Oliver tugs at Lao Wong’s leg. He pulls Tupperware out of a cabinet while she sautés mushrooms on the stove. In a room full of other women and babies, his eyes will always find her first. Lao Wong is his person. She bathes him. She feeds him. She comforts him. She calms him. She is not his first mother, but she is his mother today. And with each hug, each dinner, each bedtime routine, each time she leaves the room and returns to him, she is teaching Oliver what it means to love and be loved.

As if Oliver were her own flesh and bone. 

In this moment – Oliver making a Tupperware mess in the kitchen and Lao Wong cooking his dinner – Oliver doesn’t know he was abandoned. He doesn’t know he is sick. He doesn’t know that one day, about 16 months ago, his birth mom took a deep breath and uncurled him from her arms and walked away forever. 

In this moment, all he knows is love.

This is a love story. But it is a love story filled with as much heartache as hope. This is a story about sacrifice. It is a story of love wide open. It is a story of loving and releasing.

Because eventually, Lao Wong must make the same decision Oliver’s birth mom had to make – she will open her hands…and let him go.  

In the suburbs of Beijing, China, in a modest but well-to-do neighborhood sits a home. Inside those walls, a miracle is taking place. Abandoned children are finding hope. Sick children are being given a chance at life.

The home belongs to Morning Star Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to take in Chinese orphans with complex cardiac defects and provide the surgery that gives them a chance. All over China, state-run orphanages that don’t have adequate hospital care contact Morning Star to ask if they can send orphans to their home. 

Morning Star says yes to the most high-risk children, like the ones who need multiple $10,000 heart surgeries and ongoing, hands-on care. It partners with surgeons who operate on the orphans’ hearts, as many times as it takes, until they are adopted.

When a child comes to live in the Morning Star baby home in Beijing, they usually come from a rural province in China where abandonment rates are high and orphanages are over-capacity and under-staffed. Usually, they come with blue fingernails and blue lips (one of the few outward signs of the very serious health issue hidden deep in their chest) and an attachment disorder, unable to smile or cry or trust, certainly not likely to love.

The baby home operates more like a foster care home than an orphanage. It has a living room, a kitchen, bedrooms and a patio with toys. Only eight to 12 babies live in the home at any one time with a 2-to-1 child-to-staff ratio, so each child can receive the love and attention he or she needs.

When a child comes to the baby home, she is given a bed and dresser that is hers. She has toys that belong to her. She wears clothes that are hers. She is welcomed with hugs and laughter from the other children who have lived there – some for as long as two and three years – and have learned what it feels like to be accepted into a family.

When a child comes to the baby home, he is assigned an Ayi, which means “auntie” in Chinese. In the beginning, the Ayi looks for her new child. She is there for him. She seeks him out at every moment she can, even when he may not seek her. She meets his needs. She is consistent. Deliberate. Peaceful. This begins the process of teaching attachment. Eventually, he will start to seek her out. He will know his Ayi as his person. He might even call her Nai Nai, Chinese for “grandma.” 

Ayis are full-time nannies – Chinese citizens who have left their own families to provide around-the-clock care for these orphans. Ayis live in the home. They share a room with their babies, and aside from a brief time off during the week when most head home to their own provinces, the Ayis are there to give baths, to administer medicine, sing songs, read books and provide comfort and love.

Life in the home feels incredibly normal. Shrieks of laughter fill the air. Four-year-old Chara twirls around in a pink tutu. Music plays in the background. Toby, Theo and Oliver shake a red blanket they’ve turned into a parachute game. The children walk around the house with an air of confidence and familiarity. The Ayis call the children over for lunch – a row of blue and white high chairs wait for them. Lunch is beef and broccoli and leek with egg. 

Hidden under each child’s bib and shirt is the same scar, a visible reminder of why they are here in the first place: They are sick. They have been abandoned. They are here for physical healing. They are here for emotional healing. They are here to prepare for a permanent home.

The Morning Star baby home was never meant to be the end game. It’s meant to be a temporary landing place – a place in-between abandonment and forever. A place that repairs literal broken hearts and heals emotionally broken hearts. 

When a child comes to the home, she learns to love. She learns what family means. She learns to trust, so that when the adoption goes through and she’s placed with a forever family, her heart is a little stronger, a little braver and a little more able to love.

Lao Wong has been an Ayi at the home for seven years. She’s loved several children – known their cries, their smells, their fears and their joys.  Now she does the same for Oliver.

But she knows that, no matter what, her time with the children will come to an end. It is certain. Either they will succumb to their sickness and leave this Earth. Or they will be adopted – placed into a forever family, far away from Beijing and the baby home.

Lao Wong says she misses every child that leaves. 

 “Shòu bù liǎo.”    

The expression in Chinese means in your heart, you just can’t bear it. Lao Wong remembers each baby she cared for. She says it’s okay they don’t remember her. What matters is that they felt love.

Nobody is born an orphan. But sometimes, circumstances create more orphans than necessary. Such is the history of China’s One Child Policy – a government mandate that stated Chinese families could only have one child, or face steep fines and punishment. The One Child Policy ruled for decades and was a dramatic instigator of the orphan crisis in China. The policy still drives many Americans’ views of orphans in China, even today. Orphans are largely believed to come from families who have abandoned their daughters in pursuit of sons. And indeed, one of the residual effects of the One Child Policy was a disproportionate number of baby girl orphans as compared to boy orphans. 

But this is an incomplete picture. 

The state of the orphan crisis in China is layers deep. The Chinese government ended its One Child Policy in 2016, but years of state-funded public educations campaigns have influenced the Chinese view of family planning. Many Chinese families believe having one child is the best way to parent. Some rural families who lack access to media don’t even know that One Child Policy doesn’t exist anymore as it once did.

To fully understand China’s orphan crisis you must also understand the Chinese welfare state. Chinese families, especially those in rural provinces, do not have access to state-run pensions, or any significant programs to help them as they age. Chinese families rely on their children as a means of support in their older years. Boys are preferable because they have more opportunities for work. Healthy children are critical. 

Poor families also lack any significant form of government-funded medical welfare (such as Medicaid in the United States). Poor families must pay for their own medical services or hospital care. Having a child with severe medical needs could financially devastate a family.

Yet, despite the fact that the Chinese government will not provide welfare services to all of its citizens, the Chinese government does believe that the state has a responsibility to care for its country’s children if they are abandoned. The government has even gone so far as to institute a “baby hatch” system that provides a safe place for mothers to anonymously abandon their babies. 

When the first baby hatch opened in 2014, a team from CNN waited outside to see how often it was being used. In just 11 days, 106 babies were dropped off at one facility in the Jinan province. All had disabilities.

The Chinese welfare system, or lack thereof, forces families with sick children to choose: find thousands of dollars for medical treatments, or abandon your child to the state in the hope that they will be rescued and given a shot at life by the government.

Today, orphanages are overrun with children with serious health problems.

The families who have abandoned them have placed hope in the programs they believe are available to their children once they become a ward of the state.

But it’s a false hope. 

The state-controlled orphanages cannot afford to get the children the medical care that they need, nor do they have the staff capacity to care for the children. Orphanages themselves are crowded, with some holding hundreds of children. There is a high child-to-staff ratio. When it comes time for adoption, most families do not want to adopt a sick child. They get passed over, like defects in a file.

If they get passed over too many times, the orphans have nowhere to go. Orphaned children are denied hukou, the household birth registration required for all Chinese families. In other words, orphans are undocumented. Undocumented such that they’re prevented from attend public school, getting married, traveling or finding employment.

When a Chinese orphan turns 15 and has not yet been adopted, he or she is no longer permitted to stay in the orphanage. They walk out the doors to be welcomed by the streets of their province. 

They have no papers, no education and no hope for a rescuer.

Meredith Toering is a force, although you wouldn’t know it by her calm and reserved demeanor. Within a few moments of talking with her, however, it’s obvious Meredith is a warrior. As International Director of Morning Star Foundation, she manages the baby home and the medical care for the children who live there.

Meredith doesn’t have a medical degree, but her descriptions of complex cardiac conditions roll off the tongue with the ease of a third-year medical resident.

“He’s a single ventricle defect.”

“Her left pulmonary artery was finally big enough.”

“So they can do the VSD repair and will be giving her a new conduit?”

Every baby at Morning Star has a complex heart condition and medical charts inches thick. Meredith could tell you the details of every one. Nearly every day for the past three years, she’s been on the front lines going to battle for the babies, knocking down doors of hospitals and grasping for options.

“If the doctor’s saying, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing we can do. Your baby is going to die,’ I’m the one saying ‘No, they’re not. We’re going to find an option and we’re going to do something,’” said Meredith.

When she talks, her eyes are full of intention and the same bravery she speaks of in the babies. She is fiercely protective of them, both in the hospital and in the home. She doesn’t accept volunteers or “missions” teams who cannot commit to regular monthly visits. With children learning how to love and trust, it’s simply too risky.

 “I would much rather make sure their emotional hearts aren’t being compromised and that we’re doing everything we can to protect attachment,” said Meredith.

Every day, Meredith goes back and forth from the baby home, the hospitals and her small studio apartment in a suburban Beijing high-rise. At the baby home, she sings the English version of “Skinamarinky dinky dink” and documents life in the baby home on Morning Star’s Instagram account. She has a small office in the back of the home where she goes to make calls with donors and appointments with doctors. (Contributions to the foundation have more than doubled since Meredith became International Director). She uses her minivan to make quick stops at the hospital to visit babies waiting or recovering from surgery.

Meredith walks into the hospital and up to the 14^th floor to the cardiac wing. She is there for Finn, one of Morning Star’s babies who will undergo heart surgery. His surgery will be risky. For complex cardiac pediatric patients who are undergoing open heart surgery, death is never far away.

In this hospital, Meredith has felt the buoyancy of hope and the sting of death.

“There are so many stories that I like to write in my head. And sometimes they end so much differently than I ever could have thought,” said Meredith.

Chinese hospitals require a patient’s family to make arrangements to remove the body after they die. And so when a Morning Star child dies, the baby is literally handed to Meredith.

“I can’t tell you how much I wish I didn’t know the feel of each body in death. I can’t tell you the heartbreak of walking out of a hospital – arms full of broken hope. I remember every weight. I remember every step,” Meredith said in a post on Instagram in December 2017 reflecting on the loss of lives felt that year. Within the span of four months, Meredith held three babies as they died.

Meredith often thinks of the birth moms in that moment, the ones who were there when the child’s first breath was taken – the ones who abandoned their child for the hope of life.

“I get to be the one to make sure they are loved through their last breath. And that is such an honor to me that I really can’t explain,” said Meredith.

But in this moment, for Finn, she still holds onto hope.

Back on the 14^th floor, Meredith meets with Dr. Zhou, the Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery at the Bayi Children’s Hospital. Dr. Zhou operates on Morning Star Foundation babies and has built a strong partnership with the organization. If Meredith is their warrior, Dr. Zhou is their elixir – the one who literally holds their hearts in his hands.

And with every heart, he is going against the grain.

The Chinese government rates its doctors on how successful they are based on survival and morbidity rates. They have no incentive to take on high-risk cases; in fact, many doctors refuse to take high-risk cases for fear of it tarnishing their record and putting them out of work.

Dr. Zhou refuses to make decisions based on that rating standard. He’s confident in his abilities. But his character drives him too. He believes that choosing to operate on these babies isn’t really even a choice to make – that humanity demands only one option. “I think [all babies] were born equal. They should have the surgery. That is why I take the risk,” Dr. Zhou said.

And so, surgery after surgery, he stands in the gap, stitching hearts and fighting for the underdog when no other surgeon will.

And one after another, he sends the children, including Finn, home. Healed. Scarred. Loved.

A father paces the hallways outside the ICU. He rings his hands through his hair. How can he be forced to make this decision? 

He runs through the dollar amounts in his head. No matter how many times he tries, the numbers just don’t add up. How can he make up an 80% gap? He’s asked everyone. He’s taken out as many loans as he is allowed. Who else can he ask? His mind wanders back to his son, Jia Qi, as he thinks to himself. 

How can I be in this nightmare? I am his father. I am to care for him. How can I be forced to choose?

He rings his hands and paces and the tears come, rolling down his cheeks. And then a voice.

“Are you Jia Qi’s father?” a woman says.

He looks up. “Yes.”

“Whatever we have to do to help you, we are here. It doesn't matter the cost, it doesn't matter what happens. We can't guarantee the outcome. But your baby is worth this chance, and we want you to be able to stay together as a family.”

She extends a hand.

“I’m Meredith with the Morning Star Foundation.”

There is only one true way to solve the orphan crisis, and that is to cut it off at the root. For China, this means solving for the lack of resources available to families who love their children but do not have the financial capacity to help them.

Morning Star Foundation doesn’t just foster children while healing hearts. The organization is also working to keep Chinese families together through The Love Project, a family unification and orphan prevention program.

The Love Project finds families who are at risk of abandonment due to financial hardship. Morning Star Foundation funds the surgeries in full (or in part, if the family has already raised some funds). It also partners with families after the surgeries so they are well-prepared for the demands that come with caring for a child with complex medical conditions. It connects families with education and counseling. It provides funds for medications, follow up procedures and trips to the city for doctor visits. 

“We want Chinese families to know they’re not alone in this, and there is an alternative,” said Meredith.

“One of my Chinese families said to me, ‘we knew Americans wanted our babies. But we didn’t know they cared about us too.’”

Today, Morning Star Foundation is seeking to expand The Love Project. It also has a vision to open baby homes, similar to the home in Beijing, in rural provinces across China, so that they can take on more children while maintain the 2-to-1 care ratio and family feel the home has. Having homes in rural provinces also allows children to stay close to their hometowns. 

Brave Hearts

How many sacrificial steps does it take to heal a heart? How many people must choose hope, when there is nothing in it for them? How many brave people must decide to love when heartache, risk and vulnerability are guaranteed? How many people will stand in the gap for one abandoned child? 

In this story, there are at least five.

A birth mom opens her hands and releases the flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone into the universe, with the hope that something…someone…will find them. 

An Ayi teaches a child how to attach and love the only way a human can, by selflessly attaching and loving, even though she knows she will say goodbye. 

A surgeon puts his medical career on the line to care for the least of these. 

A director fights day in and day out, going to battle for children in need, all without knowing whether they will live or die.

An adoptive parent chooses to provide a lifetime of love and support, with no guarantee of the future outcome. 

Brave hearts are fighting for broken hearts. Because every child is worth the risk.