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 unsee 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 at the state orphanage 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 influencing a widespread change in child care practices in orphanages across China, to the final closure of Mother's Love in 2011. Hidden Treasures documents the deep and palpable scars left by the infant abandonment crisis and one-child policy on everyday Chinese citizens, and the stories of life transformation of those impacted by the work of Mother's Love. 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.
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