New York Times - September 14, 1999
Women Keep Garment Jobs By Sending Babies to China
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
he spent her days at home with her newborn son, knowing that every day she did not work was another day without money to pay back her $20,000 smugglers' debt. She spent her nights awake, hushing the baby so he would not disturb her husband or the three other restaurant workers who shared their three-room apartment in northern Manhattan. She named the boy Henry, and for four precious months, she nursed him, even after friends warned that she would soon have to let him go.
On the second Thursday in July, the woman, Xiu, finally did. Wrapping a tiny gold bracelet around his wrist, she placed her son in the arms of a friend of a friend, who, for $1,000, agreed to take him to China.
Xiu's mother is raising him there now, along with the 10-year-old daughter left behind last year when Xiu joined her husband in New York. She plans to bring Henry back when he reaches school age. But until then, she remains here, waiting to be a mother to her child.
For weeks after Henry was shipped off, she would hear him cry at night. "It seemed like she just gave up the baby to a complete stranger," said Sara Lee, a social worker at the Chinatown clinic of St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center, interpreting for Xiu one recent morning. "It's really killing her. She said no words can express her sadness."
Xiu's story has become increasingly common among the city's newest Chinese immigrants. Working long hours in garment factories for paltry pay, lacking affordable child care and the safety net of an extended family, growing numbers of Chinese immigrant women -- a great many of whom, like Xiu, are here illegally -- are sending their infants to China, according to doctors, nurses, social workers and labor organizers.
It is impossible to determine just how widespread the practice is, but it appears to involve hundreds of babies a year in New York, if not more.
At the Chinatown Health Center, 10 to 20 percent of the 1,500 babies delivered last year were sent away, according to Celia Ng, the nursing coordinator there. And at the St. Vincent's Hospital Chinatown clinic, according to Ms. Lee, one-third to one-half the women who seek prenatal care say they plan to send their babies away.
Most of the mothers are married. And many give birth knowing that soon, they, too, may end up sending their babies away.
The children, American citizens by birth, are usually raised by grandparents. The expectation, though hardly a guarantee, is that the children will be summoned back when they are old enough to begin school.
Their story is another example of the way families have been and continue to be fractured by immigration. Men and women from all over the world come to the United States, leaving children with relatives back home until they gain a foothold.
And some immigrant parents send their American children, particularly teen-agers, to the old country, to save them from troubled city streets. Sending infants to the old country is not unique to the Chinese. But social service agencies working in other immigrant communities say that while it is not unheard of, the practice is still uncommon, usually limited to cases of extreme hardship. Among Dominicans, for instance, it is usually young, single mothers who send their children to the homeland, social workers say.
It is the combination of the large debts owed to their smugglers and the long hours they must work that has made this practice increasingly common among Chinese immigrants.
There is an additional cruel dilemma: having left China and its rigid one-child policy, they are finally able to have larger families without fear of penalties or recrimination. But as poor, illegal immigrants here, they say, they are hard pressed to take care of their young.
That more of these mothers are sending their babies to China, people who work with them say, reflects the tougher working and living conditions facing Chinese immigrants today. With the threat of factories' moving abroad driving down wages, and a steady supply of cheap, illegal immigrant labor, mostly from Fujian Province in southern China, a new generation of garment sweatshops has blossomed across the city in recent years, according to garment workers' advocates and those who study Chinese immigration. Wages have fallen, and it is common for garment shops to require employees to work weekends.
"A lot of people simply have no time for their children," said Joanne Lum of the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, who works with garment workers in Chinatown and the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn.
Since her son was sent home, Xiu has returned to work. She sews women's pants six days a week and sends home $200 each month. At least every other week, she calls home. Every time, her daughter, Kei Wan, asks her to return home. Kei Wan's chances of coming here any time soon are slim at best, her mother said, since she would have to be smuggled in at great expense.
This was not the picture Xiu had in mind when her husband summoned her here. They had been apart for eight years, she raising their little girl in a small town in southern China, he working as a cook at a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan. When Xiu finally arrived, she brought with her little more than nervous dreams: to work hard, save money, and raise a bigger, more prosperous family than she could imagine doing in China.
In a matter of months, Xiu became pregnant. And that is when she learned of this unforeseen tangle in the immigrant life.
"It's not easy," she said, fingering the pictures of her children she keeps in a plastic picture album, "to be a mother here."
Certainly, most Chinese immigrants do not send their babies away. They manage by staying home, imploring an elderly relative to baby-sit or paying for child care. Day care costs at least $20 a day in Chinatown, a large sum for a garment worker like Xiu, who, in a six-day workweek, takes home less than $300.
A couple of years ago, Ms. Lee saw a flier in the clinic bathroom. For a fee -- the going rate is $1,000, plus air fare -- someone was offering to take babies to China.
Around that time, she noticed an increase in the number of women who sent their babies to China. So she began to ask all her prenatal patients what they planned to do after giving birth.
Today, she tells each one how painful it can be for a mother to send an infant away.
She explains how difficult it can be when the child finally comes back, but as a stranger.
"I can't imagine being separated from my kids," said Ms. Lee, whose own children are 1 and 3. "But they have a problem, no matter what."
Zhu, a single woman from Guangdong Province, says that sending her child home is the only way she can imagine surviving in this country. Just before her first child, Thomas, was born last month, Zhu, 36, gave up her job as a home health aide in Brooklyn.
In February, Zhu, unmarried and alone in New York, plans to take Thomas to China, where her own mother will raise him for a few years, until she can afford to have him by her side once more.
Fortunately for Zhu, she is a legal immigrant.
She can take Thomas to China herself. When she can afford it, she can even visit.
That good fortune is beyond Xiu's reach. The other day, the two mothers sat next to each other at the Chinatown clinic run by St. Vincent's Hospital, Xiu keeping her eyes on baby Thomas sleeping against his mother's belly, Zhu admiring the pictures of Xiu's children.
They were talking of the choices they had made, and Xiu was wiping away irrepressible tears.
How hard it was, she said, to walk into the clinic that morning and see babies in their mothers' arms. How hard it was, she said, when the woman who took Henry home called to say that he had cried incessantly on the one-and-a-half-day journey. At least, she said, she had nursed him for the first four months of his life. She would feel so guilty otherwise.
Would it have been easier, she wondered aloud, if she had been younger? A quick rebuttal came from Angel, 33, from Guangdong. Five years ago, when she was 28, her husband sent their daughter back home. It wasn't any easier, she said. At the time, Angel said, she had no choice. She had a good job at a photography shop in Chinatown, and her boss had agreed to let her take a month off after the birth.
There was no one to watch the baby all day, nor money for a sitter. Barely 4 weeks old, the baby was sent away.
Three years later, when Angel brought her back to New York, the little girl seemed as miserable as her mother had been when she sent her away. She sat on the sofa in the living room of their apartment in Woodside, Queens, and cried quietly.
A small, sprightly woman who looks half her age, Angel still cries at the memory.
It has brought her one lesson. She says she is not planning on any more children.