Orphaned, but not alone

Love and loss

Not all the children's stories end so well, though. The death of 6-year-old Dang Liufang, nicknamed "Fangfang" in 2013 broke the hearts of her two "mothers", one in China, one in the US. "She had severe congenital heart disease, and had undergone many operations before being adopted by her American parents," said Yan Weimin, Fangfang's nanny at the HTS Beijing orphanage, who said she sat through many sleepless nights with the child and loved her as though she were her own daughter.

"Saddened though I was by her departure in 2011, I was also elated because her adoptive mother was an experienced pediatric nurse" the 43-year-old said. "They tried, they really did - Fangfang had further operations in the United States, but the monster won eventually. My colleagues hid the news from me for months.

"Even today, I can't stop reminding myself of our last meeting, at the Beijing Railway Station. As she looked away temporarily, I ducked into the crowd to save us both from a tearful goodbye. I wish I had stayed a little longer," she said.

Patricia King, HTS' communication officer, said that despite the sad ending, Fangfang had at least experienced the feeling of being loved, and that matters more than anything else. "I remember reading a letter written by one of our nannies to her 'daughter' when she heard about her adoption by a foreign family. She wrote, 'You were only 2 when you left us, but I hope you will remember this place in China where you were truly loved'," King recalled. "For an abandoned child, nothing heals the wounds more effectively than love, without which they feel abandoned twice over."

Decades of change

According to Zhang, a change has taken place in Chinese orphanages during the past two decades. "In the past, girls were abandoned, mostly by backward-thinking rural families that valued boys. Today, orphanages are full of children abandoned because of disability, some serious, some much less so," she said. "For them, the biggest tragedy is to be neglected and to be proved 'slow'."

This "self-fulfilling prophecy", as Bowen called it, is what she and her team set out to derail. "Before, many Chinese orphanages tended to focus solely on the children's physical needs, partly due to a lack of staff. As a consequence, the children develop behaviors associated with institutionalized children. And eventually people start expecting institutionalized children to develop problems," she said. "In HTS programs, we shower the children with love and teach them always that it's all right to have the same big dreams as other children ... and to go after them."

That message was powerfully driven home a year after Maya's adoption. "I looked out my kitchen window. Maya was playing a skipping game with her friends in the garden and they were giggling so hard they could barely keep their balance - they wound up joyfully collapsing on the grass. Maya was radiant. Her eyes were bright," Bowen said. "That was the moment I knew she had truly come home - the moment I saw that a miracle waits inside every child. It was the moment I vowed to bring the same kind of transformation into the lives of children left behind."

Contact the writer at zhaoxu@chinadaily.com.cn

Every child in Half The Sky's Beijing facility is guided by at least one caring adult, regardless of the reasons for their arrival. Feng Yongbin / China Daily

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