Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China

Those touched by adoption from China want to know why so many healthy infant girls are in Chinese orphanages. This book provides the most thorough answer to date. Johnson’s research overturns stereotypes and challenges the conventional wisdom on abandonment and adoption in modern China.

Certainly, as Johnson shows, many Chinese parents feel a great need for a son to carry on the family name and to care for them in their old age. At the same time, the government’s strict population policy puts great pressure on parents to limit births. As a result, some parents are able to obtain a son only by resorting to illegal behavior, such as "overquota" births and female infant abandonment.

Yet the Chinese today value daughters more highly than ever before. As many of Johnson’s respondents put it, "A son and a daughter make a family complete." How can these seemingly contradictory trends--the widespread desire for a daughter as well as a son, and the revival of female infant abandonment--be happening in the same place at the same time? Johnson looks at abandonment together with two other practices: population planning and adoption. In doing so, she reveals all three in a new light.

Johnson shows us that a rapidly changing culture in late twentieth-century China hastened a positive revaluation of daughters, while new policies limiting births undercut girls’ improving status in the family. Those policies also revived and exacerbated one of the worst aspects of traditional patriarchal practices: the abandonment of female infants.

Yet Chinese parents are not literally forced to abandon female infants in order to have a son. While birth-planning enforcement can be coercive, parents who abandon are rarely prosecuted. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Chinese parents informally adopt female foundlings and raise them as their own. Ironically, as Johnson shows, in some places adoptive parents are more likely than abandoning parents to incur fines and discrimination.

In addressing all these issues, Johnson brings the skills of a China specialist who has spent over a decade researching her subject. She also brings the concerns of an adoptive parent who hopes that this book might help others find answers to the question, What can we tell our children about why they were abandoned and why they were available for international adoption?

For adoptive families, Kay Johnson has provided an invaluable insight into the circumstances that led to children being available for foreign families. Stripped of the emotional overlay that accompanies so many books about adoption, Kay Johnson fearlessly examines her own preconceptions to get closer to the truth by talking to birth parents, spending time with orphanage officials and pouring over statistics. Kay Johnson shows us what happened, what changed and what could change in the future.

While I personally hope that there will be an international adoption program in place for many years, I am also respectful of Kay Johnson's belief that children are best off being adopted in their birth countries. The children in China's orphanages have been helped enormously by both the international adoption program and by better domestic adoption policies. Kay Johnson, almost alone of the authors and journalists who write about Chinese adoption, recognizes the contributions of the adoptive families to the orphanages as well as recognizing other contributions that have dramatically improved the care of children whose welfare is overseen by the orphanages.

This book offers a unique insight both for those who erroneously leap on the orphanages as a token of the depravity of the Chinese and for those whose choice to adopt in China has given them a life-altering link to a country halfway around the globe.

Every adoptive parent should take the opportunity this book provides to understand more fully the lives of their children before those children belonged to an adoptive family. A lot of this book is surprising and unsettling, but a thorough reading will help adoptive parents make sense of the miracle that ocurred when they traveled to China for a first look at a small person they would love for the rest of their lives.


A Book for My Daughters...   March 9, 2004
Jean MacLeod
39 out of 41 found this review helpful

Reviewed by the author of "At Home in This World, a China Adoption Story" (EMK Press, 2003):

"Wanting A Daughter, Needing A Son" is a snapshot in time of the socio-political circumstances leading to the abandonment and international adoption of thousands of China's daughters. The facts and statistics that Dr. Johnson cites as part of her research, reflect a complex Catch-22 of a patrilineal society moving from desperate economic survival towards prosperity, and of population laws and policies that are unevenly policed and out of sync with the current emotional lives of Chinese parents.

"Wanting A Daughter, Needing A Son" is not a band-aid; it's truth won't banish our children's feelings of loss, or give adoptive parents the kind of explanations that would allow us to put a loving or heroic spin on the sad act of abandonment. But Dr Johnson's important work broadens the China adoption picture, gives it depth, and hands us the knowledge our children will eventually need in order to comprehend the complicated facets of their own Chinese/American/adoptee identity. Kay Ann Johnson's research uncovers the surprising fact that many thousands of abandoned Chinese babies actually do find happy homes (legally and illegally) within their own communities, despite our previous understanding of the one-child policy and domestic Chinese adoption. In an added twist, our children may someday realize that they have "adoptee peers" in China, who grew up in loving families with Chinese adoptive parents, and without the associated alienation of cross-cultural, trans-racial adoption that our China girls and boys must learn to live with here in the USA.

Dr. Johnson's interviews and statistics also tell us that the majority of our children most likely have a sibling or two living in China with our child's family of origin- bittersweet data that may someday provide a genetic connection for adult adoptees seeking birth information. I am appreciative of Dr. Johnson's illuminating research on a subject so close to my heart, and grateful to have her book to share with my daughters in the future. "Wanting A Daughter, Needing A Son" will be a solid resource for them in teen- and adulthood, and will help them to intellectually understand the time and place, cultural mentality, and forces of power that spun their young lives halfway around the world.


An Invaluable Book For Anyone Who Has Adopted From China!   February 2, 2004
Ginger Holland (Michigan, USA)
24 out of 25 found this review helpful

I am an adoptive mother of a daughter from China. When I saw this book's title, I just knew that I had to read it--and, boy, was I not disappointed! This book provided me with enlightening information to questions that my little mind had been pondering regarding my daughter's early life. I can truly say that I am much more prepared to answer any and all of my daughter's future questions regarding why her birth parents may have abandoned her. I learned how the Chinese feel about adopting their abandoned children domestically, and I have newfound respect for the person who found my little girl and brought her to safety. I had never dreamed that the people who take these babies off of the streets would be accused of either being the parent or knowing the parent(s). The reader can tell that the author, Kay Johnson, has poured both her heart and soul into her research--and, at first, it may have been to just answer her own questions she had regarding her adopted daughter. However, we can all be grateful that she decided to publish her findings so that all of us can glean insight about our daughter's or son's unknown beginnings. This book is a MUST read for those of us who have been blessed with raising a Chinese child. I think our children will thank us one day for taking the time to educate ourselves--which is what this book does. I plan on sharing "Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son" with my daughter one day. Thank you, Kay, for your research and for writing such an invaluable book.


Excellent   February 23, 2005
Charger (Chantilly, VA)
19 out of 21 found this review helpful

This is an excellent work on the population control and adoption policies of communist China. Very detailed and very educational. Explored the causes of abandonment and posited some unexpected conclusions about this issue. One of the best books I have read in a long time.

The only criticism I have is that the author seems to go to great lengths to show that Chinese society has come to value daughters in a way that it did not do so in the past (thus, the book's title). The author asserts that, after having a first son (who will be relied upon for social security in the old age of his parents), Chinese families are more than willing to accept and value a daughter as a second child. However, while there are certainly parents who will make this claim (perhaps because it would be shameful to claim otherwise), the fact remains that almost every infant abandoned in China and almost every child living (and dying) in a Chinese orphanage is a girl. This hardly reflects a new-found appreciation of the value of girls. And the fact remains that more sons will result in more old-age security for the parents. Chinese parents who value one son for the security he can offer will value two sons for the added security.

If you have been touched by adoption from China or just have an interest in China or its population control policies, then this book is worth its weight in gold. Kay Ann Johnson has done a wonderful job.


A MUST HAVE if you adopted in China!   March 5, 2004
13 out of 15 found this review helpful

I just finished my "first read" of "Wanting a Daughter, Needing a
Son" and am utterly impressed. I say "first
read" because I find it to be an excellent reference book that is just so full of incredible information that it would be difficult to comprehend/process it all in one reading. Of all the
articles and books that I have read to attempt to have a great,
accurate knowledge base of information for the day when my daughter who was adopted in China asks
BIG QUESTIONS about her past, THIS is THE book. I am TOTALLY in awe,
and MORE THAN GRATEFUL to the "academics" among adoptive parents
whose diligent and dedicated work will benefit ALL of our adopted
children from China. You MUST get a copy of this book to have on hand, even if the statistical info isn't currently the kind of literature that holds your attention.