Abandoned as babies and adopted by Western parents, the women searching for answers in Hong Kong
- After connecting online and discovering shared experiences, a generation of foundlings are returning to the city in search of their birth families
A tide of emotion swept over Claire Martin as she stood alone in the concrete stairwell of a bland residential block off a busy Kowloon intersection. Then, just as she did almost 60 years earlier, when she had been left there by her mother as a newborn, she burst into tears.
“Being on that staircase was an extraordinary moment,” she says. “I thought of my adoptive father. He always wanted to help me find my birth family but he couldn’t, and it would have been wonderful if he had been there with me.”
After a lifetime of wondering, Martin had finally found the place where she’d last felt her mother’s touch. The discovery that she had been left on the first-floor landing of a block of flats gave her a measure of comfort.
“Some babies were found in graveyards,” she says, “but my mother was expecting me to be found quickly.”
Martin considers herself one of the lucky ones, and with good reason. Hundreds of babies, most of them girls, were abandoned in Hong Kong as mothers, desperate and starving, fled across the border from China to escape the Great Famine that killed tens of millions of people between 1959 and 1961.
Some babies were abandoned out of sight, others were thrown to their deaths in Aberdeen Harbour. While the fortunate were rescued, many more spent their childhoods clinging to the thinly spread scraps of affection offered by Hong Kong children’s homes.
