As early as I can remember, I wished I hadn’t been Chinese.
I hated my unruly black hair and my eyes, which marked me as a foreigner in the Netherlands, where I grew up. I went to bed at night hoping I’d wake up with blond hair and blue eyes like the other Dutch kids. Sometimes I tricked myself into believing this had happened — until a mirror reminded me where I came from.
I was adopted from China as a toddler in 1993 by white Dutch parents who couldn’t conceive on their own. I grew up in a deeply Christian small town where, every week, dozens of people — all of them white — paraded past our house in their Sunday best on the way to church. It was about as far as you could get — physically, culturally, ethnically — from China.
I don’t blame my adoptive parents for the sense of alienation I grew up with. They did their best to give me a happy childhood, and I love them very much. But when China confirmed earlier this month that it would end most adoptions by foreign parents, a wave of relief washed over me, followed by suppressed anger.
The number of Chinese children placed with overseas families since China opened up to international adoptions in the early 1990s has been estimated at more than 160,000. Around half of these kids went to the United States. The topic is usually discussed from the adoptive parents’ perspective: How it allowed them to start families, how they rescued these orphans and now how the sudden ban leaves applicant couples in the lurch.
Far less attention is given to the darker side of these placements and their impact on adoptees.
China’s strict one-child family planning policy, introduced in 1979, forced many Chinese parents to give up babies. These were usually girls, because of a traditional preference for male heirs. A profit-motivated overseas adoption industry cropped up in response, in which human lives were sometimes bought and sold.
For many like me — plucked from our home cultures and raised in countries where we didn’t quite fit in — the search for who we are and where we belong has been lifelong and full of discovery, as well as confusion, regret and loss.
I was one of the first nonwhite kids at my primary school in Alblasserdam, a tidy little Dutch town. Some classmates would kick my bike, trying to break it, because, as one boy put it, “a filthy Chinese does not deserve this.” The ubiquitous, indispensable bicycle is a symbol of the Dutch nation, and to them, I wasn’t Dutch enough for one. I heard adults say “slant eye” and saw them use their fingers to pull up the corners of their eyes.
Even in my extended family, I sometimes felt like an intruder. When my parents told their relatives they were bringing a nonwhite baby into the family, not everyone was supportive. After my cousin was born, my grandparents’ house soon filled with photos of her. There were just a couple of pictures of me. I didn’t mind so much; I was just jealous that my cousin looked like everyone else. I resembled nobody.
As I got older, I connected with the rare Asian characters in movies or television who weren’t the stereotypical massage parlor worker or socially awkward math geek. My hero was the brilliant, sassy Dr. Cristina Yang in “Grey’s Anatomy,” played by Sandra Oh. I didn’t know it then, but researchers have a word for what I was going through: “reculturation,” the process of developing one’s identity and navigating between birth and adoptive cultures.
I grew up feeling a part of me had never left China, and I longed to reconnect. One day in the third grade, each student had to make a family tree. I wrote my name in the center with lines radiating out, ending in question marks. I went home in tears and pleaded with my parents to take me to China.
They took out a second mortgage on our house to afford the trip, and in 2003, at 12 years old, I was back on my native soil. To suddenly find yourself among your own kind has a powerful effect; I finally felt the sense of belonging that I had sought for so long. Now it was my parents who stood out. Strangers would stare at the two white people accompanying a Chinese child. I loved the food in China, bursting with intense flavors lacking in bland Dutch cuisine. The first sentence I learned in Mandarin was to tell restaurant workers, “Bu yao lajiao” (no hot chili peppers). I vowed to learn Chinese and go back, eventually returning in 2019 to work as a journalist.
My reporting in China further opened my eyes to the realities of adoptions.
As the one-child policy caused orphanages to fill up, babies became a commodity. Local officials in China sometimes seized infants from their parents and sold them. The industry began prioritizing parents overseas, who could afford to pay a mandatory “donation” that could exceed $5,000, which was out of reach for many Chinese couples. Some Western adoption agencies in turn played the white-savior card, implying that Chinese adoptive parents would not truly love a child who was not their flesh and blood.
In reality, even before China began international adoptions, Chinese parents had adopted millions of babies. But stringent new qualification requirements for Chinese parents were introduced in 1991. Overseas adoptions peaked in the early 2000s and went into steady decline as China’s economy boomed, the government provided more funding for orphans and finally announced in 2015 that it was dropping the one-child policy.
Many adopted Chinese, now adults, are seeking to trace their roots. This can be an emotional roller coaster.
Last year I accompanied a friend, Paula Vrolijk, who was adopted by Dutch parents in 2000, as she traveled to her hometown in rural China in search of her biological relatives. She found them and also discovered she had an identical twin who was kept and raised by the family. When the girls were born, their grandmother had wanted a boy, and back then, couples could have a second child if the firstborn was a girl. But since they were twins, one of the girls first had to be given up. The family later searched for Paula for years, not knowing she was on the other side of the world.
My search for my birth parents took me last year to Guiyang, a city in southwestern China, where I viewed my adoption file. It said a woman — possibly my mother — had asked two strangers in the city to hold me while she went to the restroom. She never returned. A note was found on me saying: “The baby is healthy. I hope she lives a long time.” My search goes on, but I’m realistic about my chances.
On Sept. 5, at the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s daily press briefing, conflicting emotions swirled inside me as I nervously raised my hand to ask a government spokeswoman about reports, then still unconfirmed, that international adoptions would be stopped. When she announced that what had essentially become a legalized form of child trafficking was indeed now over, it felt cathartic.
But any relief I feel is tempered by knowing that China’s government will probably never fully acknowledge the system’s abuses. I’m still angry — at the fraught legacy of the adoptions, at the enduring focus on prospective parents’ feelings instead of the children’s and when people imply that I should be grateful for having been adopted.
The end of China’s adoptions era and my reconnection with my birth country has brought some closure. I know I might never be fully accepted as either Dutch or Chinese, but I’ve learned to be proud of my dual identity. It’s who I am.
And I’m no longer angry at the mirror.
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