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November 10, 2010

The Great Chinese Orphan Rescuer

With more Chinese children abandoned due to birth defects, the work of Siew Mei Ang Cheung and Christian Action is more vital than ever.

Christine A. Scheller

Siew Mei Ang Cheung knows what it's like to be marginalized. Growing up as a Chinese immigrant in Malaysia, she was subject to an educational quota system that she says limited ethnic minorities’ opportunities. The precocious youngster was undaunted by the challenges, however, and earned a Kentucky Fried Chicken scholarship to attend high school in England. There, she keenly felt the sting of isolation, but it caused her to reevaluate her priorities and dig deep into the Word of God.

As a 21-year-old college student, Ang Cheung sensed a call to use her talents to address injustice, inequality, and exploitation. At 23, she began working with Vietnamese refugees in Liverpool. Today Ang Cheung is executive director of Christian Action, a 25-year-old, Hong Kong-based organization with a multimillion-dollar budget that provides vital services to refugees, foreign domestic workers, and abandoned children.

Ang Cheung so identifies with the immigrant experience that she never saw herself as Chinese. After many years of working with refugees, she had a dream about an abandoned baby girl in a Chinese hospital whose situation was hopeless. She woke up in tears. The dream involved a friend who refused to help the baby. When she told him about it, he said he and his wife had thought of adopting from China but had decided it would be too difficult. “God revealed my heart to you,” he told Ang Cheung.

She says this was the first confirmation that God was calling her to direct her energy (and Christian Action’s resources) toward the plight of Chinese orphans. The second was when a Chinese national who lived in Australia smuggled an abandoned baby girl out of China and asked for Ang Cheung’s help in adopting her. The third was visiting a state-run Chinese orphanage for herself and seeing how desperate the situation was in the early 1990s.

In 1997, Christian Action signed an agreement with local officials in Qinghai Province to work with indigenous people in caring for abandoned children. China Development Brief reports that Christian Action took over management of the Xining Child Welfare Institute and has since “invested heavily in improving the institution’s training, facilities and care practices.” The Xining Orphan and Disabled Welfare Center officially opened in 1998, and Christian Action partnered with the local government again in 2007 to open its affiliate, Xining Children’s Rehabilitation Center. Now Christian Action has been asked to co-manage several more orphanages in Qinghai Provence, according to Ang Cheung.

Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported that the number of healthy Chinese children available for adoption has decreased dramatically because China has relaxed its one-child policy. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese children born with birth defects increased by 50 percent between 2001 and 2006. The report says many of these children are abandoned.

Although the Chinese government provides minimal support for abandoned children, it is not sufficient for the level of care Christian Action deems necessary for them to either flourish or to die with dignity. This is why Ang Cheung traveled to the United States this fall. Americans have been integral to the ministry, not only as volunteers and staff members but also as adoptive parents. She hopes Western Christians will continue to respond to the James 1:27 admonition to care for orphans in their distress.

Adam Voysey is the U.S. Director of Development for Christian Action and the person who scouted locations for the ministry in 1995. He says it is highly unusual for a Christian agency to succeed on the Tibetan Plateau because the climate is extremely harsh and, as the birthplace of the Dalai Lama, Buddhism is the majority religion. It took ten years of working there to build trust and to demonstrate that Christian Action is serious about helping children. Voysey says, “When you go in there to serve and that’s what you’re telling the officials, they deserve to see the gospel in action, not to interact with a bunch of liars who say, ‘We’re going to go and serve the children,’ but actually we’ve got an alternative agenda.”

Early in the Qinghai work, a Muslim official suggested to Ang Cheung that she would have an easier time if the word Christian was removed from the organization’s name. She refused, saying, “I’m here because I’m a Christian; I’m here because God says to help the children.” Ten years later, she had an appointment with the same official. This time, he said, “You’ve proved to be our friend. . . . I now know that you are really working for God.”

Ang Cheung is a beautiful, vivacious woman in her 40s who has spent her adult life working to make a difference in the lives of marginalized people. Although she says she never felt deprived as an immigrant child, she compares her spiritual journey to a game of Super Mario Brothers in which she has increasingly mastered higher levels of service. With this new challenge, she senses God pushing her to the next level. “I believe it is easy to say, ‘Oh no, it’s humanly impossible.’ My experience with God is that he can do it. If he’s the Creator of the universe, what’s there to stop him?” She adds, “A lot of my friends have tons of money and I would have been one of them. I know that I’m doing something that fits like a pair of gloves. . . . The Lord has given me the chance to do something that is eternally valuable rather than something I can lose in the stock market.”

To learn more about Siew Mei Ang and the work of Christian Action, follow her weekly blog or explore the organization’s website.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty on November 10, 2010 9:20 AM

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