The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion

Surrogacy is a largely unregulated industry. As Ava Kaufman notes in this jaw-dropping story, “anyone can start a surrogacy agency; unlike opening a hair salon, or a day care, no qualifications are needed for the intimate, unpredictable work of bringing strangers together to create a new life.” Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang exploited this lax environment, starting their own “agency” to entice surrogates across the US to have nearly two dozen children for them. Those children are now in foster homes, after authorities uncovered abuse and neglect at the house where Guojun, enabled by Zhang, lived out his fantasy of building a family dynasty:

At the door, an Arcadia Police detective, Evelyn Calderon, asked Silvia about the number of children she had. Silvia equivocated. When Calderon pressed her for specifics, Silvia consulted an Excel spreadsheet on her phone before responding that the tally was twenty-one. Calderon asked to check the kids for injuries, and Silvia agreed.

The police entered the house through the foyer, which was sparsely decorated, except for a piano. The kitchen held a few commercial-sized refrigerators, along with strollers, car seats, boxes of baby formula, and diapers stacked along the walls. In what appeared to be a classroom, several older women were instructing a gaggle of toddlers with shaved heads. Upstairs, the police saw that Silvia’s middle-school-aged daughter, Susan, had her own bedroom, while multiple other children shared a room full of cribs and beds with guardrails.