The mystery of the LA mansion filled with surrogate children

Mint

2 days ago

ARCADIA, Calif.—In early May, after a baby was hospitalized with possible signs of child abuse, police showed up at a nine-bedroom mansion in this Los Angeles suburb known for lavish homes and residents with roots in China. Inside, they found 15 more children, none older than 3, living under the care of nannies.
The investigative trail led them to six more children at other homes in the Los Angeles area. A Chinese-born man and woman living in the mansion said they were the parents of all 22 children. Birth certificates list them as such. What mystified police was that the children appeared to have been born all over the U.S., and in rapid succession.
Local authorities removed the children from the homes, placed them in foster care, and called in the FBI.
The mansion, it turned out, was listed as the headquarters of Mark Surrogacy, which had arranged many of the children's births and was managed by Silvia Zhang, the woman living there. Zhang said she was the mother of all the children.
The surrogates who carried some of the children said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal that Zhang deceived them about the family she was trying to have, and that they had spoken with federal agents in recent weeks. The investigation is focusing, they were told, on whether the couple was selling babies whose births the agency had arranged.
Zhang denied that in an interview with the Journal, saying that she and a man she described as her husband just wanted to have as many children as they could. 'We never sell our babies," she said. 'We take care of them very well."
Vanity McGoveran, who gave birth to a baby girl for Mark Surrogacy in March, said she was shocked to learn that Zhang had so many children. Now, she said, she is wondering whether Zhang 'has something that she doesn't want people to know."
The website of the company, Mark Surrogacy, said it is in the business of connecting surrogates with American and international couples who need them. The surrogates, who live across the U.S. and were paid tens of thousands of dollars each, said Zhang and people working with the agency recruited them on Facebook, telling them they would be carrying children for a Chinese couple in Los Angeles struggling with infertility.
The probe is raising alarm in the commercial surrogacy industry, a fast-growing and multibillion-dollar market that connects aspiring parents with women willing to bear children for them. Surrogacy professionals worry that the couple's ties to China and the large number of children they had through surrogacy could prompt heightened scrutiny on what is now a lightly regulated industry. An FBI spokesman declined to comment.
The industry has been fueled in recent years by money from China, where surrogacy is illegal. In the U.S., one-third of intended parents were from other countries between 2014 and 2020, and 41% of those were Chinese nationals, according to researchers at Emory University. Some U.S. surrogacy agencies marketing their services to Chinese parents explicitly tout American citizenship for the newborns as a benefit.
It's unclear whether the Arcadia mansion had any direct ties to China. Among the many mysteries surrounding the couple are how many children they had in total, why a surrogacy business was operating out of their home and whether that business had any outside clients. Over the course of numerous conversations in English and Mandarin, Zhang either declined to respond or gave conflicting answers to those and other questions.
McGoveran, a Los Angeles beautician, said she received a Facebook message early last year asking whether she would be interested in becoming a surrogate for a Chinese couple struggling with infertility.
The message came from an account named 'Lin Hui," but McGoveran soon learned the person she was talking to was Zhang.
On 2021 business filings, Zhang, 38, is listed as a manager of Mark Surrogacy. To McGoveran, she represented herself as a prospective mother who wanted to have a child with a man she described as her husband, Guojun Xuan.
Zhang told McGoveran that she and Xuan, who is 65, didn't have any children, McGoveran recalled. That was a main reason McGoveran, who had hoped to carry a child for a couple who couldn't have children of their own, agreed to work with her.
Zhang promised to pay McGoveran $55,000, and said that during the pregnancy, McGoveran and her toddler could stay rent-free in a house Zhang owned. At the time, McGoveran didn't have a place to live. The stability was attractive enough, she said, that she overlooked red flags.
During the pregnancy, McGoveran said, she communicated mainly with two women she later learned were employees of Mark Surrogacy. Zhang and Xuan, listed in the contract as parents, didn't come to her prenatal doctors' appointments. The only time she met Xuan, she said, was at the Office Depot where they notarized her contract.
Late in her pregnancy, Zhang showed McGoveran photos of a girl who she said was her daughter. She appeared to be a teenager. McGoveran was shocked. She had wanted to help a woman who couldn't have kids herself, but was learning that Zhang had been a mom all along.
McGoveran gave birth in March to a baby girl.
Xuan is prominent in Los Angeles's Chinese-American business community. He and Zhang ran a real-estate company called Yudao Management, which they operated with a group of businessmen based in China, according to business filings and court records in legal proceedings involving the company. Using shell companies, Yudao purchased more than 100 properties in the Los Angeles area, many at foreclosure auctions, according to former employees, as well as property records and company documents reviewed by the Journal.
Xuan had come to the U.S. from Xinjiang, where he and his family had business interests, according to Chinese business filings.
Yudao workers called Xuan 'teacher," and he monitored them on feeds from surveillance cameras at the Arcadia residence, where Yudao was briefly headquartered, former employees said.
Mark Surrogacy operated out of a bedroom in the same Arcadia home, according to the former Yudao employees.
It isn't clear when Zhang and Xuan became a couple. Zhang was pregnant with her first child, a girl, in 2011 when she met a man 40 years her senior who she later married. They moved to the U.S., but the marriage fell apart a decade later, divorce records indicate.
Zhang and Xuan, who also divorced his wife around the same time, began having children together using surrogates in 2021. She said that as a child in China she had seen how that country's one-child policy had hurt families, so as an adult, she was determined to have as many as she could afford. 'We can provide for our children," she said. 'Plus, nowadays few people want to give birth, so we've decided to have many."
Xuan didn't respond to requests for comment. In an interview with a Chinese-language outlet, he cited similar motivations and said that he and Zhang are U.S. citizens.
Questions about the couple began cropping up two years after the surrogacy business was founded. In 2023, a surrogate under contract with the company was startled when people she hadn't met arrived with power-of-attorney documentation to pick up the infant she had just delivered, according to a lawyer for the surrogate.
When the client told her she'd heard other surrogates might have had the same experience with Mark Surrogacy, the lawyer, Rijon Charne, said she found the situation so odd that she asked law enforcement to examine whether it was related to human trafficking.'If I was wrong, I was wrong," Charne said. 'But it needed to be brought to somebody's attention if I was right."
Around the same time, a Los Angeles judge sent a child-safety investigator to Zhang and Xuan's home after being asked to approve surrogacy documents that named the couple as intended parents of numerous children. The investigator gave them a clean bill of health, according a person familiar with the hearing.
Lei Bai, a surrogacy lawyer who drafted contracts for Zhang and Xuan, said, 'It's not our responsibility" to investigate parents. 'It's not a requirement, and it's not anybody's obligation, to disclose how many surrogates you have," she said. Bai declined to comment on whether she still represents the couple.
A patchwork of state laws governs how surrogacy contracts are negotiated and enforced. Only one state, New York, requires surrogacy agencies to be licensed.
Agencies can certify that they comply with a roster of ethical guidelines published by an industry group, the Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy, but not every agency does so. Mark Surrogacy didn't.
On Facebook, Mark Surrogacy said that it was 'dedicated to help heterosexual couples, same-sex couples, international couples, single parents, etc."
'We know other agencies may have misled, but here you will know everything there is to know before making your decision," the company's website said.
U.S. law doesn't bar foreign couples from having children through U.S. surrogates. One potential surrogate was told by a Mark Surrogacy representative that the owners wanted to 'help couples" in places where surrogacy is illegal, according to a Facebook message reviewed by the Journal.
In an interview, though, Zhang said: 'Mark Surrogacy only helps our family, no others."
Zhang told different stories to different surrogates.
Early last year, Zhang sent some potential surrogates a document titled 'Intended Parent Profile," which described Xuan and her as the parents of just one daughter, according to copies reviewed by the Journal.
'We are very kind and caring, it would be an honor if you carry the baby for us," the profile said.
Months earlier, Zhang had told a Los Angeles court that she and Xuan had at least one dozen children, according to the person familiar with the hearing. Zhang didn't respond to questions about why she misrepresented to surrogates how many children she had.
In messages to another potential surrogate, Zhang said she had been working with an agency called Mark Surrogacy, but decided to pursue an 'independent journey" because Mark was charging her too much money. She didn't disclose that she was a manager of Mark Surrogacy, or that it operated out of her home.
In interviews and text messages, Zhang said she was being improperly targeted, and that there is nothing illegal about wanting a large family. 'There's nothing showing anything I do is human trafficking," she said. 'They can do the investigation. They will find nothing."
The trouble with authorities began after reports to police of fighting at the address, call logs show. In July 2024, one caller reported suspecting children at the home were being abused: 'There are six to seven children, and the women at the location yell and shout at the children." It isn't clear how police responded to that call.
On May 6 of this year, a Los Angeles hospital received a two-month-old baby with intracranial bleeding, a condition sometimes consistent with child abuse. The hospital asked local police to investigate.
When police arrived at the Arcadia mansion, they found 15 babies and toddlers, 'all with buzzed haircuts," in the care of six nannies, a detective said in an affidavit. Police seized video footage from Xuan's surveillance cameras, which showed that toddlers were spanked, slapped and forced to do squats, the affidavit said. The footage also showed a nanny shaking the baby that was later hospitalized.
Authorities removed the children from the home and arrested Zhang and Xuan, holding them for four days before releasing them without charges. By then, the FBI had gotten involved.
Zhang told the Journal she thought the children had been wrongfully removed. 'How would you feel if someone falsely claimed that your child had different parents, and triggered an investigation by Family Services?" she said in a text message. She declined to say how many children she had.
Meanwhile, surrogates who had worked with Mark were finding one another—and realizing they had been deceived.
McGoveran, the Los Angeles beautician, said she called one of Mark Surrogacy's employees, who told her that 'something bad" happened with a nanny employed by Zhang.
McGoveran phoned Zhang, who said her children had been taken by the county. That was when McGoveran learned that Zhang had even more children than her teenage daughter and the baby McGoveran had just delivered.
She joined a group chat with other surrogates who had worked with Mark in the past year. Some surrogates shared their stories on TikTok.
None of them said they had known that Zhang and Xuan had simultaneously contracted with so many surrogates, and most hadn't been aware that Zhang was a manager of Mark Surrogacy. It's rare for couples to employ multiple surrogates at the same time, particularly in the numbers Zhang and Xuan did.
The revelations left them wondering: Did they know anything about the people for whom they had carried children?
One surrogate, Kayla Elliott, a Texas mother of four, said she asked Zhang: 'What is going on? Who are you?"
Zhang responded with an image of a letter she said one of her daughters sent her while she was in jail over Mother's Day. 'You're the best mom that anyone can wish for," the letter said.
Around the time Zhang and Xuan were arrested, a surrogate they had contracted with in Florida was having issues with her pregnancy, early in her second trimester.
Toward the end of May, it became clear that the pregnancy was becoming dangerous for the woman, and that the baby had slim chances of survival. According to the surrogate, Zhang told her that she had done research and felt even if the baby survived the delivery, it was likely to have serious health issues. Zhang said she couldn't care for the child in that situation, the surrogate said, and left the decision on whether and how to deliver up to her.
Ultimately, the surrogate decided to induce labor. It was a difficult delivery. The baby was stillborn.
The surrogate said she held the baby's lifeless body for hours. She said she texted Zhang to let her know the baby was born dead.
Arcadia police Lieutenant Kollin Cieadlo said authorities continue to review video footage seized from the Arcadia home. The department, he said, would rearrest Zhang and Xuan if the district attorney decides to pursue child abuse charges.
The children remain in foster care. By law, Zhang and Xuan are their parents. Several of the surrogates are speaking with an attorney, though it's unclear whether they have any standing to sue the couple, family planning attorneys said.
Earlier this year, a baby born after a Mark-arranged surrogacy was taken into custody in Pennsylvania after Zhang failed to pick it up, according to people familiar with the matter.
At least two other women are still carrying children in pregnancies arranged by Mark Surrogacy. Zhang contacted one of the pregnant surrogates last month about arranging a legal document called a prebirth order that would allow Zhang to take the child home from the hospital when it is born later this year, people familiar with the matter said.
Another, Alexa Fasold, said she is unsure of what will happen to the child she is carrying and is evaluating legal options, including whether she and her husband could serve as its foster parents.
'This baby has nothing to do with any of this," Fasold said. 'This child we're carrying is completely innocent of all of this."
Write to Katherine Long at [e-mail], Ben Foldy at [e-mail] and Sara Randazzo at [e-mail]