Fantasy and Reality: A Reflection
I always felt that my experience was common because I knew many other Chinese adoptees like me, but I was still going through the pain as an individual because very rarely did anyone talk about adoption at all. I would go to adoptee events, but the narratives were once again controlled by adoptive parents with some adoption agency representatives sometimes in attendance. In other words, I was still suffering, feeling that my birthmom had placed a valuation upon my life, thought for all of two seconds before deciding she'd rather have a boy. The theme of most children stories is that you can overcome insurmountable barriers for love. Whether that's exchanging your tail for human legs, becoming a prince or a princess from lowly origins (Aladdin and Cinderella), or turning into a bear. Even children know that telling us the reason for our supposed abandonment was "gender-based" or "they didn't have enough money," seems extremely trite.
As an adult now, I'm able to look back at that point in history and say that what happened to me was not a singular experience of a birthmom evaluating the worth of her baby, but of a human rights violation on the massive scale. People should be in control of their own reproductive rights and families should be allowed to stick together. I realize that as much pain as I am in, my birthfamily likely wasn't having a picnic either. Forced sterilizations, forced abortions, threats from the local government officials to take away your house or your job if they didn't give up their baby, or coercion...sometimes trickery, empty promises, and a network of human traffickers.
It's painful to come to the conclusion that what happened to me wasn't really about me at all. I'm in so much pain because of everything. I hurt so much. I never really thought about what my birthfamily was feeling on the other side because if you're told as a baby that you were left to be taken to an orphanage, there is just a tremendous hurt there that you may not really want to poke. Especially as you're growing up a normal American, going to school, making friends, joining clubs, applying to colleges, going to college...you can't be expected to have the time, effort, or emotional reservoir to straddle both lives at once. This particularly rings true for Chinese adoptees, like myself, who have just now begun to learn more of the truth about Chinese adoptions from DNA testing that brings birthfamilies together. The One Child Nation documentary came out in 2019. The Hunan scandal came out in 2005. We only recently pieced together that my orphanage was involved in the Hunan scandal in 2019. It's only 2020 now. There's a lot to take in at the ripe old age of twenty-something.
I'm suspended between all the new realities that I now know, yet don't have any clue which one of any actually apply to me. On top of this, I need to accept I may never know what exactly happened to me. It's painful to think about this all the time, but if I have any hope at all of finding the truth, of finding my birthfamily, or of helping other people find their birthfamilies, I need to be informed with facts rooted in reality, not fantasy. Because the thing about believing in fantasy is that the world operates in reality.
Jenna Cook, then a Yale undergraduate, went back to China to locate her birthfamily and report back to her Yale program. I read this article when it came out in 2017 and absolutely could not wrap my head around the fact that fifty families came out to see if she was their "missing" girl. If the official fairytale story that we as babies were unwanted because we were girls were actually true for all of China, then it just simply doesn't compute that people would actually come out in those numbers. They told her how much they missed their baby girls, wondering if she knew their child. It was heartbreaking, but at the time, I left the website telling myself that it was all a lie. That was three years ago.
Right now, there is an effort being made by Brian and Lan Stuy featured in the One Child Nation Documentary. For years, they have been attempting to piece together the truth of what happened in China during those times. I have referenced them extensively on my blog because they are the only resource I trust with my life at this point. There are too many scams and magic beans out there for me to have very much trust to go around at this point. The Stuys I trust. They began an initiative some years ago called DNA Connect.org which has its own Facebook page and website. They are able to collect DNA of willing birthparents with the help of donation dollars and add them to a database that adoptees can also use. Adoptees use 23andMe to get their DNA file, then upload that file to Gedmatch. (I've found some Vietnamese relatives this way!) There are literally hundreds of birthfamilies that have willingly wanted to get their DNA tested and there are actual matches. At this present moment, 67 matches have been made.
The stories we were told as children, that our birthmoms made a "decision" to not keep us, when the reality was that there wasn't a choice, simply doesn't jive with this new information. Yes, I was told there was a One Child Policy and as a toddler, I respected that we had to follow rules, but I also felt that if they really cared they would have tried harder. A government that kidnaps women and forcibly aborts their babies from them to enforce the One Child Policy is not a government that fosters "free will." The story of Feng Jianmei went viral, sparking outrage, and that wasn't even at the height of the One Child Policy.
If our birthparents didn't "want" us, then they certainly wouldn't risk their personal safety to get a DNA test, effectively admitting to having more than the legal amount of children at one point, just to find a baby that hasn't been home for more than twenty years. That's because reality doesn't heed fantasy. If you want to make a decision, it needs to be rooted in the best information we have to us. This means this information will not be reported in traditional news outlets (until very recently). I have a running list of articles that describe Chinese adoptees as "unwanted" which reigned supreme a mere five years ago, and a running list of recent articles that describe Chinese adoptees as very, very much "wanted" by their birthfamilies. The information tide is changing. Our "realities" seem to be changing with it, but in fact, the truth has never changed and has always been.
Being an adoptee is so incredibly complex and we can wallow in any one part of the story as much as we wish, but that will make us closed off to the information loop. I could still be mourning about my birthmom's "decision" to "abandon" me, but that would obviously lead to a different emotional conclusion than being told it wasn't a decision, that it was a "forced abandonment" or that I was a trafficking victim. Each possibility elicits a different emotional response. It's awfully tiring. Adoptees shouldn't be expected to be interested in this anyway, either. It's like a gunshot wound. It's painful enough without having to reorganize our brains every time a new story comes out.
There's enough "story in the struggle" on the adoptee part of things. Countless things I need to go through just being a Chinese adoptee in America. There's assumptions, racism, dealing with the weird Asian submissive stereotypes, being harassed by teachers who have weird insecurities about being shown up by one of those "Asian students," dealing with people assuming I'm dating (and having sex with) my father, dealing with people evaluating the validity of my life because apparently adoptees' lives are up for debate, the "do you speak English?" questions, the "where are you from?" questions, the I don't know my name, or my birthday, or my siblings. The "I have to make a family tree for biology class and I have no inherited traits." There's that idealistic "struggling with my Chinese American identity" and the actual struggle of juggling where you belong.
It's damn difficult to be an adoptee. Then you add the pressure from society who believes they know all there is to know about orphans and adoptees: the orphan tropes, the adoptee tropes, the good adoptee, the pressure to be thankful and grateful, the pressure to be happy, to pressure to not pry into your past because apparently society thinks you only have the capacity to love just one family at a time, the pressure to represent transracial adoptees well, the very dehumanizing situations where total strangers will come up to you and spew how lucky you are for even being alive because apparently they thought you deserved to die and are comparing you to an orphan from Oliver Twist rather than Becky down the road.
It's difficult enough to deal with coming out of the fog, realizing that my 1) sensory issues, 2) hypervigilance and PTSD, 3) and anxiety about abandonment and waiting are all remnants of my time in the orphanage and being separated from my birthmom.
Then don't even get me started on adoption culture itself: the pressures the come from without and within the adoptee community: Holt camp, orphanage voluntourism, competition, Gotcha day,...not to mention each and every family has their own ideas about how an adoptee should lead their life and yours and how everyone is looking at a different set of "alternative facts" because of this massive information barrier that I was just talking about.
My adoptee blog could have focused on any one of these things. Each one is enough to make your head spin. But I'm learning I seriously need an outlet for all of my thoughts because this is overwhelming. I feel like Atlas.
Yuna
May 2020
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