I repeat to myself the truth and hope to redefine myself

I think of these stories on my way to work.

I think of these stories in bed at night, when I stare at the ceiling and wonder if my birthfamily is thinking of me. 

I think of myself detached from myself, in a never-ending dream of Kekulé's, where the ouroboros eats its own tail.

My identity is internal, informed by external information. Yet, identity is increasingly performative. In our efforts as a society to celebrate identity, there's a pressure to be declarative about our thoughts of ourselves. It can sometimes feel like our individualism is bolstered by a label, which in turn swallows us into a collective. Forever chasing our own tails and drowning in perpetuity.

I repeat to myself that I was taken from my birthparents. That I was sold by a trafficker into an orphanage. That I was wanted by my birthfamily. That the world had lied to me.

I look at myself in the mirror and wonder how quaint, how simple, how deliriously simple it was to be told by the world that I was abandoned by my mother because she did not want a girl.

How baffling that we could not see the truth.

In redefining the One Child Policy, with all of its inconsistencies -- the hidden children, the ones who were not kidnapped, the ones who did live with a neighbor or relative, the ones who could afford more children, the ones who profited -- there must be a reckoning. We believed that the very top of the government decreed that there should only be one child per family, and we believed that every Chinese citizen robotically cut out their hearts and obeyed.

The world did not understand...that babies were kidnapped and confiscated. That traffickers in the form of a neighbor, coworker, boss, friend, midwife, doctor, or family member made money by tricking mothers into giving up their babies. Or kidnapped them, held the baby for ransom, then sold the infant to the orphanage. Or told the birthmother the baby was stillborn, while selling the babies in batches...

It made sense to us that a birthmother would abandon her child or even kill it. After all, the patriarchy is a real thing.

It didn't occur to the world that others in society terrorized mothers and took the babies anyway, and then turned around and lied about it.

No one wants you.

They found you in the street.

Your mother dumped you in a box.

I was there, and now I'm here, and every step I take brings me farther away from the day I saw your face.

We cannot, as a society, continue to have the naïveté to believe that the Hunan Scandal was a small unfortunate blot on an otherwise perfect international adoption program. WAKE UP. Listen to their stories. Listen to their words.

Thank you to DNAConnect from the bottom of my heart, for publishing the true stories of birthparents terrorized during the One Child Policy, and who hope to unite with their children again.

About the cover art: Tarot cards are said to be able to predict the future, but our collective past as adoptees is just as illusionary. These tarot cards are representative of some of the common stories in Chinese international adoption. There are many more stories out there, but these characters are eery, larger-than-life shadows that haunt me. Like figures of Greek mythology, they are recurring, in different times and in different forms, threading together the stories of how we came to be here. Thus, when we have nothing left but accounts of "police," "confiscations," "traffickers," and "reward money," these figures blur together into a set of stock characters.