Baby broker: Mrs Tang sells newborns to the orphanage next door

Baby broker: Mrs Tang sells newborns to the orphanage next door

Byline: Simon Parry

IT IS seven weeks since I held in my arms a baby boy called Hoang outside an orphanage in northern Vietnam where he was offered to me for $10,000, and the look in his mother's eyes as she reluctantly handed him over still haunts me.

Beneath the watchful stare of a 'baby broker' providing her with bed and board and a cash payment in return, Hoang's 28-year-old mother seemed torn between instinct and duty as she slowly gave up her first-born child.

Married in her teens, this woman from a poor mountain village had tried for years to conceive success. When she finally fell pregnant, she decided to give her infant away for adoption because her husband had a mistress and she feared she would be left to raise the child alone.

At least that is the story I was told. But did this woman living in a country where family ties are so strong really want to give up her baby because of a spouse's infidelity? And would she really have even considered having him adopted overseas were it not for the money? The release this week of a damning UNICEF report, into the way overseas adoptions take place in Vietnam, confirmed the powerful suspicions I harboured at the time that the answer to both questions was a resounding and emphatic: 'No.'

As a father of young children, I found my encounter with Hoang and his mother grotesquely unnatural and upsetting. It should be deeply disturbing too for the many Irish parents who have adopted babies from the orphanage in Lang Son next door.

Posing as a prospective adoptive father, I arrived at the orphanage just days after a group of Irish couples collected their babies. All six babies came to the orphanage through the baby broker next door.

Those couples had been taken to the orphanage by the adoption agency Helping Hands then marshalled and minded every step of the way. I went alone with a translator and bags full of gifts for the children to see if I could find someone to show me around.

The orphanage happily accepted my gifts but refused to let me in, saying they would ring me when the director arrived. I found myself, with my translator, sitting in a cafe near the orphanage, waiting in vain for a call that would never come.

One of the few details I had managed to glean about the Lang Son orphanage was that, even after the Irish adoptions, of the 110 or so remaining children, around a quarter were under the age of one, an extraordinarily high proportion of infants for any orphanage.

It was in the cafe that we stumbled across the truth about the abundant supply of babies. When we told the owner I wanted to adopt, he led us to the home of Tang Thi Cai, just 100 yards from the orphanage's entrance.

Here, the charming, chatty and motherly Mrs Tang gave us tea, played a traditional Vietnamese instrument and eventually led us to the labyrinth of stone huts behind her home where women from poor mountain villages along the Chinese border come to give birth and then give up their babies.

Mrs Tang takes them in, nurses them through pregnancy, with free bed and board, and then - in return for signing away their babies for foreign adoption - pays them 'compensation' of around $200, a huge sum for a farming family in Vietnam.

In one locked room, heavily pregnant women lay resting. In another, five women and their babies shared a bleak, 20ft long room. It was here that Mrs Tang ordered Hoang's mother to place her son in my arms as she began to calculate how much she could charge me to take the little boy home.

Mrs Tang had never sold a baby directly to a foreigner before and it is unlikely the deal could ever have gone through, even though she claimed to know high-ranking officials in Hanoi who could smooth over the necessary paperwork.

As far as she was concerned, I was a novelty, but a potentially lucrative novelty. In every other case, she had been paid by the orphanage for each baby she provided for adoption and it was clear she felt others were making a far bigger killing on the adoptions than she was. Mrs Tang insisted the money she made was 'enough to cover costs and a little more besides'. Orphanages made far greater sums, she told us with a hint of bitterness, and we could pay up to $16,000 ($11,000) if we dealt with them directly.

Whether or not she could have arranged for me to adopt Hoang or not, she was determined to give it a go, and what we saw at her home was a brutal insight into the way foreign money has corrupted the Vietnamese adoption system.

One of the quotes that struck me when I read the UNICEF report was from an expert commentator, who said: 'Vietnam has an extremely strong family culture. It is not in a state of conflict or disaster. Why would it need so many of its babies to be adopted abroad?'

That strong family culture is something I can personally vouch for. After leaving London to work overseas in 1996, my wife and I lived for nearly two years in Vietnam. Our first child, Georgina Mai (her middle name is Vietnamese), was born during our time there and spent most of the first year of her life in Hanoi.

One thing we discovered in those months is that the Vietnamese adore babies. It would take us ten minutes to get from one end of our street to the next because of the all the cooing and cheek-pinching.

Since moving to Hong Kong, we return once a year with our children and travel widely. The family culture is as strong if not stronger in the countryside, where married couples live with grandparents and children under the same roof. In the remotest villages, there are children everywhere, playing in the fields, running in and out of brick and bamboo shacks. They are plentiful, poor, playful, happy and adored.

That is why stories like the one I was told of Hoang's mother and the many accounts given to adoptive parents of babies abandoned on the steps of hospitals and orphanages simply will not ring true to any foreigner who knows Vietnam. Deep down, I suspect, they don't ring true to the adoptive parents either.

I know that my account of what happened in Lang Son has upset many parents who have adopted from Vietnam and others who still hope to do so. I have seen the internet message boards and the sometimes vitriolic postings accusing me of somehow fabricating what I saw and being part of a conspiracy to deny them the right to have children of their own.

I did no such thing, I have no such agenda, and yet I sympathise deeply with their position. These are ugly and unpalatable truths and, for the sake of the adopted Vietnamese children already living in Ireland and elsewhere, I too wish they were somehow untrue.

In Vietnam, I met some of the couples with their adopted children in Hanoi after they had collected their babies in Lang Son. It was clear that these were people whose only desire was to be good parents and who wanted nothing but the best for their adopted children. But parenting isn't as simple as just smothering a child in love, giving them a life of comfort, and assuring them over and over everything is all right. It is also about being honest and open with them and being able to answer the increasingly difficult questions they put to you as they grow up. For adoptive parents, those questions are thornier and come sooner than they might imagwithout ine. One day they will be faced with questions like: 'Who are my real parents?', 'Why did they give me away?' and 'What did you do when you were in Vietnam to find out the truth?'

Will they be able to give honest and open answers? Will they be comfortable that there were warning signs they chose to ignore? Will they be able to say in all truthfulness that the orphanage in Lang Son was a caring, loving place where the child's wellbeing was the paramount concern?

On my many working visits to Vietnam, I have seen other orphanages, in particular, one run by the Kianh Foundation in Hoi An which I visited earlier this year. Here, I was enthusiastically invited in and shown around. There was no 'maternity home' on the doorstep. Volunteers face a constant struggle to make ends meet. There is no 25 per cent concentration of infants. Rather, its rooms are full of older, often disabled children, who rely on donations and a tireless band of dedicated helpers. These genuine orphans have little hope of ever being adopted, let alone to a rich country overseas.

In a key passage, the report notes that when U.S. adoptions, accounting for a big share of overseas adoptions, halted last year because of concerns over the processes, the number of babies in Vietnamese orphanages did not rise correspondingly.

The report said: 'The number of "abandonments" depends considerably on the extent to which there is a demand for the children.

'There is little doubt the availability of babies for inter-country adoption is essentially a function of the requirements of foreign adopters, and not of the needs of Vietnamese society and its children.' There was no doubt in my mind that when I visited Lang Son, this was more of a baby farm than an orphanage. There was no doubt either that it was not the needs of Hoang or his mother that were foremost in Mrs Tang's mind as she placed the little boy in my arms.

As I drove away from Lang Son, Hoang's fate was already sealed. He would be passed to the orphanage and given up for adoption. He might be with a new family overseas, perhaps in Ireland with one of the next batch of parents who arrived in Vietnam in mid-October.

As for his mother, she will in all likelihood be back in her village, perhaps clutching more money than she has had in her young life but, from the look I saw in her eyes, surely struggling to contain a longing for the first-born she cradled for three months and then gave away.

Will the money compensate for the loss of her son? Will the life of relative luxury that Hoang will enjoy overseas compensate him for the harsh reality he must face later in life when he realises he is not an orphan but a child whose mother was paid to give him up? When word got back to Vietnam about the story of our visit, Mrs Tang phoned my interpreter in an indignant panic.

'I am providing a service to these women,' she insisted. 'I look after them. I am not doing anything wrong. I am not a bad woman.'

I don't believe she is. And I don't believe the Irish couples who adopt from Vietnam are bad people either. But I believe that Ireland has been sucked into a trade in babies that will leave some mothers pining forever for their babies and young children growing up to face the terrible knowledge that their own mothers sold them for the price of an iPod.

Ignorance is no longer an excuse, now that the UNICEF report has been released. To me, it seems the baby trade in Vietnam is exploitative, cruel and destructive. No civilised person or country should want anything to do with it.

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Baby broker: Mrs Tang sells newborns to the orphanage next door