by Cindy Zhu Huijgen, adopted from China to the Netherlands
Last September, I sat in an almost empty grand press room at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing for its regular press conference. My heart raced as the spokesperson called on me for the next question. It was a miracle that I did not stutter as I asked: “Is it true that China will no longer carry out foreign adoption work?”
When she confirmed, I was overcome by relief. There would finally come an end to what I – after years of researching the matter – have started to perceive as a legalized form of ‘child trafficking’.
I was adopted by Dutch parents as a healthy toddler in 1993 from the southern Chinese city of Guiyang. They raised me in a small town close to the bible belt of the Netherlands. I was the first person of color in my extended family, creating a complicated dynamic.
When my parents announced that they were adopting a Chinese baby, my maternal grandmother responded with disdain. Instead of welcoming me into the family, she asked why my parents would want a child with a different skin color.
I had no other adoptees around me. Nowadays, there are dozens of platforms where one can connect. When I struggled as a child with depression due to feelings of loneliness, it took my computer minutes before it even connected to the internet. I only found one online Dutch forum about adoption, with the slogan: “You can take a child out of a country, but you cannot take a country out of a child.”
This resonated with me, since I felt like a part of me had never left the birth country I had never seen.
Hoping to connect with my roots, I started working in a Chinese restaurant five minutes from our house. The owners are from Southern China and had four children around my age. For the first time, I had peers who looked like me. When a drunk guest obnoxiously asked if we had dog meat on the menu since ‘Chinese people eat anything, right?’, at least I now had people to vent with. The boss’s daughter intricately understood my outrage.
How I wished I would wake up with blue eyes and blond hair.
Despite the racism, I was thankful to be adopted by loving parents who did their best to give me a happy childhood. At the age of 12, I was so desperate to see my birth country that my parents made a heritage tour happen. Standing on a bridge in Beijing overlooking the chaos of Chinese meandering traffic, I felt that sense of belonging.
I promised I would one day live and work in this magical place, where I blended in with the masses. This resolution made me choose Chinese Studies and Journalism as my double major in college. Eventually, I moved to Beijing as a reporter in 2019.
Through ground reporting, I learned about the ramifications of China’s adoption program, and it pushed me towards a condemning opinion about the practice. I am strongly against intercountry adoption and see this industry for what it is: the buying of children from less developed countries.
This seems like a radical conclusion, especially since my adoption is objectively a success story. But even if all intercountry adoptions had gone as well as – or even better than – mine, it should not and would not justify the malpractices; the illegal ways children were taken from their birth parents to sell to foreigners.
It has been well-documented that China’s one-child policy implemented in 1979 led to overflowing orphanages. This spurred the Chinese government to turn to overseas adoption in the early 1990s as a simple solution and an easy flow of income.
However, the role played by adoptee agencies and prospective parents in Western countries within this rigged system has been less discussed. The problem is not confined to China, as many studies on intercountry adoption point out that demand creates supply, leading to non-orphaned children being stolen, coerced through misinformation, or otherwise manipulated into being separated from their families.
Contrary to what many believe, China’s national family planning policies banned the confiscation of children, but that didn’t keep local officials from seizing babies from their parents as a form of revenue. In their turn, orphanages favored foreigners over Chinese prospective parents, since they would pay a mandatory ‘donation’, sometimes up to $5,400.
For financial reasons, Western adoption agencies made Western couples believe that they were the only option for a baby who would be better of in countries like the US. In 1999, the head of a large American adoption agency said: “To a Chinese, if a child is not of his flesh and blood, he may not love the child as much as he loves his own children. Americans don’t feel that way.”
This is a classic example of the so-called ‘white savior’ aspect, often found in motivations from people wanting to adopt from less developed countries. In reality, six million adoptees lived in China in the late 1980s. Even when the country opened its doors for international adoption, there was still a strong domestic demand. However, Chinese prospective parents had to adhere to more stringent qualifications than foreigners. According to China’s adoption Law from 1991 adopters had to be childless, reached the age of 30, and could only adopt one.
In stark contrast, Westerners could adopt without these prerequisites. China was one of the easiest countries from which to adopt a healthy baby, creating a market in the early 2000s in which children like me were treated as a form of commodity.
This practice violates several articles of the Hague Adoption Convention, ratified by the People’s Republic of China, the Netherlands, and most of the other Western countries that adopted from China. The convention stems from 1993, meaning that it was already common knowledge in the industry that children suffer more when placed for adoption in a different country.
Intercultural or intercountry adoption can create complicated family dynamics, especially when the adoptee’s ethnicity differs from that of the rest of the family. My mother is convinced grandma never accepted me, and I went looking for my Chinese heritage from a young age. Researchers even have a term for my struggle to process my identity development and navigate my relationship with both my birth and adoptive country: reculturation.
It horrified me to read about Olivia Atkocaitis, born in China, whose adoptive parents confined her in a basement room, keeping her from going to school. I know dozens of other adoptees who were sexually exploited by their adoptive relatives or otherwise abused by them. Several studies find that adoptees show a fourfold higher risk of suicidal behavior. While this is not something I ever attempted, I do remember vividly how I would lie awake as a teenager, thinking that nobody would miss me if I were dead.
Birth parents I have talked to often are unaware that approximately 160,000 Chinese babies were adopted by foreigners. I have seen that this revelation can crumble the hope of one searching for a long-lost child. One mother pleaded to me: “Tell these adoptees that they were loved and that they shouldn’t believe the lies that they were told. Please come back to us.”
Adoption from China was at its height in the early 2000s, meaning that most adoptees are about ten years younger than I. Traveling to one’s birth country alone as an adult hits differently than as a child with your adoptive parents. Therefore, I foresee that thousands of the now twenty-something-year-olds will flock to China seeking answers or wanting to experience more of their reculturation journey.
This can be both emotional as well as beautiful. Living in China has helped me stop feeling unhappy about my heritage. There is no longer a mismatch between the mirror and the features of my dream face. It took me decades to accept my dual identity, but they have made me into who I am today, and I am now proud to be both Dutch and Chinese.
What lingers is my anger towards the system. I hope that one day the adoption debate will not be dominated by prospective parents as it has been for over half a century. I have become more vocal, and I can’t stress enough how patronizing it is when strangers call me “ungrateful”. Or how disheartening when I get asked: “How do your adoptive parents feel about this.” Isn’t it time to start empathizing with adoptees whose lives were upended? Or with the biological parents whose children were forcibly taken away?
For those who wonder, my mom recently asked if I was angry at her for adopting me, and I assured her this wasn’t the case. Learning from me about the malpractices in the system of adoption has been difficult for her, complicating our relationship. I do not blame her for previously being blissfully unaware, adoptive parents often were victims of the system too. But that shouldn’t mean I have to stay quiet about my feelings to spare hers.
It remains to be seen if China will ever acknowledge its role in illegal and illicit adoptions. But for now, I see China’s decision to stop its international adoption program as a victory. It gives me hope that intercountry adoption is finally on its way out.
Resources
Dit is ook China : Terug naar mijn geboorteland (book in Dutch by Cindy Zhu Huijgen)
How I feel about the end of Chinese intercountry adoption
China’s stopped international adoptions: a Chinese adoptee’s perspective
China ends international adoption. Reactions range from shock to relief.
End of an Era: China’s International Adoption Program
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