My 100th Post, A Timeline of Everything So Far
I started this blog in the beginning of 2019. I had already written unpublished drafts of certain posts years before that. (There was also an embarrassing adoptee blog I had sometime in middle school, I'm sure. *cringe* Thank goodness I deleted it and don't even remember the name of it.)
I've learned a lot since 2019. But let's recap.
1979 - The One Child Policy Begins
1989 - Tiananmen Square
1991 - Chinese International Adoption Opens
1995 - BBC's The Dying Rooms (Put China prominently on the world stage as a crisis situation with surplus healthy baby girls left in destitute orphanages. You might notice that many orphanages took more care in their appearance after this came out. Some look like mini palaces.)
Summer 1997 - Handover of Hong Kong from the British to Chinese. And One Country, Two Systems
1997 - I am born...at some point.
1998 - I am adopted
2005 - Chinese International Adoption Peaks
Early 2005 - National Geographic's China's Lost Girls with Lisa Ling (She claims ALL baby girls in the orphanage are abandoned...because of gender. How naive we all were back then.)
Late 2005 - The Hunan Trafficking Scandal (originally implicated just six Hunan orphanages. Thought to be a freak anomaly.) I'm still in elementary school. My parents are confident this definitely doesn't apply to anyone we know and certainly not me because of the timeline and the location.
*Chinese International Adoption Plummets Post 2005 due to Hunan Scandal*
2012 - I start high school
2013 - DNAConnect.Org is founded
2014 - Stuy's article, Open Secret: Cash and Coercion in China's International Adoption Program
2015 - One Child Policy Ends (and is replaced by a Two Child Policy)
2016 - I graduate high school & start undergrad
2018 - I do 23andMe
January 2019 - Nanfu Wang's One Child Nation
March 2019 - My orphanage linked to Hunan Scandal. Timeline implies at least one adoptee was also in the orphanage at my time who was brought there through this method. (Though no guarantee that this is my personal story)
2019-20 Hong Kong Protests & COVID-19 hinder my plans of visiting China for the first time
2020 - I graduate undergrad and start grad school. I get the Birth Parent Search Analysis from ResearchChina.Org which provided valuable information to me and my family, especially in preparation for that trip to China that will one day come...when this pandemic eventually ends.
Late June - China passes Anti-Sedition Law in Hong Kong
July 16, 2020 - DNAConnect.Org has a total of 480 birthfamilies with a total of 72 adoptee matches!
The story continues. With graduate school though, I'm not sure what else I can do but continue to donate to DNAConnect.Org This isn't exactly a fast-moving soap opera. Though, it does feel like 2005 and 2019 were big years for adoptees. They were for me...even though I didn't always know it.
For my 100th post, I wasn't sure what to write. This seems sufficient. I've been documenting my life more and more now. I have a much more detailed timeline for my personal use on my home computer...pictures, old emails, miscellaneous. Maybe it's a symptom of our time. Everywhere you look on social media, it's everyone sharing their every second with everyone all the time...nonstop. Even adoptees are becoming influencers or one-time documentary makers detailing their experiences going to China or just life in general. Democratizing the camera is such an interesting thing. My grandfather was a professional photographer in Philadelphia. That took a turn when good cameras became more affordable. I watch my "coming home" videos a lot more often than maybe other adoptees do, if they have them. They make me feel like I "belong" with my family and that makes me feel safe. I realized I didn't have any other videos of my family since then...in those two decades about, the only evidence of my existence is as a baby!
So I got a GoPro. I really wanted one when I was little, walking around L.L. Bean with my dad. They've improved the camera quality a lot since then with hypersmooth stabilization and other cool time-warp effects. I bought it with my own money I had saved from my campus jobs these past years. Why did I invest in it? Well, I felt kind of cheated out of my China Return Trip that I had been hanging onto for many, many years now. I felt like being able to record the super boring everyday things now would somehow make me feel like I was recording something worth something. I wanted to practice using the technology so that when I eventually made my way to China, I wouldn't be fumbling with all the settings. That's what I tell myself anyway. When my parents went to China to adopt me, they clunked around this old dinosaur of a camcorder. Now, it's possible to record in 4K with something that can fit in the palm of your hand. Crazy.
With my new video camera, I wanted to make my own home movie. Part really bad documentary, part slightly more aesthetic home movie. I tried to shove my entire blog into movie form and then record awkward videos of myself trying to explain these concepts to...well, I don't intend to ever share them, so I guess just to myself. I mean, what if my children one day want to see these? Or if I ever do meet my birthfamily, wouldn't they be interested to know what my cat looks like? I also made my parents answer a bunch of questions about how they feel about all these new revelations and why they are supportive of my desire to search for my birth family, etc. It wasn't easy convincing them to get in front of the camera, which is also why these videos are never getting out. I think they'd kill me, haha. Still, I am so happy they took and are taking my request seriously and understand how much it means for me to have this kind of historical record of my life "right now."
It must be a very human thing, to try and figure out family trees or compile timelines or record history. Even on stone tablets. Story telling in many forms is a very human thing. Maybe I'm just feeling that urge to put something of myself down in gigabytes for the future. (Or I'm still trying to justify making that purchase!)
All I know, is that this 100th post marks something special. Even though 100 isn't a super large number, and 2019 was just a year ago, it sometimes feels like a lifetime ago.
Best,
Yuna
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