Earlier this week, Tracy posted excerpts and a link to this article in the LA Times about babies in China that were literally torn from their parents arms to be sold for international adoption. I hate to admit this, but I have become so cynical about adoption corruption (It’s everywhere. Not in every adoption, but in every country. I don’t know percentage wise how much, but I know it’s everywhere. And even one is too many.) – I have become so cynical that I read her post and my reaction was “Huh. That’s totally not a surprise. The only surprise is it took so long for this to come out.” Which, I think we can all agree, was rather callous on my part.

Then today, I saw the article again, posted on one of the yahoo lists, in its entirety. And for some reason, it hit me differently this time.

In much of China, villagers live in dread of surprise visits from family planning officials. It was certainly the case for the residents of Tianxi, a mist-shrouded village of 1,800 people tucked high in lush mountains near Zhenyuan.

No matter that the village is a two-hour drive down a rutted dirt road and then a 30-minute hike uphill, family planning officials make inspections as often as twice a week. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when families were too poor to pay, the officials would punish them by ransacking their homes or confiscating cows and pigs, residents say.

Then, in 2003, things changed. The year after the Social Welfare Institute in Zhenyuan was approved to participate in the burgeoning foreign adoption program, family planning officials stopped confiscating farm animals. They started taking babies instead.

“If people couldn’t pay their fines, they’d take away their babies,” said a retired municipal employee from Zhenyuan who used to work as a foster parent for the orphanage.

“We were always terrified of them,”said Yang Shuiying, the 34-year-old mother whose daughter was taken away.

In December 2003, Yang gave birth to her fourth daughter, delivering her at home with the help of a midwife. It was an unplanned birth. In fact, her husband had gotten a vasectomy just a few days before she realized she was pregnant again.

“I hadn’t planned to have another baby, but once I did, I wanted to raise her,” said Yang, a soft-spoken woman who told her story with downcast eyes.

Her husband, Lu Xiande, felt even more strongly that the girl belonged at home. Away at the market when the baby was seized, he erupted in fury when he discovered what had happened.

“I’ll get her back,” he promised his distraught wife. He headed off to China’s east coast, hoping that as a migrant worker he could raise the money to pay the family planning fine. But Lu fell sick and had to return home. Shortly afterward, he tried to slit his throat with a butcher knife.

Almost everybody in the village knows somebody whose baby was taken away. An old man leaning on a hand-carved walking stick told of how his granddaughter was taken away. A younger man spoke of a niece.

The villagers resent the suggestion by some that they don’t love their daughters and readily abandon them.

“People around here don’t dump their kids. They don’t sell their kids. Boy or girl, they’re our flesh and blood,” said Li Zeji, 32, a farmer who says his third daughter was taken in 2004.

And I’m not just horrified – I feel guilty.

When we first decided to adopt, it was our intention to adopt from China. In fact I was ready to adopt at 28, but we waited another two years so we’d be old enough to meet China’s requirements. I read a ton of books about China, watched movies and listened to language CD’s, and went to our agency’s adoption class. In the class they explained that when a mother abandons her baby it’s an act of love – she leaves the baby someplace safe where it will be found quickly. They were careful to emphasize that abandonment was not the way we see it here, because in China there is no way to legally relinquish.

The wait times were growing longer and longer for China just as our dossier was ready to be sent off, and about that same time we heard about Cambodia. To be honest, I’d always felt a little uncomfortable about adopting from China. Knowing that many of those babies were only abandoned because the families were not allowed to have more than one child made me feel as though I’d be complicit in that draconian system if I participated in their adoption program. So I was relieved to have another choice in Cambodia – especially when I was told Cambodia’s babies were abandoned due to poverty or social issues, not to any restrictions on family size. That sense of superiority didn’t last long.

Everyone knows what happened in Cambodia. Some children were in orphanges because their mother was too young, or single, or sick, or poor, or even dead. But some were there because people would go into the villages and offer money or food in exchange for attractive babies and children to be sold for international adoption. And since most children were “abandoned”, there’s no way to know their true histories.

We’ve been honest with R~ about her birth and adoption story, as much as we can. We tell her the things we know are absolutely true and tell her we don’t know the rest. I hate that we don’t know.

Part of me wants to hire an investigator to search for her birth family. Another part says that search would be futile and we’d have a hard time knowing the truth even if her family was found. Cambodia is not China. The country was decimated by the Khmer Rouge thirty years ago and it still hasn’t really found its footing. A whole generation of parents was wiped out. The children were brainwashed, and many of them grew up with severe attachment issues. Those children are now parents. Most of them are poor and illiterate. They cling to superstitions and put their faith in “luck”. So what happens when a child is considered “unlucky”? Or what if a woman is pregnant and someone comes to her village and offers her food or money for the baby? Or what if a family is told their child will go to America, and some day he or she will be able to bring the whole family to America too? These are not the relinquishment scenerios that my daughter thinks about. I am not prepared to open that Pandora’s box – it may not be my box to open at all.

I wish I could know that her birth family placed her for adoption out of love. I wish I knew they had peace knowing she was healthy and happy and growing up in a family that feels so blessed by her. More than that, I wish that R could have the peace of knowing about them. When R is sad or frustrated or angry, sometimes she’ll say “You hate me!” or “I hate this family!” – and I know that all kids say stuff like that, but I always wonder if there’s more to it because she’s adopted. We tell her all the time that she is loved. But is there a part of her that needs to hear those words from someone else – from the mother and father who let her go?

“We’d never make her come back, because a girl raised in the West wouldn’t want to live in a poor village like this,” said Yang Shuiying’s mother-in-law, Yang Jinxiu.

“But we’d like to know where she is. We’d like to see a picture. And we’d like her to know that we miss her and that we didn’t throw her away.”

I can only imagine the peace such words might bring to my child. How many children, from all around the world, seek that same peace?