When two young women shared a delivery room in 1992, their fates and heartstrings became intertwined in ways no soothsayer could have predicted.
By CAO Linhua
Back in June 1992, in a hospital in Kaifeng, Henan Province, Xu Dongmei and her husband Yao Fushan welcomed a bouncing baby boy, the very picture of health. A few hours later, her roommate in the hospital Du Liqing gave birth to another boy, but he was not so strong. In his mother’s medical records the doctor noted “moderate hepatic insufficiency.”
Du’s son would need a hepatitis B vaccination.
That year China began vaccinating new-born infants for hepatitis B, though parents still had to pay for the jab. In 2005, the vaccine became free nationwide for all newborns. For this reason, Du’s baby had the shot and Xu’s did not, or so they thought.
Four days later, Xu Dongmei was discharged and took her new baby home to Jiangxi Province where she and Yao Fushan named him Yao Ce. Du Liqing remained in Henan Province with her husband Guo Quan and the child who would soon be known as Guo Tao.
The two families never met again until their tragic circumstances brought them back together around this year’s May Day holiday when they met to pick over the bones of their devastated lives.
During a routine blood test for admission to kindergarten, 2-year-old Yao Ce was found to be a hepatitis B carrier. Xu Dongmei blamed herself for not taking enough care of him and wished she had had him vaccinated as an infant.
In February this year, in Jiangxi, Yao Ce was confirmed with late-stage liver cancer. In a peculiarly cruel twist of fate, around the same time 500 kilometers away in Henan Province, Du Liqing was diagnosed with the same illness.
“It was God’s will that we both developed cancer,” said Du Liqing during the May Day encounter, as she held Yao Ce’s hand.
Both families had prepared for New Year this year as usual. Yao Ce was by now running a startup in Ningbo, but he went home to Jiujiang on Jan 17 and spent the holiday with his mother Xu. While New Year was busier for Guo Tao, an assistant police officer, he still found time for his family.
The Spring Festival holiday was both extended and very quiet this year. The two families were obliged to stay at home to limit health risks, but in the middle of February, Yao Ce began to feel unwell. He went downhill fast, plotting his decline in his diary: “February 15, backache; February 16, stomachache.”
He was soon diagnosed with liver cancer. Xu Dongmei refused to believe it and repeated again and again there must be a mistake in the diagnosis. Yao himself also thought the doctors had got it wrong, but a second opinion left no doubt. It was liver cancer, late stage. Without surgery, he would be dead in a matter of months.
Xu Dongmei felt like she had been “bashed on the head.” Back home, she and Yao Fushan cried on each other’s shoulders. But tears never solved anything and, wiping them away, she started to think about raising money for her son’s treatment.
Getting treatment was harder than ever with resources stretched and face-to-face contact with people from outside one’s own household strongly discouraged.
Xu and Fushan sold their car for 150,000 yuan, borrowed a van from a friend, and took Ce to provincial capital Nanchang for help. The hospital did not allow visitors and hotels were mostly closed, so the couple had to live in the van for a fortnight. In the middle of March, the search for a cure took them to Shanghai where Ce’s prognosis was extremely poor.
A liver transplant was recommended, so Xu took it upon herself to do what any mother would do. She would go through the fraught and uncertain procedure to give part of her liver to her son and took a blood test to ensure compatibility.
When the test results came through, Fushan was shocked to his core. An ex-serviceman, he had been responsible for organizing some medical tests for his troop and well understood the ominous news that the report brought: Ce was not his son. He must be another man’s child!
But as he recalled times strolling with his wife beside Gantang Lake in Jiujiang, he banished the thought from his mind. That was a mystery for another day.
As Ce’s ordeal in Shanghai was beginning, in faraway Zhumadian, suffering from the same complaint, Du Liqing was being prepared for theater.
Already sure that Ce was not his son, further tests showed Fushan that Ce was not Xu’s either. As one mist cleared, another descended. If Ce was not his son, who was? And where was he? And who was Ce really?
Both Xu and Fushan had watched the baby they brought home 28 years ago grow into the man he is today. There was no doubt in their minds that the baby and the man were one and the same person, so whatever had happened, must have happened before baby Ce was brought home.
In the early 1990s, a pretty strict mother-child separation policy was in place in China’s maternity wards, with mothers generally only seeing their babies to feed them. Both Xu and Du had the merest glimpses of their babies before they were taken away by nurses. The physician in charge at the time, Wang Shelian, told the media that she was not able to remember the exact situation, but confirmed that new-born babies were not tagged or identified in any distinctive way.
After the delivery, a flustered Fushan arrived at the hospital. When the nurse brought the baby to them, Xu was seeing her son for only the second time. She complained to Fushan that their child was ugly. Yao told her most newborns looked ugly to him. Likewise, Du Liqing saw her kid only a few times, and Guo Quan recalled how he and his wife had commented that he had quite a fair face.
Guo Quan had already authorized the hospital to vaccinate his son with hepatitis B immunoglobulin. He was charged for the injection and assumed it had been carried out. As his grown-up son Guo Tao was fit and healthy enough to join the police, he had no reason to think any differently.
“I suspect the hospital vaccinated the wrong child and the two babies were swapped either before or soon after the mistake,” he said later. “I have consulted many experts, who all said if a child is had been vaccinated, he could not have developed this disease at such a young age. The mistake caused us great pain.”
As the situation came into focus and the truth began to materialize, Xu contemplated suicide. But the idea that her son was out there waiting to be found took root and gave her the strength to go on.
“It wasn’t just that we wanted to find our son; Ce was terribly ill and we wanted to locate his birth mother as well as finding our real son, whether he was alive or dead.”
At the beginning of April, as soon as the Qingming Festival was over, Fushan went to Kaifeng. The day before, Xu had visited the family tomb where she offered three paper flowers on each grave as she prayed to her ancestors for help.
In Kaifeng, Fushan’s amateur detective work to him to meet with the hospital superintendent Zhang Weijie and tell his story. Soon Kaifeng police were involved. Four male infants were born in the hospital between June 15 and June 19, 1992. Through investigation and DNA comparison, the police locked onto Guo Quan’s family in Zhumadian and gave their phone number and address to Fushan.
Answering Fushan’s call, Quan was sure he was talking to a conman. “Taking the wrong baby? Nonsense!”
But Fushan refused to give up and demanded a meeting with Quan, putting him on high alert. “I thought someone was trying to kidnap me” he said later.
After the call, he went so far as to remove his SIM, just in case he was being tracked. “I told Tao and he agreed that it sounded like a fraud. He works in a police station and I trust him.”
Refusing to abandon his quest so quickly, Fushan tried to visit the Guo family home in person, but the police had given him the wrong address.
Never one to take no for an answer, Fushan sought help from the local police station where yet another coincidence arose. With the information provided by Fushan, the police computer system coughed up a picture. The chief was confused. “Doesn’t this kid work in the station?”
As it happened, assistant police officer Guo Tao was on a field trip, but the chief immediately called him back.
Guo Tao was completely unprepared for meeting Fushan. The only thing that he, his father, or anyone in their family knew was that a “fraudster” had recently called, making outrageous claims. But he was left with no choice. All the evidence indicated that Fushan was telling the truth.
“Their eyebrows were exactly the same,” the chief said.
DNA tests followed and on April 16 Shenzhou Judicial Expertise Center in Jianxi declared Yao Fushan and Xu Dongmei to be Guo Tao’s biological father and mother.
In the days preceding the announcement, Guo Tao lost 5 pounds. “Mom just had surgery for liver cancer. How was she going to take this?”
Xu immediately set off for Kaifeng.
When she arrived, she hugged Guo Tao tightly, and on hearing him call her mom, she broke down and cried.
One week later, when Yao Ce saw the video of Xu and Tao’s first meeting, he understood why his blood type did not match his parents’. “They have been my mom and dad for 28 years and now they are someone else’s,” he said.
Guo Tao struggled to find a way to tell his parents, and when Guo Quan and Du Liqing came to see their grandson, he showed them the DNA report. “The call the other day was not fraud. It’s true,” he mumbled.
Having had a son for three decades, only to suddenly discover that he was not theirs was very painful for his parents, but they had no choice but to “trust the science.”
With half the enigma resolved, Tao’s parents felt obliged to take DNA tests themselves. They would wait for the test result before finally accepting that Guo Tao was not their son.
And so it came to pass that the four parents and two sons met at Guo Quan ’s home for the International Workers Day holiday. No one had ever given a second thought to their sons’ parentage. They were both so like their fathers.
It was awkward, to say the least, but the atmosphere thawed a little when the two fathers found that they both had served in the military. After a few hours, they reached a consensus: cure the kid.
Once a medical student, Yao Ce was a slightly rebellious youth, determined not to live a life laid out for him by his parents. It had never occurred to him that his life had been somehow arranged 28 years ago when he was barely a day old.
Regardless of whatever further twists fate has in store for them, Yao Ce, Guo Tao, and their disoriented parents stand on the frontier of an unknown country.
On May 6, Yao Ce left for Shanghai once again for more treatment. On a crowdfunding platform, he wrote, “I am still young, I want to live.”
(Names of the Yao and Guo families have been altered to protect privacy.)
