nation feeding 1.2 billion people - one-fifth the world's population - on limited arable land, controlling the birth rate is a must. All aspects of family life are watched by the state.

Women are encouraged to wait until 35 to bear a child - and then to have only one.

In urban areas, couples who have more than one child can find themselves demoted out of jobs or evicted from state-controlled housing.

In rural areas, two children are allowed - a nod to the need for manual labor. But the sheer economic burden of raising children and paying for their education puts a chill on large families.

Stories abound of forced sterilizations and abortions, at-home abortions, and girl babies abandoned or killed at birth.

Guo Xie's record offers no clues to her story except to note she was brought to the orphanage by a policeman. No one wants to speculate on how a 2-year-old is abandoned. Was she set on a bench and told to wait? Was she left while she was sleeping? Did her mother just turn and run?

Export children

As common as Guo Xie's story is, it also is historic. Her name will be recorded as part of the last wave of Chinese children adopted by foreigners under China's old adoption law.

More than 15,000 children have been placed in U.S. homes since China passed its first adoption law in 1992. The stern one-child policy, and a cultural longing for male heirs, created an ample supply of the little girls American families prefer.

Chinese officials bragged that the clamor for healthy Chinese babies was a sign of the world's respect. Some even spoke of children as a valuable export.

Yet every child sent overseas was an implicit admission that the Communist government could not care for its unwanted children. That view gained currency when, in 1996, Human Rights Watch-Asia issued a graphic expose about conditions in Chinese orphanages.

Now, as part of broader social reforms, the government wants Chinese families to adopt the nation's homeless children. A new law allows exceptions to the one-child rule, a remarkable concession debated at the highest levels of government.

Hard-liners in the People's Congress argued that any change would weaken crucial family-planning laws. But reformers said orphanages were overcrowded, and that Chinese families needed more incentive to care for their own. The Human Rights Watch report urged the state not to punish Chinese families willing to take in foundlings.

But even if in-country adoptions are wildly successful, there should be no shortage of children available in the foreign pipeline. According to one Western diplomat in Beijing, there may be as many as 200,000 children in China's orphanages.

`For other people'

When Guo Xie was found on the streets of Wenzhou in the fall of 1997, Sue Devine was in her second month of conversion classes at Boise's St. John the Evangelist Cathedral.

Her husband, Paul, was Catholic, as were their three children, Tony, 15, Rachel, 12, and Ryan, 9.

A Lutheran, Sue attended Mass with her family, but didn't take communion. Now, as Ryan neared his First Holy Communion, Sue wanted to join them.

Her conversion studies probed more than religious ritual.

"For nine months, you hear how this is just the beginning and your job is to look around and figure out how you can walk like Jesus," Sue says. "What can you do for other people?"

Her answer came through a newspaper story about a neighbor who adopted a Chinese baby.

"It was like a message," she says. "Right there it said who to call. I've always wanted to adopt and my last excuse - `I don't know who to contact' - was gone."

The Devines had talked about adopting in 1989, after seeing news coverage of Romanian orphanages.

"I remember seeing babies in cages," Paul says. "Sue said, `Those babies need somebody.' "

But the timing wasn't right.

Now Sue pressed her interest again. Their children were older. Paul's job as an international salesman for Lamb-Weston, an agribusiness firm in Kennewick, could support a growing family. Sue could interrupt her work as a special-education teacher.

Like most American families, they applied to adopt a girl. "I had four brothers," Sue says. "And I didn't want Rachel to grow up without a sister."

A broken heart

The Devines found their daughter through the World Association for Children and Parents (WACAP), a private, nonprofit adoption agency based in Renton.

WACAP eases the massive paperwork required for foreign adoptions. The agency collects biographies and photographs of Chinese babies sanctioned for adoption by the China Center for Adoption Affairs, a branch of the Civil Affairs Ministry.

WACAP also provides the Chinese with a background study of American families, including financial and criminal checks.

Parents pay fees on both sides of the Pacific - about $5,700 to WACAP, and a similar amount to the Chinese.

The Devines wrote personal essays explaining their desire: "We have been blessed with good fortune, and we have a loving family. We wish to share this with a little girl in need."

Last fall, WACAP alerted them that a girl was available. She had hepatitis B, a disease that can trigger lingering illnesses.

The family declined, reluctant to take on that indefinable risk.

The Devines knew they could not claim a child in perfect health. Under China's original adoption laws, foreign couples younger than 35, or with other children, qualified only for "special-needs" children - those suffering malnutrition, physical or mental disabilities, chronic illness or heart defects - like a four-millimeter hole between ventricles.

The Devines got a second call. There was a toddler in Wenzhou, a girl with a heart condition.

The Devines fired off a volley of questions: Does she talk in sentences? Does she run and play?

They asked for medical reports, and had local doctors review the child's echocardiogram to make sure her heart could be fixed.

They asked for a photograph.

Looking at it, they saw no smile. Guo Xie bites her lower lip and stares straight ahead.

"She just looked very worried and concerned, not distressed and upset," Sue says. "I just wanted her to smile."

Abundance of girls

WACAP started as a support group for adoptive parents. In 1976, it became a licensed adoption agency. It now operates in 10 countries, placing about 300 children a year in U.S. homes.

Its work in China began 10 years ago, when an American couple living there sought help adopting a child in their care.

WACAP Executive Director Janice Neilson made inquiries in Beijing, and found there was no national law allowing, or regulating, foreign adoptions.

Neilson saw a natural link. China had an abundance of orphaned girls - exactly what most American families wanted.

But Chinese officials were wary.

"They were very frank," she says. "They said, `Why do you want our children?' We said every child deserves a mother and father. They said, `The state is their father, the party is their mother.' "

The Chinese were especially skeptical when Neilson said Americans would take disabled orphans.

"It was, for them, hard to believe," she says. " `What is this altruism? How do we know these children will be taken care of?' "

But while the Chinese balked, unregulated "baby brokers" were rushing to find children for desperate American couples. Fees were steep. Sometimes the baby didn't exist when the couple arrived in China.

China's central government could not keep track of how many of its children were leaving, or where they were going. The government imposed a moratorium on adoptions pending creation of the China Center for Adoption Affairs in 1992.

"Things were out of control and the Chinese said, to their credit, `Stop,' " Neilson says. "It was an anti-corruption measure to protect the children."

Family portrait

In late March, Paul Devine is in Asia on business. The rest of the family flies to Beijing to meet him. From there, they fly to Hangzhou, a city of 1 million people built around a famous lake where poets once gathered, to meet Guo Xie.

The little girl is making a long trip herself, nine hours by train from Wenzhou, escorted by two orphanage workers.

They arrive in Hangzhou the same day. But the Devines spend one more night as a family of five, waiting for paperwork, before they can see the girl they already call Micaela.

The next morning, the Devines leave the luxurious Wang Hu Hotel and cross a busy street to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, a cold, cement fortress with barred windows. A Jackie Chan movie plays at the theater next door.

Six American families crowd the ministry's upstairs waiting room, all here to meet their daughters. Tears are contagious, passed from babies to mothers to sisters to fathers.

Sue loses her battle not to cry. Rachel weeps when her new baby sister rejects a stuffed pink bunny she has carried from Idaho. Guo Xie - soon to be Micaela - wails.

"She doesn't want to come with us," Rachel sobs.

Chinese bureaucrats stand ready to place their signature chop - an official stone stamp of approval - on the adoption. But first the questions:

Do you like her? Do you promise not to make her a servant? Do you promise not to abuse or abandon her?

Micaela toddles out of the dank building stone-faced, hands held on each side by her escorts from the orphanage. Her face holds the look seen in the photograph: concerned, not scared, not smiling.

The Devines walk slightly ahead, trying not to crowd Micaela. The entourage stops at a local notary office for the last round of paperwork. Another set of photographs is needed.

The new family poses on the sidewalk, outside a one-hour photo shop. A crowd gathers to witness this snapshot of Americana:

Sue, 41, is the bright motor that drives this adoption. Paul, 42, is tall and rugged, with the confidence of an international salesman.

Tony is restless, and eager to get home to join his soccer team for a tournament in Las Vegas.

Rachel plays soccer on the Idaho state-championship team. She is fascinated by Micaela, and clutches the pink bunny. An accomplished cellist, she has her eye on a junior-size cello for her sister.

Ryan is tired of having his blond curls patted by passing Chinese hands. He is glad to pass the baby-of-the-family mantle to Micaela, proud that the laser pointer he bought in Beijing is the only thing that stops her crying, furious when the pointer is lost. When he finds that Micaela has jammed the pointer in her jacket pocket, he pronounces her a genius.

It is Paul who takes charge. He scoops the girl in his arms and marches into a TCBY yogurt shop.

"Let's give her a taste of America," he says.

Now the Devines lead the procession as a solid family of six. They are trailed by a reporter, photographer, adoption-agency official and WACAP translator who will help with Micaela's exit visa. The escorts from the Wenzhou orphanage drift into the background like practiced bit players.

Micaela licks at the yogurt, and is teased into a Mona Lisa smile.

"Wait till you taste a Big Mac," her father laughs.

The new world

The Wang Hu Hotel is four lanes of traffic from the Ministry of Civil Affairs. But the Chinese babies who cross that street in American arms leave the world of outcasts and enter a world of promise.

In the Wang Hu parking lot, the Devines pass a gold, stretch Lincoln Continental and a black Mercedes Benz. They skirt the The Cowboy Bar and billiard parlor into the towering marble lobby that serves as a gateway to the mind/body fitness lounge, seven restaurants, disco, karaoke bar, beauty salon and the Wang Hu Cape Relaxation Paradise - a trip that takes Micaela much farther from the orphanage than her nine-hour train ride.

In their hotel room, Sue and Rachel tug her out of her orphan clothes - a thick winter coat, its orange shell dancing with Chinese cartoon characters, five layers of thermal underwear covered with tights and leggings, a small bib tucked under her chin.

Are there new things for Micaela?

"Oh, honey, a whole suitcase full," Sue says, smiling. A pile of dresses, a purse, a backpack, rings, pajamas, bubbles, hats, coloring books and a blue pile cap and jacket handed down from Rachel.

If Micaela were to stay in China, her damaged heart and advancing age likely would have sentenced her to childhood in the orphanage.

In Boise, she will live in a 3,400- square-foot home with five bedrooms and a dog named Mandy. By the first snowfall next winter, she will be in Mogul Mice, the youngest class at nearby Bogus Basin Ski Resort.

American couples are a common sight in Hangzhou, where the local orphanage director encourages foreign adoptions.

The Chinese people seem supportive, too. American families say Chinese approach them on the street to remind them to keep the child warm, to say how lucky they are to be going to America.

David Fiorini, a state social-services administrator from Magnolia, came here last year to get his daughter, Allison. "A shopkeeper looked at Allison and said, "Oh, she is so lucky.' " Fiorini says. "We said, `No, we are so lucky.' We almost got into this argument about who was the lucky one."

But it is a touchy political subject, and Chinese officials put a careful spin on foreign adoptions.

A July 1998 story in the state-run China Daily said overseas adoptions were on the rise because foreigners found Chinese babies healthier than children from Japan or South Korea, and adoption fees lower.

"You have to reckon that our glorious history and rapid economy serve as another two major attractions for foreign families," a top Chinese official was quoted as saying.

The semi-official China News Service reported recently that 90 percent of foreigners who adopt Chinese babies are wealthy and well-educated.

Those families make a significant bloc of political support for China.

When Human Rights Watch-Asia alleged widespread neglect in Chinese orphanages, American adoptive parents rushed to China's defense. And after NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May, U.S. adoption agencies were quick to send the Chinese their regrets.

Overseas adoption also has become something of an industry for the strapped Chinese economy.

"The tertiary businesses that accompany any adoption - hotels, transportation, guides, interpreters - can be lucrative," says a Western diplomat in Beijing who would speak only if not named.

Adoptions pump needed money into China's children's welfare system: as much as $3,000 from the parents' adoption fees go to the orphanage that housed their child.

"They say that the money is for the children left behind," the diplomat says. "But exactly how the donations are spent is left to the discretion of each orphanage's administration."

A nation's sorrow

Foreign adoptions have long been a source of tension inside the Chinese government.

"There has always been opposition at the higher levels," says Neilson, the WACAP director.

That opposition helped reformers push through the new domestic-adoption laws. All Chinese couples 30 or older will be eligible to adopt, and to apply directly through their local orphanage. Unlike foreign parents, they will not have to negotiate the bulky Beijing-based authority.

"The goal is to simplify the laws to encourage domestic adoption," says Barbara Knowles, an assistant director of WACAP. "It is a source of national sorrow to be unable to take care of your kids."

The China News Service reported in April that there were 700,000 domestic adoptions from 1992 to 1998, a number U.S. sources say is wildly inflated. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, an independent newspaper, said 70,000 children had been adopted by Chinese families since 1992.

Chinese and American officials agree most domestic adoptions happen within families.

Yang Su Qing runs a small store in Luoyang, an industrial city in the north of China. When her brother died, she took in his daughter, now 3, as a sister to her own 4-year-old.

"I want to give them whatever they want, to make sure they have the best education," she says.

The store is little more than street-front closet. Yang sells candy, instant soup, cigarettes and liquor from behind her single counter. The floors and walls are bare concrete. The success of domestic adoptions will depend more on money than on politics, Yang says.

"It will be very expensive," she says. "It depends on whether the family could afford it."

Dream of home

China's adoption-reform laws come with a recognition that the system of caring for abandoned children needs help.

"Analysts said orphanages are now over-stretched by the work of caring for orphans and abandoned infants, and the living conditions in many of these institutions are not very satisfactory," China Daily reported last year.

In March, the newspaper announced that the country's most notorious orphanage, in Shanghai, will be replaced with a $7.3 million state-of-the-art facility - "the most advanced of its kind in Asia."

The 1911 vintage orphanage was a Dickensian warehouse at the heart of the Human Rights Watch-Asia attack. According to official media reports, the new orphanage has central air conditioning, cable television, security and monitoring cameras, and computerized record keeping. It will be home to 1,000 children.

The state media touts adoption reforms as a crackdown on overseas adoptions, designed to protect the children's "safety and interest."

And then the pitch to Chinese parents: "The adoption of children by more qualified families will help reduce the burden on the country and help children develop better."

"Focal Report," one of China's top-rated television shows, ran a program in March called "Home - A Dream Not Too Far." It said the old law had diverted Chinese babies overseas, "out of the home they dreamed of."

Sentiment against foreign adoptions is boosted by China's official hostility against the West.

"I think more Chinese families adopt the orphans than go overseas," says a 45-year-old Hangzhou man who works for the local branch of an American company. "I read a story in the local paper about a very poor woman, a garbage collector, and she adopted a lot of orphans and takes care of them."

In March, the Beijing Weekend newspaper carried a domestic-adoption success story, about a 6-year-old girl who had been abandoned as an infant but went on to set a world record for roller-skating under a 6-inch-high limbo bar.

The story tells of taxi driver Zhang Guilan, who finds newborn Wang Xue on the pavement one cold winter day. Zhang and her husband raise the girl, even though they already have two boys of their own.

Life was hard, because the little girl remained an "unregistered resident." Zhang was warned she "should not keep the infant with unknown antecedents for it might cause a lot of troubles."

Under the reform laws, the story says, the problem of Wang Xue's residency will be solved within the year.

The story carries a cautionary note: It will cost the family about 25,000 yuan, or $3,000, to formally adopt Wang Xue.

Search for history

Chinese culture may not be a big part of Micaela's life in Boise.

"We're not Chinese. We're American," says Paul Devine. "Her best chance of success is assimilation into American culture. I'll encourage her to come to China with me and see where she was born."

When that happens, Micaela is likely to be part of a massive movement of adopted Chinese children returning to discover their origins.

"There is going to be one wave of assertive Chinese women coming back," says Neilson of WACAP.

That trend has been set by thousands of Korean-Americans, adopted in large numbers beginning in the early 1960s.

"There's an inner need to search," says Barbara Kim, a hospital administrator from Bellevue, who was adopted by a Nebraska family when she was 10. "It doesn't matter how wonderful your adopted family is. It's a sense of longing and a feeling - I just want to know."

She was born the eldest of four children. Her brother stayed; she and her sisters were given away.

"My memory of my Korean family was extremely abusive and being told that I wasn't worth anything," she says.

She returned as a young adult. She found her father, who wanted money. She found her youngest sister, who was an orphanage resident hired out as a domestic servant.

"I chose not to support them and not to bring them here," says Kim, who also works as an adoption social worker. "But I don't have to keep wondering."

Tim Holm was among the first Korean adoptees brought to America in 1959, when he was 2.

"My birthplace is now a subway stop," says Holm, a Mill Creek accountant. "But just knowing that that was where I was born, that's important."

Kim and Holm predict that Chinese adoptees will have the same need to know.

"It will be very interesting," Neilson agrees. "I've told officials to expect thousands and thousands of children coming back and saying, `Can I see my file? Are you the one who made the decision in my adoption?' "

Because babies in China are abandoned, not formally relinquished, there are no birth records.

But the China Center for Adoption Affairs is building archives that include parents' letters of application, birth certificates and photos of the children, and information about the orphanages the children came from.

Surrender to love

The Devines don't fear the questions.

"I'm sure the day will come where she'll wonder how she came to be living in Boise, Idaho, with us," says Paul.

Late the night of their first day together, the Devines rest in the lobby of the Wang Hu. Sue sips wine, her youngest daughter propped in her lap, continuing her battle to stare down all the fuss.

It is hard work. The child falls asleep, relaxed in her mother's arms, her guard giving way to comfort.

Sue, too, surrenders at last to this love, seen first in a photograph 6,000 miles away. She thinks about what she will someday tell her daughter.

"I'll tell her her parents cared enough about her not to abort her or drown her, and that we picked her out of all the other babies. We'll tell her China had a one-child policy."

Paul completes the thought: "And she lost out."

Lost out in Wenzhou, perhaps.

But in Boise, there are ski lessons, a cello, a bedroom, a dog and a team of doctors waiting to heal the four-millimeter hole in Micaela Devine's broken heart.

Micaela's journey - a postscript

After three months, Micaela carries memories of China with her. "Every couple of minutes she'll say `Mama,' just to make sure I'm around," says Sue Devine. "She has her moments where she looks sad and homesick or like `I'm tired of people not understanding me.' " She calls her brothers and sister by name, plays with Beanie Babies, is wary of the dog and hates being strapped in her car seat. "I feel like I've had her her whole life," Sue says. The heart doctors say she may not need surgery. Her father says she smiles all the time.

-------------------------------------- China relaxes its policies on children --------------------------------------

On April 1, the National People's Congress of China reformed its child-welfare system to encourage domestic adoptions, and made exceptions to the nation's one-child policy:

-- Parents with a biological child will be allowed to adopt an orphaned child.

-- Childless parents will be allowed to adopt more than one child.

-- The minimum age for adoptive parents dropped from 35 to 30.

The Chinese are billing the reforms as a "crackdown" on foreign adoptions. But the same eased guidelines apply to foreign parents.

Under China's old adoption law, only "special needs" children - those with serious mental or physical disabilities - could be adopted by parents who were otherwise ineligible because they were too young or had children of their own.

Those incentives were eliminated, making it easier to adopt healthy Chinese babies. But Janice Neilson, executive director of the World Association for Children and Parents (WACAP), says she is confident Americans will still take troubled children.

The campaign to promote domestic adoptions was launched with a photo exhibition in Beijing, featuring adopted Chinese children posing with prominent U.S. politicians. The message: Adopted children go on to successful lives.

A similar campaign worked in India.

"Everyone said, `It won't happen. People won't adopt girls. They won't adopt a dark child,' " says Barbara Knowles, an assistant director at WACAP. "But guess what? They did."

On the streets of China, residents support efforts to keep more of the country's foundlings at home.

In Luoyang, a poor industrial city 500 miles from Beijing, Ren Shui Fang sells dou fu pi, spicy bean curd, from a battered hot pot on the back of her three-wheel bicycle.

"I'm suspicious whether the children (who leave) will have a happy life or not," Ren says. "If it is a kind family, it would be good, but we don't know what will happen. Doesn't anyone ever check on them?"

If children are adopted by Chinese families, Ren says, "then we could watch to see how they are doing."

----------------- About the project -----------------

David Postman, 41, is the paper's chief political reporter and has been based in the Times' Olympia bureau since 1994. This was his second trip to China. In 1997 he accompanied Gov. Gary Locke to the governor's ancestral village in southern China. He can be reached at 360-943-9882, or by e-mail at dpostman@seattletimes.com

Benjamin Benschneider, 46, has been a photographer at the Times for 15 years. He first visited China in 1985, for a story about Seattle's sister city, Chongquing. He can be reached at 206-464-8132, or by e-mail at bbenschneider@seattletimes.com

----------------------------- How to learn more about WACAP -----------------------------

For more information on international adoption, the World Association of Children and Parents (WACAP) can be reached at 206-575-4550, or at wacap@accessone.com.

The mailing address is P.O. Box 88948, Seattle, WA 98138. The agency holds adoption-information meetings every Monday at 7 p.m. in its office at 315 South Second Street, Renton.