my adoption story

Written By Kristen Nelson

A few notes:

There is a geopolitical situation between the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China) and the Republic of China (Taiwan). The ROC controlled mainland China from 1912-1949, at which point the PRC won the Civil War and the ROC moved its capital to Taiwan. For the purposes of my story, whenever “China” is written, I am referring to Mainland China unless stated otherwise. For more information on this, search "Two Chinas."

This post only expresses my opinions, my perspective, and my story. All adoption stories are unique and I do not claim to know, nor represent, any stories besides my own. Whenever you see “mom” written, I am referring to my adoptive mom and not my birth mother.

When people ask me for a fun fact about myself, I tell them that I don’t know my real birthday. It’s fun to say because people stare at me, really confused, thinking, “how can she not know her own birthday?” I once put that fact on a dating app profile and added “drinks on me for anyone that guesses why.” I got some pretty entertaining answers, ranging from answers as creative as “you were born on a boat right as it was crossing over the International Date Line” to answers as probable as “your parents lost your birth certificate.” But the real reason is that I am a product of the One Child Policy.


The One Child Policy existed from 1979/1980 to 2015 and applied to people that were Han Chinese (the majority ethnic group in China) living in Mainland China, also known as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The policy restricted most* families to only having one child and was created to help control China’s increasing population due to fears that there wouldn’t be enough resources for everyone in the future. As a result, lots of babies (especially girls) were abandoned, adopted, killed, or made invisible to society.

The policy did not apply to those living in Hong Kong and Macau, both of which are special administrative regions (SAR) that are ruled by the PRC. For Han Chinese families living in the PRC, there were also exceptions made for certain families to have two children. These exceptions included families where the father was a disabled serviceman, families whose first child had a physical disability and/or mental illness, and some families who lived in rural areas. For families that were allowed to have two kids, they were subject to birth spacing, meaning the births had to be spaced out by a few years (usually at least five).

The One Child Policy tore so many families apart but it also brought a lot of new families together, including my family. How can I appreciate what that policy ultimately gave me while acknowledging and honoring all the pain and suffering it has caused the world? How can something create light and darkness at the same time?

first day meeting each other

In February of 1994 when I was a newborn, a police officer found me abandoned outside their station and took me to an orphanage nearby. There were no records of my birth, so the orphanage assigned a name to me and a birthday based on my height and weight. In December, at the age of 11-months-old, I was adopted by an American woman and have lived in the United States ever since.


As a kid, I wasn’t aware of the dark reality of the One Child Policy. I spent most of my Labor Day weekends as a kid attending Chinese Heritage Camp, a camp for adoptees and their adoptive families to connect over shared backgrounds and learn about the Chinese heritage. I remember each year during the Closing Ceremony of the camp, we’d sing the Adoption Day song by John McCutcheon: “Oh who would have guessed…All these roads we have traveled…would have finally taken us home…For out of a world so tattered and torn, you came to our house on that wonderful morn. And all of a sudden this family was born. Oh Happy Adoption Day!”


Growing up, I never dwelled too much on “a world so tattered and torn” because I was so focused on the “family was born.” All I felt was gratitude. I was grateful that my mom took the leap of faith to adopt me*, thus giving me an incredible world and life. And I was grateful that my birth parents took actions that I assume were meant to protect me. Police stations are busy places, with lots of people coming and going, so I appreciate that they left me where I would be found quickly.

first photo of me

The adoption process took about 9 months to complete. Some adoptions happen sooner, some happen later; there was no telling when a baby would be available. All my mom could do was go through the very expensive and time consuming process and wait. In November of 1994, my mom got a call and the person on the other end of the line said “you have a daughter.” A week later she received a photo of me for the first time. Seventeen days after that she was on a plane headed to China with my aunt. The following day the adoption papers were signed and two days later, in early December, my mom was allowed to take me home. Less than a month after receiving a call saying there was a baby girl for her, she came home with one in her arms. If that isn’t a leap of faith, I don’t know what is. And I love her very much for it.

Of course, I was always curious why my birth family abandoned me, but I was okay not knowing. I guessed that it was because either I was the first child and given up because I was a girl and not a boy, or I was the second child and given up because I was the second. But I didn’t need to know the real answer. I was curious, but I was okay, and I’m extremely thankful for that because I know that not every adoptee feels that way.

my mom and I at Chinese Heritage Camp

When I was growing up, adoptive parents were encouraged to instill positive images of China in their kids, which no doubt contributed to my focus on the “family was born” part of the song. It’s one of the reasons why I went to Chinese Heritage Camp: so that I could learn about the good parts of my heritage such as the songs, the beautiful calligraphy, the food, and the dragon dances. In my opinion, the main goal wasn’t to make the Chinese government look good and hide the dark parts. The main goal was to help me develop a positive identity and embrace China and my heritage with pride rather than rejecting it with shame. The goal was to make an abandoned baby feel wanted and loved.


At the age of 10, I visited China on a two week trip with my mom and aunt. We did a mixture of sight-seeing (such as the Great Wall, Guilin river cruise, and shopping in the Beijing silk markets ), cultural visits (historic landmarks and parks, and visiting homes and schools), and also visited the city I was from. The travel agency that crafted the trip made a deliberate effort to create a positive experience, which is why we did a lot of sight-seeing and visited beautiful parks.


Visiting the city I was from felt like I was getting a glimpse at what my life would have been like had the One Child Policy not existed and had I not been adopted. We visited the place I was found and the orphanage I lived in. I don’t remember much from either part of the trip but I remember it being an out-of-body experience. After spending my childhood in the United States, China felt foreign to me despite being my birth country. But even though my hair color and eye shape was similar to the locals, I didn't feel or look like a local, and I think they could tell it too.


Years later, most of the memories I have from that trip are from the photos we took. Last Thanksgiving, I looked back at the photos from my trip and tried to find instances where the presence of the One Child Policy was felt. At the very least, I tried to look for propaganda signs advertising the advantages of having only one child because back then, there was propaganda everywhere. But I couldn’t find anything in the photos. The only presence of the policy I could see was myself.


The dark history of the One Child Policy isn’t kid-friendly. It’s not a bedtime story you tell your kids when they’re young. As a kid, if you’re not told there’s bad out there then you assume bad doesn’t exist, at least that was the case for me. So throughout my youth, I didn’t wonder if there was more to China’s policy than what I was being told. No one told me and I never asked. So I grew up without learning about the darkness that existed. But I’m glad I didn’t know about it then because my self-esteem back then was already somewhat shaky.


My perspective on the One Child Policy was drastically altered this past fall. The older I got, the more questions I had, and the more my curiosity grew. So I challenged myself to learn more about the policy and China as a whole. I spent hours digging through online articles and with every article I read, my rose-colored glasses cracked further. I couldn’t believe how many families the One Child Policy tore apart, how many children were killed because of it, and how many people the policy physically and psychologically scarred for life.


Things really sunk in when I watched the documentary "One Child Nation" by directors Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang. I first came across this documentary during the research I did last fall. It felt like fate, because the documentary was being released on Amazon Prime that very Friday after I had learned of its existence. Watching it both confirmed what I had read and provided more details. I knew that a second child was illegal and the depths to which the government enforced this were drastic and cruel. But it didn’t fully sink in until I saw the documentary. I didn’t comprehend it on an emotional level until the images and interviews were in front of my face.


Some families were forced to give up their baby before it was even born, by way of forced sterilizations and forced abortions even at 8-9 months pregnant (full pregnancy is 9-10 months). “In 2012, 6.7 million women in China were forced to have abortions under the one-child policy, according to official statistics” (Washington Post, 2015). People who resisted these processes faced harsh penalties. And the people enforcing it all? Locals in each town/village deemed family planning officials, assigned to enforce the PRC’s rules on their own neighbors.


In other cases, the second child wasn’t given up, but families were forced to pay a hefty fine known as a “social maintenance fee” in order to register the child within the household. Upon being registered, the child would receive a hukou which is essentially like an American social security card and gives them access to basic rights. The amount of the fee varied based on the family’s location and level of income, usually increasing with income. In one example, a family in Shanghai was required to pay 110,000 yuan ($17,300 at the time of the article) whereas a family in a rural area was required to pay 40,000 yuan ($6,300); but this was still about 10 times their monthly income. He Yafu, a demographer, “estimates the government has collected over 2 trillion yuan ($314 billion) in such fees since 1980" (Economist, 2012).


But not everyone paid. Not everyone could. “The rules say that officials cannot deny such children their official resident permits and other papers, but in practice, officials deny them as a way of punishing families, or families avoid applying for the permits out of fear of being fined” (New York Times, 2015). Without this card, these children didn’t have access to education, health care, etc. They essentially didn’t exist in society and were known as the Heihaizi (means “black child”). “A government researcher, Wan Haiyuan, estimated that at least 6.5 million Chinese had no official status because they were born outside the family planning rules” (New York Times, 2015).


For families that adhered to the one policy rule, they received an award each year for doing so. But what if the first child was a girl and they wanted a boy? Or what if they had a second child but didn’t mean to? I suspect my birth parents fall into one of these categories, but this is only speculation.


Men were desired. They were strong, they carried on the family name (a woman always married into a man’s family), and they were expected to support their parents in old age (there was no social security system). It was a patriarchy and when you can only have one child in the family, only one chance at making sure your family will be supported, it’s understandable why so many baby girls were abandoned at bus stations, alongside roads, at meat markets, police stations, and so on, in the hopes of someone finding them and taking them to an orphanage.


But despite all the deaths, abandonments, and continual sacrifices made by families, not all Chinese were opposed to the One Child Policy. Some of the population understood the need and wanted to help curb the booming population so that resources wouldn’t run out. Others understood that policy was policy and they had no choice. In the documentary, people describe it as putting “national policies above personal feelings” and described it as helping fight “a population war.”


The documentary was so eye-opening and striking, but the thing that was most surprising to me was learning about the role of human traffickers. I had assumed all babies that ended up in orphanages were once abandoned in a place where they would be found, then taken to an orphanage. But watching the documentary showed me that there was another alternative: paying a human trafficker to take the baby and deliver it to an orphanage in another province. The baby would be put up for international adoption and sometimes the orphanages would make up a story about how and where the child was found (rather than mentioning the trafficker) and tell that story to the adoptive parents.


Learning about this sent my gears turning. What if my origin story the orphanage had told me wasn’t true at all (the police station, the founding date, etc.)? What if I was from a different province in China, or found in a different month, or all of the above? What makes this even more interesting is that I took a DNA test earlier this year and it said that my strongest trace of ancestry wasn't from the province that the orphanage was in (that area was listed second). What if I was born in a different province and brought by a human trafficker to where the orphanage was and then the orphanage made up the story about the police station? Where was I really when my life first began?


I didn’t need to know the truth about my origins, and I'd like to believe that what the orphanage told us is true . But it was fascinating to speculate about all the “what if’s" and it’s very bizarre to think about the start of my life being a complete blank to everyone I know, as if those days never existed at all. What’s even crazier is that China didn’t start international adoptions until 1992, only two years before I was adopted. If there was ever a time when luck was on my side, it was those first few weeks.


For roughly 35 years, the “One Child Policy” and “People’s Republic of China” were synonymous with one another. To think of one, you thought of the other. But then in October of 2015, the government announced plans to alter their response to this “population war.” Now fearing that there would not be enough young to take care of the old, not enough young people to work, and not enough women to marry all the men, all families were now allowed to have two children beginning on January 1, 2016.


According to an article from the New York Times in 2018, in some provinces there are now incentives to have another kid, such as tax breaks and housing and education subsidies. And in some provinces there are also restrictions such as less access to abortion and rules making it harder to divorce. What was once restricting people from having to many kids, now (at times) restricted people from having too few. By the time the policy ended, “There were 33.59 million more men than women in China in 2016, according to figures from the country’s National Bureau of Statistics that were issued last month” (New York Times, 2017). By 2015, several sources suggest that around 400 million births were prevented, but this number is contested.


People have asked me if, given the chance, would I want to find my birth parents. The answer is always yes, but not because I feel there's a hole I need to fill. I’d love to just talk to them and get to know them; to understand what happened when I was born (my real birthdate, the reason they gave me up, etc.) and to find out my medical history. But the financial cost of doing such a thing is high and the probability of finding them is low, so I don’t know if I will ever look for them. But I’m okay with that. I choose to believe that they loved me and that giving me up was a hard but necessary decision they had to make. And even though I couldn’t ask them for confirmation, I asked Nanfu Wang, director of One Child Nation, when she came for a Q&A in Los Angeles in December (incidentally just a few days before my Adoption Day).


For her film, Nanfu had interviewed birth parents in China who had to give up a child. Some of these people were even her relatives. As I listened to her talk, I realized that she was as close to the source (birth parents) as I may ever get, and I suddenly found myself raising my hand to ask a question. I asked her how parents reacted to giving up their child and if any parents wouldn't be sad to give up their child. She replied with something akin to, “I think all parents would be sad to give up their kid.” Hearing her say that brought tears to my eyes. I think I had known the answer to my question already (it felt pretty obvious), but somehow hearing it from her made my assumption about my birth parents feel less like an assumption and more like the truth. It felt like the closure to my research and the start of closure to something bigger.


I still feel conflicted about the One Child Policy and that feeling may never go away, but I’ve never felt conflicted about adoption. Adoption was, in my opinion, the best thing to come out of that policy. Being adopted created a home, a family, a new beginning, and a future for me. I may not know my origin story, but I do know my adoption story. To me, that matters more.

Kristen Nelson
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