They were sold and made to wed their brothers. China’s fostered child brides now want answers

PUTIAN, China: For the first two years of their marriage, Hu Jinxiang, who got married at 16, avoided her foster brother turned husband by sleeping in a separate bedroom.
It was Chinese New Year when her foster family lost their patience. At her husband’s behest, her foster father banged on her door, demanding that it be opened.
“I felt disgusted every time (my husband) touched me,” recalled Hu, now aged 50 with three children. “There’s no cure for that feeling.”
She was a “tong yang xi”, or fostered child bride, whose experience exemplified an age-old practice in China for families to marry foster siblings to each other.
Men from such families were typically poor and could not afford bride prices in the marriage market.
Between the 1970s and 1990s, an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 baby girls were sold to families in Putian, Fujian province. Many of them were from the nearby district of Changle.

WATCH: The women who were sold to marry their brothers (46:33)
Simply called “Ah Le”, foster daughters such as Hu often endured years of abuse by the families who bought them as future wives for their foster brothers.
Today, decades after they were adopted, the former foster child brides are hoping to track down their biological parents while still carrying the emotional scars from their childhood.
In Changle, a volunteer group began hosting an annual reunion drive in 2006, and the event has drawn hundreds of these women, along with families searching for the daughters they gave away.
DNA testing offers a glimmer of hope. Each of them dreams of finding a match with another DNA sample in the volunteer group’s database — created in 2010 — and of reconnecting with their long-lost kin one day.
The women are featured in the documentary Daughters of Putien. And like many of them in her situation, Hu has been left with a lingering question for her birth parents: Why did they abandon her to such a “hard life”?
Amid widespread poverty and a strong preference for sons, many families across China used to give away or sell their daughters, seeing them as one less mouth to feed.
When the one-child policy came into effect in 1980 to curb population growth, it exacerbated the abandonment of female children, experts contend.
In Fujian, many parents who gave their daughters to brokers had believed they would be sent to childless families nearby and were often unaware that their girls were being sold to households looking for child brides instead.
“In the beginning, one baby could sell for 70 to 80 yuan (S$13 to S$15). Later on, the price went up to more than 300 yuan each,” said Liu Fengzhi, a former baby broker who facilitated hundreds of these transactions.
The girls were expected to wed their foster brothers so the family could ensure that the bloodline continued.
“At the time, we were so poor that we hardly had enough to eat,” said Cai Zhenming, foster father to Cai Xiuping, whom he bought for 200 yuan in the 1990s.
The younger Cai recalled her shock, at age 16, when her foster mother announced over breakfast that she and her foster brother were to marry each other.
“I said no right away,” said Cai, now 34. “I felt my foster brother was my brother, and I was his sister. Why would a brother and a sister get married?”
She succeeded in defying her foster parents and has a daughter of her own now.
Another foster child, Huang Shuhong, who was bought for 120 yuan, was also asked to marry her foster brother when she was 16. She tried to run away but was caught, beaten and locked in a barn for days.
“My neighbours also pressured me. They said I had a good family, and my foster brother was nice. They couldn’t see why I’d refuse,” she said.
Her foster family relented only after she threatened to kill herself. Even so, finding a husband outside was immensely difficult. Matchmakers introduced her only to divorcees or “very poor men who struggled to find a wife”.
“Because of who I was, those were the only men I deserved,” she recalled being told.
For some men, marrying their foster sisters was not what they wanted either. In Cai’s village, a 29-year-old schoolteacher ended up killing his 25-year-old wife.
She was uneducated, they could not communicate well, and he had wanted the freedom to choose his own partner. “He smashed her head in,” recalled Cai, who was a child then. “There was blood everywhere.”
Although the practice of “tong yang xi” was outlawed with the passing of China’s first marriage law in 1950, the custom persisted in some rural areas.
And divorce was difficult for many of the women who wanted out of their marriage. Out of the 100-plus court records CNA could find in Fujian, most of the child brides failed in their first attempt.
“It’s very difficult for (a child bride) to provide evidence that the marriage has broken down irretrievably, because everyone in the village would side with her husband,” said Li Wenbin at the Zhongda Legal Clinic.
“All the divorce cases I’ve handled were initiated by women. If a man wants a divorce, it’s often because he looks down on his fostered bride.”
Hu, who still dreads intimacy with her husband, would have divorced him if times had been different then. “He should’ve married someone else, someone who actually liked him,” she said. “He’s suffering too.”
Besides the trauma of being made to marry their foster brothers, there were child brides who grew up feeling unwanted well into adulthood. Cai, for instance, could not recall her foster parents ever being supportive of her.
Nor could Huang. “I don’t think they thought of me as their own, because they treated their own children very differently,” she said. “I was basically a servant.
“For example, when they finished their rice, I knew I had to refill their bowls.”
Hu, who was sold for 105 yuan, said she was put to work in the fields at age 7 while other children went to school.
“I was sad, but so what? If I said anything, (my foster mother) would beat me,” she recounted.
Her foster mother, Huang Yaxiu, said: “She was clever when she was little. Had she gone to school, she would’ve run away.”
Child brides without an education could only take on backbreaking, low-paid jobs as adults, entrenching themselves in the cycle of poverty they were sold into as babies.
“I didn’t dare to look for work in the cities. I can’t read. I’m afraid of being scammed,” said Liang Meirong, who earns 100 yuan a day from weaving fishing nets in her village.
“I didn’t go to school, so I had no confidence. I had nothing to offer.”
These foster daughters have had to grapple with not only the lasting effects of illiteracy, but also the stigma of abandonment. Liang recalled how, in her childhood, people would make disparaging remarks like, “You were just picked up from somewhere.”
After her foster brother was allowed to marry his girlfriend, Liang met her current husband through a matchmaker.
He agreed to pay the family a bride price, which was a common practice in Putian, even for biological daughters. But he paid 20,000 yuan, below the going rate of 30,000 yuan at the time.
“The unwanted daughters were treated like garbage, tossed out one by one,” said Chen Lilan, another foster daughter.
“On the marriage market, everyone looked down on us. If a man married someone else’s fostered bride, people would talk behind his back.
“When I married my husband, his brother despised me. He said I was unwanted, that my parents threw me away.”
But as economic conditions improved and the one-child policy ended in 2015, families who once cast their daughters aside started to look for them.
Among the members of the volunteer group in Changle is Chen Yanming, whose parents gave away his sister. In helping to track down and reunite foster daughters with their biological families, he hopes to find his sibling in the process.
“My parents wanted to have me, a son, so … they had to get rid of her,” he said. “I want to feel less guilty. I need to do something.”
Lin Caijin, whose sisters-in-law pressured her to give away her third daughter, has been searching for the girl for 40 years. She kept her two elder daughters and her fourth child, a son.
“I can’t imagine when I’d find my daughter,” she said. “When the time comes, I’ll gently hit her and ask what took her so long.”
The volunteer group’s DNA database currently has about 16,000 entries, with 10,000 from abandoned daughters and 6,000 from parents.
“We’ve had about 800 matches so far. It’s a pity my own sister hasn’t been found,” said Chen Hui, one of Liu’s elder daughters.
Time is running out for the daughters looking for their birth parents and for answers to all that they have endured. As this group of parents age and die off, the likelihood of more reunions diminishes.
In the lead-up to this year’s reunion event — held on Valentine’s Day coincidentally — familiar emotions began resurfacing. “I want to ask them why they abandoned me. Why me? Was I not good enough? I want to know,” said Cai.
As part of the event preparations, some daughters wrote letters to their birth parents. This is what Hu’s said: “I’ve had a hard life in my foster family. I’ve wanted to find you since I was 6 or 7.
“My children have grown up, and I’m doing fine. I just want to know where I came from. My wish in this life is to find you.”
For Huang, one thing is clear. “Once a fostered bride, always a fostered bride. If I have to be a fostered child bride in my next life, I’d rather not be human,” she said.
Watch the documentary Daughters of Putien here.