Finding Home

On my most recent trip to China last year, I met a baby at one of the several orphanages that I visited who was trafficked, but thankfully found by a Good Samitarian and eventually taken to this privately-run and loving orphanage.  Lately, the issue of kidnapped children in China is being publicly acknowledged.

I cannot imagine not knowing who I am and where I came from. Time Magazine recently published a story about a man who remembers that his name used to be Zhou Chengliang. Other than that, he has hazy memories of an older brother, not being a strong student, and living in the company of several other families. He doesn’t know his age and where he is from.

Zhou has become quite successful in his professional life as entrepreneur fueling China’s rapidly expanding construction projects.  Yet the memories of his past are incomplete. When Zhou was 6 years old, he was going to school with his older brother when a couple who claimed to be family friends told them that they would take them home. The couple asked Zhou what he wanted to eat and bought him his favorite noodles. Meanwhile, his older brother was cautious and stood further away watching, and later refused to go on the bus with the couple and Zhou. When the bus passed by his parent’s stall, he knew that something was amiss. The couple acted coldly towards him, not paying any attention to him as they boarded a crowded train with nowhere to sit. They continued traveling for two days, until they arrived in the countryside, going from house to house until finally he arrived at a new family. Zhou had to do manual labor on his new family’s farm and got less food than their other children. He would run away often, but eventually learned to cooperate with the family. Watching his baby daughter grow up makes him long for the birth family that once cared for him as he does for his daughter.

There are various reasons for kidnapping a child in China. The “one-child policy” seeks to ensure that every family has one child. Parents traditionally prefer sons because sons would care for their parents in old age, whereas daughters leave their parents to live with her husband’s family. Other children are kidnapped to be extra labor hands or even to be a future wife in areas where there are fewer women. Some have also been researching the possibility that children who have adopted into foreign families have been kidnapped, because international adoptions involve lots of money.

Awareness of human trafficking and the various facets of it will hopefully stop the criminals behind the operations and also bring some answers to those who have been kidnapped.

More information:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2030782,00.html

http://www.research-china.org/

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/303039810/finding-home-documentary-on-kidnapped-children-in