Outsourced Children by Leslie K. Wang

Author:Leslie K. Wang [Wang, Leslie K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Marriage & Family, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9781503600119
Google: dXjzwAEACAAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2016-08-31T05:26:52+00:00

5

The Limits of Outsourced Intimacy

Contested Logics of Care at the Yongping Orphanage

CRISP AIR FILLED MY LUNGS as I stepped off the bus in a nondescript suburb on the eastern side of Beijing and jumped over piles of decaying brown leaves blown onto the sidewalk. After a brisk ten-minute walk down several pleasant tree-lined streets, I arrived at the Yongping Social Welfare Institute (SWI), a local Chinese state-run institution that also contained an elder care home, a facility for disabled adults, and a small orphanage that housed around forty mostly special needs children. The orphanage had been built three years earlier with funds donated by the Helping Hands Organization, a local grassroots group of affluent Western expatriate wives in Beijing.

At the front gate, a baby-faced security guard stood at attention, his slight body engulfed by an oversized navy blue uniform cinched improbably tightly at the waist. As I approached, the teenager stepped forward and raised a slender hand to block my passage. In a surprisingly gruff voice, he barked, “Where are you going?” “To the orphanage,” I stammered nervously, before quickly adding, “I’m a foreign volunteer.” I was unsure whether this would help me get inside or raise suspicions. In light of Beijing’s preparations to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, rumors were circulating around the international NGO community about new restrictions on foreigners attempting to gain access to state orphanages. To my great relief, the boyish guard stepped aside and waved me through.

From where I stood the orphanage looked small and insignificant, sitting off to one side of a modern four-story nursing home that cared for several hundred senior citizens. On my way in, I nodded a greeting to two elderly male residents in their seventies who had donned matching dark rectangular sunglasses, striped winter caps, and the black cloth slipper shoes common among Asian grandparents. They sat together silently on a wooden bench in the courtyard, soaking in the sun and tapping their feet along to the jolting rhythms of Chinese opera that blared from an old-fashioned handheld radio. On my right sat a colorful, but forlorn, children’s playground built with donations from a Western multinational corporation where the husband of one of the Helping Hands volunteers worked. Rarely ever used for children’s play, the blacktop was littered with broken plastic toys. Sturdy white laundry lines crisscrossed the space, drying an array of bedsheets and children’s clothing that flapped in the breeze. Several foreign luxury cars were parked alongside the playground, and their Chinese male drivers were dozing off or playing on their cell phones in the front seats. The Western volunteers had clearly arrived.

The orphanage was a plain, one-story L-shaped structure with large plate glass windows that had oversized decals of animals dancing across the front. Pushing open the heavy doors, I ducked first into the baby room, which was located directly across from me. Measuring only ten by fifteen feet, the space was filled to capacity with metal cribs. Four beds formed an island in the center of the room, and eight more cribs, each holding a toddler or baby, lined the faded periwinkle walls.

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