Why I Want to Visit China, Part 1

I have never been back to China as a Chinese adoptee since I left at age one in 1998. Of course, I want to go back. Not all adoptees feel the same way, but for me, I have a self-evident desire to return and see China. It's my homeland, after all. If I only have one life to live, and if I had no other responsibilities, oh, and teleportation abilities, I would have returned to China long ago. One day, I will die. I want to see China before that happens. It's my life and this is what I want.

I still haven't been.

I've been planning on it though. After high school graduation, my family said we could go, but then preparation for undergraduate college started and we were overwhelmed. I was very scared about going to college because of my attachment issues and I've never been away from home that long. Despite going to a college within a two hour radius from my house, it was still a huge concern for me, a sentiment echoed by many other adoptees who typically go to college nearby, or end up transferring to a college nearby after the first year away. Believe me, it was a struggle. Then undergraduate college picked up, summer internships and other things took up my summers in preparation for graduate school, and then, what do you know? The Hong Kong riots were getting bad and my family and I would need to fly into the Hong Kong international airport as this was closest to my orphanage. And then, as if the universe were giving me a not-so-subtle hint: COVID-19. 2020, a year to remember.

So this is where I am now, already one foot in the door for graduate school where once again, my future travel opportunities are unclear. Graduate school in the sciences is not like "school." You're an employee. This is your job. You get paid! (And science grad school is free in the USA.) You only really take classes your first year, and then you continue to work on your PhD thesis until you graduate in five years. So you see, time off to go on a life-changing adventure around the world...may not be in my future. I'm not sure. I don't even know how visa's work.

Despite not knowing Mandarin or Cantonese which is spoken in my home area (In my defense, most Asian Americans I know don't know either of them, despite taking more than four years of formal training and possibly with parents who do!), I still want to return to China, the so-called Mother Land. I don't want to do a heritage tour, as I'll explain in a post later, because I'm really sick of being lied to. Still, I want to set foot on Chinese soil again. Ideally, I want to return to my own province, Guangdong, and check out the town where I was supposedly "found." While finding spots are mostly lies, as mine clearly were, there is a modicum of hope that the town itself could be accurate.

It is a big IF, and even IF that is true, my birthparents could have 1) died, 2) moved away 3) I could just have bad luck and miss them. The population of "my" town is apparently about 60,000 people...so, given my vacation time restrictions, assuming I've got about one solid week, given that I don't know the terrain or the language...I don't know.

No, I won't hire a searcher: I don't trust them either. They are just another cog in the machine that's lied to me over and over. I also have reservations about not having language skills, as I would need a translator to even move around in rural China...but I don't really trust them either. What if their presence pressures people into giving me more lies? What if they purposefully don't translate certain truths correctly and I'll never know until it is too late? So...clearly, a lil' ol' Asian American girl of no skill (that's me) can't go trouping into the heart of rural China without a guide.

(This is why people study abroad to China with their Mandarin minors and East Asian Studies majors, I berate myself. Even questionably ethical orphanage volunteering trips are safe and structured ways of getting to and from China, despite the lifelong trauma they inflict on orphans, but if you look past the human crimes and the broken hearts of orphans you leave in your wake...Affordable, the path laid out, gah! Why didn't I just do that?)

Part of me just throws my hands up in the air. Why not just go see the tourist attractions? I can operate with my English. I'll be depressed as hell already being back. I am prepared to be emotional. I might as well see pandas and the great wall for all the money, time, and effort it took to get there. I'm not sure. Back in December 2019, I tried to explain to my close Chinese American friend why I wanted to go back to China, but couldn't because of the Hong Kong protests. She seemed offended, telling me, "There's more to China than just Hong Kong, you know." She knew I was adopted, but I never shoved it in her face, and I knew that mentioning my one time "stint" as an orphan was like throwing ice water on the conversation, but I didn't want her thinking I was some kind of ignorant jackass. So I said, "I know that...but I want to see my orphanage and that's the closest airport." That put a damper on the conversation. The next time I mentioned it, she understood I wanted to see my orphanage, but still wasn't convinced why that was worth the international travel. "Why not just go see Hong Kong? Or the normal tourist attractions?" she asked. I shrugged off her suggestion, feeling like it was my destiny for me to return to my orphanage, which isn't even where I was because they built a new/current one down the road/redistricted, etc...but honestly, I don't want to do a heritage trip anymore. And pandas do sound nice. I would avoid being the only twenty-something year old amongst immature 16-year-old adoptees with their adoptive parents, all still believing in that fairytale "finding story" bullshit. Is that the journey I want for myself? Isn't just being in China enough?