Chinese parents finally dare to look for daughters they gave away long ago. The one-child policy has been abolished for a few years now, so they no longer get a fine. Behind the shame that remains is the deep need to know how their child is doing.
Eefje Rammeloo2 July 2020 , 10:57 AM
Ye Yunfeng has a face full of laughter lines, the face of someone who likes to get up to mischief and can laugh happily. He must be a nice father to his son and daughter. There are two of them, the third was an accident. The laugh lines suddenly disappear. "Had it been a son, I might have fled into the mountains with him." It was the heyday of the one-child policy, and Farmer Ye couldn't pay another fine.
His parents still knew someone who could make the baby disappear. The girl was a few days old when her parents gave her to a crippled man in the morning. “The sun wasn't up yet,” Ye recalls. When he regretted it a few years later, he went after the man, but he turned out to be dead. He would give something to see his now 34-year-old daughter. The great thing is: nobody can fix it anymore, because the one-child policy is history.
A few hundred parents spend their Saturday afternoon on a square in the town of Shouning. They walk restlessly from one side of the square to the other. Maybe their daughter will also register just today. On a table in the semicircular gazebo lie sterile-wrapped cotton swabs and needles. The ladies who manage the table are sure to prick the fingers of the seekers. They drip some blood onto a card that they staple to a form in a brown envelope. Those who cannot write can leave it to them.