. >> reporter: that 18-year-old maya bowen can talk let alone graduate with honors seems both natural and unlikely, given her early childhood in a distant orphanage. richard and jenny bowen adopted her when she was 2. >> no one had ever talked to her and, you know, language develops when people talk to you. that's how you learn to speak, so she had no language at all. >> reporter: the bowens were moved to adopt -- first maya and later anya -- after reports in the late '90s of child neglect on a vast scale in china. this film, shot undercover, called "the dying rooms," showed orphanages filled with girls abandoned in a country that had begun restricting families to one child in a culture that traditionally favored boy children. >> we thought the thing we could do is save one life. so that's what we did. we went to china to save a life. >> reporter: but she found it impossible to ignore the conditions maya would escape, but where millions of others still languished in the custody of indifferent or untrained workers, invisible in a nation focused on industrializing its way out of third-w