‘Shanghai foundlings’ search for their roots
Print Edition
WANG Yanjun, 58, was abandoned in Shanghai as a baby and sent to an orphanage. For the last 17 years, she has been searching for her biological parents. So far, it’s been a wild-goose chase.
Her quest has produced only pieces of a puzzle. For starters, Wang figures she was probably one of thousands of babies, mostly girls, abandoned by peasants during a time of severe famine and hardship in China. In fact, the Shanghai Orphanage became so overcrowded in the late 1950s that almost 300 children were sent to families without children in the city of Tangshan, 180 kilometers east of Beijing. Wang was one of the so-called “Shanghai foundlings” there.
In 1976, an epic earthquake in Tangshan killed an estimated 240,000 people. Records that might have helped Wang search for her roots were destroyed. Indeed, she feels lucky to have survived the disaster at all.
“The earthquake flattened our house and left us with nothing,” she said. “I guess all my adoption clues were buried in the rubble.”
Wang, now a grandmother, is a retired primary school teacher from Tangshan. She said her foster parents, whom she loved dearly, are now dead. They went to the grave never admitting that she was adopted. But she had her suspicions growing up.
“When I was 10, my classmates taunted me, saying I was from a Shanghai orphanage,” she recalled. “My parents simply denied it.”
But there were signs. For one, her parents were much older and grayer than those of her classmates. And relatives sometime hinted that she was not of their bloodline.
After her parents died 30 years ago, she thought about tracking down her biological roots but had no idea where to begin. She had no clues and no paper trail to follow.
Then, in 1998, a friend in Sichuan Province mailed her a newspaper series from the West China Metropolitan Daily. It reported that 18 Shanghai orphans sent to Tangshan around 1960 had searched for and found their biological parents.
Inspired by the news, Wang went to the Tangshan Civil Affairs Bureau, looking for information about orphans in that era. The files that had survived the earthquake referred to several groups of babies transferred from Shanghai but gave no detailed personal information.
Wang was not deterred. She wrote a letter about her search to the Tangshan Evening News. Its publication brought dozens of calls from people in the same situation as her, but no new leads.
“I talked with many of them and they had the same interest as me,” she said. “We are not out to criticize our parents for abandoning us.
“As parents and grandparents, we can understand they had no other choice at that time. We just want to know who our parents are and whether they are still alive.”
In 2000, Wang wrote a letter to top Tangshan officials, seeking assistance on behalf of the Shanghai foundlings. With the help of the city government, the Tangshan Evening News joined forces with the Shanghai Evening Post and organized an investigation for 33 of the Shanghai foundlings.
It led to another dead end. They were told that many of the files were destroyed or lost during the “cultural revolution.” Wang and most orphans had no documentation from adoptive parents.
Shreds of evidence did survive, however. One orphan, Guo Huiling, 59, produced an adoption certificate kept by her foster parents. It showed that she was abandoned in the waiting room of the Shanghai Railway Station at 3pm on June 20, 1958. She was found with a red paper saying that she was born on November 29, 1957, and named Ye Xueqing. She was sent to Tangshan from the Shanghai Orphanage on August 8.
But the trail ended there for Guo.
“I thought if I went to Shanghai, I could find further evidence,” Guo said. “But I found none and felt terribly disappointed.”
The quest to find biological parents has taken some surprising turns, however. Wang said she was contacted by two families from Yixing in Jiangsu Province in the early 2000s. The families believed she might be related to them. DNA tests found no blood ties.
That’s not to say there hasn’t been the odd success story. One of the orphans, a man who lost a testicle as a baby, managed to trace blood relatives in Beijing several years ago, as they remembered his impairment.
Stories of the Shanghai foundlings’ search for their real parents have touched hearts. Wang said one man in Shanghai offered to go through all the archives in the city looking for clues that might shed light on their roots. The volunteer, who asked to remain anonymous, told Shanghai Daily that he just wanted to help.
And help he did, to some degree. The volunteer found that one orphan, named Chen Yuping, had a twin sister living in Shanghai. He found the adoption record of her sister and helped the twins reunite. DNA proved they were siblings.
Chen declined to be interviewed.
Despite her lack of success, Wang said she won’t give up the search. As she celebrated Spring Festival with her own son, daughter-in-law and grandson, she said the holiday of family reunions always revives pangs about her true heritage.
“I will continue looking for my parents,” she said. “I’m nearly 60 now. They might have already died, but even if that were the case, I would like to know their names and see their photos. That would bring me closure.”
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