Why does the origin story matter?

I spend a lot of time on my blog explaining and exploring the origin story of Chinese adoptees (the first wave: 1991-2010ish). While other adoptee blogs focus on the experience of being adopted, why is it that I keep rehashing stuff that happened twenty years ago?

In many ways, the origin story does not matter to my sense of self as an individual. I'm still doing what I do, eating what I eat, and seeing who I see. A seismic current doesn't blast me off my feet every time a new development in the origin story comes to light. The only way I'll know my individual truth is by finding my birthfamily, which means I am left with a composite truth or a weighted average of birthfamily testimony every time a new DNA match is made. Similar to the double slit experiment, it may seem that photons or electrons are particles when viewed individually, but together form a diffraction pattern--there are patterns you cannot ignore that shift the origin story.

Why does any of this matter?

1) Self-esteem. I believe that adoptees are growing up like a climbing vines around the belief that they were "abandoned and unwanted." As children, this belief was hammered into us by children's books and movies made for the Chinese adoption community that reinforced the abandonment narrative. I have a small pile of children's books still at my house that my parents read to me at night, each one saying something along the lines of "abandoned" due to "being a girl." Yes, it makes sense not to scare little kids with the reality (which at that time in the early 2000's was not even known), but many of us are in our mid-twenties and are still believing those words on the page and what's more--telling others, such as reporters.

2) Compassion. When one learns about what was really going on in China, especially to the women, I think that it adds a dimension of compassion for the birthmother. She was probably around the age many of us are right now with no freedom and no choice. We tend to believe that our birthmothers had all the choices in the world and picked the other child over us. Instances of police confiscations of babies, or midwives who coerced parents into giving her the newborn, or even doctors in hospitals who threatened to turn in parents for breaking the law unless they gave the baby to the hospital do not factor into the original story, nor do they occur to us spontaneously. These truths need to be sought out independently--and very often aren't because the original story told to us is never questioned.

3) Birthparent searches. When you go on a birthparent search armed with false information, you will likely not make as much headway into the thicket. People can lie to you and you'll believe it. You may not even be aware that you are sabotaging your own efforts because your tactics might cause people to work against you. You in your warm house can believe whatever fantasy you want--but when you go to China to search for birthparents, the world does not reorganize to suit your delusions. The world is and always has been structured around reality. If you are serious about searching for birthparents, you need to realize that you will be directly interacting with reality, and it would behoove you to bridge that gap between what you think is true and what's actually true.