From the Washington Post (link)
DONGGUAN, China On a muggy evening in July 2004, on a concrete lane reeking of raw sewage and chemicals from surrounding factories, a stranger leapt from a white van. He yanked 16-month-old Fei Mei from the arms of her 8-year-old cousin and sped away.
All night, her parents searched this industrial city in southern China for their round-faced baby girl.
“We looked everywhere, on every street corner,” said her father, Xu Mohu. “We thought maybe the guy wouldn’t like a girl and he would abandon her.”
That was once a reasonable assumption. For generations, girls in rural China have been left to die in the cold or abandoned on doorsteps while families devote their scant resources to nourishing boys. But over the past decade, a wave of foreigners, mostly Americans, has poured into China with dollars in hand to adopt Chinese babies, 95 percent of them girls.
