In a mildly cluttered house on the outskirts of the city of Langfang, in China’s northeastern Hebei province, the scent of oven-baked bread wafts around, dovetailing with happy clappy Christian rock music emanating from the kitchen stereo. A young man in a hairnet scoops pert balls of biscuit dough into rows, nodding his head to lyrics about Jesus metaphorically breaking chains from people’s wrists and generally being brilliant.
With the Thanksgiving food order rush over for the year, all is calm in the Bread of Life bakery as the staff quietly go about prepping their Christmas orders.
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All photos by Aurelien Foucault.
China’s bakery market is on the rise, fuelling more openings of chain stores such as Paris Baguette and Bread Talk. However, Bread of Life is very different from the increasing amount of cake-stuffed outlets lining the country’s shopping streets. The bakery, which in 2016 marked its tenth anniversary, is staffed by disabled orphans who largely had no cooking experience before they took on jobs here.
“I didn’t know a single thing about baking before I started,” says Grace Yang, 29, momentarily diverting her attention from an electric mixer churning hot dog bun dough. “I was especially bad at stuff involving proportions of ingredients. But I learned with a calculator and gradually began to understand the recipes. We learned from cooking magazines, too.”
Grace is from China’s central Shaanxi province and was abandoned by her parents as a child, likely because of her physical condition. Having contracted polio when she was young, she cannot walk and uses a wheelchair to get around.
“I never worked before I came here,” she says. “I was taken to hospitals only to be told that my condition was not easy to cure. Some doctors told me that if I had surgery there would be a danger of me being paralysed. For a while I was thinking about giving up, because I couldn’t face the potential consequences of that. I seldom went outside in Shaanxi, because I didn’t have a wheelchair.”
In 2011, aged 23, after living in a previous foster home Grace moved into the Langfang branch of the Agape Family Life House foster home. It was set up by Keith and Cheryl Wyse, an American couple, to house orphans who have osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease. The home has links to a nearby hospital that specialises in the condition, offering solid treatment plans for its residents that many of them lacked before.
It’s hard to estimate how many children are abandoned in China each year, but the government has said that there are around 600,000 orphans—the term including both permanently abandoned children and those whose parents have died—in the country. Other groups claim that the figure is closer to 1 million. Almost all abandoned children in the country have disabilities.
Chatting in the Bread of Life dining room, next to a bookshelf piled up with Bibles and cookbooks, Danny Mun, who works with the Agape foster home and oversees the bakery, outlines the scenarios that led to some of the orphans being taken in.
“We get that classic ‘kid left in the basket’ kind of thing,” says Danny, who has been working with Bread of Life since 2011 and is originally from South Korea. “For a couple of our kids, their families did things like taking them out to play, then telling them to wait somewhere while they bought them snacks. They’d come back with a bunch of snacks then tell them to wait again while they went to buy something else. They never came back.”
Bread of Life was set up to help provide adult Agape residents such as Grace with jobs. It’s hard to estimate the employment rate for disabled people in China, but in 2010 the government said it was around a quarter. Social stigmas, and unsteady implementation of employment laws designed to protect the disabled from discrimination and encourage firms to hire them, have contributed to this low figure.
For disabled people who do have jobs, ensuring they are protected from discrimination can be tough. “You get firms that will say ‘no females’ or something like that in recruitment adverts, but no company would say ‘no disabled people,’” says Cindy Zhang, an employment lawyer with Shanghai’s Conshine Law Firm.
She adds: “So, you can find legal cases about discrimination against females and they get [to win cases about] discrimination [because they can show evidence]. But it’s really difficult for disabled people to find evidence showing that a company is discriminating. Also, because compensation amounts for such cases are not high, in my opinion it’s not worth pursuing these kinds of cases.”
Bread of Life provides its staff with a workplace in which their baking skill, rather than their disabilities, is the focus of their lives. Grace refuses point blank when I ask her to talk about society’s attitudes toward disability in China, and I’m told that she was dismayed at her depiction in a recent TV news report about the bakery that featured schmaltzy music played over her interview.
“One of my biggest challenges early on was to get rid of that whole ‘charity’ mentality,” says Danny. Indeed, a large factor in the success of Bread of Life, which has been self-sustainable as a business since 2011, is the excellence of its products. Due to its compact setup, the bakery has not applied for licenses it would require to sell its goods in shops or canteens, but does well through direct orders and servicing private events.
It has found a niche catering to Western palates, which tend to vary from those of local Chinese, in expat-heavy areas such as Shunyi in northeast Beijing. “People seem to be impressed that we have Chinese people making this stuff [Western-style] and that it actually tastes like proper chocolate cake,” says Danny. Grace, meanwhile, highlights how preferences don’t always translate between Western and Eastern tongues. “I do enjoy the occasional bite,” she says, “but not always. Some of them are really sweet…”
Another more traditionally Western element that has a large influence on the bakery is Christianity. The foster home’s founders are Christian, as is Danny, who uses the word “blessed” frequently and describes the help that the bakery gets from volunteers as “coming from God.”
With the Chinese government heavily promoting secularism and clamping down on both religion and foreign non-government organisations, this could potentially mean a double whammy of trouble for places such as Agape. “We don’t flaunt that we’re a Christian organisation,” says Danny. “And it’s not like we force them [the orphans] to do it. This is the only life that I know, and that my wife and Keith and Cheryl know, so this is how we’re going to live.
“If they [the orphans] see it and say it’s cool, ‘I want to do that, too,’ we do it. But they’re all typical in that when they’re young they’re like, ‘This is great, I’m all for Jesus.’ Then when they’re teenagers they’re like, ‘What the heck is this!’”
The bendy-soft chocolate chip cookies that I buy at the bakery do taste pretty heavenly, although I’d put it down to the skills of Grace and her colleagues rather than any divine intervention. After saying my goodbyes, I eat four during the taxi ride home—easily the most guilt-free treat troughing session I have ever had.
