Chu Yan has been living at the Suichuan Welfare Institute. This is located in a rural area in the Province of Jiangxi. I have been researching the orphanage. A family who recently took their grown daughter back to her first home described their experience: "Suichuan County (pronounced “sway-chwahn”) is in the south of Jiangxi Province (“jiang-shee”) in southern China. It is considered a relatively small county of perhaps 400,000 to 500,000 people. For those who prefer to look no deeper than the surface, Suichuan is an unremarkable corner of a largely unremarkable province.
To get here, one must first take a plane or train from a major Chinese city to Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi. Once there, you must find a driver willing to take you on a four to five hour journey through the heart of Jiangxi – a land of rivers and rice fields, dotted by the occasional stand of pine trees covering the rolling hills.
Suichuan has not been immune from the contagion of new growth consuming China today. Yet Suichuan is still a largely rural county; its urban areas are dingy and gritty and dark at night, with far more bicycles and scooters than cars on the roads. This is not a place used to foreign faces such as ours."
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