3 AM Pacific Coast Time: On the Plane to Guangzhou

I have an absurd image in my mind that I know is completely inaccurate, but it’s persistent. I see a gymnasium-sized vault of a room, with a hard tile floor and garish lights hanging from metal pipes, institutional paint, and in the room are a thousand cribs in rows, uniform and regular, like tombstones at Arlington, and in each crib is an orphan. I imagine a handful of birdlike ladies bending over crib rails efficiently adjusting bottles, changing diapers, drawing thin rectangle blankets. The room sounds like seagulls over a bay, and somewhere in the sea of cribs is Ji Xia, who, if not at this very moment then in some other moment very much like this one, is crying up into the bare lights, acutely aware that something is missing because no one comes to pick her up.

Here’s what we know: She was born around February 24, 2006. She was found at a bus stop in Wénzhou, a big city, when she was just a few days old. She has a cleft lip and palate. She’s in an orphanage. That’s it. The rest of her history we have to imagine.

We’ll probably never learn the details of how she was found. Did her mother come from the country, spending most of her money on a long bus ride to the city to leave her where she knew someone would find her quickly? Did she linger in the dawn, watching from a distance? I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t linger. Did she pin a note to her clothes with a message, or an apology, or an attempt at an explanation, or a declaration of love? Did she leave a flower, or a button, or a ribbon? Was it even her mother who left her? Maybe it was her father. Or an Aunt.

What could possibly explain how someone came to such a desperate decision? The boilerplate answer is that she was born a girl in a culture with a one-child-per-family policy that values boys, but that’s a thin explanation. I believe that mothers are mothers, and this mother would have wanted what all mothers want for their babies: a good life. Perhaps she wasn’t wretched, or weak, or even shameful, but simply willing to do anything, even the unthinkable, to give her daughter a chance at the kind of life she felt she couldn’t provide. Otherwise, if she really was hard-hearted, why a bus stop? Why not an empty field, or a river?

No, I think this mother must’ve cared very much, which means that what she did - leave her baby at a bus stop for a stranger to find - was utterly stunning in its humanity. It was desperation, but also hope, that drove her to that bus stop. Maybe she’s too poor to feed her, or too ill to raise her. Maybe Ji’s cleft palate kept her from nursing and she feared Ji would starve. Whatever the reason, I know this: she had the strength to do what she did and I certainly won’t judge her a monster, because the fact is that in all likelihood she faced the horrible reality of watching from a distance while a stranger took her baby away in the hope that her baby would find a better life. That mother must be broken with grief. What haunts me is the thought that she will almost certainly never know what became of her daughter. She’ll never know that against incredibly long odds, her desperate gamble paid off, her daughter found a home.