China’s Baby Trade

Former Foreign Correspondent journalist and host of ABC TV’s “One Plus One”, Jane Hutcheon met Linda Shum, a not-so-ordinary grandmother and widow from Gympie whose compassion for China’s forgotten children inspired her to create COAT (Chinese Orphans Assistance Team). Linda’s quest to help orphans, many with multiple disabilities, reveals the hidden human aftermath of the One-Child Policy. What Jane Hutcheon intended as a five-minute “human interest” segment in a news broadcast inspired an unexpected friendship and the writing of China Baby Love. To relate some of the Linda Shum story Jane Hutcheon addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 12 September 2017. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of the talk Jane Hutcheon’s talk.

CHINA’S BABY TRADE

JANE HUTCHEON

Thank you so much. It’s very nice to be here. And good evening and welcome to all of you. I thought I should explain that, whatever image you have of China, I hope very much that the world of China Baby Love will perhaps change that in some way.

We tend to look at China through its very big cities. We love shots of Shanghai showing glistening lights, a lot of wealth, skyscrapers, rice paddy fields that have been converted to amazing conference centres, housing. We see very expensive cars, both there and, of course, here. In many people’s view, China is a land that has undergone a huge transformation. In some respects, we see it as a glittering jewel. But that is an image of China that represents a very small part of that country. The part of the country that I write about in my book is a world away.

I want to first explain how the book came about. It was 2013 and Julia Gillard was planning her very big trade trip to China. They had signed an important trade deal. A lot of people were going there. I was presenting an evening news program called The World. I wanted someone who would tell the story of China in seven minutes. I didn’t want it to be a commentator necessarily. I wanted an example of the people-to-people relationship between Australia and China.

I’m not a superstitious person but, as I was having this discussion with my producer, an email pinged into my inbox. I thought, how interesting. It was from a Chinese woman who said she worked in China. She was Australian and looked after some 60 to 80 orphans in foster homes located at an orphanage in Central Eastern China, in Henan Province, which is actually home to 100 million people. It is not one of the richest provinces, I’d have to say. The email was bizarre. I was looking for somebody just like her. But the emailed trailed off, a bit like one of those scam emails where the next line is, “Please send money to”. But I replied thinking “what’s the worst that can happen?” I wasn’t sending any money.

The lady on the other end had absolutely no idea what I was talking about and to this day she maintains that she didn’t send me any email. She’d never heard of the social media account that the original email had come through. To this day, she thinks we were put together somehow very magically. She’s an evangelical Christian so she sees things appearing where I don’t. I’ll just leave it there. Anyway, I replied and she told me more of her story.

The woman lived in regional Queensland and had been travelling to China for many, many years. She hadn’t initially learnt to speak Chinese. I had so many questions. How could the Chinese government let her run foster homes in a Chinese orphanage? I remembered from my time as a correspondent that Chinese orphanages were an absolute no-go area, particularly after a 1995 documentary called The Dying Rooms which showed horrific pictures of babies and children who were suffering because the orphanages were so very, very full at that time. I had so many different questions.

I invited her onto the program and we met in the Brisbane studio. I was pleasantly surprised by the woman who appeared in front of me. She was very different from how I imagined her. She wasn’t Chinese at all. Her name is Linda Shum, a surname she told me is an Irish-Catholic name. She lived in Gympie. She was quite large. Linda is like someone’s granny, and she is. It was a good enough interview. It wasn’t going to bowl anyone over but I still couldn’t get it out of my head that this Australian woman had been given permission to work in a small orphanage. So I Googled things about her.

I saw she was legitimate. But, thought, she really isn’t very well known in Australia. I suddenly felt I would love to do a story that brought together my experience of China with hers. And wouldn’t it be great to get into an orphanage. I had never been able to go into one during my time as a correspondent. They were completely off limits.

I asked Linda and she said yes, most fortunately. I started by paying her a visit just to see whether I could make a book out of the story of Linda Shum and her foster homes. It soon occurred to me that this was Four Corners gold in a way. It is such a beautiful story because it tells the historical tales of the people who worked in the orphanage – stories of the Cultural Revolution, the great famine and why they, historically, felt the way they did about certain things.

It told the story of the One Child Policy. As a confession here, when I was working in China I had thought that the One Child Policy was a wonderful thing. The streets of China seemed full to bursting; everywhere you went you were just bowled over, the traffic used to be bicycles, now it’s motorbikes and people. The One Child Policy seemed a great idea. It was China being very responsible. And I left it at that. I didn’t do a lot of stories to do with the One Child Policy. And I came to regret that when I was writing the book. By interviewing people and seeing what it took to get that population down, I came to realise what a great human sacrifice it was. And we only saw the tip of the iceberg in the West about what the One Child Policy did.

Next year marks Linda’s twentieth anniversary of going between Australia and Jiaozou city, a city of about 3.5 million people, which has grown immensely. From a town, it’s been merged into a conglomeration which is called a city. But there are about 300 cities the same size as Jiaozou in China. They were built to grow into a city. It feels a bit empty, especially compared to somewhere like Beijing and Shanghai. But these are the future cities of China. If I went back there in ten years I probably wouldn’t be able to recognise a single thing. I noticed around Jiaozou, unlike in Beijing and Shanghai, that a lot of families seemed to have two children.

My first visit there was 2013. My next visit was 2015. And I wondered why were there two children in families. I could easily catch sight of them during the day. I found out that the One Child Policy is applied very differently depending on which part of China you are in. In some of the biggest cities, it is quite rigorously applied, but in smaller cities it depended on local officials and so it might not have been applied with such strictness. Jiaozou was one of those places where it wasn’t as rigorously applied.

Linda saw her first orphanage in 1998 on her first visit. Another one was built after that which I’ve also seen and which is now an old people’s home. The third is currently a ten-storey building with the orphanage on the first three stories.  There was another NGO that had a facility to look after babies who once would have died but now survive because they’re given medical intervention.

Linda has foster homes and an amazing special needs school that she set up on the top floors of a building. Ninety-eight per cent of the kids in the orphanage were severely disabled both physically and/or intellectually. In the 1980s, there were a lot of female babies, but once the female babies were adopted overseas and adopted by local Chinese, the predominant orphanage population became disabled kids. These kids were abandoned by their families. This can be very hard to accept for most of us.

The easy impression and sometimes the impression of Western and Chinese media outlets was that they had been abandoned in some kind of a callous sense. Perhaps Chinese people didn’t love their children, which of course is absolute rubbish. In fact, they had been abandoned for a variety of reasons. One such reason was that, as the One Child Policy eased, people might be allowed a second child if their first child was a girl. But if they had a second girl they might abandon that child in order to try for a boy, because they wanted gender balanced families.

 

People would also abandon kids if they were disabled. There are various reasons for this. There’s still a lot of superstition, particularly in rural areas in China. Sometimes it’s just a straight financial reason. For example, if you were born with leukaemia as a child, the cost for the parent to try and save a child with leukaemia is beyond almost every ordinary citizen. And medical intervention, or medical help, even though it’s improved so much over the years and so has the health insurance, is still very expensive for some families to get treatment for their children. That is another reason why a child might be abandoned. The family would think that the child would get better attention and care if it were in a state orphanage.

When you walk into the orphanage, the first floor is actually the older children. They are anything up to about 14, 15, 16. When they get older than that they get moved to the adult orphanage and it’s a very, very confronting site.

I went by myself on these visits. I wasn’t accompanied by TV cameras. Linda’s not considered a guest because she works in conjunction with the orphanage. All the lights were off in the room as we entered and we went in. They were all watching the TV which was playing a Russian soap opera or something like that, with Chinese subtitles. It was easy childcare I suppose. We started to notice that some of the children had rags around their arms. And then I starting to notice they had a rag hanging down from their arm. Until I noticed they were in fact tied to their beds.

A number of the children were tied into iron beds and that sent Linda apoplectic. This has been a battle for many, many years. The Chinese staff say there are not enough staff to look after the children and so they tie them into the beds for safety. Linda feels that it’s a massive breach of human rights by anyone’s interpretation. It’s probably the one thing that sets her off in a huge way. She gets very upset by this. I don’t know whether it was because I was there but she demanded to see the head of the orphanage. I didn’t go into that particular meeting but it was mentioned that she had brought a guest in there as well. As a result, she was given a punishment.

Normally Linda can go into the orphanage to pick out children to put in her foster homes. In the foster homes, the children get very good care. There are about 6-8 children looked after by a domestic helper that Linda herself employs. They’re clean, they’re happy. You can see the complete difference between the kids in the orphanage and the foster home. But, because of our visit that day and Linda’s protest, she wasn’t allowed to take some children from upstairs after that for three months.

The One Child Policy was ended officially at the end of 2015. Families are now allowed to have two children, but you still have to apply. You can’t just have a second child. You have to have your papers in order, it has to be approved. This is a long way from the 1980s when you could argue that female children, girls, were not as respected or honoured as they are now.

Today a girl child is seen as very special because she tends to look after her parents. China has a massive demographic problem now. They call it 4-2-1. Four grandparents, two parents, one grandchild or child. That means in future years there’s going to be so many people to support but not enough people in the labour force. This is one of the key reasons why the One Child Policy was changed.

Many people say that it never needed to be implemented in the first place, because in the 1970s the birth rate was coming down in China. It was coming down in many countries around the world and China was just one. Yet when Deng Xiaoping was about to take power, he really wanted to find a scientific response to the population policy. A group of – believe it or not – rocket scientists were hired to make this policy fit a goal which was that the population had to be kept at 1.3 billion by the year 2000. The goal wasn’t quite reached but nobody made a fuss about it at that stage.

I’ve got a very special spot for China. Although, as I look at the country now, I wonder what the future is. Academics are not allowed to write freely. You could argue that they haven’t ever been allowed to completely write freely but there is a big clampdown going on against personal freedoms at the moment. You have to be careful what you say even over the internet. We know that Chinese academics, even from Australia, have been detained. There’s also a big crack down on religion.

Official churches are allowed but some official churches have had their crosses taken down. It is a tough time in China at present. My parents were both born in early last century. My mum was born to two Eurasian parents so both of them were of mixed heritage. My dad was born to a Scottish engineer and his English wife. They remember Pearl Buck’s stories about how she used to go and find the bones of small children and put them in a special bag and she would bury them herself later. There have always been times of infanticide. If a child wasn’t very well or if parents had too many children – I won’t go into details but those children may not live very long.

So, what is it about the book that draws both on the past and links the present? We talked a little bit earlier about the idea of the real China versus the fairy-tale China. In the book, I interview some of the workers at the orphanage who are now employed by Linda. She introduced me to people that she hired and they talked about their own family histories. Everybody knows what their family was doing during the Great Famine of the late 1950s to early 1960s. Everybody knows what happened to their family during the Cultural Revolution from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

I love to talk to Chinese people about their backgrounds. They are interested to talk personally about their families’ past. Deng Xiaoping, who came after Mao, wanted to create a smaller population but a better quality population. The word “quality” is used quite frequently in China. Our driver used to talk about people whose quality was very low – that meant they weren’t very nice or they weren’t good or they were just downright criminals.

Deng believed that a better, more industrialised, a richer China could only happen if China had a smaller population. Orphans and disabled people do not fit into that plan. You can argue that a lot of good is being done on the welfare side. Two academics who live near me at the University of NSW are doing incredible work to increase the allowance for every orphan that they get from the Chinese government. But it is still a very different world.

Linda has started to have open days so that the population in Jiaozou can come in. Some arrive having never known that the orphanage had been there. The orphans are marginalised and aren’t being schooled. They do get a lot of help but they’re still mostly invisible from the general population. It is a secret world in China. Not the fairy-tale version of the increasingly growing and rich country.

When I arrived on my first visit to China and was met by Linda at the airport in Jiaozou, she was with a little boy who was in a wheelchair. His name was Wen Xuan and Linda told me he had spina bifida and scoliosis. Everybody in the airport was staring at this little boy in a wheelchair. He was like a little Kurt Fearnley – he was amazing. He had a very bright, vivid face and he didn’t want anyone to help him thank you very much, he could manage it all on his own. It was very interesting seeing the attitude to people watching him. Even when we were in the coffee shop, the boy had ordered an hilarious sandwich with an umbrella in the top. It just was the most amazing looking sandwich that when it arrived it didn’t quite fit the description. Again, everyone was watching to see how would he eat that. But, of course, he just wolfed it down.

But there is an attitude as Linda has noted that is gradually changing but probably not quickly enough. To be a disabled person means they’re stupid in some way. And they’re certainly watched very carefully. People can barely believe that they can wheel themselves out on the street, taking their life into their hands given the obstacles on sidewalks, pavements and the roads in a lot of Chinese cities. Wen Xuan was very, very bright. He was approaching the age where he would not be allowed to be adopted because he was about 11 and the cut off age is 14. But he had so many physical disabilities. And he hadn’t started school until he was nearly ten. It didn’t look as if there was going to be much hope for him. If he wasn’t adopted, he be sent to the adult orphanage, an institution where everyone is shut in. They don’t have freedom of movement there. 

An American evangelical couple had looked at adopting one son from China. They saw Wen Xuan in the corner of the shot and thought that he looked like a bright young thing. And they decided if they were going to get one son, why not two? I laughed because he’s now called Wen Xuan Smith and lives in North Carolina. He’s the eldest of four American children. In the 1990s, when I saw groups of Australian families coming to get their new adopted babies in China, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It seemed strange this state run adoption, almost an industry. People would come from overseas. They would pick up their babies. They’d have acclimatisation and then take them home. I used to feel conflicted about that. But I saw Wen Xuan’s happy face in the Facebook posts and heard Linda saying if he’d stayed in China he would have had to be squirreled away in an apartment because people wouldn’t be able to accept his disability so better that they didn’t see him. In the US, I’m sure he’ll go much further.

People tell me after they’ve read the book that it’s quite sobering. Ultimately, I feel quite lifted because I see the work of an incredible Australian. We had many, many discussions about religion. I saw Linda two days ago. We’re still having very robust discussions but I think it’s a wonderful tribute that from Gympie, this former school teacher, now grandmother, took herself off to go to a country to help a group of children she’d never met before.