I was adopted from Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China on June 17, 1997. I was three years old at the time and unable to anticipate what dramatic life changes were in store for me. For the last 27 years, adoption has impacted so many facets of my life – many of them out of my control, and some of them within. Through what I chose to study in college, who I sought out for friendship, what I choose to nourish my body with, how comfortable (or uncomfortable) I feel in certain Asian American spaces, and what I continue to pursue academically and professionally, adoption is a core part of me. It’s something I think about everyday – some days more than others – and especially a lot recently.

I was standing in my bathroom on September 04, 2024, aimlessly scrolling on my phone while brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed, when I stumbled upon the Nanchang Project’s Instagram post announcing the end of China’s international adoption program. They were the first organization to break the news publicly, and I was initially unable to find any other news sources that had reported on the topic. My first reaction was one of denial and disbelief mixed with some skeptical optimism that the news might be true.

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A post shared by 南昌项目 (The Nanchang Project) (@nanchangproject)

The next morning when I woke up, several other adoptees and adoptive parents had shared the letters that were sent by the State Department to adoption agencies and to waiting families regarding China’s decision to close its doors to international adoption. Once I finally allowed myself to believe the news, like many Chinese adoptees have expressed, a myriad of emotions washed over me. Among the adoptees who responded to the Nanchang Project’s blog prompt about the end of Chinese international adoption, the primary feelings seem to be a sense of relief that others won’t have to experience international adoption, and instead, will have the opportunity to be raised in their culture and home country, as well as a heightened sense of concern about what will happen to our birth and adoption records in China. Other feelings adoptees have relayed are empathy for the families who were in the middle of the adoption process when this news suddenly came out, genuine concern about whether social services will be strengthened in China for children and people with disabilities (who were the primary recipients of the Chinese international adoption program in more recent years), confusion that something that has been so impactful in our lives can simply be “over” on a policy level when it can never truly be “over” for us, and a fear that, with no new members, our community may become even more marginalized. I have also heard from some Chinese adoptees who wanted to adopt from China in the future, so for them, there’s a sadness that this is no longer a possibility.

In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Grace Gerloff, a Chinese adoptee and PhD student in anthropology, highlighted the concerns about what the end of Chinese international adoption means for “future access to our birth records — if there are any to be found — or any of our documents.” I’m not convinced that our records would have been safer or suddenly made more accurate if Chinese international adoption continued. Orphanages close down or change leadership, which are times that files can and do get shuffled. In my case, the social welfare institute that I was adopted from still exists, but the building I lived in for over a year was demolished and moved to a new site in 2015. Because of the One Child Policy and the fact that most of us were relinquished anonymously, Chinese adoptees, for the most part, do not have any birth records held by orphanages, and the records that do exist are likely sparse with few meaningful details and often contain fraudulent and fabricated information.

If this is the case, why are these records so important to Chinese adoptees? More than just the documents themselves, they are the very first pieces of information about us and represent a lifeline to finding out who we were and who we could have become. These documents are relics of our individual and collective existence in China. Katie Naftzger, a Korean adoptee a psychotherapist in the Boston area, argues in her book that one of the most challenging parts of adoption is that we have “no words, no witnesses, no documentation,” which is a phrase that has stuck with me. While we may not have much documentation of our pre-adoptive lives, through documentary films, memoirs, and blogs like this one, adoptees are creating forms of documentation that serve as collective memory, proof of our being, and public acknowledgement of what happened to us. With the closing of China’s international adoption program, there is a fear that our records may disappear or “get lost in a fire or other natural disaster” (a not uncommon phrase when adoptees search) as China attempts to forget about this time period and forget about us, which would be a second rejection from a country many of us have held in our hearts. As China has done with other events in its history, I hope that the horrors of the One Child Policy and all of its aftermath will not be swept under the rug, and that we, adoptees, will not be relegated to a brief footnote in history, if present at all.

For me, the word random has felt particularly meaningful in the midst of all of this. So many aspects of adoption are random. Throughout my life, I’ve marveled countless times that simply because of different decisions by social workers here in the U.S. or by officials in China, I could have been placed with any number of families who adopted in 1996 or 1997. An even stranger realization is that I could have been sent anywhere across the globe and could have become Swedish or Spanish or Australian. Now with the closing of China’s international adoption program, I can’t help but think how random it is that I happened to have been born in this tiny blip of time, given the vastness of China’s thousands of years of history, where the country chose to send its children abroad for adoption – intersected with an even smaller amount of time where predominantly healthy girls were sent away. Adoptees know intimately what it means for our entire lives to be dictated by political whims, climates, and mistakes.

A question that I have grappled with throughout my participation at adoptee conferences and spaces is more than just recognizing and responding to the inherent traumas in adoption, how do we instill pride in a community that wants to become extinct? What does joy and what does liberation look like for such a community? Of course, this doesn’t describe every adoptee’s perspective, but as stated by Hannah Johns, a Chinese adoptee and social worker in New York, “the blunt reality is that there will be fewer families in existence like mine. And none will likely be created the way mine was ever again.” The news of China ending their international adoption program creates a sense of finality to the idea that we, Chinese adoptees, will go extinct. As families that are created through international adoption become rarer, they should absolutely be accepted and de-stigmatized as a less legitimate type of family; however I don’t believe that adoption should be normalized in the ways it has been again.

I agree with JaeRan Kim’s statement in her Lab Notes 21 that China closing its international adoption program represents “the end of transnational adoption as we know it.” After Korea, China has sent the second largest number of children abroad for international adoption. And since the opening of its program, China has been the largest exporter of children across the world in the last 30 years. With international adoption out of Korea at just a trickle now, the practice banned for citizens in a few European countries, and the end of adoptions from China, I don’t think that international adoption will be as widespread and systematically practiced again. And that’s a good thing.

I know that this news hit especially hard for many who hoped to expand their families through adoption, including some Chinese adoptees who assumed they, too, would adopt from China. International adoption is predicated on the positive assumptions that we are a global community with more in common than different and that nations will support other nations in times of need. It feels good to believe in these ideals. However, the way that international adoption has played out over the last 80 years has not upheld these values at its core, favoring instead the mass amount of wealth to be gained through the commodification of children and the personal desire of many people who have been desperate to become parents, oftentimes unknowingly at the expense of existing families. When corruption, trafficking of wanted children, coercion of birth families, and fabricated paperwork to create “paper orphans” occur in every single place that allows international adoption, they are not location issues rather ones that are endemic to and embedded within the whole system.

Some have questioned the sincerity of the intentions behind the decision for China to stop international adoption and claim that rising U.S. – China tensions are to blame. According to CNN, the ministry’s spokesperson Mao Ning relayed, “This is in line with the spirit of relevant international conventions,” as part of the country’s rationale. In addition to the current population crisis, which is undoubtedly a factor, and the already drastic decline of international adoptions out of China since 2005, Mao is correct that the decision does reflect trends in the shifting landscape of global child welfare. I immediately thought of the Resolution on the Rights of the Child , which was unanimously ratified by all member states of the United Nations General Assembly, including China, on December 18, 2019. As written in Section 1, point 22 of the resolution, the United Nations:

Urges all States parties to intensify their efforts to comply with their obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to preserve the identity of children, including their nationality, name and family relations, as recognized by law, to protect children in matters relating to birth registration, family relations and adoption or other forms of alternative care, recognizing that every effort should be directed to enabling children to remain in or swiftly return to the care of their parents or, when appropriate, other close family members and that, where alternative care is necessary, family and community-based care should be promoted over placement in institutions

I see the future of international adoption being much rarer, and when it does occur, at a more local level – perhaps Syrian children being adopted by relatives in Lebanon or Ukrainian orphans adopted by extended family in Poland. The current Chinese adoption law allows for international adoption only in the cases of step-parent adoptions and direct kin within three generations. I don’t think that children will cross such distances at such high rates again. And if that does happen, we will not have learned from the advocacy and life stories of the hundreds of thousands of international adoptees that currently exist.

While following the news on our honeymoon, my husband (wow, my first time using that word in writing!) asked me if I thought I would continue studying Chinese and international adoption if this truly signals an end to the practice or pivot in another direction. My answer is that I remain as dedicated as ever to creating work and knowledge that benefits my community, so that adoptees’ feelings and experiences are validated, so that non-adoptees better understand adoptees, and so that adoption professionals are better prepared to serve the needs of adoptees and their adoptive families. Moreover, I want Chinese adoptee to be able to see ourselves represented in the literature, not only as the child subjects of others’ research, but as the creators and makers of knowledge, and as whole individuals with all our strengths and struggles.

While no new Chinese adoptees may be created, studying Chinese adoptees is still relevant because little is known about the Chinese adoptees who have already been adopted and how we will continue to develop over time. In my opinion, there has been a real flattening of Chinese adoptees into a fictional single cohort. We’ve run with numbers and findings from initial “outcomes” studies on Chinese adoptees from the mid-2000s as if we can definitively know what lifelong outcomes will be from a 12-year-old. Very little has been written on disabled Chinese adoptees, Chinese adoptees who have been raised in large, Christian evangelical families, queerness and the ways Chinese adoptees are embodying fluidity of identity in multiple realms, and almost no attention has been given to the thousands of male Chinese adoptees. As we know from history, trends often occur in swells and dips. If ours is a fixed population, a finite group of people, it is even more urgent that our stories are preserved now, so that they don’t die with us, and so that the next time someone thinks dispersing children around the world might be a good idea, our truths are readily available.

The current trend in global child welfare is a shift from congregate care to deinstitutionalization for children who require out-of-home care as outlined in the 2019 Resolution on the Rights of the Child. Adoption Studies is pertinent to this area as well because some of the major actors, including adoption agencies and Christian organizations, who were deeply involved in promoting international adoption, are now at the helm of the new deinstitutionalization movement. Simply because an organization was successful at finalizing adoptions does not mean they will be successful at deinstitutionalization. While I ultimately agree with the principles of placing children in family-like care settings over orphanages, this will have to be closely monitored. Further, as it becomes more difficult to adopt internationally, people with the financial means to do so will likely turn to assisted reproductive technologies, including donor gametes and surrogacy. These alternatives raise many of the same questions that are involved in adoption — traumatic separation for the baby at birth, unknown heritage and parental identity, potentially intentional creation of transracial families, and all of the ethical quandaries involved in commodifying children.

In a similar vein to the idea that “our homeland is each other” (a quote that should be attributed to Mark Hagland stated at a KAAN Conference), I believe we are each others’ ancestors. I have been cut off from my ancestors in China, a filial relationship I may never know. However, I truly feel a kindred connection to the adoptees of the generations before me who have paved the way thus far and a kin-like responsibility to adoptees of younger generations and who are yet to exist. My promise is that I will do everything in my power to make sure that Chinese adoptees and international adoptees are not a forgotten group of people. In the wake of this news, it feels even more important to find each other, be in community, and let our voices be heard.

Cover image by Rudy Buhagiar at the Terracotta Daughters exhibit by Prune Nourry.