We welcome the following essay from an adoptee we have known for over two decades. She was adopted from our eldest daughter's orphanage, and we met her and her family at several orphanage reunions I organized in the early 2000's. We last saw this adoptee in 2006 at our last reunion.
But last year she emailed me, reminding me of who she was, and asking for help in locating her birth family. Given our long history, Lan and I decided it would be possible to organize a joint trip of the adoptee and her parents with Lan, since our oldest daughter was also from the same area. This is the first adoptee that Lan has accompanied to China to search, and we were interested to see what results such a search project would bring. With the help of this adoptee and her family, combined with the data we already possessed for this orphanage, a total of 67 birth families were located and tested. When everyone had returned home, I asked the adoptee to write down her thoughts and "take aways" from the trip. What follows are her deepest impressions.
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| A birth sister searches one of our search posters. |
It was a trip in the fullest sense, just as being under the influence of a powerful narcotic would be, falling down the rabbit hole and entering an upside-down world, where day is night and up is down. I quickly realized though, that I had been the one living upside-down my entire life, walking around in pitch darkness and confidently calling it daylight.
The story of Chinese international adoption is a complex one, which has been spackled into a smooth, simplistic surface that can be summarized as follows: Chinese couples could only have one child during the One Child Policy, and male heirs were favored, so female babies were willingly abandoned. Despite mounting evidence in the past two decades that not all was as it seemed, this is the prevailing story repeated by the international news media even today, reinforcing our own ignorance.
Cracks in the perfect façade were discovered early on and quickly suppressed within China to varying degrees of success. Cases of human trafficking were highlighted in documentaries such as One Child Nation and books such as “The Orphans of Shao”, both works that are banned in mainland China. Search articles featuring adoptees searching for their birthfamilies are often censored, and removed from Chinese news and social media, and abandonment and finding documents have been found to contain fraudulent or fabricated information. The masterly confusion of what exactly happened in China concerning international adoption continues to separate and divide adoption families and birthfamilies around the world. It is a marvel that we have any successful birthparent matches at all given our collective ignorance—the successful reunion stories we do have teach us the valuable lesson that truth is truth, no matter how mismatched our beliefs about reality.
The distance of cold-hard statistics and a strong moral stance that adoptees should absolutely be in control of their own lives, ill-prepared me for the skyscraper of emotional whiplash when actually face-to-face with birthfamilies. From the moment we touched down in Guangzhou, it was as if all of these voices went silent and an invisible hand moved me to the side, as if to say, “it is now your turn to listen to their stories.”
Case 1:
The first birthfamily we met was a bubbly couple. The birthmother had a youthful energy and wore a solid jade bracelet on a slightly plump wrist. What struck me was how young she seemed and how bright her personality. I had imagined birthparents to be godlike, untouchable really, but these people were so human and so full of life. In 1993, they had their first daughter who they raised in China. In 1997, they had their second daughter, who they were able to keep for 40 days. Back in those times, the One Child Policy was very strict, and the government would tear down your house for keeping extra children. Knowing they had this second daughter, a family member approached them with a false promise, “Give me the child and I will send her to a local family. You will be able to watch her grow up and she will be near.” So, the couple gave their trusted family member their second daughter, but as stories of this type so often go, the relative sold the baby to the orphanage.
This first birthfamily insisted on paying for our breakfast, our very first meal after the long-flight to China. There were savory noodles, hargow, xiaolongbao, turnip cake, and congee. The birthmother said that she felt so much guilt and shame for not being able to take care of her daughter and keep her, but there was no choice. She kept holding up a single finger, indicating the One Child Policy. If they reunited with their lost daughter now, they really wanted to know if she was alive, happy, and healthy. They did not want to interfere with her life or be a burden in any way to her.
As my parents and these birthparents sat around the table, the contrast in our situations was starkly obvious. Both sides, my family and this one, were searching for answers and for loved ones. I had seen reunions before and having both families around a table of food is the hallmark of a successful reunion. But here we were, my family and I, tasting what we could not have. It was hopeful and sobering, all at once.
“If we found our lost daughter,” the birthparents said, “we would want to become one large family with her adoptive family.” It was not about taking the adoptee back, but about adding more love to her life and loving her adoptive family as well. My parents and I answered that we wanted that too, more than anything.
Case 2:
We arrived in a small village under active construction off the side of a highway. It seemed that everyone was building these two-story marble-encased homes, surrounded by smaller one-story cement houses. When the birthfather saw Lan, he began to cry, wiping his tears with the bottom of his shirt.
The birthfather was looking for his fourth daughter, born in 2004. When his first wife (now-deceased) gave birth with the help of the village midwife, that midwife immediately took the baby away. For years, he has been searching for his stolen daughter, but the midwife never gave any information about his or any other baby she stole from people in the village. Even after the birthmother passed away, the birthfather never gave up. He could not have fathomed that his daughter could be overseas, he told Lan. He had never even heard about international adoption, let alone consented to it.
Case 3:
The birthmother met us at the entrance of her village. She appeared middle-aged and remembered the day her daughter was born like it was yesterday. She had three total children. The first- and second- born were daughters. The third-born was a son. It was the second-born that had been taken from her. Originally, this second child was supposed to be cared for in her older sister’s home (the adoptee’s biological aunt), but the baby caught a cold when she was 100 days old and was brought to the hospital for treatment. However, when the birthfamily went to retrieve the baby from the hospital, the baby was gone. Her second daughter had been sold to the orphanage by the hospital.
The birthmother pulled out her smart phone, bringing up a recent family photo, telling us that her family photo was incomplete because it was missing her daughter.
“I miss her every day,” she said.
Last year, in 2023, the birthmother even traveled one hour away to the orphanage to ask about any clues to find her missing daughter. Because the orphanage was so far away, she said that no one in her village would have ever considered bringing a baby there. It was never her intention for her baby to end up in the orphanage. She was supposed to come home. It had only been a mild cold.
“How long have you been searching for your birthfamily?” the birthmother asked me seriously.
Lan told her that I have been searching for 20 years.
Her face twisted up in surprise. “Then how come I only found out about this now? Why are the other kids not coming back? Why only you?” Why isn’t my child searching for me?
The grief on the birthmother’s face and the frustration packed into her questions was terrible to witness. She missed her child each and every day. The pain never just left for her, but remained in her heart and memory. Then there was me, standing in her bedroom on the second floor of her new home, very much alive and returned to China like a cruel magic trick. If I was here, then where was her daughter? I could feel the injustice in my bones, the anger at my own powerlessness to produce her child.
Lan answered that the trip to China was expensive and took a lot of time, even if adoptees did desire to travel back one day.
I asked Lan to tell her that, “We adoptees miss and love our birthparents too.”
The birthmother replied, “I know how you feel and can relate. Your birthparents must surely be looking for you. Be patient.” Still, something just didn’t make sense to her. “What,” she asked passionately, “was the purpose of sending our babies outside of China? Why? Why?” She told Lan that she heard rumors that children were sent outside of China for organ harvesting, and that she had been worried sick her daughter had been chopped up and used for parts. It was a rumor many birthparents have told us before.
Lan gestured to my parents and explained that babies were adopted into foreign families, that these were my parents, which surprised her. All this time, she had just assumed they were random people in the bedroom. Her face lit up, “Oh these are your parents! They are so nice! You are so lucky to have such wonderful parents who bring you back to China!”
She asked to get a photo with my parents because, as Lan explained, they were so nice and she loved them too.
“Why don't you get a boyfriend in China? Why don't your parents retire in China? You are smart and you'll pick up Chinese fast! Can’t you be my daughter?” She asked excitedly. She gave us all hugs and brought out large green grapes, and a bowl of foil-wrapped candy. “I will be your godmother. Come back to visit anytime!”
Through Lan’s careful planning, we were able to locate and test 64 birthfamilies—surpassing our goal of reaching thirty birthfamilies. All of these families welcomed us into their homes, gave us gifts, offered us lunch, poured us tea, and showered us with more mooncakes than we could possibly eat. Their stories were versions of the others: trafficking midwives, hospitals that sold their babies, or a false-promise made by a trafficker that the baby will be raised by a local family. Their collective pain blurred into one large nightmare. It was like you could still hear the entire region crying out in pain and anger. It felt eerie, like we were in a haunted place bathed in blood that never quite washed off. I felt so inadequate, feeling like I couldn’t provide answers or guarantees to the birthfamilies so eagerly hoping to reunite with their now grown babies, wishing I could be more than what I was.
My pain took a backseat to the birthfamilies’ pain. I knew my story, my own self-discovery journey like the back of my hand: different gripes I’ve had with the media portrayal of adoption, the objectification of Chinese adoptees, the exploitation of our pain to sell books, the perpetual gatekeeping of our identities, my personal vendetta against any article that dares suggest a Chinese adoptee should be perpetually “grappling” with their identity, like we must always be confused about who we are, even though it is others who struggle to put us in a box…
But this world? This was more raw, more real than anything in my typical American life. As my dad said, “Up until now, we have lived in the fairytale. We got to raise you and you completed our family. And now, we see the horrors on the back end of it. Our first trip to China to adopt you felt like Heaven and now we realize that it was really Hell.”
While still in China, still exploring the area around my orphanage, China officially announced the end to its international adoption program. It felt poetic, as I stared out of the hotel room windows onto the streets of people on motorbikes below. It was with some sense of masochism that I went onto Facebook via a VPN to see what the reactions were from the Chinese adoption community. While there was certainly a mixed bag of emotions, there was an overwhelming reaction from adoptive parents who lamented that this was the "end of an era." I remember collapsing onto the bed in the hotel room, after a long day of meeting with birthparents, thinking, “What a relief this is. Let this madness end.”
The news media descended too, like hawks over roadkill. Everyone was so eager to write about us and write through us, like we adoptees were transparent cells squished between glass slides on a microscope. Even reflections from within our community feel skewed and strange, intensely and inextricably and justifiably passionate about something that was always an illusion. How do we heal? Who decides the truth? Who owes who anything—who deserves anything—what is right?
The intense landscape of birthparent searching, at least as it appears on social media, leans strongly towards an adoptee-centric approach: If the adoptee doesn’t want to search, it is felt that it is their choice. It felt natural for it to be our choice, as nothing about this adoption was performed with our consent or consultation. When choice is taken from you, even this small amount of control over your fate feels owed to you. It is our lives, so we should make decisions about it, right?
This adoptee pride shriveled up in the face of meeting birthparents. The people I met wanted desperately just to hear that their baby was safe and alive. It was never about wanting to have their child back. Many people expressed deep respect for my adoptive parents for raising me. Birthparents in reunion eagerly showed me the very few photos on their smartphones that their lost child, the adoptee, had sent to them. I was overwhelmed by the amount of pride these birthparents in reunion had for their stolen children sent abroad, even if they had never yet met in-person.
The division between reality and our understanding of reality never felt more separated. Adoptees, raised to believe they were abandoned, often express resentment for a birthfamily who presumably chose to raise a son over them. The idea that six daughters were raised at home, or that a hospital sold a newborn without the birthmother’s consent was never featured on our abandonment paperwork. There’s a not insignificant sentiment shared by the adoption community that, sure, “I feel sorry that they had to go through that, but I did not cause it. I don’t owe them anything.” I imagined standing in front of any of the hopeful birthfamilies I met—looking at me in wonderment that there were more Chinese children like me raised by foreigners abroad—and telling them that their child may never search for them, because it was an inconvenience fraught with emotional pain to search for people who “abandoned” them. It was a sentiment I was well acquainted with: the unfairness of needing to decide to derail my life to search for birthparents, in case they passed away and I lost my chance forever, needing to feel the weight of a decision that non-adoptees were not saddled with, to set out on a journey with a miniscule success rate and a 100% chance of pain. This was my life—and yet, it was connected to theirs.
Regardless of what we were told by the adoption agencies, by the orphanages, and by the world, the truth was always and will always be the truth. Birthfamilies live with the pain and the memories of being powerless, of giving birth to a baby that got spirited away, only to reappear as a paper-ready orphan into the international adoption program. We have a buffet of beliefs to choose from about our origins, but our birthparents do not have a choice.
There is only truth and we adoptees are, through no fault of our own, so incredibly separated from it. I felt ashamed and so, so small. All my life, I have struggled with feeling like I was enough, since my abandonment declared me inadequate from Day One. All this time, I had been suffering with a falsehood without ever fully sitting with the truth: that birthfamilies had their families torn apart. All these articles proclaiming that birthfamilies “chose” to put their baby up for adoption, when birthfamilies had no power at all, felt unbelievably cruel.
As my parents and I sat in a hotel room in China, after a long day of birthparent conversations, we discussed the complexities of our roles in adoption. While all of us had been lied to and tricked -- birthparents, adoptive parents, and adoptees -- it became clear that we had not all suffered equally. I’m quite happy with my life in America, even if I still struggle with the aftermath of adoption. My parents also love that I am their child and wouldn’t trade me for the world. What struck me so fully, though, was that birthparents were still so visibly suffering, missing their children, wondering if they were alive. There are days I forget about my birthparents. Meeting these birthparents made me realize that they lived each day remembering us.
The memory of us did not stop existing in China the minute we were adopted. There was a story in China before we were adopted, and a story in China that continued even after we had left the country…It is so ironic to me that every journalist wants a bite of the story of the end of Chinese international adoption, when we have not even reckoned with what it was that ended. In fact, we haven’t even agreed as a community what exactly happened.
As my family and Lan met with birthparents, it became more and more apparent that the wound was still fresh, still bleeding…and that rather than providing any sort of relief, answers, or promises, the power of what Lan was able to provide was opportunity. We were able to provide a semblance of control over their own fate, the opportunity to choose to participate in the matching process. Whether they get answers or not rests then entirely on whether the adoptee ever chooses to test. It was an incredible feat to find these birthparents, sometimes in villages without real addresses that our GPS’s struggled to locate—and yet a successful match depended on an adoptee millions of miles away, perhaps mauling over whether to get a DNA test on sale for the holidays. Two situations that were worlds apart—and yet, answers that depended on one another.
We, as a community, should honor and acknowledge the pain that was brought by this program in the formation of our current families. These are our stories, but they are not ours alone. Our stories are a part of our birthparents’ stories—and it makes me wonder, if we believe as a community, that it is entirely fair that a birthparents’ desire to know their child is alive, should depend entirely on adoptees’ personal desire to connect or not. Just a simple, “I’m alive,” would relieve so much pain the adoption program has caused these birthfamilies. No relationship needed, no strings attached, just a simple, “I’m alive.” It feels like it shouldn’t be our responsibility, and yet, there are so many things that should not have happened that brought us all to this point. So the question is, what do we do about it? I wonder if there is a place that exists within the search community for such things as empathy, grace, and the openness to think outside of our own world. I wonder, if we believe as a community, that birthparents should be considered just as thoughtfully as well. I certainly hope so, for the sake of the 64 birthfamilies this trip alone was able to contact, all hopeful, all waiting for an answer from across the world.
