She was abandoned by her Chinese parents, and spent 14 years trying to find her way back

Girl she is She was found on a street in Maanshan, China, in May 1993. The story goes that her paternal grandfather put her down and walked away. There is no explanation. It is not clear how long she has been out when someone 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 the spring of 2010, When Youxue (her Chinese name) was a high school sophomore in Dallas, Texas, she decided to start looking for her parents. She knew it wouldn’t be easy. Given the international nature of her adoption and the secret circumstances under which most Chinese children were abandoned, there was a strong possibility that she would never find them. But her adoptive mother was supportive and she found a “finder” through Yahoo Groups, one of the first forums where adoptees communicate online. In China, the researcher pasted Youxue stickers and information in high-traffic areas in Ma’Anshan, in Anhui Province, and went to the police station listed on Youxue’s affidavit of abandonment. There, the researcher was able to access the records and find a short note that seemed to have been left with Youxue.

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 the photos, Youxue thought she could see the resemblance. For a maternity DNA test, she sent a cotton swab containing buccal cells from the inside of her cheek, as well as a few strands of hair.

In November, she received a text from her adoptive mother saying the DNA results had come back positive. There was a match! She wanted to tell all her friends and family; It felt perfect. She began taking Mandarin lessons and writing to her parents. They said they love each other and can’t wait to meet.

But when she was on spring break in 2011, Yoshio’s father told her that her birthday was September 11, 1994. This was impossible. Youxue had already been approved by then. Thinking it was a mistake, Youxue replied, but he insisted: The mother knows the date of birth.

After checking with the DNA company, Youxue discovered that they had emailed her someone else’s results. This was not her biological family. Devastated, Youxue deleted all her letters with the family and all the photographs she had taken of them. She knew she would regret it, that she could be useful to someone else adopted, but she couldn’t bear to hold on to her anymore. To want something is to expose yourself to pain, and to choose to seek is to expose yourself to heartbreak.

Meanwhile, in A In a small village in Anhui Province, China, a mother asked her adult daughter and teenage son to help her search for her two abandoned daughters. She had long wanted to search for them, but she spoke only her local dialect and had little access to technology. Because she had no formal education, she didn’t know where to start, and no one was sure how to help.

Decades ago, the circumstances that shaped this family’s life began with China’s one-child policy. The government’s population control program, passed in the late 1970s, transformed family planning into state-enforced decisions about whether children were allowed to exist. In the 1980s, rural parents were not allowed to have a second child unless the first was a daughter. Families who violated this policy received heavy fines and other punishments, and sometimes sterilization and physical violence.

Today, there are more than 82,000 Chinese children adopted in the United States, most of them adopted between 1999 and 2016. More than 60% of the children adopted during that period were girls. The majority of adoptive parents are white, wealthy, and well-educated. Because child abandonment is illegal in China, there is very little documentation linking Chinese adoptees to their families.

In the summer In 2011, just 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 researcher who, along with a local radio personality, had helped bring about successful reunions in the past. With access to police records and the short note found by the first researcher, they finally have more context to move forward.

In Ma’anshan, Youxue gave newspaper interviews, online news interviews, and even a television interview conducted on all the local buses. She was looking for families who had given up their daughter between August 1993 and January 3, 1994, because her orphanage documents indicated she was likely born around that time. She had blood tests done. That summer, one family had it all. Both parents had her blood type. They even knew what was written on the note the child had left; They said they wrote that note years ago in a moment of desperation.