The Story of Baby Liu Jia Jia

August, 2017: After nearly two years, the adoptive family of "Baby Jia Jia" is now in contact with the birth mother. The birth mother is over the moon happy.  

June 11, 2016: The following message was sent to us by the birth mother, addressed to the adoptive family:

“Please forgive my sudden appearance. I understand you and your family might need time to make a decision, and need time to talk about this with the whole family.

"But I would like to let you know that I am not asking you to return my daughter back to me. I understand my daughter was already became an American citizen, and I believed you love her very much too. I really appreciate your care for her and for adopting her. I hope you and I can make friends, and I just wanted my daughter to know that I never abandoned her or gave her up, and that I love her very much! I hope she is happy!”

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The following essay, written by Lan, is a plea to families with children from the Xuzhou, Jiangsu orphanage to try and locate the adoptive family that adopted the child profiled below. Beyond that, there are some important lessons adoptive families generally can take away from the experiences of this family:

1) Many children are transported long distances before being turned into an orphanage.

2) As we have seen in other instances, orphanages almost always work to prevent birth families from locating and retrieving children once they enter an orphanage.

3) This child was abandoned by her paternal family for one simple reason - she was a girl. Gender bias, especially among older citizens of China, still exists.

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“I have been looking very hard for my child for three years, and I beg you to share my story to help me make my dreams to find my daughter come true!”

Recently, I received a link to a story posted on-line by a birth mother inside China, “mom of baby Jia Jia,” looking for her missing daughter.

After I got in touch with this birth mother, I was able to learn her story.

The birth mother is 29 years old. She lives in Tengzhou City in Shandong Province. In the first story that she posted on-line on February 17, 2016, she stated “I am an unfortunate woman.”

Below is her unfortunate story:

On December 9, 2012, she was very excited to finally become a mother with the birth of her baby girl, born in the Women & Children’s Health Hospital of Tengzhou City. The next day, her husband and his family came to check her and the baby out of the hospital.  She was with her husband, in her husband’s car, and the grandparents, holding her newborn baby girl, went with the aunt and uncle in another car home. After her husband and she got home, they waited and waited, but the grandparents never showed up with her baby girl. All that night and through the next morning, she waited. Finally she realized her baby girl was gone.

“I started to go crazy, screaming, looking for my baby girl. The next day I found out they had already abandoned my baby girl somewhere secretly, because they wanted a boy, not a girl. They would not say anything, and wouldn’t tell me where they had abandoned my baby girl!” the birth mother told me.

“They did not let me go out of the house to look for my baby girl, and locked me inside the house try to stop me. I started to text any friends that I knew, asking for their help to find my baby girl.”

She searched for her baby girl very hard on her own for a while, but her husband’s family did not cooperate with her in looking for the baby girl. They didn’t provide her the location where they had abandoned the baby. Instead, they did whatever they could to try to stop her, repeatedly threatening her. “That got me very angry,” the birth mother screamed, “Finally, I reported them to the police station for abandoning my baby girl.”

The policemen came, a reporter came. With the police department and the media involved, the birth mother learned her husband’s family had abandoned the baby girl at the First People’s Hospital in Xuzhou City in Jiangsu Province on the night of December 10, 2012. The hospital is about an hour drive from the city where they lived.

In May 2014, after she had spoken to many people in her research, the birth mother finally found out her baby girl had been sent to the Xuzhou City orphanage after she had been abandoned. She went to the Xuzhou City Orphanage immediately, hoping to find out any information about the baby girl. But the director of the orphanage denied that they have accepted any abandoned baby girl.

Then, she went to the Xuzhou City First People’s Hospital, and tried very hard to find the witness who found the girl in the hospital. She located the police officer who was involved with the girl’s finding and who had sent her into the orphanage. With the witness and evidence, as well as a reporter, she returned to the orphanage. This time Director Chen Li of the Xuzhou orphanage admitted that they had accepted the baby girl into the orphanage that night, but that the baby girl had already been adopted by a couple from the United States.

“In front of the reporter and the camera, this time Director Chen Li’s voice was much softer as she admitted that they had accepted my baby girl into their orphanage from the police station. But she told me that before she could provide any information and pictures of my daughter, she would first need to apply to the government to get state approval to allow her to do that. She also needed to ask for permission from the adoptive family, to see if they agreed to get in touch with me.

“In January 2015, I finally got baby pictures of my daughter from the orphanage.”

In April 2015, she went to the CCAA in Beijing. After she explained her story to the security guard who worked there, and with his help, she was able to speak to the principal of the CCAA and told her the whole story. Three days later, she revisited the CCAA and spoke to the principal there again. The principal told her that the CCAA had contacted the Xuzhou orphanage, they found out her daughter’s orphanage given name was “Yang Yu Shao,” and they were 99% sure that she was her daughter. But, the CCAA principal continued, besides this information they had provided her, she would have to go back to the orphanage and figure out a way to communicate with the orphanage and ask their help if she wanted more information about her daughter.

So, she went back to the Xuzhou orphanage after she left Beijing. This time the director of the orphanage told her to give up when she asked for help again, and told her that her daughter had her new life now. “She said I should just go on with my own life now on.  I told her that I will not rest in peace in death if I don’t get to see my daughter of my life.” The director’s response? “Who lives a life without regrets? Your search should end here now. Stop looking for your child, because the fates that you have with your child is just the way it is.”

The next day after her visit to the Xuzhou orphanage, her mother tried to call the director again, asking for her help. The director suggested to the mother that she needed to take the birth mother to see a psychiatrist. “Am I crazy because I don’t want to give up looking for my daughter?!?”

The birth mother concluded, “My daughter should be three years and six months old now. As I found out, she was about 11 months old when was she was adopted by the American family. I am worried that her adoptive family won’t help her to find me at all, and she will never have a chance to know that I love her as much as I love her younger sister who’s next to me. She will never know that she has a little sister who loves her very much, too!”

After her daughter was abandoned by her husband’s family, she and her husband quarreled constantly. Both struggled and tried hard to keep their marriage together,  hoping to have a complete home for their daughter if they found her. Their second daughter was born in March 2014. “She has brought much joy to me, but did not change the fact that I still miss my missing daughter every minute in my heart.”

About half a year ago, she and her husband divorced.

The birth mother would very much like to have her daughter to meet her younger sister, and hopes to stay in touch with her adoptive family as a family member. She also hopes her daughter grows up happy with her life.

“It has been three years that I have been looking for my daughter, since the day after I gave birth to her and her “missing” took my heart away! If not for my youngest daughter with me to hold on to, my life would not be worth living. Please! Help me to find my daughter!”

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If anyone has information about this missing baby, please contact us. She was named Liu Jia Jia by the birth mother and Yang Yu Shao by the Xuzhou City Orphanage. Her estimated birth date by the orphanage was 12/1/2012. She has a hyperpigmentation in both her nasolabial groove and left leg.