Connie Moy, now 83, came to this country as a young bride nearly six decades ago.

Teia Brandl, 2, was adopted from a small town in central China by her mother, Shannon.

Jan Zheng, 37, left her life in Shanghai to create one anew in Na-perville more than a decade ago.

Three women, one destination

Across six decades and 70,000 miles, three Chinese women find new life, love in the suburbs

STORY BY TARA MALONE | Daily Herald Staff Writer
PHOTOS BY PATRICK KUNZER | Daily Herald Photographer

In the southern Chinese village of Jianan, a young mother draws water for the farm that sustains her family, just as it sustained generations before her when another young bride watered the field. Connie Moy left Jianan in 1948, creating a new life in McHenry. Nearly six decades later, this young woman hopes to make a similar crossing.

A narrow mud alley leads a young bride toward a field masked in morning light.

Two pails of water hang from her shoulders, slowing the walk toward the patch of earth in southern China that feeds her family and anchors her life.

• • •

Along another pockmarked mud alley hundreds of miles away, a child takes her first, faltering steps toward a road with no name, a road that will take her away from her remote Chinese village forever.

• • •

On a paved sidewalk in Shanghai's business district, a young woman's heels click away seconds as she walks briskly to a job interview with China's first global high-tech venture. This job soon will set her on a road to others in America.

• • •

From a rice field, a hardened mud alley and a concrete metropolis, two Chinese women and a young girl take steps that lead them to Chicago's suburbs, planting new roots in McHenry, Elgin and Naperville.

Together, their story spans three generations and 7,000 miles.

Together, they represent the changing face of China, the Middle Kingdom rich in history and newfound wealth. Together, too, they represent the changing face of Chicago's suburbs.

Connie Moy, Teia Brandl and Jan Zheng are three of nearly 52,000 Chinese living in Chicago and its suburbs — the region's fifth-largest immigrant group. They are among thousands of suburban immigrants crossing from China.

The world's most populated country, China now also has the fourth largest economy worldwide. As such an economic power, its fate increasingly is tied to our own.

Despite its growing prosperity, China's income gap widens. As city-dwelling engineers and entrepreneurs get richer, many rural workers languish.

Foster mother Li Jingling keeps pictures of Teia Brandl, the young girl she cared for in her home along the road with no name in Feng-cheng, a small city in China. Li, 41, has not seen her foster daughter in two years, but she still remembers the girl neighbors called "beauty." "Every morning when she woke, she would sing by herself. She would say things to herself," Li recalls.

That gap, a restrictive population control policy and the prestige of America's universities and businesses still lure many Chinese here just as economic opportunity brought others a generation before.

Connie Moy left her southern farming village as a young bride nearly 60 years ago when China sat on the precipice of communist revolt. While political upheaval gripped her homeland, barred her return and divided her from her oldest daughter and sister for more than three decades, Moy created a new start for her remaining family in McHenry, one egg roll at a time. Her journey mirrors that of an older immigrant generation that fled on the eve of the 1949 rebellion with little education and less English but plenty of determination.

Teia Brandl, carried to Elgin in the arms of a U.S. mother, is one of 7,044 Chinese babies adopted by Americans two years ago. They could be called the generation lost to China. Like so many babies, Brandl was born in a remote town where yearly income hovers near $300. Jobs that support multiple children aren't available in such rural areas and contraception isn't as accessible either.

If Teia Brandl's generation is China's lost one, Jan Zheng's reflects that of newfound pride. She and others arrived at a time of better relations between the United States and China. Talent and ambition drove Zheng and thousands of others first to U.S. graduate degrees, then to lucrative jobs.

These are the stories of their journeys, of their crossing China to create lives here in the new suburban mosaic.

Finding McHenry

Park Ridge, July 1965 — It is time to move again.

Connie Moy remembers life as a young immigrant woman, widowed at age 25, separated from her eldest daughter and forced to fend for herself and her three youngest children. "Three babies and no father," Moy, 83, says, shaking her head at the memory.

Connie Moy followed her Chinese husband here in 1948. They had three American children, but he died just four years later. Her oldest daughter and sister remain stranded with relatives in a communist country that forbids Moy's return and her daughter's departure, dividing theirs and countless other families ensnared in the country's political tensions for more than 30 years. Now an immigrant widow, Moy must fend for herself and her three young children.

"Three babies and no father," Moy recalls, shaking her head at the memory. "Come to this country, I don't have no schooling, no nothing."

Yet Moy has a skill that requires no translation: cooking.

For nine years, Moy folds spring rolls, cooks chop suey and cleans the cramped home she and her children share with a great uncle who took them in as only family would.

As her oldest son nears high school, Moy decides her three children need more than she can provide by working shifts in her great uncle's Canton Tea Garden restaurant. Paid a third of what men in the kitchen get, Moy ends the nine years with $3,000 in savings.

Jan Zheng checks company e-mail from the kitchen of her Naperville home on a recent Sunday afternoon as her daughter, Angelica, plays nearby. Zheng, 37, works as a product manager for Lucent Technologies in Naperville.

Moy searches for a suburb without a Chinese restaurant. Every town needs one, friends tell her.

She hustles her three teenage children — Jim, Maxine and Perry — onto a commuter train bound west. The woman who stands shy of 5 feet does not know where they are going, but she knows what she wants.

She wants a town like Jianan, the rural village she left as a young bride in 1948.

She wants green, uninterrupted space for her children.

She wants a small town, where families count years by generations and neighbors don't bother to knock.

When the train rolls into the city of McHenry, she finds it.

Leaving Teia

Now almost three years old, Teia Brandl lives in Elgin with her mother, Shannon. The girl who loves lion dancers, McDonald’s and animals, was born and abandoned in the remote city of Fengcheng in central China.

Fengcheng, April 2004 — It is time, they said. An American woman will come for the girl with the birthmark, officials from the Fengcheng Sui, a social welfare institute in town, told the foster mother.

So, Li Jingling dresses the young child for the final time. She leaves her home on the outskirts of Fengcheng, taking the girl who came into her life as a two-day-old infant.

Days earlier, orphanage officials told her the U.S. woman will take the child to the American embassy and then to a place called Elgin, a destination Li can only imagine. At 41, Li never has left rural Jiangxi (pronounced gee-an-she) province.

Shannon Brandl and her daughter, Teia, now nearly 3, march down Wentworth Avenue in Chicago’s Chinatown as part of a Chinese New Year parade. They join others with children, mostly daughters, adopted from China.

For nearly 11 months, Li has cared for Feng Chunhong as her own. Now she faces what she has dreaded since her foster daughter came into her life: leaving her.

At the institute, Li musters her fortitude and marches inside with Chunhong — called "beauty" on account of the tiny birthmark above her right eyebrow. She hands the girl to a nurse and walks out.

On her way home, Li does not cry when she passes a dog trotting down the Ganging River road, an image that made Chunhong giggle.

She does not cry when she passes the wooden table where the girl ate, the only furniture in a room lit by a single bulb.

She glances at the homemade crib. Tucked in its corner, where Chunhong slept, is a small sweater. It smells like Chunhong. That is when Li's eyes mist.

"I washed the baby's clothes and cried," Li recalls two years later, her voice soft as she holds a snapshot of an infant Chunhong, a picture she tucks away in a drawer for safekeeping.

"Someone from the institute told me not to worry, that the adoptive mother was very young," Li says. "So I don't worry...I just miss the little girl."

Faith in familiarity

Naperville, September 2005 — Jan Zheng stands alone in the back of the cafeteria, her head bent in prayer.

Amid the basketball hoops, medieval castle mural and U.S. flag hanging in Naperville's Lincoln Junior High cafeteria, more than 300 members of the Chinese Christian Mandarin Church gather for Sunday worship.

The Naperville woman helps orchestrate the Chinese buffet after the service. A Lucent Technologies product manager, Zheng greets friends in her native Mandarin as she ladles broccoli onto plastic plates.

Like her job, her suburban townhouse and her Lexus sedan, Zheng acquired her faith in the suburbs, all of which contrast sharply with life in Shanghai, where churches are scarce in the atheist nation and most live in apartments and ride buses.

Only when Zheng and her future husband enrolled in U.S. university graduate programs did they discover Christianity. Other Chinese grad student friends persuaded them to join church. While the baptisms, blessings and Bibles may be foreign, the language, food and communion with friends from places like Beijing, Xi'an (pronounced shee-an) and Tianjin (pronounced tea-an-gin) offer the comfort of familiarity.

"It was a pretty hard feeling of leaving my parents," Zheng says of leaving Shanghai 14 years ago. "At 22, you're not really afraid to leave your past behind. It's a little bit exciting and a little bit, you know, uncertain."

But business success beckoned. With the ink on her Shanghai University degree still wet, Zheng landed a job with an international high-tech firm in 1990. Her starting salary doubled those of workers in state-run ventures. Zheng soon realized she could only climb the corporate ladder halfway without a Western master's degree.

She began her ascent in 1992 when she enrolled in a graduate program in England. Following the man she would marry, Zheng transferred to a program in this country. She earned a master's degree in business administration from the University of Dallas where she got straight A's. She landed jobs with Richardson Electronics in Geneva and Equus Computer Systems in Seattle before settling in with Lucent Technologies in Naperville.

Connie Moy pauses between preparing egg rolls at McHenry’s Plum Garden restaurant, a business Moy opened as a one-women store-front in 1965.

Any lingering unease about leaving China fades as Zheng spots friends mingling with her husband, her 5-year-old daughter and her younger sister at the service.

"This is my home," Zheng says. "I am part of society. I have a connection here."

Love from Shanghai

Shanghai, December 2005 — Jan's mother, Zheng Zhiying (pronounced zee-ying), dips her chopsticks into a platter of pickled turnips and carrots.

She offers food to her husband, a slight man who sits quietly by her side. Only when he is served does she take some for herself. Zheng is less concerned with food today than with sharing the latest news from Jan, back in Naperville.

"She is planning their spring festival," Zheng says, brandishing a Chinese newspaper from Chicago, where Jan is shown with other leaders of the Northern Illinois Chinese Association. "Much responsibility."

To many in her Shanghai social circle, this means little. But Zheng knows the excitement is not lost on the four couples gathered around a restaurant table in Shanghai's Hong Kou district.

They know Chicago's suburbs. They check the weather forecast in Naperville, Lisle and Aurora. They scour the Internet for property listings in Oak Brook. They stay current on suburban school rankings.

And they repeat to all who listen that Naperville ranks as the third-nicest place to live in the United States, as Money magazine concluded last year.

Keeping abreast of such news makes the 7,000 miles dividing them from their daughters feel shorter.

All professional 30-something women, their daughters traveled to the suburbs during the early 1990s via master's degrees in engineering, business and computer science. They landed jobs in some of the region's fastest-growing companies, settled down and now have children of their own who often struggle to communicate with their Mandarin-speaking grandparents.

By trading articles and news from the suburbs, the Shanghai couples stay connected with their families.

"It's the Chinese way. We encourage our children not to be satisfied. They should make even more effort to get better in the future," Zheng says. The frankness of her voice slips and her eyes fill as she thinks of her daughter, Jan. "I miss her very much. ... She is very good to her parents, to us."

Meeting Teia

Evanston, March 2004 — The fax arrives at 4:23 p.m.

For three years, Shannon Brandl has waited for papers bearing the name of her future daughter, Feng Chunhong.

Health problems would complicate a pregnancy for Brandl so she turned her focus and $20,000 of her funds toward a child from China, a place with a culture she'd long found intriguing.

For three years, Shannon Brandl had worked through the paperwork and processes and dreamed of this day.

The fax finds her at Evanston's Fox Animal Hospital, where Brandl works as a technician.

A picture, grainy and faded, shows a smiling girl with a small birthmark above her right eyebrow.

"I'm a mom. I'm a mom," Brandl shouts, gripping the fax in trembling hands.

"Just to see her picture," she recalls later. "This kid is halfway around the world, but from that moment, she was mine."

Five weeks later, the Elgin woman travels 14 hours to China's Jiangxi province to meet Chunhong, a girl authorities say was born at dawn and abandoned by dusk.

Because Zheng Zhiying, Jan Zheng’s mother, and her friend, Zhu Ning, left, both have daughters who live in Naperville and Lisle, they have bonded and often socialize with each other.

Chunhong is one of 7,044 Chinese babies adopted by Americans that year, a number that swelled 50 percent in three years, U.S. State Department figures show.

At the Fengcheng orphanage, Brandl brings a toy and bag of Cheerios with her to meet her daughter. Nurses bring out four babies. Twins come first; they go to another mother. A door swings open and two girls emerge. Brandl spots her daughter instantly; the birthmark gives her away.

Teia Chunhong Brandl screams as the nurse walks away, leaving her in her new mother's foreign arms.

'Keep it in the family'

McHenry, October 2005 — Connie Moy plunges her right hand, curved by years of work, into a large bowl of cabbage sauteed with pork and chicken.

Her brow furrows, her mouth frowns in concentration as she places a small fistful of the leafy mixture onto a slip of dough.

Wearing black pants that skim her ankles, black sneakers, white athletic socks with a tell-tale Nike swoosh and a red collared shirt bearing the Plum Garden logo, Moy runs a dampened finger along the edge before tucking inside a stray piece of cabbage and sealing the egg roll.

She has 40 years of practice.

Egg rolls anchored her first menu in October 1965, when the Plum Garden restaurant — Moy means plum in Chinese — opened as a take-out storefront along McHenry's main street, next to the town barber.

Egg rolls remained a culinary staple when Moy, buoyed by an $8,000 loan from the local bank, bought the building five years later, remodeled the kitchen and fashioned a dining room.

At 83, egg rolls get Moy out of bed every morning, drawing her to the kitchen by 9 a.m.

"I opened this restaurant. I couldn't read. I couldn't write," she says, pausing between rolls. Moy's English, spoken in what sounds like a song, hint at her rural Canton roots. "I answer the phone. I do the cooking. I could sell three egg roll for 90 cents all day long."

Moy still sells egg rolls all day long to suburban residents who have come to love the flavor of southern China.

A man secures his bicycle load of rice as nightfall descends on a road with no name in Fengcheng, where Teia Brandl lived with her foster mother until she was adopted by Elgin resident Shannon Brandl two years ago.

"I like McHenry so much. The people so nice," Moy says. "I go to the bank. People trust me. They say, 'How much you need Mrs. Moy?'æ"

Such a sense of belonging, coupled with family roots now deep into the third generation, keep Moy in Plum Garden's kitchen. But she no longer works alone.

Moy's grandson, Jesse, stands at the oven where a wok simmers with cabbage. Two daughters and a granddaughter stand beside Moy folding egg rolls. And her son, Perry, manages the restaurant in addition to serving as a GOP member of the McHenry county board.

At 26, Jesse Moy towers over his grandmother but snaps to attention whenever she calls out.

"If I didn't do it, my grandma would probably have me in a chokehold," Moy laughs, talking about his work. He graduated McHenry East High in 1997 before enlisting at Plum Garden. "You got to keep it in the family. Grandma wouldn't have it any other way."

Missing sisters

Toisan, December 2005 — Connie Moy's sister, Li Pandi, presses three sticks of burning incense to her chest.

Sporting a pair of boxy, brown-rimmed glasses and a rose knit cap, Li faces the shrine on her living room floor, closes her eyes and meditates for a moment, remembering her sister in the suburbs.

Li has not seen her sister in 13 years. At 85 and 83, it's unlikely they ever will again.

"My sister, her life is so hard," Li says in the same lilting tone Moy uses when calling out an order for Hong Kong chicken in McHenry. "My younger sister work so hard."

Zheng Zhiying huddles under an umbrella with her friend, Zhu Ning, as they walk to lunch on a rainy afternoon in Shanghai. Zheng’s daugh-ter, Jan, lives in Naperville while Zhu’s daughter lives in Lisle. Trading news accounts with one another, the women say, helps them stay in touch with their daughters living in Chicago’s suburbs.

Moy fended for her family just fine. Plum Garden's profits not only turned a take-out into a popular sit-down restaurant, her work also helped buy the apartment along the tree-lined road overlooking the Tong Ji river where Li now lives.

"Don't worry about me," Li assures her younger sister. "Sometime, if you have a chance, just come back."

Half a world away in the dimly lit Plum Garden dining room, Moy rests during an afternoon lull. After five hours on her feet, the matriarch is tired, too tired to think about visiting her sister or her childhood home. McHenry is home now, alongside a new generation of U.S.-born Moys.

"I too old," Moy laughs. "She's too old. I miss my sister. All the time, I talk to her. Every month, we call."

Wanted: Mothers

Fengcheng, December 2005 — Sixteen baby walkers sit empty in a room with turtles, fish and an octopus splashed across newly painted orphanage walls.

The new Fengcheng Sui orphanage, where Teia Brandl was taken as a day-old baby, awaits its next crop of orphans.

"It's important when they are young, it's important for them to be taken good care of," says director Wu Yingen, striding through the $2.5 million social welfare institute in a neighborhood where roads are unmarked and dust pervasive.

Foster mother Li Jingling cared for Teia Brandl for 11 months until she was adopted by her American mother, Shannon Brandl of Elgin.

Just inside the building labeled in bronze English letters "Child's Department," pictures sent from America of Fengcheng babies held in the arms of U.S. parents plaster the walls, images collected from birthdays, Christmas visits to Santa and outings to the park.

All are girls, like Teia.

All were abandoned, like Teia.

Nine out of every 10 Chinese babies adopted by Americans are girls, statistics show, a ratio skewed by China's one-child, one-family policy and a traditional preference for boys that lingers in the countryside where boys may be better suited to work in the fields.

A mother who bears a second baby cannot give up the child without first being saddled with a hefty fine, one many in rural areas — where the average household yearly income is just over $300 — can ill afford. Nanchang province officials will not say what the penalty is. In Beijing, however, the fine is about $1,000.

Faced with these options, some mothers leave their babies in hospitals, police stations or on the doorstep of the city's family planning offices. They are taken to the Fengcheng orphanage where a doctor checks them over and deputy institute director Li Qiong (pronounced li chi-ong) gives them a name.

For Teia, Li chose Hong, or spring red.

"Sometimes I look in the dictionary to choose a character with a very good meaning," Li says. "I want to give good luck, a good fate for the child's life."

New year traditions

Naperville, January 2006 — Ni haos mingle with hellos in the ballroom of Naperville's Holiday Inn Select Hotel where people gather to celebrate the Year of the Dog.

Zheng Zhiying, Jan Zheng’s mother, remains in Shanghai but reads up on her daughter’s community, Naperville, regularly.

Dining room doors swing open as a cadre of waiters serve a decidedly American dinner: roast chicken, potatoes, salad and New York cheesecake with strawberry sauce.

Picking at her meal, Jan Zheng, wearing a red qi pao, rehearses her lines as host of the Northern Illinois Chinese Association's new year gala.

"Gong xi fa cai," she says to the more than 300 people gathered. "Happy New Year," her co-host echoes in English.

In Mandarin, Zheng introduces routines that range from kung fu to folk dance, from traditional love songs to a fashion show of dresses from different Chinese dynasties.

"In China for the New Year," Zheng says, "it's basically every town, every city will get together for a celebration."

Chinese immigrants continue the tradition in this Naperville ballroom, punctuated by snippets of Mandarin, traditional music and red lanterns dangling from chandeliers. Enveloped in this familiar ritual for an evening, Zheng does not feel so far from home.

Li Pandi, 85, misses her younger sister, Connie Moy.

"Basically everyone we associate with are the same age, the same education and face the same issue with aging parents at home and we are adjusting," Zheng says. "We really support each other."

Still, the distance troubles her. In a culture that celebrates age and where children traditionally care for their elders, Zheng frets her parents will be alone in their need.

Each month, Zheng sends her mother in Shanghai vitamins, letters and snapshots of her 5-year-old granddaughter, Angelica. It does not quiet her anxiety.

"I always want to go back," Zheng says.

Generations of roots

Jianan, December 2005 — Her black rubber work boots are silent on the concrete alley snaking between homes in this southern farming village.

Connie Moy concentrates on the task at hand: perfecting an egg roll at her Plum Garden restaurant in McHenry.

Money earned in restaurant kitchens and laundries from Chicago to Boston paved this walkway.

Money earned abroad built this village hall, where Jianan's 100 residents gather to play table tennis or mark the new year.

Money earned in McHenry's Plum Garden kitchen, in part, remodeled the home at No. 20, where Connie Moy lived as a young bride.

Six decades later, another young bride now lives in the gray, brick home. Chen Aichang married Moy Weihung, Connie Moy's second cousin.

And while the alley today is paved and lit by electricity, little else has changed in the village not marked on any map, not named on any road sign.

The mountains of Dan Jia Yang rise behind utility poles lining the two-lane road that links Jianan, a village of 100 residents, to nearby Toisan, a city of 1 million with 1.3 million more abroad, who annually send money back.

In a farm field near the road, the new bride works silently as the distant chatter of neighbors and guzzle of a truck engine drift past her.

The 26-year-old in pink jeans and a long ponytail waters the field, nursing tomatoes, turnips and lettuce that feed her family as they fed three generations of Moys before.

Elgin's Shannon Brandl waited three years to become a mom, as she now is to young Teia.

Marriage brought both Connie Moy and Chen Aichang to the fields of Jianan. Marriage might take Chen to the same place Moy journeyed to years ago: Chicago's suburbs.

"I'm waiting for an opportunity," says Chen's husband and Moy's 30-year-old second cousin, Moy Weihung. "For some who went, life is better. Some said life is just so-so. I don't care. ...If it comes, I'll go."

Nearly 400 million Chinese rose from poverty during the past 20 years. Still, the gap dividing rich from poor spiked during the same period.

As a driver who earns $250 a month, Moy Weihung falls on the lower end of that divide. He and his wife live comfortably in their remote village, but he knows relatives in America's "golden mountains" live better.

Smiling as she looks at her year-old daughter dozing in her arms, Chen says she will follow her husband to America, just as Connie Moy did a lifetime ago.

Keeping Teia's culture

Chicago, January 2006 — Clutching her Asian doll, Teia Brandl stands in the heart of Chinatown.

A boom sounds, a Chinese dragon wakens and the 2006 New Year parade begins.

With the bottoms of her traditional Chinese red qi pao peeking out beneath her coat, Teia and her mother, Shannon, march down Wentworth Avenue along with other adopted Chinese kids.

"You've got to walk and wave to people," Brandl tells her daughter. "How do you wave to people?" Teia offers a toothy smile in response.

Brandl hopes joining the Chinatown parade, attending weekly services at the True Light Chinese Lutheran Church in Streamwood and taking Chinese classes in Hoffman Estates will connect Teia to her cultural roots.

And one day meeting Li Jingling — the soft-spoken woman who guided Teia's first steps — Brandl hopes will link Teia to her past, one defined both by her birth mother's abandonment and her foster mother's love.

"I owe a lot to her. Teia has birth parents, but Li Jingling was her first mom; she was. There's no way around it," Brandl says, her eyes tearing as she feeds Teia a Chinese cookie. "She cared for her the first 10-1/2 months, 11 months of her life and did a good job, just did a really good job. I've always just felt incredibly indebted to her.

"I know (Teia) was loved," Brandl says. "I know she was well cared for."

Inside a concrete home along a mud alley miles away, Li cradles a picture of Teia clad in a party dress Brandl recently sent.

"When I saw this picture, I thought, now her life is quite good. Her mother cares for her well," says Li, standing in a pool of afternoon light streaming through the window.

"I hope the girl is healthy," Li says. "Tell her to listen to her mother."

Part 2: China's cell phone frenzy