Whose Child Is This?

MEMPHIS, Tenn. —  In a one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Memphis, four members of the He family live with a ghost baby.

Anna Mae He gazes out, an infant with ribbons affixed to her silky hair, from studio portraits -- the living room’s main decoration. Beneath the photographs, two dresser-drawers are crammed with legal documents about her. Anna’s brother Andy has been taught to say this about his sister:

“Anna Mae has been kidnapped,” says Andy, 4, who speaks mostly in Chinese. “I will rescue her.”

In fact, Anna lives about eight miles away, in the home of Jerry and Louise Baker, who have raised her since she was 3 weeks old. She is now a 6-year-old who lines up her shoes in the closet with mathematical precision; at night, in moments of insecurity, she calls Louise to her side and asks, “Mommy, can I smell you?”

Beside her bed is a T-ball trophy inscribed “Anna Baker #7.” Although the Bakers have tried to interest her in her heritage -- a Chinese baby-doll, a red-brocade outfit -- Anna squirms away. She wants to look like her blue-eyed sister, Aimee, 5, with whom she has shared a bed almost every night of her life.

Now in its fourth year, the battle over Anna has become Memphis’ painful parallel to the Elian Gonzalez case; when it ends, the Hes, who are illegal immigrants, could be deported, and either the American family or the Chinese one will be separated from her forever.

The case has opened an angry split in this city; in a letter to the editor of the Commercial Appeal, one Memphian wrote, “Since when did being a great American parent rate higher than being a so-so Chinese parent?” Another fumed, of the Hes, “If they want rights, then let them become citizens.”

At a trial last spring to determine Anna’s future, the Hes’ lawyer said his clients were misled into signing their daughter away and should be allowed to raise her. Circuit Judge Robert Childers rejected that argument in a blistering decision: He found that the Hes had tried to trade their baby for profit or legal assistance, and that they had tried to reclaim her in a scheme to avoid deportation. Childers terminated their parental rights on the grounds of abandonment: They did not visit the child or provide child support for a four-month period.

The decision cleared the way for the Bakers to adopt Anna.

In an appeal last month, the Hes’ lawyer, David Siegel, argued that the charge of abandonment did not fit his clients, who “relentlessly persisted in their efforts at gaining the return of their daughter.” Throughout the process, he argued, extraneous issues have been drawn into the courtroom. “Whatever you may think of China,” he said, “the Hes have the right to raise her wherever they want.”

When the appeals court rules this summer, a network of the Hes’ supporters will be watching. A delegate from the Chinese Embassy in Washington has attended every hearing, and Chinese Americans have followed developments. Bruce Boyer, director of the Loyola ChildLaw Clinic in Chicago, got involved, he said, because the case fell into a pattern of decisions against disadvantaged biological parents.

“You don’t let this kid grow up in the suburbs just because you think it would be in the best interests of the child. We don’t do that in this country,” said Boyer, co-author of an amicus brief in the case. “We have a really hard time in this country distinguishing between poverty and neglect, and parenting and cultural issues.”

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Louise and Jerry Baker live in a subdivision northeast of Memphis, with a fenced-in backyard and a minivan in the driveway. Louise, 43, is a Baptist preacher’s daughter who always knew she would be a stay-at-home mom; Jerry, 46, is a mortgage banker from a big Memphis family. In their care, Anna has grown to 3 feet, 5 inches. She returned from kindergarten on a recent morning energetically wiggling a loose tooth. With a sweet smile, she sprawled across Louise’s lap, whispering a list of vocabulary words into her ear as if they were secrets.

The last few years have drained the Bakers’ savings. To raise $100,000 for their lawyer, they sold their house and moved into a leased home; three years ago, Jerry asked their oldest daughter, Heather, 22, to transfer to a community college to save tuition costs.

As for Anna, she shows little interest in her biological parents, whom she has seen once since her second birthday, the Bakers said. But Louise suspects Anna knows more than she says. One day, Louise recalled, Anna turned the television on and spotted her baby picture on the news.

“It’s all about me,” the girl said quietly. “It’s all about me.”

In this case, as in a messy divorce, many facts are disputed. The central question is whether Jack He, 40, and his wife Casey, 36, knew what they were doing June 4, 1999, when they gave the Bakers legal custody and guardianship of their daughter.

The Bakers say the Hes asked them to raise Anna into adulthood and then reneged; the Hes say they believed the Bakers were taking care of her temporarily, as a favor.

“In China, very simple,” Jack said recently. “Either your children are your children, or they are abandoned in an orphanage.”

Shaoqiang He, a former English professor in China, came to the U.S. in 1995. Three years later, he enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Memphis. Jack, as he is called in America, began asking friends to find him a Chinese wife of “a certain size, a certain height, a certain age,” and “inferior to me in education, in ability, so I ... could enjoy the pleasure of teaching her,” he said.

Qin Luo, who chose the English name Casey, sent photos of herself posing coyly on staircases, in parks, in the romantic glow of studio lighting. Pale, dreamy, with long, dark hair, she traveled more than 1,500 miles from the provincial city of Chongqing and waited for him at the Beijing airport, carrying a sign that read, “I am here to meet Jack He.”

Casey’s idea of America was based largely on the film “Gone With the Wind.” She spoke no English. When she later arrived in Memphis on June 28, 1998, her first reaction was disappointment. “It was not as beautiful as I thought,” she said.

They were not married, although Jack had told the Immigration and Naturalization Service they were. She was pregnant with Anna.

Casey had been in America for three months when a Chinese graduate student accused Jack of attempting to rape her. The university stripped his job and scholarship. Jack said the woman falsely accused him after he refused to loan her money. In 2003, a jury acquitted him of sexual assault charges.

But in the winter of 1998, other Chinese immigrants took the side of his accuser, “gossiping and backbiting,” Jack said. Two months before Casey was due to give birth, the couple had a tussle with the husband of Jack’s accuser. The Hes pursued criminal and civil charges against the man, claiming that incident had caused Casey to give birth early. (Both cases were ultimately dropped.)

Anna was born Jan. 28, 1999, with respiratory problems that confined her to the intensive care unit for 10 days. When she came home to her parents’ apartment, “they were very upset,” said William Webb, 37, who befriended Jack through a church outreach program. “I remember Casey looking at her and crying because she had been born premature.”

It was a chaotic time. Jack was worried about felony charges and the baby’s medical bills. Casey recalled sobbing as she washed Anna for the first time, holding her awkwardly under the shower, terrified that she would hurt her. Jack said he sometimes thought adoption might be the best choice for the child, and persuaded Casey to put the child into foster care.

“I reasoned with her: ‘You cannot drive, you cannot even speak English,’ ” Jack said. “She got all her information from me.”

Their situation seemed to brighten when they met the Bakers through a Christian adoption agency.

Louise, warm and motherly, loved taking care of babies. She had recently had surgery to reverse a tubal ligation and they were planning to have a fourth child; she would become pregnant with Aimee within the year. In the meantime, they were taking in infants through an adoption agency, usually for days or weeks. They invited the Hes to their home to talk about taking Anna for 90 days.

“They had a need, and we were going to do it as a favor,” Louise said. “The first thing Jack said when he walked into our house was, ‘Will you take our baby?’ ” She warned him the arrangement was temporary.

The relationship was strained from the beginning, the Bakers said. Unaware of Jack’s legal troubles, the Bakers couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get a well-paying job. Casey, who was working 12-hour shifts at a restaurant, chafed at Louise’s restrictions on the times she could visit her child.

The Bakers testified that Jack told them he wanted them to raise Anna to adulthood. Jack denies this; by the end of the three months, he said, “I felt very guilty toward my wife” for having ever considered adoption as an option.

With the foster period near an end, the Hes were still not ready to take their daughter back. They discussed sending the baby to China to live with relatives. In the final days, the Bakers testified, the Hes told them they were planning to give Anna to a lawyer representing them in their civil lawsuit. Siegel, the Hes’ lawyer, calls this a “wild and bizarre allegation that’s never been substantiated.”

In the meantime, Anna remained with the Bakers and eventually the two families agreed on a very different plan: The Hes would sign a consent order giving the Bakers custody and guardianship. Such orders can only be overturned when biological parents convince a judge that their difficulties have been resolved and that reuniting them is in the child’s best interest. After having signed the order, regaining custody would be “next to impossible” for the Hes, Siegel said.

“We didn’t trust them so much that if they wanted us to raise her for the rest of her life we would have said, ‘OK, let’s do it,’ ” Jerry said. “The only way we were going to do that was for it to be sanctioned by a court.”

Casey and Jack signed the papers June 4, 1999. But Siegel said Casey had consistently resisted the idea of giving up the child permanently; it has never been clear whether she understood the gravity of the document she was signing. The Hes weren’t represented by their lawyer during the process.

“It seemed like she knew” what agreements were being made about Anna’s future, “but maybe not,” said Richard Sevilla, the Bakers’ pastor. “I guess that’s a big question mark, as far as what she knew.”

The day after the agreement was signed, Louise began documenting the Hes’ visits in a journal. In October -- when she believed the Hes were planning to leave Memphis -- she described their interaction this way:

“They wanted to see if they could come and get Anna and keep her for the day next [Sunday]. I told them No. She is too little to be away from us. Casey was very distraught, crying very loud.... We would like to get visits to every other week. We feel like they would wean away, but the last two visits we could see Casey is wanting to come more.”

About a year after the custody agreement, in May 2000, the Hes sought to regain custody of Anna, which alarmed the Bakers. Casey’s visits continued, but her feelings toward Louise had changed; she stopped eating during her visits based on a traditional Chinese admonition against accepting food from an enemy, she said.

One day that summer, when Louise asked Casey to leave after a visit, Casey exclaimed that the Bakers were “bad people, demons,” and threatened to take the child away with her, Louise testified. Disturbed by Casey’s behavior -- “she was foaming at the mouth in the house,” Louise said -- she called the police.

When a similar incident occurred in January 2001, a deputy told the Hes not to come back to the house. It was the last visit the Jack and Casey made to the Bakers’ house; they testified that they feared they would be arrested if they returned.

By this time, the Bakers were adamant that the Hes should not get Anna back. They filed to adopt Anna in June 2001.

“There’s lots of types of love,” said Jerry Baker. “I mean, there’s the kind of love where someone loves their car, or loves to eat pizza. I mean, she’s always been nothing but a pawn, an object to them, to get what they want. And they are still using her to get what they want.”

The struggle over Anna became a public melodrama in Memphis, where Casey’s tear-stained face was pictured regularly on the news. The Hes were married in 2002, and had a third child later that year. They said they looked forward to returning to China with all three children when their legal troubles were over.

Judge Childers released his decision in May. Much of the 72-page decision addressed matters of character. Childers described the Bakers as “honest, straightforward, sincere,” displaying “an enormous amount of love, care and concern” for their children and Anna.

He described Jack as a scam artist whose behavior was “marked by deceitfulness and dishonesty, without remorse, repentance or conscience.” Childers cited lies in Jack’s past: about his income in a deposition; about being married twice to obtain a spousal visa; on a loan application for a vehicle in 2001.

The judge summed up Casey as “an impetuous person not subject to being intimidated or deterred in achieving whatever she sets as her goal.” Childers called her “calculating, almost theatrical, in her actions.” He faulted her for taking a job when she was not a legal resident of the United States. He wrote that she “appears to speak and understand English better than she professes” and dismissed her tears on the witness stand as “courtroom hysterics.”

The judge noted that the Hes’ petitions to regain custody occurred “in close proximity” to INS calls about their immigration status. “Mrs. He only seems to be interested in regaining custody of [Anna] when deportation seems imminent,” he wrote.

In the days after the decision, some critics complained that Childers never bothered to answer the question of whether the Hes were abusive or neglectful parents.

“If the Hes are as bad as Childers claims, why hasn’t the Department of Children’s Services taken their other two children away from them?” wrote Wendi C. Thomas, a columnist for the Commercial Appeal. “I’ll tell you why. Because no American family is fighting to keep those children.”

Fred Wu, pastor of the Grace Chinese Christian Church of Greater Memphis, took particular offense at the judge’s criticisms of Casey’s emotional outbursts.

“That is part of Chinese culture,” Wu said. “When you lose a baby, you are allowed to cry. You are allowed to do things you usually would not do.”

But Larry Parrish, the Bakers’ lawyer, said Childers’ findings about the Hes’ character and behavior go to the heart of the matter.

“You wouldn’t let them have your children,” Parrish said. “They’re somebody that society needs to be protected from.”

The Bakers are confident that they will walk Anna down the aisle on her wedding day.

But there is a heaviness in their home. They don’t let Anna play in the frontyard any more; they are deeply hurt by mail they get from the Hes’ supporters. Louise said she has watched a curtain of sadness fall over her husband, who used to be the comedian of the family.

As for Anna, Louise said, she is so traumatized by her memories of Casey’s more emotional visits that women who look like her biological mother frighten her. When the family flew to California recently to appear on the Larry Elder Show, a Chinese American woman approached them in the studio and “Anna just froze,” Louise said.

“I mean, she’s afraid of them,” she said.

Eight miles away, Andy and 2-year-old Avita have covered the walls of the He apartment with crayon scribbling. Jack and Casey vow they will never stop fighting for Anna. Casey takes encouragement from the Victor Hugo novel “Les Miserables,” whose heroine, Fantine, sacrifices herself for the sake of her daughter, Cosette.

Fantine sells her hair for 10 francs to buy her daughter a skirt; increasingly desperate, she becomes a prostitute. Fantine is about to be sent to prison when Monsieur Madeleine, the virtuous mayor, intervenes to return her child to her.

Casey had this in mind a few years ago, when Jim Rout, then-mayor of Shelby County, ate in a Chinese restaurant where she worked. She asked for his signature, and he signed a card for her, complimenting her on her good service.

She brought this slip of paper back to their apartment, where she treasures it, although she is unsure what miracle it will bring.