For more than three decades, thousands of children — many of them thought to have been abandoned in China — were adopted to other countries. Over half found homes in the U.S.
Then, in September, China suddenly announced it was ending its international adoption program, sending shockwaves through the adoption community and angering families still in the process of adopting children from China.
But for adoptees themselves, many of whom are now young adults, the news was met with ambivalence, if not outright happiness that China was stopping international adoptions.
“I had this huge sigh of relief, because I'm glad it's over,” says Tessa E. Osborne, who was adopted from China’s Hunan province in 1999.
All the Chinese adoptees NPR interviewed for this story said they had supportive parents. Most had good childhoods. They acknowledged they might have faced a tough, uncertain life if they hadn’t been adopted from China, and they worry about orphans left in China.
And yet many said they supported China’s decision to end international adoptions, pointing to a bevy of scandals in which Chinese agencies were found to be buying babies or outright kidnapping children to put up for international adoption in order to collect the lucrative fees. They also pointed to the complicated and often painful questions of identity and assimilation that Chinese adoptees, many of whom are just becoming young adults, encounter throughout their lifetimes.
“Two truths can be held at the same time,” says Hannah Johns, who was raised in Texas after being found on a street corner in eastern China. “I can be grateful, and I can have a great, great relationship with my parents. But I can also still be critical of the systems that caused my adoption.”
Looking for racial mirrors
China paused international adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic. But this fall, China said it would no longer send children abroad “in line with the spirit of relevant international covenants” unless they were being adopted by relatives. The decision comes as the country grapples with a shrinking population brought about by a plummeting birth rate.
After China opened up international adoptions in 1992, more than half of the 160,000 Chinese-born children adopted internationally were brought to the U.S., indelibly shaping how Americans perceive adoption — and the American family — in the process.
Many of these children grew up as the only Asian person in their adoptive families. While they describe their parents as loving and committed, they also said they frequently encountered racism growing up, with no genuine connection to their country of their birth.
“I got called China Doll. I got called Ching Chong — the usual derogatory statements and sentiments by schoolyard elementary school bullies,” says Johns, who grew up in a white community in rural Texas.
“It was just, ‘Hey, let's assimilate the kid.’ And your love is going to cover all of the racism,” says another adoptee Leah Burns, who was raised in Arkansas in a predominantly white community.
Burns remembers her mother enrolling her in a summer camp teaching Chinese culture classes that was organized by other adoptive parents.
“That was the only time that I saw, like, racial mirrors, of kids who looked like me,” says Burns.
A celebration and a loss
Starting in the 1970s, a loose collection of rules later consolidated under China’s One Child Policy limited couples to just one child and later on punished violators with hefty fines and even forced abortions and sterilizations. In effect until 2016, the policy also created an influx of mostly baby girls given up for adoption, as couples prioritized having boys over girls due to longstanding cultural beliefs favoring men and the desire to carry on the family name.
“That was definitely a different thing that I had to accept,” says Osborne on learning of the history behind the Chinese adoption system. “It’s just mind-boggling that one decision can … just change my life completely and displace me so far away.”
Osborne says she celebrates the life she has had in the U.S. but mourns the loss of connection to her birth country and birth parents. Not knowing her birth parents still torments her, but she says she finds comfort in knowing she resembles them: “Every day that I look in the mirror and every day that I walk around, I'm representing them, and I have a piece of them with me all the time.”
Numerous studies show adoptees sufferhigher rates of depression and mental anxiety than non-adoptees. Those psychological risks are heightened among transnational and transracial adoptees.
“That all can really stem back to that first initial point of separation,” says Emma Rady Wanroy, an adoptee raised in Colorado who has become a therapist specializing in working with other adoptees.
Wanroy cautions against narratives that adoption is a happy ending. Instead, she says it marks the start of a lifetime of wondering: “Adoptees have all these dangling questions that hang above them that we don't really get answered ever.”
Holding the “both and”
Weeks after China cut off future international adoptions, adoptees say they are still in shock and processing what this means for their small community.
“This kind of felt almost like it was the final blow of not belonging,” says Anna Stollman, an adoptee who supports the ban but fears people like her will now be considered a finite, demographic blip and what she calls “a footnote in history.”
“Our story is over in a lot of ways. There won’t be any more Chinese adoptees,” she says. “Maybe my grandchildren or great grandchildren will be like, my ancestor was one of those people who was adopted in the 30 years that this program existed.”
The ban comes amid rising scrutiny of the mixed legacy of international adoption programs. In South Korea especially, adoption agencies are under scrutiny for fraud or often under pressure from adoptees themselves because of well-documented allegations that Korean adoption agencies faked paperwork to make it look like children were orphans and manipulated Korean parents into giving up their children, bringing in millions of dollars in adoption fees and taking the financial burden off a nascent social welfare system.
“I can have a great life, love my mom, have a positive adoption experience, and also feel sad and bitter and angry toward a system that was established before I was even born and was established by people who may or may not have been able to foresee what problems they might be running into today,” Burns says.
She calls these conflicting ideas “holding the both and” -- acknowledging and trying to find peace in the contradiction.
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