Chinese Adoption: Denial in the Origin Story

The origin story that most Chinese adoptees will tell you is verbatim from their official abandonment documentation/echoed by American and International news media/and enforced by the Chinese government:

1) Boys were favored

2) The One Child Policy meant that people gave birth to one child and then extras had to be abandoned

3) Girls were left in cardboard boxes/abandoned in public places/and taken to the orphanage

This story is favored by many people because:

1) They have no reason to question it

2) They think all other stories are fake news

3) Adoptive parents like the idea that they can paint the birthfamilies as evil and therefore prevent the adoptee from wanting to search for them

4) It is echoed literally everywhere you go (newspapers, magazines, journals, interviews, books), even by adoptees

5) Even if you go back to China and interview the finder, the orphanage director/employees/caretakers, or locals, they may lie to you to make their lives easier

For me, I was born in Guangdong province, near the epicenter of one of the most infamous of human trafficking cases in Chinese adoption, the Hunan scandal. Though this scandal broke in 2005, putting the first crack in China's perfect international adoption program, many of the families who had already adopted children from China had many mixed reactions--in no small part because there were so many conflicting versions of the truth that did not actually share the truth.

The truth is very hard to come by because the Chinese government tries to control the narrative by punishing authors and reporters or taking down articles. The Hunan scandal was an example of damage control and by the time a version got splashed onto the Western media, much of the truth was gone, boiled down to a catchy headline which read something along the lines of "Human Trafficking/Bought and Sold/Baby Buying in China."

It was unclear for many adoptive families if this applied their children or not because it wasn't like there was a full list anywhere. The Chinese government had limited the investigation to just six Hunan orphanages, though many, many others were involved in more than just Hunan province. The time frame was also unclear (did it affect babies born in the 1990's? Answer: Yes). Where were the babies "sourced" (keeping in mind that babies were not allowed to be kept in the first place due to the law)?

Because of these complexities, it was very difficult for people to wrap their minds around how to interpret this. Though my orphanage has been implicated in the Hunan scandal in early 2019 through a DNA match (baby was adopted in 1990's), it is also unclear how to interpret that. How many children from the orphanage did this affect? Were children taken "unwillingly" from their parents by police or "willingly" given to midwives to move to the orphanage? What does "willing" mean under the One Child Policy? What percentage of babies have false documents? What percentage of the documents are false? Were any babies actually "abandoned" and what does "abandonment" really mean if it was illegal to bring babies to the orphanage in the open?

Take this confusion, and then funnel it through thousands of households. Like my own family (prior to 2019), many families simply believed that the Hunan scandal was not personally relevant to their child's story. Some parents refuse to believe it was real. Some adoptees don't even know of it.

I have tried to give a summary of some common red flags in finding documentation in my post here. It is difficult to see the patterns, though, with only your own documents, which is why the birthfamily search analysis is crucial. However, I was privy to the information of my own orphanage group (The way Chinese adoption worked was that adoptive parents had to fly over in groups, stayed at the same hotel, and saw us for the first time together, all closely monitored by the Chinese people involved in the adoption program. Then, back in the States or Spain or UK or wherever, these groups were encouraged to stick together, though few were able to due to several factors.) So I knew for a fact that my ~10 China sisters were all "found" in the same finding spot, which is indicative that this information is not true and was in fact made up. Sometime in middle school, some of them went back to China on a Heritage Tour, a special program part of the tourism industry that tries to entertain adoptees and their foreign families. Included in this tour is a trip to the orphanage and then a tour of the finding spots. For many, this is a chance to snap a photo of their adoptee in the place the adoptee was "abandoned" for nary a thought to the emotional implications of such an event. But hold your tears, because though my China sisters were brought to some random wall and told the market had long since burned down, recent information from birthparent searches indicate the orphanage had engaged in a baby buying incentive program and that the orphanage worked with local police to forge finding documentation. Not to mention, involvement with the infamous Hunan "human trafficking" scandal. So...where exactly had those Heritage Tour guides brought these children and their families? Definitely not their finding spots. Yet, the Heritage Tour industry as well as the Birthparent Search industry are booming as adoptees grow older and want to go back to seek answers. What is the point of this charade to pretend adoptees were "willingly" abandoned and then years later, continue to pretend they were abandoned? (Answer: The Chinese government does not want their international adoption program to be tainted with news of human trafficking--they want to control the narrative.) 

Surely, people who have worked for the orphanages, who have seen babies arrive in batch from middlemen seeking reward money must know that we were not "found." Surely, the police who have forged documents or the middlemen and midwives themselves must know something of the truth. Many of the current players in these new industries are old orphanage employees, claiming their experience gives them credibility, when really, it should mean they are continuing the deception and milking all the money they can from it. 

One must imagine then what a mindfuck it is to think that the finding story is a lie and that the charade continues well into the next two, three, four, five decades--that when you spend the money to go to China and go on a heritage tour and the Chinese tourguide says, "I used to work at the orphanage and I remember you and you were found right here beside this very rock" and you're already an emotional wreck, with some adoptive parents holding resentment in their bones for the birthparents who "would be so cruel" and the adoptee feeling "abandoned and unwanted" all over again...no one thinks twice about whether the information on their finding documents now verified by a real live Chinese person might not be the entire story, or the story at all.

Then, there are all the inconsistencies:

1) Parents having multiple (>3) children (and yes, multiple girls) during the One Child Policy

2) Parents raising "hidden" children off-the-record, thus leading to inconsistencies in our statistics about the birthrate in China because people aren't even being counted

3) Some people have documentation that has true information about their finding locations. Others do not.

4) The American news media still insists that all Chinese people obeyed the One Child Policy (no exceptions) and uphold the belief that girls were unwanted and unloved, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary

Denial is a natural reaction because it simplifies everything. Ignorance is bliss. I cannot even hold a conversation with the adoptees I know who are even willing to talk about adoption because some of them think the whole thing is a haux, some think it isn't relevant to them, some heard false rumors, some "disagree," and many, many still believe there is no war in Ba Sing Se.

My most recent experience of one such conversation where it felt like our wires were crossed was this morning. This adoptee and I had known each other forever as there is a kind of network of Chinese adoption families in the region. She had done an entire project on Human Trafficking in China for her undergrad college (though she really focused only on the Hunan scandal and not on any other trafficking ring, confiscation scandal, or other things since then).

Despite this, she gave me a sad look and told me I was likely trafficked (although this is a probability with a value between 0 and 1 which I will not know, and then proceeded to talk as if her own documentation was 100% true.

It baffled my mind because the point of the Hunan scandal wasn't that some poor saps in Guangdong got moved to Hunan, but that the entire facade of the perfect international adoption program came crumbling down. At the time, it was indeed interpreted as a blot in an otherwise perfect system...evidence, experience, and data in the nearly two decades since has enlightened us that this is not the case.

Yet, I understood in a way her abject confidence in her own origin story. The nuances and inconsistencies of the Hunan scandal were not "her problem," in her opinion: it affected a subset of Others and so, it became easier to digest when it wasn't about her. But without any evidence, how can one absolve themselves from ANY of the complexities of China's international adoption program? 

"Not my province, not my orphanage, not my problem."

That doesn't make any sense--it is no more evidence-based than a whim.

Despite the fact I've done my research and continue to stay up-to-date to the best of my abilities with the evolving updates, I still dislike being told by someone else that I was probably trafficked, in that weird pitying tone of voice that implies my life sucks more than theirs because they believe their paperwork is right as rain. 

1) Your value is not determined by what happened to you. You have innate value by virtue of your existence. Playing the "I'm better than you because you got trafficked but my mom willingly abandoned me" game is both inane, unhelpful, and likely false. Please shut up.

2) I dislike the way human trafficking is talked about in regards to China because China, unlike other countries, had this little thing called the One Child Policy which was the driving force for why babies could not be kept by their birthfamilies in the first place. And thus, I believe it would be better for people to understand the situation with a level head, rather than regurgitate sensationalist articles:

You must understand:

It was illegal for parents to 1) have more than one child 2) keep their own kids 3) abandon their kids 4) bring their kids to the orphanage.

It was (unofficially?) sanctioned by the Chinese government to 1) confiscate children by the one child police 2) offer finding fees in baby buying incentive programs by the orphanages to the finders

And so, for me, I understand the fact that birthparents were forced by circumstance and law to give their children to middlemen/midwives in order to get their babies to the orphanage. And if those midwives and middlemen got money from the orphanage for their transportation services, well, I am not "disgusted" by that either because what fucking choice did the birthparents have? 

It's not like when you hear about "human trafficking" in America in sex abuse scandals. It is a very different beast.

I am upset that there was a One Child Policy at all and that people had no choice. The fact that within this unfair framework/circumstance/situation, people had to make decisions about how to get their offspring to the orphanage without being persecuted--those decisions do not "bother" me because they were not really "choices."

What bothers me is that due to the one child law, orphanages/police/doctors/officials would forge finding documents, separate twins, change birthdates, confiscate children, make women "choose" between being sterilized and undergoing an abortion, etc. etc. etc. The fact that babies were being moved around affects me insofar as my own origin story is a lie and it becomes damn near impossible to convince others that their own paperwork isn't trustworthy without evidence. That is what upsets me. 

But to frame these complexities as me among others being (potential) "human trafficking victims"  does not ring true to me--

For instance, what is the moral difference between police confiscating a baby and police pressuring a family into placing their child in a public place to be taken to the orphanage the next morning (since it was illegal to bring the baby to the orphanage themselves and illegal to keep the baby)? What is the moral difference between a family giving the baby to the midwife to take to the orphanage because of the One Child Policy forcing them to, and whether or not the orphanage gives the midwife money or not? 

For me, I simply do not understand why the adoption community is completely content to know that birthparents were forced to give up their babies, that women were forcibly sterilized, that women were forced to undergo abortions etc...but that the second they learn that the people who bring those babies to the orphanages get money, suddenly out of the blue, are throwing shit fits about ethics and acting like the only "unethical" adoptions were the ones where orphanages offered money for babies brought in by the middlemen--which, hate to burst your bubble, was most if not all orphanages.

I am just upset at all the splinters of truth and lies in the Chinese adoptee community, fueled mostly by emotion and helped along by inconsistencies in reporting. It is no wonder so many are in denial--but this cycles back into the problem because then those adoptees give interviews and write articles that perpetuate the lies the Chinese government sanctioned all those years ago. I want the truth and barring that, I would like a healthy dose of acknowledgement of the unknown, rather than having adoptees unquestioningly trumpet whatever they've been fed.