The truth about Chinese orphanages from my own personal experience.

Essay by Keir September 2005

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I visited an orphanage a few miles outside Beijing with my students and we would spend 2-3 hours playing with the children. The orphanage itself contained about 80% babies all of whom were female perfectly illustrating the contempt the Chinese have for them in their society, and 20% older children with physical disabilities (both sexes, though the majority were female). We would play with the older children and sometimes visit the baby room for a quick cuddle.

We have personally not seen anything like the horror shown in the BBC show "The Dying Rooms" (forcing the fascist regime to actually ban the BBC from its people to this day) like that in reality, but, as usual, believe that EVERYTHING is true somewhere in China. I am sure that if you searched for it you possibly could find it. In this orphanage the staff were clearly overworked and underpaid but remained committed to the children and showed care for the children's welfare.

In the late 90s the foreign-adoption boom had already started. I didn't just see groups of adoptive parents, mostly Yanks in the Wan Fan Guo Hotel. The leaders and representatives from outside charities working with this orphanage told me that 98% of their babies were adopted to foreign families. The turnover was in my mind incredible.

What are Chinese perspectives on adoption? I'm not Chinese but once a student and I were playing with the orphanage children. On the wall there was a photomontage of pictures that adoptive parents had sent back showing the babies in their new homes. The older children asked us to raise them up to see the pictures. The student was puzzled and asked me to explain what the pictures were. After I told him, he paused, and then exclaimed: "Oh, those lucky...