As early as I can rememberthunderbolt online casino, 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.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.thunderbolt online casino