For Jenny Bowen, the distance between herself and her newly adopted daughter began to close when the child, barely 2, slowly began edging nearer on the hotel bed. "She didn't dare to look at me, but as I felt the warmth of her back inching closer to me, I also felt her courage," Bowen recalled in an e-mail exchange with China Daily.
Bowen had met her new daughter a few days before, at an orphanage in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. "Her face was splotched with sores and she was clutching a dried lichee nut in each hand that had been placed there to keep her from scratching her scores. Tired and confused, she was so beautiful and so sad," said the 60-something mother of four, looking back to that hot afternoon in summer 1997. "A smiling woman in a white uniform lifted her up to me, but she arched her back when I tried to hold her. She wanted nothing to do with me."
Back in the United States, it quickly became clear to Bowen, a former Hollywood screenwriter and independent filmmaker, and her cinematographer husband Richard, that despite her one attempt at contact their new daughter would not adapt to family life easily. "She was emotionally shutdown. Vacant," Bowen said. "Her isolation was heartbreaking. She simply didn't know how to accept loving attention. But still, we did what parents everywhere do: We gave her lots of hugs and kisses. And in time, she was transformed by that love."
The girl, Maya, is now a freshman at the University of California, and She harbors ambitions of becoming a teacher. The 19-year-old was also the inspiration for her mother's charity, the Half the Sky Foundation, named for Mao Zedong's famous dictum, "Women hold up half the sky". Founded in 1998 by Bowen and a handful of friends, mostly US nationals who had adopted Chinese babies, HTS now works with about 70 orphanages across China.
"Parents know instinctively that at least one consistent, loving adult is crucial for a child's healthy development. Children who spend their early months and years in orphanages without experiencing that love often have great difficulty forming emotional bonds as they grow older," Bowen said. "In the first three years of life, a child's experiences dictate how her brain is wired. Each stimulus - each kiss, each story, each sunset - promotes the development of brain cells. Holding and stroking an infant stimulates the brain to release growth hormones, without which children cannot thrive."
Later in the exchange, she wrote: "It's our mission to offer loving, family-like care to children who remain in orphanages, no matter what has brought them there."
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For Jenny Bowen, the distance between herself and her newly adopted daughter began to close when the child, barely 2, slowly began edging nearer on the hotel bed. "She didn't dare to look at me, but as I felt the warmth of her back inching closer to me, I also felt her courage," Bowen recalled in an e-mail exchange with China Daily.
