为中国弃婴寻亲的故事 One little boy's journey from a Chinese street to Seattle and bac

“Hello kind people! When you see this child, you will doubtless criticise the parents for being immoral. But we have no way out — please help us, we don’t know what to do.”

“好心人您好！当你们看到这个小孩的时候肯定会骂他的父母不道德。我们也是实在没有办法——请帮帮我们，我们也是不知道怎么办。”

Thus begins that very rare thing: a letter from a father, forced to abandon his disabled infant on the streets of Ningbo — a city near Shanghai that is one of the richest in China — explaining why he did it. And, no, he had not lost a packet in the stock market slump that has rattled the rest of the world. The financial calamity that befell this father was to bear two sons, both of them deaf. Raising one son had taught him how hard it is to care for a disabled child, even today, in the age of the Chinese dream. Raising a second deaf child was simply out of the question.

这是一件稀罕事的开头：一位父亲迫不得已，将身有残疾的孩子遗弃在宁波（离上海很近，是中国最富裕的城市之一）街头，并留下一封信，解释自己这么做的原因。哦，不，他并不是在令全世界惊慌失措的中国股灾中遭受了损失。降临在这位父亲头上的经济灾难是抚养两个失聪的儿子。抚养一个儿子已经让他明白照顾残疾儿童有多么艰难，即使是在追寻中国梦的今天。根本谈不上抚养第二个失聪的孩子。

So the father abandoned his six-week-old son — for his own good. And, remarkably, he felt moved to explain his reasons. “We don’t own a house, or even a place to live. I thought I could make life gradually better by being diligent: but God has had no mercy on us,” the father wrote in May 2012. “In 2004 my wife gave birth to a boy, but when he was two years old we found he couldn’t hear or talk.”

于是，这位父亲遗弃了出生6周的儿子——为了他好。不同寻常的是，他觉得有必要解释自己这样做的原因。“家里连老房子也没有，连住的地方也没有。本以为靠自己勤劳的双手可以让日子慢慢地好过一点。可是老天太作弄人了，”这位父亲在2012年5月写道，“2004年我老婆生下了一个男孩，在两岁的时候才发现耳朵听不到、不会讲话。”

The family could not afford proper treatment so by the age of nine the child was still mute. “This year we had another child — but God is so unfair, he has the same condition as my elder boy,” the father wrote. “We beg you to save this poor thing.”

这个家庭无力让孩子接受妥当的治疗，所以大儿子9岁时仍然不会说话。“今年又生了一个——可是老天太不公平了，他居然跟我大儿子一样，“这位父亲写道，“求求你们救救这可怜的小生命吧。”

So far, so sad. But this is not a sob story. It is the tale of Bennett Sano, now aged nearly four, adopted by an American family and living in Seattle. He was recently diagnosed with Usher syndrome — a genetic disorder that will leave him not just deaf, but blind as well by adulthood.

到这里，这个故事还是悲伤的。但这并不是一个悲剧。这是如今快满4岁的贝内特萨诺(Bennett Sano，中文名龙淼——译者注)的故事，他被一个美国家庭收养，如今住在西雅图。他最近被诊断出患有乌谢尔综合症(Usher)——这种遗传病不仅会使他耳聋，而且会使他在成年后失明。

It may not sound like it, but Bennett is lucky. First, it’s rare in cases such as this for a birth parent to leave a note at all, and far rarer for the note to include anything but time and date of birth. The note was preserved in Bennett’s orphanage file (another rarity). And last week fate conspired to deliver another remarkably joyful twist to the story, when Bennett’s adoptive mother managed to find the father who wrote that letter.

贝内特是幸运的，尽管听起来不太像。第一，在类似情况中，很少有亲生父母会留下信，而信中除了准确出生日期以外所有信息都有的情况更是少之又少。这封信被保存在贝内特在孤儿院的档案里（另一件罕见事）。命运再次给这个故事带来了一个非常令人欢喜的转折，贝内特的养母成功找到了写这封信的那位父亲。

Molly Sano, a Seattle sign language interpreter, appeared on local television in Ningbo, and scarcely three days later she’d met the boy’s mother, father, brother, six-year-old sister and a healthy boy born after Bennett was abandoned (proving yet again that China’s one-child policy is often a misnomer).

莫莉萨诺(Molly Sano)是西雅图一名手语翻译，她上了宁波当地的电视台，三天后，她就见到了贝内特的亲生父母、哥哥、6岁的姐姐以及一个在贝内特被遗弃后出生的健康的弟弟（再次证明中国的独生子女政策往往形同虚设）。

“So many things had to go just right for this to happen,” Ms Sano said: the doctor who diagnosed Bennett as a baby saw the TV report, the parents had not changed their phone number and they resisted the urge to ignore a call from one they didn’t know.

“太多的巧合促成了这个结果，”莫莉称。这些巧合包括：在贝内特还是婴儿时给他看过病的医生看到了电视报道、贝内特的亲生父母没有更换手机号、他们没有忽视那通陌生来电。

Frightened that she might be in trouble, the mother at first denied who she was. But she quickly had second thoughts and called back. Within hours, this extraordinary extended family was united — and Bennett’s two mothers could hardly stop hugging and crying. They did have one touchy subject to tackle: the birth father’s letter makes clear that he abandoned the baby because a doctor told him the child needed a cochlear implant and the birth family could not afford one.

因为担心会惹上麻烦，那位母亲起初否认了自己的身份。但是她转念一想，又把电话打了过来。数小时后，这个特别的大家庭聚在一起——贝内特的两位妈妈情不自禁地拥抱在一起，痛哭不止。他们需要处理一个敏感问题：亲生父亲的信清楚地表明，他遗弃了这个孩子，因为医生告诉他孩子需要植入人工耳蜗，而他们一家无力承担。

But Ms Sano and her husband, Chris — who is deaf — plan to let Bennett decide later if he wants an implant. They have taught him to sign. “To us, he is perfect,” says Ms Sano. “This isn’t a sad story of a deaf boy who will lose his vision, it’s a joyful, powerful story of a boy who happened to land in a family and a location that are a perfect fit for him,” she says. “There is no limit to our dreams for our son.”

但是，莫莉和她的丈夫克里斯(Chris)——他也是失聪人士——计划以后让贝内特自己决定是否想要植入人工耳蜗。他们已经教会他打手语。“对我们来说，他是完美的，”莫莉称，“这并不是一个终将失明的失聪男孩的悲惨故事，而是一个快乐、感人的故事，一个男孩碰巧进入了一个非常适合他的家庭和地方，”她说，“我们对儿子的梦想没有任何界限。”

Back in China, the birth family’s financial situation has improved; the father now has an iPhone 6s. But they think Bennett is lucky, too. “The birth mother said, over and over, now that we have seen your family, we can see that he has a better life there than here,” Ms Sano says.

贝内特亲生父母的经济状况有所改善：这位父亲如今用的手机是iPhone 6s。但是他们也认为贝内特是幸运的。“他亲生妈妈反复说，既然我们已经见过你们一家了，我们看得出他在那里生活得更好，”莫莉说。

So Bennett is where he needs to be. But as the adoptive mother of two abandoned Chinese daughters myself, I can’t wait for the day when birth parents can nurture dreams for their deaf toddlers without having to discard them in the street to make that happen. Gross domestic product is one thing, but I’ll be looking for a different measure of Chinese success: the day the last father writes a letter like that before leaving his disabled baby in the shadow of skyscrapers.

因此，贝内特就在他应该呆的地方。但是作为一名收养了两个被遗弃的中国女孩的妈妈，我期待有一天失聪儿童的亲生父母可以亲自为孩子培育梦想，而不需要把孩子遗弃在街头。GDP是一回事，但是我期待看到另外一种衡量中国成功的方式：有那么一天，再也没有一位父亲会写下这样一封信，然后把身有残疾的孩子遗弃在摩天大楼的阴影之下。