DNA Technology Improving for Sibling Testing

Everyone knows the stories of two families searching their child's orphanage adoption group and finding another family's child that bears an uncanny resemblance to their own child.  At times, such matches seem possible, with the two children sharing common characteristics such as birth dates and finding locations.  Sometimes it borders on the absurd, such as the adoptive mother who thought the child on the Fisher Price Little People Sonya Lee box looked just like her own daughter.

A few years ago I wrote an article on what I felt were significant weaknesses in then-current sibling DNA testing technology, cautioning adoptive families not to put to much faith in their accuracy.  The reason was simple:  Using only 27 genetic markers, the tests were possibly susceptible to "genetic drift", a problem with small, inbred populations, which many Chinese towns and villages are.  Additionally, these tests were often (usually) conducted against databases with few actual native Chinese DNA in them.  Rather, they consisted of diaspora Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and other Asian samples.  Obtaining a 95% "probability" result simply meant that the two children were more closely matched in DNA than 95% of the database.  With a database of millions of DNA samples, 5% of the DNA database's samples would produce a higher "probability". Usually, that margin of error allowed for thousands, or even tens of thousands, of possible matches ("False positives").

I remain of the opinion that many of the most well-known stories of reunited siblings in the Chinese adoption community are more than likely not really siblings at all.

Technology has improved significantly in the intervening six years, and today many DNA labs don't test only  27 markers, or even 1,000 markers, but currently a million markers or more are compared when a DNA test is done.  With so many genetic comparisons being done, previous problems of genetic drift and general uncertainty of a sibling match are eliminated.  With modern testing, the need for parental DNA to perform sibling matches is no longer needed.  When two people's DNA are compared with one million markers, the result is either a positive or negative.  The ambiguity is gone.

This is, of course, of significant importance to the adoption community, where parental DNA is usually lacking.  With current technology, one can now achieve the level of confidence one could only obtain with parental DNA five years ago.  Combined with falling testing costs, and it is now possible for every child from an orphanage to submit DNA and for sibling matches to be made across a wide number of submissions. 

One lab that employs this new technology is 23andMe.com, located in Mountain View, CA.  For $99 (plus $9 per month for 12 months) 23andMe.com will analyze over one million genetic "genomic variations" on a person's DNA.   Of interest to adoptive families, the lab will then cross-analyze the submitted DNA against the DNA from every other person in the company's database, and alert you of any sibling, half-sibling, first cousin or parental matches.  They also allow you to be alerted if a match is made in the future.  Thus, two DNA samples can be independently submitted by interested adoptive families, and 23andMe will provide information (if both parties agree) that allow matched individuals to share information. 

But 23andMe's test goes way beyond DNA matching.  As a result of their huge database of DNA samples and the results of studies done on specific genetic markers, 23andMe can provide you with ancestral information on where your child's ancestors originated -- did her ancestors originate in northern China or Southern?  Did an ancestor migrate into China from another country?  With female children, this information is only available for the maternal lines, but it is nevertheless fascinating reading.  Meikina's DNA indicates that some of her ancestors originated outside China, most likely in Vietnam.  Meigon's ancestors were the same people that migrated over the land-bridge and settled North America. 

Additionally, and perhaps the most important practical information, 23andMe's report will detail possible medical risks that may be found in one's DNA.  For example, my daughter Meigon's test indicates she has a lower than average risk of Parkinson's and type 2 diabetes, but a higher risk of high blood pressure.  Meilan's DNA suggests she may be at significantly higher risk for breast cancer.  These assessments may have important ramifications for Meigon and Meilan's futures. 

Families would be well advised to utilize the current technology in the future for any sibling testing, or to confirm previous tests conducted with the old technology.  Not only will you be given a definitive answer to your sibling suspicions, but you will be given an amazing array of useful information about your child, some of which may have important implications to their lives.
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After I posted the above article, I contacted 23andMe.com to have them provide a more detailed explanation of their sibling testing.  They provided me with the following answer:

We can determine a relationship between two siblings by comparing the amount of DNA that they share. We look for segments of DNA between two people that are identical-by-descent (IBD); the more IBD segments two individuals share, and the longer those segments are, the closer their relationship. Siblings, half-siblings, cousins, parents/children all share a certain range of IBD segments. We can assign a relationship based on the segments. 

In plainer English:  When the DNA strands of the birth mother and father are separated to produce the eggs and sperm, it does not occur like a zipper, with one gene going on way, and the next one going the other.  The egg or sperm contains strands (complete sections) of original DNA.  These "gene clusters" are highly unique, and if a gene cluster appears in two individuals, it is strong evidence that the two people are related.  If two individuals possess many such gene strands in common, it is definitive proof that they are siblings.  

With modern genetic testing such as 23andMe's, population drift and other genetic anomalies are no longer a consideration.  This was the main weakness of the 27 allele tests.  But current technology is based ONLY on the two DNA samples, and are not compared to DNA databases in order to confirm a relationship. 

Why Birth Parent Searches are Often Simple

Among the many e-groups devoted to China adoption are the newsgroups dedicated to families wanting to search for their child's birth family in China.  These groups, whose members number in the hundreds, share ideas and anecdotes about how a successful search should be conducted. 

Additionally, there are hundreds of families informally searching.  These families don't belong to any formal groups, but seek information from other adoptive parents, agencies, and other respected sources of adoption information.  They all share a common goal -- to locate their child's birth family in China. 

Unfortunately, for most of them a successful birth parent search will remain an unfulfilled dream.

It is not that birth parent searching is difficult; it is not.  In fact, locating birth families is not overly complicated.  In our recent research projects in Jiangxi Province, for example, we have located scores of birth families, many without even trying.  An adoptive family dedicated to truly learning the truth about their child's origins in China can do so, yet emotional barriers prevent most from really trying.

What are these barriers?  For one, there is a common idea among adoptive parents that a birth parent search isn't in their job description, that it is something that is best left to the adopted child.  This misguided notion assumes (incorrectly in almost every case) that the information will "keep" -- that success is just as likely in 20 years as it is today.  Unfortunately, in China next year is a long time.  Ignoring the fact that such basic sources of information such as finders, foster families, orphanage caregivers and directors will almost certainly no longer be available in twenty years (either from moving, dying, or loss of clear memories), waiting such a long time also diminishes the chances of finding hospital and police records, and probably the birth family themselves.  It goes without saying that I believe adoptive families are foolish to wait in seeking their child's birth family, since doing so almost always insures that the search will fail down the road (I am focusing on searching; whether to reveal information to an adopted child is a completely different subject, which I addressed in an essay entitled "What to Tell -- And When". 

But there is another reason adoptive families don't look -- fear.  Last year we announced to the adoptive family groups for the Hunan scandal orphanages that we had obtained the receiving logs for many of the children adopted from those orphanages.  The numbers of children listed were in the thousands, yet only a dozen families inquired about their child's record -- most apparently decided that having that information was not important to their child's future.  There is no doubt that many adoptive families experience feelings of ambivalence regarding such information -- possessing it requires them to alter the "family story", to acknowledge the impact of trafficking and money on their adoption.  Many choose to ignore offerings of such information.  I understand that impulse, we are dealing with it in our own family.  But our first priority as adoptive parents should be to obtain every shred of information we can about our children.  We ignore such information at our own peril.

Searching families ostensibly want to locate their child's birth family, yet most again act in ways that will ultimately prevent them from ever having success in their search.  Why?  Because even after all of the stories and evidence that has come out of China regarding incentive programs, Family Planning confiscations, etc., many adoptive families still cling to the idea that the information provided by the orphanage is largely true, that the director, finders and others will honestly respond to questions, and that having someone simply ask the "basics" is all that is needed to search.  In most cases, such a strategy will doom a search to failure.

To begin a successful search, families must accept and understand that there are two ways that almost all children end up in orphanages: found abandoned and reported, or pulled in through incentive programs (including Family Planning confiscations).  An adoptive family must assume that either of those situations played a role in their child's history.  Most adoptive families will fail because they don't want to consider that their child ended up in the orphanage through Family Planning activity or due to baby-buying or other incentive programs.  Unless you enter the search with your mind receptive to any possibility, you will miss key pieces of information that will lead you to the proverbial dead-end.

A successful search begins by looking at the orphanage's overall adoption patterns.  Do findings appear random?  Have any significant shifts in patterns occurred?  Does the orphanage fit the patterns for other orphanages in the area, or does it exhibit characteristics that set it apart from the other area orphanages (such as a dearth of male findings, or an abundance of infant findings).  Our Birth Parent Analysis was specifically designed to provide that information, but another source is fellow adoptive families (who, unfortunately, are almost always uncooperative).  Armed with detailed data about the "lay of the land" in a specific orphanage area, a family is ready to formulate a birth parent search strategy.

Most families begin by approaching the orphanage director, asking for information such as a police report, birth notes, etc.  Unfortunately, this is usually the last thing a family should do.  By alerting the orphanage that you are looking into your child's history, the potential exists that the orphanage will contact key people in your child's history and coach them on how to respond to your questions.  Finders will be told to stick to a "boiler plate" storyline:  "I was on my way to work, and heard a baby crying, etc., etc."  Once the orphanage contacts these key people, your chances of a successful search fade to nothing without your even realizing it.  Few will contradict the direct orders of a government official and tell you a story that contradicts what you have been told. 

Let me cite a recent example.  In researching a child's birth parents recently, we investigated the finding of a child found by a "Ms. Wei" (name changed), who worked for the orphanage.  The police report for the child indicated that Ms. Wei reported that she was on her way to the market on the morning the child was found.  As she passed the market gate, she heard some crying and glanced over and saw a baby in a box.  "What kind of parents would do such an evil thing?" Ms. Wei stated in her police report.  She went into great detail about calling the police, and the police confirmed by signature her story. The adoptive family had little reason to doubt the veracity of the events as described by Ms. Wei.

We met Ms. Wei away from the orphanage (something we learned long ago was necessary to getting good information) and asked her about the finding.  She recounted in pretty good detail the story as told in the police report, except for one difference: In our interview she said she had been on her way to work, and was passing the market.  When pressed, she finally admitted that she had not really found the child, but had been sent to pick her up from an area hospital. Her story (and the police report) had been fabricated out of whole cloth. 

A family unaware of the background at this orphanage would have accepted Ms. Wei's story, assumed that a market finding meant that locating the birth family was impossible, and never realized that the birth family was in reality a family friend. 

There is little question that if an adoptive family had approached the director and asked to talk to Ms. Wei, that he would have quietly contacted her and told her to stick to the official storyline.  An adoptive family, unaware of the finding patterns in their child's orphanage, would have then conducted an interview and received the "corporate line" about the finding.  They would have left the city never realizing how close they came to finding the truth. 

But performing a successful search required this family to acknowledge and accept the  realities of their child's orphanage -- the peculiar gender ratios, the finding location clustering, the improbable finding stories.  Our research family was willing to do that; many others aren't.  Rather, they will conduct no preliminary research into their child's orphanage, naively ask their child's orphanage director for assistance in locating and interviewing the finder, and innocently go through the steps most birth family search groups advocate.  These families will almost always meet with failure.

When we perform our searches, we make one basic assumption that has served us very well -- assume that everyone we speak to has something to hide.  In court parlance, we treat everyone as a "hostile witness".  This doesn't mean, of course, that we act rude or aggressive with finders, etc.  Rather, we probe, repeat questions, and most importantly we ask the "tough questions."  I read an account of an adoptive mother a while ago who had interviewed her daughter's finder.  She asked about the circumstances of her daughter's finding, and received the common explanation:  "I was on my way to work when . . ."  She says she studied his face to see if he was being truthful, but felt it rude to probe his story deeper.  She left with confirmation of what the orphanage had told her.  But her interview probably would have yielded more information if she had been aware that over ten children had been found at the same location, and that the orphanage displayed characteristics consistent with incentive programs.  The bottom line is to ask the difficult questions -- "Did you really find this child? Do you have an idea who the birth parents might be?  Did you receive money for reporting my child to the orphanage?"  Those are the type of questions that bring forth the truth.

There are other important points to consider, including whether to have an area resident do the asking and interviewing, or whether to do so yourself?  How does one approach police and hospital officials to get information and records?  There are many possible avenues of information, but all must be treated in just the right way to obtain that information.  And even doing everything right does not guarantee success. 

In our own research, we have discovered that a common tactic used to prevent both birth parents and adoptive families from discovering each other is to alter or switch finding information. For example, the Qichun, Hubei orphanage director admitted to one adoptive parent that “they deliberately fudged the estimated birthdate. This was routinely done, he said, specifically so that a birth family would never be able to corroborate a child's birth date should they comeback in later/months years trying to reclaim a child.”  Obviously this tactic cuts both ways -- while preventing a birth family from correctly identifying a relinquished child, it also prevents an adoptive family from having vital information for a birth parent search. 

We saw another tactic used in a recent birth parent project in Jiangxi.  While we were successful in locating numerous birth parents, many of them were birth parents for children not in our project.  This was because the orphanage had switched the police reports and finding data of our project child with another child found around the same time.  This shuffling of finding information would create obvious problems for a search.  

Not all of the hurdles of a successful search are a result of orphanage action; some involve the finders themselves.  While I have found most finders to be cooperative, often they will specifically inform us that they are unwilling to put us in touch with the birth family because of the deception that occurred in obtaining the child.  In our recent research in Jiangxi, for example, a quiet dinner with an employee of the orphanage, who was the finder of one of our research subjects, admitted that she lied to the birth family when she promised them that their daughter would be adopted by a local Chinese family and not sent to the orphanage.  She stated that this was necessary, because many people believe that internationally adopted children are used for organ donations, and thus don't survive.  Thus, even though she knew the birth family, she would not allow us to contact them since they would then know that she had deceived them.  A birth father that we located in  became ferociously angry when we tracked him down and he learned that his daughter had gone into the orphanage and had not been adopted by a local family as he had been promised.  While incentive programs often increase the chances of a successful birth family search, if the birth family was deceived into relinquishing their child to the orphanage, orphanage workers, foster families and other finders will be unwilling to cooperate for fear of reprisal from the birth family. 

Searching for birth parents requires that every assumption you have ever made about your child's finding be discarded.  It may be that the finding occurred just as you were told.  But it is more likely that your child actually was transferred, person to person, into the orphanage, and therefore a trail of custody exists.  Discovering that trail requires detective work and good interviewing skills.  Not many families do either, and for that reason will never see a reward for the expenditure of the time and money they invested into their search.

Silencing the Voices of Gaoping's Searching Birth Families

Things have not been going well for the families from Gaoping who have been seeking information about their confiscated children.  As we reported here, the story of Family Planning confiscations in the Shaoyang orphanage area was known in the West as a result of our initial highlighting of the story in 2006, and a documentary broadcast by Netwerk TV in the Netherlands.  But coverage inside China was non-existent until Caixin Magazine published a series of in-depth articles last month.

Although the reporter from Caixin Magazine has sought to make contact with the adoptive families of these children by having contact information forwarded to adoption newsgroups, so far none have come forward.  As a result, frustration and anger has grown among the score of birth families, and they decided to file a lawsuit against the Shaoyang orphanage and the area Civil Affairs to obtain an official apology and information as to the destination of their children.

A story out today details the latest twist in the Gaoping saga. On June 21, Yang Li Bing and Zhou Yinghe, the appointed representatives of the Gaoping family group, filed "a petition regarding the case of the missing children in Shaoyang City."  Later that same day they were approached by a man who claimed that his child was also confiscated, and who asked if he could join forces with Yang Li Bing's group in seeking redress.  This individual, ostensibly named Li Hongfu, asked the two men to remain in Shaoyang while the other birth families from Gaoping returned home.  After a dinner, he invited the two men to go with him to a local massage parlor.  Shortly after they arrived, police busted the place and made only two arrests: Yang Li Bing and Zhou Yinghe.

An investigation into Li Hongfu's ID card revealed that the identity was manufactured, and that this person didn't really exist.

Yang Li Bing and Zhou Yinghe are both being held for 15 days, during which time it is clear that they will "pressured" to stop making trouble for the orphanage and Family Planning officials.  Already government officials have been busy convincing the other families to stop working with Yang Li Bing.  Slowly but surely the inevitable pressures put on these families will force them to stop seeking their children, and to disappear like so many previous families have done.

The "Science" of Orphanage Naming

Most adoptive families invest a significant amount of emotion into their child's Chinese orphanage name.  Many use the name as their child's middle name out of a desire to retain a piece of their child's life history.  Orphanage names uniquely identify each child, and of interest in this essay are the methods employed by orphanages to create those unique names.

First, a short primer on the names themselves.  While many families notice that names often appear the same in the pinyin version, the Chinese characters underlying those names are different.  This is due to the fact that many different characters in Chinese can be "translated" into the same pinyin syllable.  For example, "Mei" is represented by forty-one different Chinese characters, six of which (梅, 美, 妹, 媚, 玫, 媄) are common characters in female names.  Thus, an orphanage could adopt many children with the name "Dang Mei", but in Chinese all the names would be different, represented by different Chinese characters.

First Character
The first character of a child's name in Chinese is designated as the surname.  Unlike in Western tradition, in Chinese the "last" name of the child is represented by the first character.  Thus, my name in China would be written surname, or family name, first: Stuy Brian Harry.

Although most children adopted from a specific orphanage are all given the same "surname", this is not always the case.  In Kunming, Yunnan, for example, the surname is a designation of what area of Kunming the child was found in.  Thus, children from Kunming may be surnamed "An" (安) if they were found in Anning City, "Cheng" (呈) if they originated in Chenggong, "Guan" (官) if they came from the Guandu district of Kunming, etc.  Although surnaming based on finding location is fairly uncommon among orphanages, we will see that it is more commonly used when designating the second character of the name.

While Kunming is pretty straight-forward in its surnaming, other orphanages are less transparent.  Desheng orphanage, Guangxi has employed surnaming in an almost "secret-code" method to designate where the children originated from.  Desheng is fairly unique among orphanages in that it adopts children transferred from other orphanages in Guangxi Province, including Guiping, Yulin, Pingnan, Cangwu and others, most of whom are also participants in international adoption (Nanning's "Mother's Love" orphanage also adopts largely transferred children from other Guangxi orphanages).  The first batch of children submitted by Desheng in April 2001 (when Desheng began international adoptions) was comprised of children mostly from the Cenxi, Pingnan and Guiping orphanages.  But in this early group, the surname given to a child is the only clue that they came from another orphanage. In April 2001, for example, seven "Cen" (岑) girls were submitted by Desheng. Although the surname originates in "Cenxi", the assigned finding location was in Desheng. In the same batch were seven children with "Gong" (龚) (indicating an origin in Pingnan) and "Jin" (金) (indicating an origin in Guiping) surnames, all with finding locations inside Yizhou City.  In a few cases, finding ads from the originating orphanage lists another finding location, which was of course not conveyed to the adoptive family.  For example, an ad for "Jin Xiao Ling" (name altered) was published by the Guiping orphanage on January 13, 2001 listing this child's finding date as December 1, 2000, birth date of November 29, 2000, and the finding location as the Muwa hospital in Guiping.  A finding ad for "Jin Xiao Lin" (name also altered) was published by the Desheng orphanage in April 2001, listing the birth date as December 1, 2000, birthdate as November 29, 2000, and the finding location as "Desheng Northern Temple".

Another girl's finding ad published in the same newspapers give the Guiping information as "Jin Mei Ling, born December 5, 2000, found December 5, 2000 at the Guiping City roundabout" (name altered).  The corresponding Desheng ad lists "Jin Mei Lin, born December 5, 2000, found December 5, 2000 at the Latang Forest Farm in Yizhou City" (name also altered).

A third girl's Guiping finding ad details ""Jin Guo Ling, born November 14, 2000, found December 9, 2000 at the Yu River bridge in Guiping."  The corresponding Desheng ad lists "Jin Guo Lin, born November 14, 2000, found December 9, 2000 at the Desheng main roundabout" (names altered). 

After these two groups of children, surnames became uniform for almost all children submitted by Desheng between June 2001 and December 2004, with "Sheng" (胜) being listed as the surname. However, now the finding locations betray the origin of the children, with children found in Qinzhou, Hechi, Xingye, and Cangwu apparently having their finding locations retained, but with a "Sheng" surname given. This would change again in 2005, when both the surnames and the finding locations of the children sent to Desheng were apparently retained. Also of interest is that the children arrived in batches, with each originating orphanage sending 3-6 children at the same time to Desheng. With a few isolated exceptions, this process is still followed in Desheng.

The deceptive "reassigning" of finding locations in 2001 is of course of concern to adoptive parents, who often have no idea that their child did not originate in Desheng, but actually was transferred from Guiping, Pingnan, Cenxi or another orphanage. Another potential problem arises if both the name and finding location were changed, which would then prevent easy detection of a transfer.  Thus, in the case of children adopted from Desheng, the surname choice reflected, at least in the early submissions, the area of Guangxi Province where the children originated. 

Other common surname methodologies include having the orphanage surname be a part of the town, district or city name -- "Bao" (宝) = Bao'An, Guangdong; "Chen" (郴) = Chenzhou, Hunan; "Ning"(宁) = Changning, Hunan; "Gao" (高) = Gao'An, Jiangxi.  This is the most common surnaming method.  Also common is the practice of making the orphanage surname the same as the orphanage director's surname --"Lin" (林) = DianBai, Guangdong; "He" (何) = Sanshui, Guangdong; "Qiu" (邱) = Yangxi, Guangdong; "Zhao" (赵) = Yuanling, Hunan.

Surnames can also be based on some characteristic of the area, as in Huazhou's use of the surname "Ji" (吉), which originates from the Cantonese "Jihong", a popular medicinal plant in that area.  Other examples are Shangrao City, Jiangxi use of "Ling" (灵) for its children, originating in the majestic Ling Mountains south of the city, Jianxin, Jiangxi use of "Gan" (淦) after the Gan River in Jiangxi Province, and Xiangtan, Hunan use of "Peng" (彭), the surname of a famous military leader born there.

The two most common orphanage surnames are "Dang" (党) and "Guo" (国), especially early in China's international adoption program.  "Guo" (国) is translated as "State" or "Country", and is used to reflect a child's origins in China's State or overall country.  Many orphanages have used this surname at some point in their history, including Zhuzhou, Hunan; Beihai, Guangxi; Beiliu, Guangxi, DianBai, Guangdong; Qingcheng, Guangdong; Zhanjiang, Guangdong; and Guixi, Jiangxi. 

Another very common surname is "Dang"(党), which represents the political face of China, being interpreted as "Political Party" or "Government".  This surname is used most frequently in Henan Province, with more than half of that Province's orphanages using the "Dang" surname at some point in their histories (some examples are Anyang, Hebi, Kaifeng, Luohe, Luoyang, Nanyang, etc.).  Other orphanages that use "Dang" include Zhangzhou, Fujian and Ankang and Jiangzhang orphanages in Shaanxi.  Other surnames with similar connotations include "Hua" (China), and "Min" (The People, Citizens). 

A final example of a common orphanage surname is "Fu" (福), meaning "Good Fortune."  It is the root character for "Fuliyuan", the Chinese word for "orphanage", and thus is used to designate a child from an orphanage.  This character is used as a surname by the Fuling, Chongqing; Hengdong, Hunan; Sanshui, Guangdong; and  Yizhou, Guangxi orphanages among others.

One last use of an orphanage surname is to designate when a child was found.  Thus, many orphanages change the orphanage surname periodically (annually, etc.) to reflect the finding time frame of a child.  Thus, the Baoji orphanage in Shaanxi used "Sun" (孙) as the orphanage surname in 2002, "Li" (李) in 2003, "Zhou" (周) in 2004, "Wu" (武) in 2005, etc.  Other orphanages that have employed similar chronological naming patterns include Zhongshan, Guangdong; Zhuzhou, Hunan; Changsha, Hunan, etc.

Thus, an orphanage surname can be used to designate that a child was an orphan (Dang, Guo, Fu), a city of origin, or a unique aspect of the child's birth city, or when the child was found. In most cases, the surname is chosen to imbue the child's name with some historical or cultural significance.

Middle Characters
The use of middle characters in orphanage names is much more varied, but follows most of the general use patterns found in surnames.  Thus, for example, the Shangrao City, Jiangxi orphanage uses the middle character to designate which county a child was found in -- "Cha" (茶) for Chating, "Qian" (铅) for Qianshan, "Wu" (婺) for Wuyuan, etc.  Middle names are also commonly indicative of finding time-frames, which can range from just a few weeks to a year or longer.  One interesting character that was used by some orphanages in 2008 was the "Ao" (奥) character (Huazhou, for example, gave this character to every child found in 2008).  "Ao" is found in "Ao Yun", the Chinese word for "Olympics" (奥运), which were held in Beijing in August 2008. 

One naming method employed for middle names that I have not yet seen in surnames is the assigning of characters based on the gender of a child.  Since 2007, for example, the Qingyang orphanage in Gansu Province has assigned the character "Fu" (福) to boys and "Xiao" (晓) to females.  Generally, however, the overall tendency among orphanages is the use of finding location or finding date "codes" when assigning middle characters.


Last Character
The last character (for those children assigned three characters to their orphanage name) is usually the most varied character from any given orphanage.  I have not seen any use of the last character to indicate timing, location, or any of the other "informational pieces" that we have seen in the surname and middle characters.  But the last character often does follow a pattern, and that pattern is usually the order it appears in a character combination dictionary.  Characters in Chinese are not organized by themselves, but rather in groupings based on common usage, or "radicals", with other characters.  They are generally listed by complexity of the character, meaning how many strokes it takes to write the character.  For our purposes it is only needed to know that characters can be found in "conjugation" groups.

Wuwei orphanage in Gansu gives us a good example of an orphanage almost certainly using a Chinese dictionary in naming children.  The image below shows the finding ads for Wuwei orphanage for two consecutive submission batches -- March 9, 2004 (left) and April 15, 2004 (right).  The two finding ad scans are four consecutive pages from a typical Chinese dictionary.  As one can plainly see, the names for the eight children in the March 9, 2004 and the first child in the April 15, 2004 batch all had the last character of their orphanage name taken from the "Baogaitou" radical section of the Chinese dictionary.  The rest of the April 15, 2004 batch all had the last character of their name taken from the "Nvzhipang" radical section, located on the next page of the Chinese dictionary.  One child (the fifth ad on the right side) is not listed in our version of the Chinese dictionary, but the last character of her name belongs in this same radical group, and almost certainly appeared in the orphanage's Chinese dictionary. It is extremely unlikely that such naming "clusters" occurred randomly, and they point with certainty that a Chinese dictionary was used.

While most adoptive families imbue their child's Chinese name with emotional meanings, in practice the names chosen are usually (but not always) selected based on a set of bureaucratic and practical reasons.  An orphanage may factor in the finding location, the finding date, the child's gender, and lastly a Chinese dictionaries to come up with the name that will be used to identify a child for adoption purposes.  While adoptive parents may see the orphanage name as a reflection of a child's history, personality, and character, for most orphanage directors assigning a name to a child is simply a formulaic exercise.