Hidden Treasures: A Letter to the Children of Mother's Love
Résumé
Hidden Treasures is the true story of a young woman whose brief visit to Nanning, Guangxi, China in 1992 sparked the beginning of nearly two decades of work with abandoned babies in China. At age 29, Kit Ying Chan was sent to the Nanning state orphanage to conduct a needs assessment in response to alarming reports about the poor conditions in the local state orphanages as they struggled to cope with the widespread infant abandonment crisis that resulted from the country's one-child policy. What Kit Ying witnessed in that first visit was something she couldn't unseen or turn away from, calling her to leave her life in Hong Kong and move into the Nanning state orphanage.This book follows her remarkable journey from the first baby she picked up and nurtured back to health, to facilitating the first intercountry adoptions in Guangxi, to founding and leading Mother's Love, a home for abandoned babies, to modeling best practices and training child care workers in state orphanages across China, to the final closure of Mother's Love in 2011. Drawing from Kit Ying's own personal story, interviews with those involved with Mother's Love, and research on the infant abandonment crisis of the 1990s, it documents the deep and palpable scars left by this massive disaster on everyday Chinese citizens and the stories of transformation of the individuals who responded to the need. It is also a personal letter from Kit Ying to the 1,500+ young people who were adopted from Mother's Love and an accounting of this critical part of their history and identity.Hidden Treasures is the story of what happens when we choose to open our hearts to the call for help from one human to another.Kit Ying Chan is the Director of Services at Mother's Choice, overseeing the organization's services for children, youth, and families. After graduating from the University of Guelph with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Sociology, Kit Ying was hired as the first social worker at Mother's Choice in 1988. In 1992, she began her work with China's state orphanages, in response to the widespread baby abandonment during that time. In 1995, she founded "Guangxi-Hong Kong Mother's Love Orphanage", the first joint venture between Hong Kong and China, where she pioneered a professional model for residential child care services, introducing foster care and specialized care for children with special needs. Kit Ying returned to Hong Kong in 2011 and continues to pioneer in this field as she leads the team to provide life transforming services for clients of Mother's Choice.