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A girl is found on a street in Ma’Anshan, China, in May 1993. Her paternal grandfather, the story goes, set her down and walked away. No explanation. It’s unclear how long she’s been outside when somebody arrives and takes her to the orphanage.
A white woman adopts the girl and brings her to America in August 1994. She gives her an English name.
In spring 2010, when Youxue (her Chinese name) was a high school sophomore in Dallas, Texas, she decided to start searching for her birth parents. She knew it wouldn’t be easy. Given the international nature of her adoption and the under-the-table circumstances in which most Chinese children were relinquished, there was a strong likelihood she would never find them. But her adoptive mother was supportive and found a “searcher” through Yahoo groups, one of the first forums where adoptees connected online. In China, the searcher plastered posters of Youxue and her information in high-traffic areas of Ma’Anshan, in Anhui Province, and went to the police station that was listed in Youxue’s certification of abandonment. There, the searcher was able to access records and find a short note that Youxue had apparently been left with.
In September, several families came forward. One of them seemed like a potential match. They had an older daughter and a younger son. Looking at photographs, Youxue thought she could see a resemblance. For the maternity DNA test, she sent off a cotton swab with buccal cells from the inside of her cheek, along with a few strands of hair.
In November, she received a text from her adoptive mother that the DNA results had come back positive. There was a match! She wanted to tell all her friends and family; she felt whole. She started taking Mandarin lessons and texting with her birth parents. They said they loved each other and couldn’t wait to meet.
But when she was on spring break in 2011, Youxue’s birth father told her that her birthday was September 11, 1994. This was impossible. Youxue had already been adopted by then. Thinking it was a mistake, Youxue replied, but he insisted: Mother knows birth date.
After checking with the DNA company, Youxue found out they had emailed her someone else’s results. This was not her biological family. Devastated, Youxue deleted all of her messages with the family and all of her photographs of them. She knew she would regret it, and that they could even be useful for another adoptee, but she couldn’t bear to hold onto them anymore. To want something is to expose yourself to pain, and choosing to search means opening yourself to heartbreak.
Meanwhile, in a small village in China’s Anhui Province, a mother asked her adult daughter and teenage son to help her search for her two relinquished daughters. She had long wanted to look for them, but she spoke only her local dialect and had little access to technology. With no formal education, she didn’t know where to begin, and nobody was sure how to help.
Decades earlier, the conditions that shaped this family’s life were set in motion by China’s one-child policy. The government’s population control program, enacted in the late 1970s, turned family planning into state-mandated decisions about which children were allowed to exist. In the ’80s, rural parents were allowed to have a second child only if the first was a daughter. Families who violated the policy received large fines and other penalties, sometimes sterilization and physical violence.
Today, there are more than 82,000 Chinese adoptees in the United States, most adopted between 1999 and 2016. More than 60 percent of the children adopted in that period were girls. The majority of adoptive parents are white, wealthy, and well educated. Because child abandonment is illegal in China, very little documentation connects Chinese adoptees with their birth families.
In the summer of 2011, only a few months after the false match, Youxue and her adoptive mother traveled to China to try searching again. Through a friend who had been adopted from the same orphanage and was now reunited with his birth family, they found another searcher who, along with a local radio personality, had helped make a successful reunion in the past. With access to police records and the short note the first searcher found, they finally had more context to move forward.
In Ma’Anshan, Youxue did newspaper interviews, online news interviews, and even a television interview that ran on all the local buses. She was searching for families that had relinquished a daughter between August 1993 and January 3, 1994, because her orphanage documents stated she was likely born around that time. She did blood tests. That summer, one family matched everything. Both parents had her blood type. They even knew what was on the note left with the baby; they said they had written that note years earlier in a moment of desperation.
