Identity and the Origin Story

 Disclaimer: The following is from my own personal experience. Everyone will have their own.

When I was younger, I was one of many Asian Americans in my community and one of a number of Chinese adoptees in my community. I had a quintessential adoptee childhood, went to FCC get-togethers, learned Mandarin with other adoptees, even attended Chinese school with other adoptees! I went to adoptee camp in the summers and spent vacations with my adoption group. I was bathed in a sense of belongingness and togetherness, that being adopted was simply natural and that sometimes Asian kids had white parents and sometimes they did not.

I could probably wax poetic for many more paragraphs about my wonderful parents and how they raised me with great pride in my heritage and honor for my birthmother. I could probably say much more, but I am crying and I will simply need to get to my point before I lose all train of thought.

When I was a little girl, I missed my birthmother very much. I missed her more than the entire world. I felt absolutely worthless, wretched, completely unworthy of being loved. I had night terrors and frequent nightmares of being kidnapped and taken out of the house. And yet, I had decided before the age of preschool that searching for my birthmother and by extension, birthfamily, was simply impossible and a waste of this proverbial second chance of life. In my child brain, I calculated that China was the most populated country in the world and that I could spend my entire life searching and come up empty, devastatingly, gut-wrenchingly empty. So I put the prospect of searching out of my mind and shut the lid.

I met other adoptees and we greeted each other in customary adoptee fashion. You began with the year of birth and of adoption, then the orphanage, then the Chinese name, and then the finding spot. The holy finding spot. The finding spot was the mythical place where your birth mom last saw you, last kissed you good-bye and held you close. The magical finding spot was, for better or worse, the most important piece of knowledge you could have because maybe one day, you could go back to China and your birthmother would be there, waiting for you. I remember telling so many kids at daycare so proudly that I was adopted from the orphanage and that I was left at a food market. It did not mark me as pitiable, but rather unique and special. It was often celebrated when two adoptees had the same finding spot because it just had to mean something.

The entire origin story read like a fairytale out of Grimm or the Bible. Many people don’t even realize how many orphan heroes there are in literature, people touched by fate from birth, who somehow rise from their lowly orphan origins to great things. There is such a strong narrative around the orphan, that we are special, chosen, saved, marked by destiny, and loved above all others. Some of it is related to strong religious narratives like Moses floating down the river, and some of it leans more sappy like a Hallmark movie. In any case, I was surrounded in this cultural stew, and I pictured vividly those last moments of separation, cried over it, mourned it, but never, ever questioned it. I know adoptees who have the GPS coordinates of their finding spots tattooed on their skin. It is so integral to our identities, the way a pearl forms around a piece of sand. Everything, everything, everything revolves around the origin story. 

China valued boys.

They didn’t want a girl.

There was a One Child Policy.

My birthmom abandoned me at the finding spot.

They kept another child.

It is so difficult to feel like you are allowed to mourn because of the pressure by society to not appear, look, or even think “ungrateful.” An ungrateful adoptee gets abandoned again. An ungrateful adoptee gets attacked online. An ungrateful adoptee is unloved. And so it is very difficult for many adoptees to mourn what they think they know about their origins, let alone mourn the rest.

The first year of undergraduate college was when I came out of the fog. Coming out of the fog sounds peaceful, like one second you are in a trance and the next, you are not. It is anything but. Imagine your skin being peeled from your body and your insides being flipped inside out, then someone puts everything back together again who never saw a human being. I mourned my birthmother like never before. I felt deeply how unfair it was for both of us, because I finally could see her as a woman and not just a myth. She became real to me as a human who was probably terrified that she was pregnant. It occurred to me that I had siblings who may have known I existed and it occurred to me that my birthmom probably remembered me too. It was and still is unbearable to live knowing that she is out there somewhere and cannot know me. I filled journals and wrote poetry about those final moments we had together. I gave her a name I picked out from some Mandarin I was learning. I had always pictured her as Chang’e, from a book my parents had read to me as a child, and so I printed out a poster of her and put her in my room. It struck me that she was real, too real, and it made every nerve light on fire.

In 2020, the pandemic hit. I did not get to attend my college graduation and I spent the rest of the spring semester with my parents, attending Zoom classes from my bedroom. My chances of visiting China after graduation, finally, were dashed completely. It was with the vibrating restlessness of being in quarantine that I finally decided to watch One Child Nation. About a year earlier, I learned that my orphanage was connected to human trafficking in China, but it was not until watching the movie, many times in fact, that it began to sink in. The Hunan Scandal wasn’t special and it wasn’t just a couple of bad orphanages. The stench of baby buying was everywhere. I was suddenly bombarded online with news articles and interviews about the documentary, all about this sudden “truth” of Chinese adoption. I also read the report, “Open Secret: Cash and Coercion in China's International Adoption Program.” 

We were not abandoned lovingly (and without choice) by our birthmothers, but were simply pawns in a complicated black market fueled by greed. We weren’t the main characters in our own narrative but just merchandise being stolen and bought and sold and moved orphanage to orphanage. There was an unstoppable avalanche of testimony from birthfamilies searching for their children and in reunion: everything from babies/kids being kidnapped by local authorities, to midwives tricking birthmoms into giving up their babies to a nice local family (that never existed) to sell them to the orphanage, to hospitals selling babies in batches to orphanages after telling the birthparents the baby was a stillborn.

And if you thought I was finally happy to be told, “You were not truly abandoned! You were kidnapped, trafficked, and sold!” You would be grossly oversimplifying things. I felt everything at once, but my most immediate feeling was pure anger. Anger over what? you may ask. Anger that I was merchandise in a black market? Anger that my birthmom might be mourning over my empty grave? Anger that I had been lied to and that my parents had been lied to and that the world had been lied to my entire life, about my very life?

No!

I was angry because the world had absolutely no right at all to take away my origin story! I was so incredibly angry that this origin story that I had worshiped and dreamed of, and loved as the very last relic of my birthmom could be thrown out so easily and so swiftly by the world. I was angry that my finding spot, which I had fantasized about, which I shared with all my adopted China Cousins, was meaningless! I was angry that I was expected to simply take in this new, updated, shiny “truth” and swallow it down before I could even fully wrap my heart around the first story. How DARE the world do this to me? How dare the world think it can make me jump and run and change at a moment’s notice? It was as if my entire identity, which I had held so close to my heart: the orphan abandoned by the fruit stand, was blown over by nothing more than the gentlest of breezes. My friends, with their shiny personal statements of being abandoned by their birthmoms, and their artists’ statements of why they painted their finding spot, and me with my piles of poetry — all turned to dust and shit.

There never was a finding spot. They forged these abandonment documents in batches. People had them pre-approved and stamped, all ready to be filled out. Police got paid, orphanages employees got paid, orphanage directors got paid, heritage tour leaders got paid, everyone got a pay day at my expense. My entire heart, laid open and stomped on, because the finding spot was a lie and it never existed in the first place and everyone on that Heritage tour was told to stand at the place where it supposedly was and take a photo in front of nothing but dirt and delusion. How dare this be allowed to happen?

And so I have witnessed a similar divide in the adoption sphere, as if my two halves were represented by the community at large.

Of those who choose to cling to their fairytale and those who embrace the truth. And it has, of course, bled into the Birthparent Search community, because this is where the saltwater and the freshwater mix. Reunification is the ultimate slap of reality, because there are no longer blinders and filters to separate you from the truth. Nowhere to hide, no more tales to read, simply the truth. And that is why, even before starting my birthparent search, I had to have an honest conversation with myself and acknowledge that on some level, I did not want to succeed in finding my birthparents, even though I wanted nothing more in the world. I wanted to try, of course. I wanted to feel like I tried, at least. I wanted to have those picturesque movie scenes. Despite everything I had learned about baby buying and finding fees and human trafficking in China, I still yearned for those moments of pure movie magic and live safely in the little world I had built and that the world had let me build.

A part of me still wants to believe that nothing has changed, even though I would rather be a human trafficking victim than abandoned a thousand times over. I was upset that the narrative had changed without my permission about my own life, yes, but when presented with two doors, I would really rather have been trafficked from the get-go. It is less of a personal rejection to have the story reflect that my birthmom had no choice and might have even been lied to, rather than growing around a toxic story of very direct birthmother rejection. Considering that the truth was unknown, one wonders why the story of abandonment was chosen if not to make international adoptions legal and to prevent adoptees from searching for those who supposedly abandoned them (and thus the truth.)

Still, there was a part of me that yearned for simpler times. The story of my birthparent search would have looked like this in my fairytale world: I do everything right like a good adoptee should. I politely call the very innocent adoption agency and they would politely and honestly tell me information that might make a difference. Then I play by China’s rules. I sign up for a Heritage tour so that I get access to the orphanage and of course all the employees will say they remember me and pull out a magical piece of paper with some truthful information on it that I will somehow not be allowed to photograph. This paper of course, would be unique to me and not be shown to everyone who asks. I get to talk to a foster mom or two and of course, everything would be honest and not censored as they translate for me. Then I get to take photos at my finding spot which must have one day existed, and then I go home, feeling like I tried my best.

My world isn’t changed. My goals of ascending the corporate ladder and living my very American life will remain unchanged. I go to work the next day. I get coffee with my friends. And time marches on. It was a lost cause anyway, right? And besides, now I never have to face more truth, such as maybe meeting two sisters and a younger brother? Or that maybe my birthmother cried and cried for me but a neighbor snitched and got me hauled away to the orphanage for reward money. The truth is that without finding my birthfamily, I never have to face reality and my story can remain under my control, in my own fantasy world. Aren’t I owed a little control over my own identity and destiny?

Unfortunately, the chances of a successful birthfamily reunion is significantly less likely if I go the route of my childhood dreams. While I may successfully be able to live in my safe make-believe world, the rest of the earth continues to rotate. In other words, if the orphanage falsified my abandonment documents and how I came to be at the orphanage, the workers are much less likely to tell me who my birthfamily is, even if one of them actually knows. In other words, if I make decisions based on China being a fairytale land instead of a country with complexities and nuance, I may alert the orphanage director to my intentions to scour the town for my birthfamily, giving him enough time to threaten my birthfamily from seeing me or telling me the truth. 

We don’t want to believe that our fairytale origins of good samaritans, the helpful and kind-hearted police, and the charitable orphanage director are simply that- tales. But seriously searching for your birthparents in what is essentially a crime scene takes unconventional methods. It’s something people need to understand when I tell them about the Wide-Net Search initiative. They think being specific about their finding spot and abandonment date is good for their search, but only if the fairytale is real. Given that for the vast majority of us, the international adoptees, the fairytale is laundering babies into being orphans paper-ready for adoption, being specific about falsehoods is like shooting yourself in the foot. Because your birthmother will see your poster and think your face is familiar and then see the information and it will not match what she knows, and so she will walk away.

What story we choose to believe about ourselves in some ways feels like it should belong to us. It feels like we are owed it to own our own narratives. In some ways, it feels as if the crimes of yesteryear and the weight of all the hurt and pain should be paid in letting us paint whatever story we want to cover up the gaping black void we have in our personal histories. And that’s fair. But every time I want to just fall back asleep and snuggle back into my fairytale, every time I want to feel like my feet are on the ground and the sky is the right way up again, I think of the birthparents who are searching for their children. I think of the stories I’ve heard and the pain that never subsides for them. I think how unfair it is that I can simply sink into delusion while they remember the details of the truth that so few people know. It feels like I am erasing their pain to ease my own, as if I need to deny their existence and experience to bring myself comfort. How insulting it must be that I have grown around a sacred finding spot and holy fable of abandonment, while my birthmother suffered the truth.

So in writing this, I just wanted people to know that things are very complicated, that searching is not simply “searching.” It is a Pandora’s box that threatens to once again make the world invert itself until the earth’s molten core is under our bare feet. How can I lead my life without making some peace with who I am? And how can I be comfortable in who I am if I’m having to change fundamental truths of who I thought I was every decade? When will this rollercoaster end? And that is just a very, very small snippet of what some adoptees might possibly feel.