As stories go, the tale of how a desperately ill, nameless baby from China turned into Bella Xin KaLare Strickland of West Monroe, Louisiana, is an extraordinary one. Three short years ago, a friend and I found the newborn, swaddled in several layers of clothing and abandoned in a Shanghai alleyway. Since then, her story has morphed from communist tragedy to Christian fairy tale: one minute an orphan screaming in a cold, dark street; three years later a stroppy toddler, living a charmed life in sunny Louisiana.
Baby Bella made her debut in this magazine in 2011, under a different name, “Baby Donuts”, given for the Dunkin’ Donuts outlet where her birth parents chose to leave her in December 2010. She was about six weeks old. More than 110,000 children born in China have been adopted by families overseas in the past two decades. But Bella has the dubious distinction of being the only Chinese baby yet abandoned at the feet of an FT journalist.
A friend and I found her one night, only steps from one of Shanghai’s top hotels. She was lying on top of two plastic bags that bulged with new baby clothes, tins of infant formula, packs of newborn nappies and scrubbed-clean baby bottles: the only love note a mother could dare to leave, for a child she would never know.