China’s one-child policy was implemented in 1980, restricting families to one child per couple in an effort to curb the country’s population growth rate.
Until it officially ended on Jan. 1, 2016, this policy was enforced at the provincial level through a variety of measures, including contraception, fines, sanctions, intimidation and coercion, and abortion and sterilization — consensual or otherwise. Additionally, if parents did not comply with the policy, additional children were prevented from being registered in the national household system, excluding them from legal documentation and social services.
Throughout China’s history, families have privileged male children due to cultural and social conventions and expectations. These traditions included sons inheriting their family name and property, and providing for their aging parents, whereas daughters were expected to leave their family homes upon marriage. This was further exacerbated during the 1980s when birth planning restrictions were on the rise and the growing retiree population strained collective welfare.
In 1991, the central Chinese government issued the Adoption Law of the People’s Republic of China. This law raised penalties on households that had an “unauthorized” child, including Chinese children adopted by Chinese families who went unreported in census and surveys. China subsequently opened the country to international adoption. Up until this time, adoptive parents in China were not penalized for violating the birth quota.
After this loophole closed, abandonment peaked and resulted in around 2 million Chinese children — primarily girls — whose biological families deserted them.
According to the U.S. Department of State, American parents adopted 78,257 children from China between 1999 and 2016. More than 60% of adoptees were girls, according to the Pew Research Center.
I was one of them.
In 1996, an American couple from Boston longing for a child adopted me. The orphanage told them I was abandoned outside a post office in Wuhan, less than 48 hours after I was born.
My childhood was a happy one, full of dance classes, birthday parties and making my mom play Barbies with me. I lived in Boston’s West End neighborhood, sandwiched between the Charles River and the city’s historic Beacon Hill.
The majority of parents who adopt children internationally were like mine: white, wealthy and over the age of 35. Many Chinese adoptees are raised in communities drastically different from those they would have experienced with their biological families.
Though Boston was considerably diverse by that time, I was among just a handful of Asian students in my first elementary school and the only one in my grade.
My parents did their best to explain adoption and what it meant for our family. By the time I learned to talk, I already knew key phrases like “birth family” and “adoption agency,” and could recite the city and province where I was born (but of which I had no memory).
I had stacks of picture books on the topics, owned movies like “Big Bird Goes to China” and even attended Chinese culture class for a year, where I sang songs and played games with a class full of other Chinese American adoptees.
When my parents and I were out in public together, we’d be subjected to stares of curiosity, confusion and sometimes downright hostility.
When I transferred to a public school located in close proximity to Boston’s Chinatown, many of my classmates were children of Chinese immigrants and lived in lower-income households. Many of them spoke English as a second language or spoke exclusively Mandarin or Cantonese at home. We had trouble understanding each others’ lived experiences. As children, we did not have the sophisticated communication skills and social awareness to bridge the numerous gaps.
Because of this divide, I struggled to connect and find community with my fellow Chinese American classmates. Instead, I gravitated toward other children with whom I shared a similar background and life experiences. Many of my childhood friends were from white, upper-middle-class families like mine.
As I continued to grow up, I was rarely in a social or professional situation where most of the other people were also Asian. I felt isolated and untethered wherever I went, estranged from my own identity, with no blueprint to follow.
This experience is by no means unique for Chinese American adoptees. Because of the disconnect between Chinese adoptees, their American families and the wider Chinese American community, it is difficult for many of us to engage with and embrace the culture we left behind as young children.
No connection to the past
Many of us will never find our biological families. Because child abandonment is illegal in China and subject to strict criminal punishment, no documentation connects parents to abandoned babies.
Meanwhile, many children were abducted and trafficked rather than abandoned. Domestic adoption was prohibitively expensive for average Chinese families, while international adoption was lucrative, and this created a market for kidnappers to bring babies to orphanages.
Fabricated “finding ads” in newspapers that included false information about children in orphanages further obfuscates the process if adoptees or their biological families are searching for one another.
As adoptees, our pasts prior to being adopted are utterly obscured. In most cases, we do not speak our birth country’s language, practice its customs or celebrate its holidays. We do not have family or members within our community to help us understand expectations, familial roles and personal history across generations.
But one thing we do share — with each other and with other members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community — is the effects of racism.
I was born in the same city where COVID-19 originated. The first time I saw Wuhan covered by American media was when news of the emerging pandemic reached the U.S. This was my first connection to my birth city since I was taken from it, not knowing whether my biological family still lived there or if the virus had killed them. All around me, discussions of “wet markets,” tropes and stereotypes of Chinese people eating bats and dogs, and other unfounded speculations ran rampant.
There was also a rise in negative attention toward Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. According to Stop AAPI Hate, one in five respondents to a survey conducted from mid-March 2020 through September 2021 reported experiencing a “hate act,” including harassment, shunning and physical assault.
Additionally, the way that former President Donald Trump referred to COVID-19, using terms like “Chinese virus,” ”Wuhan virus” and “kung flu,” stigmatized Asian Americans, experts say.
Just because we are adoptees does not mean we are exempt from the harm of these events. People who commit violent acts, use inflammatory rhetoric and exclude us from their communities do not see the difference, either.
I have done — and continue to do — comprehensive exploration of myself, my fellow Chinese adoptees and the AAPI communities as a whole. I now understand concepts like generational trauma, internalized racism and institutional oppression. While this journey will be a lifelong one, being a part of these communities is one of my greatest joys; I have finally learned how to be “Asian enough,” without shame and with great honor.
Chinese American adoptees are just one facet of the AAPI community, with tens of thousands of individual stories among us. Each and every one is worth telling.
Lian Parsons–Thomason is a Boston-based writer and journalist. She has served as New England chapter president for the Asian American Journalists Association since 2022. Her bylines can be found in Boston Art Review, the Harvard Gazette, Technical.ly Media, iPondr and more. She currently works at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education as a digital content producer.