Sometimes, with an intentional family like ours, one wonders what would have happened if we hadn't met. If the Magic Stapler in the referral room had attached someone else's photograph to our dossier.

This isn't necessarily a healthy thing to be wondering, but sometimes you can't help it.

See, I was reading about kids in China. Time had a (somewhat manipulative) story about the "disposable athletes" of China's Olympic teams. I say somewhat manipulative because one of the points of the article is that these teenagers don't know what they're going to do after their brief athletic careers are over - well, that's true for teenagers everywhere, I think, to a certain degree.

But the article does illustrate how children grow up inside a government-controlled system not that unlike the Social Welfare Institutes - and shows what happens when new capitalism crashes into a cradle-to-grave social bureaucracy.

That bureaucracy, of course, is descended from a religion - possibly the most ethical (and most bureaucratic) religion on earth, Confucianism. Now that the anti-Confucian Communist ideals are being pushed aside, there's room for the ideals of Confucianism to come back (which include things like the golden rule and caring for the less-fortunate - the virtue Confucius called "ren").

Mr. Crane over at the Useless Tree blog offers some opinions and analysis on the much-lauded return of Confucianism to (nearly) post-Communist China.

Then, he points out an Observer story on disabled children being sold into slavery in China. This, then, is what happens to those not lucky enough to wind up in a Social Welfare Institution. Girls with scoliosis and worse forced to beg in Tiananmen Square, then hand their earnings over to "uncles" - men with sticks. Some were sold by their parents, some just got separated as the grown-ups migrated to the big cities to find work. Read the story at your own discretion. I remember seeing some of these beggars when we were in Beijing en route to adopting Daughter.

You try not to think about them, but I guess their stories are a part of ours, too.