Chinese orphan takes on Hong Kong role at her adoptive mother’s childcare foundation

When American scriptwriter and film director Jenny Bowen adopted baby Maya from a Guangzhou orphanage in 1997, she never imagined it would lead to her setting up orphanages across China and being involved in the transformation of child welfare in the country. And she certainly could not have foreseen that other Asian nations would be clamouring for her model of early childcare.

This feel-good success story of young lives transformed by love and nurturing is one that Hong Kong can share in, because the city is now the regional training base for Bowen’s work.

What gives it an even more special twist is that Maya – who spent almost the first two years of her life in an orphanage just across the border before being adopted by the Bowens and raised in Berkeley, California – is now working at the OneSky Centre in Hong Kong.

“Maya inspired OneSky – totally, 100 per cent. It was her transformation being in the arms of a loving family, watching a shell-shocked little child just blossom. That’s when I thought, ‘It’s so easy, we could do that for all of them’. We couldn’t bring them all home, so OneSky was the answer,” says Bowen, founder and CEO of OneSky (formerly Half the Sky Foundation).

The story of her adoption is one Maya must have heard her mother tell hundreds of times, but she listens intently. Now a confident 23-year-old with a radiant smile, she earned a double major in human development and psychology, with a minor in education, at University of California, Davis.