She Was Given Up by Her Chinese Parents—and Spent 14 Years Trying to Find a Way Back

A girl is found on a street in Ma’Anshan, China, in May 1993. Her paternal grandfather, the story goes, dropped her off and left. No explanation. It is unknown how long she had been outside when someone arrived and took her to the orphanage.

A white woman adopted the young girl and took her to America in August 1994. She gave her an English first name.

In spring 2010, When Youxue (her Chinese name) was a sophomore in high school in Dallas, Texas, she decided to start searching for her biological parents. She knew it wouldn’t be easy. Given the international nature of her adoption and the clandestine circumstances in which most Chinese children were abandoned, there was a good chance she would never find them again. But his adoptive mother supported him and found a “finder” through Yahoo groups, one of the first forums where adoptees connected online. In China, the researcher put up posters of Youxue and her information in high-traffic areas of Ma’Anshan, Anhui province, and went to the police station listed in Youxue’s abandonment certificate. There, the researcher was able to access the files and find a short note that Youxue had apparently been left with.

In September, several families came forward. One of them seemed like a potential partner. They had an older daughter and a younger son. Looking at the photos, Youxue thought she saw a resemblance. For the maternity DNA test, she sent in a cotton swab containing buccal cells from the inside of her cheek, along with a few strands of hair.

In November, she received a text message from her adoptive mother telling her that the DNA results were positive. There was a match! She wanted to tell all her friends and family; she felt whole. She started taking Mandarin lessons and texting her biological parents. They said they loved each other and couldn’t wait to meet.

But while she was on spring break 2011, Youxue’s biological father told her that her birthday was September 11, 1994. It was impossible. Youxue had already been adopted at that time. Thinking it was a mistake, Youxue responded, 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. They weren’t his biological family. Devastated, Youxue deleted all her messages with the family and all her photos of them. She knew she would regret it, and that they might even be useful to another adoptee, but she couldn’t bear to keep them anymore. To want something is to expose oneself to pain, and to choose to seek is to open oneself to sorrow.

Meanwhile, in a small village in China’s Anhui province, a mother asked her adult daughter and teenage son to help her search for her two abandoned daughters. She had long wanted to research them, but she only spoke her local dialect and had little access to technology. Without formal education, she didn’t know where to start and no one knew how to help her.

Decades earlier, the conditions that shaped this family’s life were triggered by China’s one-child policy. The government’s population control program, enacted in the late 1970s, transformed family planning into state-mandated decisions about which children were allowed to exist. In the 1980s, rural parents were only allowed to have a second child if the first was a girl. Families who violated this policy received heavy fines and other sanctions, sometimes sterilization and physical violence.

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

In summer In 2011, just months after the fake 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 had now been reunited with his biological family, they found another seeker who, along with a local radio personality, had contributed to successful reunions in the past. With access to police files and the short note found by the first researcher, they finally had more context to move forward.

In Ma’Anshan, Youxue conducted newspaper interviews, interviews for online newspapers, and even a television interview broadcast on all the local buses. She was looking for families who had abandoned a girl between August 1993 and January 3, 1994, because her orphanage documents indicated she was likely born around that time. She did blood tests. That summer, only one family had it all. Both parents had his blood type. They even knew what was on the note left for the baby; they said they had written this note years earlier, in a moment of desperation.