Nobody likes a do-gooder know-it-all who wants to change the world. When the do-gooder is a foreigner and the world she wants to change is China, nobody likes her even more. But Jenny Bowen, a Californian film-maker, somehow managed to dissolve enough of that dislike to create one of the most successful non-governmental organisations in China.
Her newly published book, Wish You Happy Forever: What China’s Orphans Taught me About Moving Mountains , talks about how the NGO she founded, Half the Sky Foundation, transformed orphan care in China. The approach, however, was anything but saccharine. Ms Bowen took on one of the country’s toughest bureaucracies, and charmed and tricked them into adopting a new culture based on “nurture” rather than just physical care.
Her basic premise was touchy-feely, literally – that babies in Chinese orphanages needed to be touched to heal. They were fed, clothed and housed but they also needed to be cuddled. Fifteen years ago, when she founded Half the Sky, that was a novel concept in mainland orphanages overwhelmed with babies abandoned because of poverty or childbearing limits, struggling just to keep them alive. Today it is the official policy of the child welfare system.