Mooncake Festival

I was born in the fall of 1997, two days before I was promptly abandoned at a food market.

Then I spent over a year in an orphanage, before being adopted to America.

 

That’s probably a lie.

 

Actually, I am certain that it is.

 

A more accurate story would go like this:

I was born and the midwife threatened to turn my birthmother over to the authorities if she kept me. The midwife offered my birthmom a way out: she knew a friend who would love a baby girl, so just. Give. The. Child. To. Her.

And she did.

Then I was trafficked and sold to an orphanage that did domestic adoptions.

Before I was trafficked and sold by that orphanage to an orphanage that did international adoptions.

Then I was adopted.

And raised by the world to believe I was abandoned with the official paperwork to prove it.

 

Or maybe,

I was born at the hospital, and after my birthmom gave birth to me, the doctor who had a deal with the orphanage told my birthmom I did not survive childbirth and took his cut.

In tears, my birthmom would have left the hospital, and the doctor would have sold the five or so newborns to the orphanage for a tidy sum.

 

Or maybe I was just snatched, like contraband, like heroine.

I was living peacefully at home and then bam, the police bang through and snatch me, sell me to the orphanage and generate the false paperwork that say I was abandoned.

 

Maybe it’s the story where someone turned in someone else.

Maybe it’s the story where the birthparents are told the orphanage is a “study abroad program” and the child will return in twenty years after being educated abroad.

Maybe it’s the story where I was raised in grandma’s house and the police came.

Maybe it’s the story where I was hidden and caught.

 

In any case, every single Chinese adoptee was raised to believe they were abandoned.

Every single Chinese adoptee was given a finding date and a finding location.

And each and every birthfamily reunion shows us that we were all fed lies, and the world believed, because to be a hero, one must rescue an infant.

To be a villain, one must be participating, however uninformed, in a human trafficking scandal.

And the world wants to believe they are good at heart. Adults read papers and watch the news and consume media which makes them feel good. Infants cannot. The world is not shaped for the benefit of orphans.

 

The idea that our fairy-tale orphan origins were forged for someone else’s benefit leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth. Because the story goes that you’re lucky, that God was watching out for you, that you’re special. That you’re chosen. And this is your story.

 

It is so cemented into our collective memory that Chinese baby girls were abandoned and so permanently irrefutable that the idea that someone could lie, could forge, could traffic babies seems like it. Just. Couldn’t. Happen.

 

After all, if God has designed your destiny, why would you be trafficked as an infant and confiscated by force and lies from your birthparents and sold from orphanage to orphanage, trapped in legal tape so that even if your birthmom knocks on the orphanage door and demands to have you back, they say, “We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

I made mooncakes this year for the mid-Autumn festival. As a child, my parents read to me many Chinese folktales, and Chang’e flies to the moon was among them. I imagined my mom as the moon—and the sentiment is common, with many people leaving out offerings for their lost loved ones on the day of the festival. Most of my Asian American friends say the holiday is pretty minor. They eat store-bought mooncakes, but it’s not like a full-blown holiday. The way I celebrate Easter with chocolate eggs, but don’t celebrate it that way some more religious people do. My Chinese international friends say that they don’t celebrate the festival in their village. Mooncakes, sure, but festival? Not so much.

 

To the Chinese adoptee community, sometimes celebrating holidays is a way to “reconnect” to our birthculture, however misguided or ill-informed we are of said culture or why on earth we should perform out what the adoptive culture believes to be authentic birthculture. The idea of reconnecting as if it were a virtue or a compulsion, rather than a desire is a tone-deaf cruelty. Much like adoption. Done with good intentions but blatantly ignores our personal volition, feelings on the matter, our individuality, and pesky things like “international adoption encourages and increases the human trafficking of infants.”

 

Anyway, I was an absolute mess the week of the mid-Autumn festival. I had prepared pork soup dumplings and homemade red bean mooncake. I ate too much for the express and specific purpose of being unable to do anything but sleep and put myself out like a light. I was in a lot of pain. To have all these truths swirling around in my head and to be ignored so loudly by a world that wants to believe, neigh, finds it more convenient, for my origins to arise from abandonment, when the reality was that a crime was committed.

 

The idea of police kidnapping children to sell them to internationally adopting orphanages seems like it has the spirit of a crime, but when done to uphold a national law of the One Child Policy—is it a crime in name?

Besides which, all of the many, many, many families living under the One Child Policy who raised in broad daylight multiple children. Sure, some had to be hidden with false paperwork. Some had to be hidden for years or just a couple of months. Some went to school and studied in American undergrad. Some families raised four other daughters, each with PhDs,. Social mobility is a real thing, especially over the last twenty years in China.

 

The law, to my interpretation from various stories, seems to have been “fluid.” The same phrase over and over, “The One Child Policy at that time was strict.”

 

In America, we don’t think of laws having elasticity. We don’t think that laws can become “more active” or more “heavily enforced.” But in China, time and time again, I hear the story of the One Child Policy suddenly becoming “stricter” and the One Child Police becoming “more active.”

 

This is an alien concept to most international people, people in America, Europe, Australia, who have been brainwashed and spoon-fed to believe that no one dared to break a law in China, and that the One Child Policy had few if any exceptions, such as living in the country or being allowed a second child if the first was born a girl. Even these exceptions sound hollow, like a thin veneer of white paint on the inside of a prison cell, giving credence to a circumstance that was never meant to happen. Explain to me why that family was targeted by the police, but not that one? Tell me why that family gave up the third daughter, but kept number four and five. Tell me why the law was fluid, why the world believed too strongly in a rigidity that did not exist.

 

The world is full of contradictions.

 

The thorough brainwashing of the world, even when it feels like the world should know better, makes me feel trapped in a cage. I exist and I know I am alive. I hear stories and I know them to be true. So why does the world insist on clinging to the vestiges of a fantasy? Of a big, bold, irrefutable One Child Policy that had no seams, cracks, or complications?

 

It is simpler to believe that orphans were unwanted than it is to understand what really happened. It is easier for adoptive parents to say “I am a hero for adopting an unwanted orphan” than it is for them to admit, “I have participated in the unknowing forceful separation of thousands of children from their parents.”

 

Adoptees are overwhelmingly expected to say they are lucky, and whenever I see an adoptee getting attention for delivering the “lucky” line, I pity them for buying into the white savior attitude of the general public.

 

I repeat my origin story like a mantra. Except, I don’t know what the truth is and I don’t know how to explain to someone why I need to know.

 

I need to know the truth.

 

Not because I need to know how special I am. Or important, lucky, or blessed I was.

 

I need to know the nature of the crime. It isn’t enough that the body was found. I want to know the make and model of the weapon. Where was the victim stabbed? How many organs punctured? Was their breathing labored before the end? How many gallons of blood? Any last words?

 

I need to know.

 

Did they beg for mercy before the end? How many minutes did they struggle to live? Was it done at night or in the middle of the day? Did they go fighting or did they close their eyes in acceptance?

 

I need to know.

 

So many birthparents are struggling to find their babies. How is that possible if we were so unwanted in the first place? So many birthparents living with the shame and guilt of being helpless to stop their babies from being taken from them. And I wonder, is there an empty grave somewhere in China where my birthmom goes to cry? An empty grave of all the children that were said to have “died” when we’re all right here, right here, birthmom. I’m right here, living in America. I’m alive. I’m alive.

 

Sometimes I feel like I’m pounding on glass.

 

I think of all the times in my life where I felt like I was subhuman, like some creature that didn’t earn human rights. I think of all the times that hit me like a ton of bricks because something that day triggered me, and made me “remember my place,” and made me remember that I was not worth enough to love.

 

All because I was told I was abandoned, one of the most elegant lies ever told by humanity. For the child will not go seeking those that hurt them. We’re couched in a fairy-tale world, built by and for adoptive parents that tells us that love of our adoptive family can heal any nonexistent pains left by the birthfamily. The truth is, they are unrelated. Like treating skin cancer with a lung cancer drug. The love of my parents is infinite and eternal. Strong and sure. And it does absolutely nothing to treat my pain.

 

Only the truth will set you free.