I’ve officially begun my birth search as of this month! The agency I was adopted through is processing all of my documents between China, USA, my parents, and preparing to FedEx them to my apartment in New York within the month. After going through files as adults, sometimes adoptees report finding new information that was withheld by the agency during the adoption process, likely considered nonessential to the case but essential to a birth search. Things like notes or letters pinned to babies during abandonment with our original Chinese names could be included within the official papers that were not sent to to adoptive parents during the original paper transactions.
1999-2000
Wondering about my life before adoption means considering things like the likelihood of my at home birth and the suppression of my first cries of life as not to alarm the ears of lawfully reporting citizens and neighbors. I imagine the grief of my biological mother as the days and trimesters passed as I grew into a baby that would soon be forced to be an orphan. The Nanning Social Welfare Institute aunties tended to us as we cried our songs of the motherless, wet, ate, and bathed in harmony and disharmony.
After some months (idk how many), I was fostered to a local Nanning woman who lived with her brother and five year old daughter. I hear she was devastated when she saw me for the last time. My adopted mom tells me she cried so hard at my leaving that it made her uncomfortable, my adopted dad doesn’t remember much. That is all I really knew about her until November when I came across pictures of us, my foster mother and her mother, in some piles of my adoption papers my mom keeps in a chest in her room. I looked so happy in them. I’d never seen myself like that as a child, surrounded by loving Chinese women. I couldn’t stop weeping. I don’t even know her name. My mom says her message was to tell me, “her first mother was Chinese.”
Between here, there, however many months, I was matched with my parents by an adoption agency out of Oregon, measured, tested, documented, processed, and then adopted from China by the time I was one and a half years old. Nationalized in California, we took the cross country flight to West by God Virginia, where I would be raised for the next seventeen and a half years.
2025-ongoing
As I’m awaiting my adoption documents, I applied to a nonprofit called Nanchang Project that is selecting 2-3 adoptees from Guangxi and taking them back to the original villages in hopes of finding birth families. I found Nanchang Project through a grief writing meetup for asian adoptees ran by Also Known As, Inc. This process is incredibly emotional in a way that is foreign from the adversities I’ve learned to navigate over the past quarter century. Something inherently reacts, a swell of something I can’t yet identify. It’s not the piercing of abandonment or the long dull ache of unmet childhood needs. It’s the dark ocean slowly climbing and inevitably coming to destroy me and all that seemingly exists while I watch from an empty house, or was that a dream?
Looking at my first pictures, doe eyed and sniffling, dressed in auspicious red, and held up by a foreign hand, I can’t help to feel sorry for that little girl and all of the children like her. My hardships in the US seem nothing compared to the messages I’ve grown up subliminally believing, the guarantee that my life here is exponentially better than it would have been in China. But when I think of the grief of that foster mother upon my being taken away, I wonder about the love of her’s I could’ve kept.
My wish is that I can one day find her and tell her that I went all the way across the world, that I only found about her at the end of 2024 and have been searching for her since. I want her to know I’m safe, healthy, and loved, and that I wouldn’t be where I am without her, even if she only had me for a few months, weeks, or days. And same to my birth mother, faceless for now but loved nonetheless.