“It’s very strange”, says Youqine Lefèvre. “This moment was so important in my life, yet I don’t have any direct memory of it.” Speaking in a melodic Belgian French accent on a video call from Namur, Lefèvre wears her dark brown hair in a neat box fringe and looks at me through a pair of dark-rimmed glasses. “I have to believe what other people show me and tell me about it.” Lefèvre was born in China but was adopted when she was just eight months old. In July 1994, her soon-to-be adoptive parents arrived at an orphanage in the small city of Yueyang, about 160 km north of Changsha, Hunan province, along with five other Belgian couples. She was one of six baby girls, aged between six months and three years, carried out that day by the orphanage carers to meet their new families. Soon they would travel back to Europe to start a new life.
Lefèvre’s new photobook, The Land of Promises, begins on this same day. The dummy was nominated for the Mack First Book Award last year, and the project will be published by The Eriskay Connection this may. It opens with Lefèvre’s personal story. The artist invites us to leaf through her adoption and identification documents, followed by photographs that her adoptive parents took before, during and after their meeting with Lefèvre. The orphanage was a simply building – we see group shots of the couples, the tiny babies in their cots, and finally, the moment parents and children meet. Meanwhile, the book’s second half focuses on how China’s one-child policy has affected its citizens. It is a tragedy that continues to impact the life of every Chinese family and Lefèvre’s as well.
Growing up in Namur, a small city in central Belgium, Lefèvre always understood that she was adopted. As someone of Chinese origin, she was in the minority. Older children at school taunted her with racist insults, which Lefèvre internalised and hid from her white parents. They loved their daughter but could never understand what she was experiencing. “When I was young, I had a very difficult relationship with my country of origin.” Her struggle to make sense of her culture led to feelings of shame and anger at being ‘different’. And those led to Lefèvre rejecting her Chinese culture altogether: “I didn’t want to know anything about it.”
It was only in 2017, at the age of 23, with a photography degree under her belt and preparing for an MA at KASK in Belgium, that Lefèvre finally felt ready to delve more deeply into her past. Accompanied by her father, the pair travelled back to the Chinese city where they first met. They were granted permission to visit the now-disused orphanage – special authorisation was needed – but photographs inside were forbidden. “I felt very distant”, she says, recognising the area from pictures taken by her parents in 1994. “What was more moving was when we visited the police station”, continues Lefèvre, who, growing up, was told she was found in the streets as a baby and given to the local police, who took her to the orphanage. But, aside from a hand-written police report, no other documents exist to prove that story.
Lefèvre and her father also visited the neighbourhood where she would have been found. She photographed it. “Now I have a clear idea of how it looks”, she says. “The police station and the nearby district existed in my head in name, but not as images. As a photographer, it was super important to be able to make these pictures. It was my way to appropriate this in my story and have a tangible trace of it.”
During that first trip, it became clear to Lefèvre that to understand her adoption, she needed to learn more about China’s birth-control policy. In 1980, attempting to curb the country’s population, the Chinese government implemented a nationwide initiative restricting families to having a single child. The rules were relaxed over three decades years later, in 2016, when families were allowed up to two children. In 2021, this increased to three.
Lefèvre spent the next two years immersed in research. The more she learned, the more her story began to unravel. The photographer slowly unpacked the Western generalisations with which she had grown up. These included the idea that Chinese families preferred sons who could support them in old age and that unwanted baby girls were killed and abandoned in the streets. Sadly, such tragic events happened, but not in every case. “There are so many explanations regarding the preference for having a son,” says Lefèvre. “It’s not as simple as we think. It is more nuanced.”
Lefèvre was particularly impacted by the book China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy (2016) by the late Kay Ann Johnson. Johnson, a American professor of Asian studies and the adoptive mother of a baby girl from Wuhan, carried out extensive research on adoption and the birth-control policy in China. She found that, in Chinese tradition, it was desirable to have a baby boy and a girl; a balance, a ‘complete’ family. “The Western media’s exaggerated claims about China’s preference for sons gave cover to the more systemic violation of human rights, imbedded in government policy”, Johnson writes. Indeed, many families tried to resist the policy. Some hid their ‘unauthorised’ second children, including adopted ones.
Others were not so ‘lucky’. According to China’s Health Ministry, some 366 million abortions resulted from the policy. “Abortion was not a choice, but a compliance”, the psychotherapist Kate YiJia Yan shared during her 2018 TEDx Talk, titled Facing Secrets’s from China’s Single Child Policy. If a child was born outside of the quota, parents had to pay expensive fines. The families who could not afford the payment could have their possessions and property seized, and government officials had the right to ‘remove’ the child and place it in an orphanage.
In her writing, Professor Johnson humanizes and empathises with the Chinese families forced to make unthinkable decisions. She also seeks compassion for the millions of birth parents who suffered greatly after their children were taken away against their will. “Such understanding, I imagined, could help mitigate feelings of bitterness against [my daugher] birth parents, and above all help assuage a young child’s often unspoken worries about ‘what was wrong with me’, ‘what did I do wrong to lose my parents’, worries that my daughter articulated when she was only three years old”, Johnson writes.