I adopted Maya in June of 1997, when she was nine months old. Three days after she was born in a rural area of Jiangsu province, she was abandoned in one of the 14 farming villages are known collectively as Xiaxi Town, with some 40,000 residents. They are sons and daughters of longtime villagers, many of whom married a son or daughter of one of their parents’ friends.
My daughter’s abandonment papers don’t tell us exactly where she was found. They tell us only that local police drove her 25 kilometers from Xiaxi Town to the orphanage in Changzhou, a city of several million.
The orphanage staff gave her the surname Chang. It is the same surname they gave to hundreds, if not thousands, of babies, nearly all of them girls, who took up residence in its second-floor rooms in wooden cribs arranged in long lines of light blue. Her given name became Yulu. Some babies shared a crib. Because my daughter was on her back day after day, she used her arms and legs as toys. Soon after her caregiver placed Chang Yulu in my arms, I began playing with her with the white fuzzy finger puppet animal I brought as her gift. Right away, I noticed how she pulled her legs, as if by instinct, toward her head, wrapping them all too easily around her neck.
[For more of this story, written by Melissa Ludtke, go to https://medium.com/@melissaludtke_70103/my-daughter-is-my-daughter-due-to-china-s-one-child-policy-e9f6d7268afd#.rurd48nav]
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