Little girl lost, little girl found

By this time, I knew that bringing a baby into our household would help all of us. It would help ease the burden of our grief on Sam, who was only ten years old and read our emotions each morning like barometers. It would bring back the noise and laughter our house had lost. It would fill my empty hours. Babies make you do things for them. They get you up and they get you moving. A baby's smile, I knew, could change everything.

I had spent almost $25,000, and I was out of expendable income. I realized that in this time that had passed and with the money I had spent, we could already have a red haired baby from Russia, or three year old Hungarian twins. Lorne and I decided to stop the fertility treatments and focus on adoption instead. What I knew as soon as we made that decision was that in a year we would have a baby.

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For the next few months, I had coffee with women who had battled Central American governments, rescued children languishing in Russian and Romanian orphanages, lied, borrowed money, corrected cleft palates and crossed eyes and weak hearts, lost babies they had held, named babies they never got to see, traveled thousands of miles more than once, all in pursuit of a baby.

"I don't know if I have the emotional stamina for this," I told Lorne after hearing my friend's story about three failed adoptions in Guatemala and over a hundred thousand dollars spent. She did, finally, have her daughter. But still.

"China," Lorne said. "Everyone I talk to who adopted from China, it went like clockwork."

One afternoon I watched a mother at Sam's school pick up her daughter who she had adopted from China. I sat in my car and watched that little girl leap into her mother's arms and I drove home and emailed that woman. As it turned out, she lived two blocks away from us. "Come over for coffee," she said, "and I'll tell you all about it."

Walking home from her house, Lorne squeezed my hand. "Let's start," he said.

Within a week we were sitting in a crowded room in an adoption agency office in Boston, signing paper, collecting information, beginning the journey that would lead us to China and a baby girl.

I spent the month of April, 2004, filling out paperwork for the adoption. It was exactly two years since Grace had died. This process -- collecting legal documents and getting fingerprinted and asking friends for recommendations -- was the calmest, and most focused thing I had done in two years. I had a purpose, and I moved toward it with a doggedness I had forgotten I possessed.

What I didn't know was that while I filled out papers in triplicate and made appointments and arranged for a home study, a woman in Hunan, China, was giving birth to a baby girl she could not keep. Over a hundred thousand baby girls are abandoned every year in China. Some place the number at even higher than that. In Hunan, as in other provinces, infanticide is not uncommon. Some women give birth with a bucket of water by their beds, and if the baby is a girl, she is drowned. Other women walk for miles from their village to have their baby somewhere that no one knows them. Baby girls are left on footbridges and in parks, at police station doors and orphanage entrances. They are left where their mothers know they will be found. It is illegal to abandon a baby in China, so they are left with no notes or pertinent information. In Hunan, a family who has a girl is allowed to have a second child. But that second child has to be a boy. Therefore, most of the abandoned baby girls in Hunan are second or even third daughters.

A year almost to the day after we began our adoption process, we were on a plane to China to pick up our daughter. We had filed our documents with the Chinese government and then waited for six months to get the call telling us a baby had been referred to us. Her Chinese name was Lou Fu Jing: Lou was the last name given to all the babies in her orphanage, which was in the city of Loudi; Fu was the name given to all the babies in her orphanage because it meant luck, and it was given to counter their bad luck; Jing was the name the orphanage gave her -- bright. She lights up a room, someone wrote on her referral papers.

The name we gave her was Annabelle, Grace's middle name. We had briefly chosen Mamie, and Daisy, and argued over Talullah. But we loved the name Annabelle, and we had loved it enough to almost give it to Grace as her first name. It honored Grace, we decided, without burdening the new baby.

Annabelle had been found in a box at the orphanage door, early in the morning of September 6, 2004. They estimated her age as five months. Most of the babies found abandoned are under two weeks old. Many of them still have their umbilical cord stump. No one will ever know what led Annabelle's mother to leave her there after five months. Perhaps she had not wanted to give her up at all. Perhaps a male relative waited until the baby was not nursing as much as a newborn does and then took her from her mother. Perhaps they tried to hide her in the system -- a forbidden second or third daughter -- and were caught. The penalties for this are huge, often involving many years' salary or loss of medical care for the entire family. Perhaps her mother died. Perhaps her mother got pregnant again and hoped for a boy.

We will never know what led to Annabelle being dressed in blue pants, white socks with blue flowers, a thin coat, and put into a cardboard box in a city that was most likely not her own. Around Loudi, there are dusty roads and fields of kale and sweet potatoes. Women walk with a bamboo pole across their backs, and one head of kale or a sweet potato in a basket at the ends. They take this meager yield to a market miles away to sell. It is not green or beautiful there. No mountains or sea, no glittering architecture. It is not the China in glossy magazines. It is poor and rural and the women there sometimes abandon their baby girls rather than drown them.

Next page: "The mothers brand the babies they abandon. It's a sign of love"