A Brief Timeline of Chinese Adoption and Population Control

Beginnings

China imposed strict regulations on foreign couples looking to adopt Chinese children. The government regulated the age, income levels, marital status and family size of prospective families, in addition to requiring a two-week minimum stay in China in order to adopt a child. These policies resulted in a specific demographic profile of American adoptive parents: largely white, middle to upper-class, heterosexual and highly-educated couples.

Me and my father in Guilin, China, a few days after my adoption. (Photo by Paige Shea)

Growing up, my parents were always transparent about the adoption process. They described undergoing rigorous background checks, submitting numerous financial documents and statements, having adoption agents thoroughly check their home and selecting close friends to be interviewed to prove they were fit to be parents. Haeseler said that her parents even had to submit a photo of their family members, from cousins to uncles, as well as their occupations.

However, across the world, the same protections were not necessarily afforded to babies being given up for adoption.

China’s one-child policy and open borders for international adoption resulted in many parents abandoning their children where they would be found, whether that was in a busy area or at the steps of an orphanage. Children were abandoned at all ages — from just a few days old to a few years old.

For example, Newton was given up for adoption when she was two years old, while Haeseler’s umbilical cord was still attached to her when she was discovered.

The vast majority of Chinese adoptees are female due to a historical and cultural preference for boys as children. Therefore, primarily girls were given up for adoption.

After they passed the approval process and were paired with babies, adoptive parents were typically given pictures of the child they were paired with before they traveled to China, taken by the orphanage’s caretakers. They were also given some background information of their adoptive children: age (or approximate age), information about their abandonment and health status, as described in the "certificate of abandonment" and other documents.

Before traveling to China, my parents were given a packet of basic information and two pictures. One photograph was one of me sitting in a crib, bundled up so as to not catch a cold — I was probably about six months old in the picture. The other was a small headshot taken against a white background.

One of the two photos my parents received from my orphanage before my adoption. (Photo courtesy of Lisa Shea)

From my certificate of abandonment, one of the documents given to my parents, I know that I was about a month and a half old when abandoned, left by the side of a busy street so that someone would find me. A note was left with my name and birthday on it. I was first checked into my orphanage on Sept. 24, 2002.

My adoption journey was delayed by an extra six months due to the 2003 SARS outbreak, making my parents’ wait time for me about a year long. They said that they stared at the pictures for months, as they were the only evidence they had of my existence.

From the two pictures, they decided on the name “Paige” during a car ride to Philadelphia, on the way to meet with their adoption group for the first time.

Parents traveled in groups with other parents to adopt their children from areas all over China, and would bring their children back together in large adoptee groups. My parent’s adoption group consisted of 13 total families, including one single mother who took the trip with a friend. Three families were adopting their second daughters.

My parents first held me on Sept. 12, 2003 — just two days after I turned 13 months old.

When in China, parents were able to meet the caretakers at their children’s orphanage and see where their child grew up. They then toured around China, typically in the city that their babies were from. It usually took some time for babies to acclimate to their new family, but after a few weeks, young adoptees began to warm to their new parents.

My parents recalled that it took a month or two for me to let my mother hold me — for some reason, the adopted girls from my group would only let their fathers hold them for some time. My parents were told that this was a typical reaction for the babies as they got used to their new families and environments.

After adoption, children were brought to the U.S. to begin their new lives.

Adoption From a Young Age

Most of the adoptees that I spoke to grew up in predominantly white areas, such as the suburbs of Pittsburgh, New Jersey and Madison with the exception of Haeseler, who grew up in Long Beach, which is 12.8% Asian.

Growing up as a transracial adoptee, it’s not hard to realize that you look different from your parents. I always knew that I didn’t look like my mom and dad in the same way that my friends resemble their parents. But at such young ages, it’s hard to comprehend the true meaning of adoption. In addition to the typical coming-of-age conversations, adoptive parents have to explain to their children what adoption means in a comprehensible way.

A large part of being a transracial adoptee is learning how to self-advocate at a young age, especially when answering uncomfortable questions from curious peers. Questions such as “Why don’t you look like your parents?” to “Why didn’t your parents want you?” persist throughout childhood, and even through adolescence and adulthood. While most questions are born out of pure curiosity, learning how to deal with them is part of the growing pains of adoptees.

Olson said that her mother was an avid scrapbooker and always showed her pictures of her adoption, as well as pictures of her life in the orphanage. She also provided Olson with children’s books about adoption.

“There’s times when little kids, they don’t really know,” said Olson. “And so they'd say, ‘Why are these white people picking you up? Yeah, you don’t look like your parents.’ And [my parents had] those conversations with me early so that I was comfortable when people would make comments like that… to educate them as to why I don’t look like my parents.”

A photo of Olson and her mother, Denise, in a scrapbook. (Photo courtesy of Myah Olson)

Poutous’ parents also taught her to self-advocate from a young age, and like Olson’s parents, turned to books for aiding in explanations.

“They had kids’ books about families who really wanted a child and how they would travel across the world,” she said. “Each year on my adoption anniversary, they would always show me the video footage from when they went on the trip — that was our tradition.”

Poutous’ parents are very active members of the adoptive parent community — the two founded the group Three Rivers Families with Children from China (TRFCC), which aims to connect families with Chinese adoptee children in the greater Pittsburgh area. Poutous therefore had a lot of friends growing up who were also Chinese adoptees.

Haeseler also emphasized the advantages of growing up surrounded by fellow adoptees, especially when growing up.

“I had a lot of friends growing up that were adopted — my parents met other couples while I was getting adopted that we still stay in touch with. So we made the effort to see them and definitely embrace ourselves and connect with similar experiences,” she said.

Haeseler said that because she grew up in a diverse area, she was faced with less questions than adoptees living in predominantly white areas.

“I’m very fortunate and lucky to have grown up in such a diverse area [where] it’s not rare to see people of different ethnicities and have so many different ways a family can be made,” said Haeseler.

A Cultural Dissonance and the "Outsider Perspective"

A photo of Haeseler as a child. (Photo courtesy of Amy Haeseler)

Growing up with white parents, many Chinese adoptees face a disconnect from their Chinese heritage and cultural background. The cultural loss felt by adoptees varies.

Lust shared a moment in college when she was approached by a Chinese exchange student who invited her to a potluck dinner with other Chinese students. She said that the experience was a “distinct” feeling.

“I felt super disconnected because I would love to do that — but I would go and feel so lost. It’s something for them that’s comforting because they’re all exchange students — they don't have family here,” Lust said. “I’d enjoy the food, but it's not something I grew up eating. I wouldn't understand the experiences they had in China, [or] having Asian parents.”

For Poutous, growing up in a predominantly white area — the suburbs of Pittsburgh — while trying to understand her heritage was challenging.

“The school district I went to was very white — I think I was one of maybe two ethnically-looking, racial Asian people in my grade. It was tough for me because I just wanted to blend in and be American,” said Poutous. “My parents really had all the best intentions."

Lust echoed Poutous’ sentiments of viewing Chinese culture from an outsider perspective, despite being ethnically Chinese.

“My mom asked if I wanted to go to Chinese school when I was younger, and I was like, ‘No, why would I ever want to do that?’ Part of me kind of wishes she just signed me up, even though as a kid I would have resented it,” said Lust. “But part of me [thinks] maybe it’s a good thing because I really would have felt like an outlier… I feel like my experiences are seen through a white person’s lens.”

Both Poutous and Olson were members of the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA)’s Pittsburgh chapter where they participated in classical Chinese dance lessons and performances. The group was full of Chinese adoptees and girls with Chinese parents alike. Olson said that her mother was very involved in OCA programming.

Olson in OCA's "Little Pandas" dance group. (Photo courtesy of Myah Olson)

“She helped me find a group because Pittsburgh also had a good handful of Chinese adoptees. She made sure I was still connected with those people because they share similar stories and backgrounds to share those experiences with each other,” she said.

For Newton, who was adopted at three years old, the longing and loss of her culture was strong, especially growing up in a predominantly white area — outside of Madison, Wisconsin.

“I was very lucky to be in an environment with my adoptive parents who were very supportive of my questions and cultural longing and very verbal expressions of grief for my birth family and that loss,” she said.

“I think that transracial adoptees also are, because of our proximity to whiteness, we're put in this situation where we are likely to face racism at school, in our community, etc., but then also within our own adoptive families. And I think that in times like right now that can be exacerbated and like those, those thoughts are like coming to the floor even more and people are are having to figure out like how to negotiate that within their own like immediate and extended family. So I think that's definitely a challenge.”

Returning to China

Many Chinese adoptees partake in trips back to China at differing ages and stages of life. Typically, they return to see the city they are from and visit the orphanage they were raised in, travelling with their parents. However, reasons for returning or not — and experiences when in China — differ from case to case.

Poutous returned to Zhanjiang and was able to see the orphanage that she grew up in. She met a caretaker who watched her when she lived at the orphanage over lunch, with the aid of a translator.

“You get to see all that your life could have been — which is very far different than the lives we live,” she said.

Olson and her adoptive sister, Chloe, have not returned to China. Olson said that trip is one they would take together, but that she has "different overseas vacation priorities."

Newton studied abroad at Nanjing University during her time at Macalester College, in the city that she was adopted from. She said that she always knew that she would study abroad in China and learn the language.

"That's been a big thread, all of my life," Newton said.

Lust has not returned to China, saying that it was never something she dreamed of doing one day.

“I think it's important that I go — it’s something that my parents and I would do together and I want to. But I definitely have some hesitations,” she said. “I think it’s going to be really emotional for me, and I think there’s a lot of things [with] my adoption and self identity that I haven’t fully worked out. I feel like a lot of that would manifest there, and maybe not in the prettiest of ways.”

Returning to China — from the parental perspective.

Iris Ponte is an adoptive mother of a boy, William, from the city of Kunming in the Yunnan province in China. She is half-Chinese herself and is fluent in Chinese.

She previously worked as an adoption researcher, specializing in adoptions from China. She wrote two of Adoption Quarterly’s most popular articles: “Returning to China: The Experience of Adopted Chinese Children and Their Parents” and “Letting Her Go: Western Adoptive Families’ Search and Reunion With Chinese Birth Parents.” Ponte now works as the director of the Henry Frost Children’s Program Inc. in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Ponte, her husband and William have been back to Kunming numerous times since his adoption.

“The most important part was that William was still young enough that when we went back, the caregivers remembered him — they had pictures of him that I’d never seen in orphanage care on their cell phones. We got to retrieve so much more of his story than we had access to prior, which I know, every image is a gift — every single freaking one. And he doesn’t even realize — still, at 15 — how critical those will be later,” she said.

During one of the family’s trips to Kunming, Ponte was determined to find her son’s foster family that had cared for him for two years before he was adopted. Over the course of two years, she was able to raise $10,000 for a playground for the orphanage’s foster village. Since Ponte is an early childhood specialist who worked at preschools, she was not only able to fundraise money but design a playground for the orphanage. She even brought a construction team to China to build the playground, and in return, the orphanage granted her access to the foster family in her son’s file.

“I did it fast enough that he remembered how to walk through the village to his home that he lived in for almost two years before I received him… [His foster mother] gave me a music box that he would fall asleep to — these are precious items.” According to Ponte, William was about five years old when this reunion happened.

The Dark Side of Adoption

While many adoptee stories end up being happy ones, the international adoption system has been fraught with corruption and child trafficking, and China is no exception. Many Chinese families who accidentally conceived more than one child post-1979 were forced into unwanted abortions or sterilizations, or had to abandon their children for adoption.

A cultural preference for male children resulted in a disproportionate number of abortions of female fetuses, or in some cases, infanticide of female babies. 20 million girls were estimated to have “disappeared” due to infanticide or abortions during the one-child policy.

Some families had more than one child during the one-child policy — if they did not relinquish them for adoption, they were forced to hide them from the government. These children became undocumented and had difficulty obtaining an education or employment as they grew up.

Newton said that while she was pursuing her undergraduate degree at Macalester College, she took a class called "Transnational Perspectives, Race, Politics and Empire of Transracial and Transnational Adoption." Taught by a Korean adoptee, the course opened her eyes to the ethical shortcomings of adoption.

“I had always known that adoption came with these elements of cultural loss, familial loss,” she said.

Newton said that Macalester College (in the Twin Cities) has the largest population of Korean adoptees per capita and has what she described as a “robust” adoptee community. Therefore, she was surrounded by fellow Asian transracial adoptees while in college and taking the class. Newton said that the experience of that class and the adoptee community she built from it inspired her to start her Red Thread Broken blog.

There are estimates that up to three fourths of Chinese adoptions involved fraud and corruption, according to Newton. She pointed to an Associated Press investigation regarding international South Korean adoptions that found that thousands of children were trafficked from South Korea to be adopted internationally, sometimes without parental knowledge or consent. South Korea is the largest sender of children to be adopted abroad, closely followed by China.

“For me, when I see the level of child trafficking, the buying and selling of children that has happened on a global scale, it’s not a country-specific issue. It’s an adoption system issue if the same problem just keeps cropping up in all these different locations,” said Newton.

Grace Yung Foster is an adoptee from South Korea. She was relinquished in Busan, South Korea, when she was estimated to be three years old.

At the age of five, she was adopted by a family in the U.S., a family with one Asian parent and one white parent. After two years, she was never formally adopted and the family relinquished her into the American foster care system. Her Midwestern foster family, two white parents who had about 20 foster children total, formally adopted her when she was about eight years old. After nine years, Foster voluntarily left at 17 years old.

In 2023, Foster founded The Inclusion Initiative, a professional and mentoring network that aims to close the opportunity gap for adoptees of color and foster care alumni. She said that she first had the idea during the COVID-19 pandemic after not being able to find any professional adoptee network.

“If we can’t even talk about how inequitable the systems are for us and then we can’t find each other in the workplace because we’re too scared to talk about our experiences — or we’re too scared about the biases and stereotypes and assumptions that come with talking about our experience — then it’s hindering us from building authentic relationships and [finding] mentors, sponsors, coworkers, peers, to the detriment of the adoptee or the foster in the workplace like me,” Foster said.

Foster also spoke about the siloing in the adoption community itself, which she views as a hindrance for adoptee advocacy.

“I do think we need to connect broadly more often — I see a lot of Chinese adoptees get together. I see a lot of Korean adoptees get together. I see a lot of white adoptees there, and see a lot of Black [adoptees],” she said. “You know, we all kind of grouped together based on our ethnicities or the races that we identify with, which further causes a disconnect of understanding, of what lived experience can look like and feel like.”

A study conducted by Foster’s Inclusion Initiative found that 46% of respondents felt “invisible in the workplace as a transracial adoptee,” as there are few places to speak about that experience in the workplace.

Chinese adoptee activist and actress, Kira Omans, also spoke about the misconceptions surrounding adoptees, stressing the need for adoptee-led storytelling.

“There’s an overwhelming sentiment that Chinese adoptees should feel lucky and grateful to be adopted, which is rooted in saviorist mentalities. Additionally, having loving adoptive parents does not negate relinquishment trauma,” she said. “I’ve noticed in general discourse surrounding adoption, many people infantilize adoptees. Society tends to treat us as if we’re still children, rather than as adults who grew up and developed our own values and beliefs.”

Ponte said that she never wanted biological children, and with all of her research with Chinese adoptees, knew that she could make a difference.

“I [didn’t] know how I [felt] about my body being a vessel to bring another child into this world when there are so many children that need[ed] me. And that is why I specifically went for a waiting child situation,” she said.

The “waiting child” classification that Ponte mentioned refers to a situation in which a child is in immediate need to be adopted — typically, these children have medical or developmental special needs in varying degrees.

“These Chinese people could not get it… People had all kinds of rationale. But for me, I lived and breathed in so many orphanage settings… We had the privilege and my mom is a physician, so it makes it easy for medical files to be reviewed,” she said.

Ponte’s son had a known heart defect that qualified him as a waiting child.

According to Newton, from about 2009 on, China’s international adoption program was almost entirely special-needs based.

China’s adoption numbers sharply decreased after their peak in 2004-2005 due to the need for domestic adoptions from China’s growing and childless middle class population. From 2014 to 2018, 95% of international Chinese adoptions involved children with disabilities as domestic Chinese adoptions were prioritized for "healthy" babies.

Reactions to China Ending International Adoption

China ended international adoption on Sept. 5, 2024 as the country has been battling declining birth and marriage rates and an aging population for years.

Click on the video to hear adoptees' reactions.

Transitioning Into Adulthood

Growing up as a transracial, Chinese adoptee comes with its own set of challenges. As Chinese adoptees reach adulthood, many expressed the challenges of becoming an adult without any guides. While growing up as an adoptee presents its own set of challenges in childhood and adolescence, it continues into adulthood.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Although international Chinese adoption has ceased, the research and its legacy are far from over. For Newton, there are several unanswered questions that she is interested in researching.

Newton has been working on an adoptee consciousness model for the past three years, which she describes as “a model that explains different phases and touchstones that adoptees go through when they develop clinical consciousness around some of the issues in adoption, and these realizations that: ‘I am not the only person implicated. There are all these other political, historical, racial gendered components that go into adoption.’”

“I am interested in how this access to the Internet and other adoptees through virtual communities will have impacted people’s experiences. I’m interested in the Chinese male adoptees, because I feel like they just get completely forgotten about in the literature,” Newton said.

She also pointed out that the group of Chinese waiting children adoptees are missing from the literature as well.

All of the adoptees that I spoke to stressed the importance of finding an adoptee community to speak to about shared experiences and emotions with, especially as so many of us reach adulthood and have begun to grapple with our identities even more.

“As I’ve gotten older, and with my parents trying to get me involved and have those conversations, I’ve definitely had more confidence to talk about being adopted. I’ve never really been shy about it, but I have more knowledge to then also educate people that have questions,” said Olson.

Haeseler mentioned that being adopted is an incredibly special part of one’s identity, and one that is important to reckon with.

“I think it’s a really special part of you,” said Haeseler. “Although it may be hard, it’s almost like you’ll enjoy it when you get older. I have to tell myself that if I want to remember parts of myself, I do have to embrace it more, too.”

A recent photo of Haeseler. (Photo courtesy of Amy Haeseler)

She added that “It’s good to find some commonalities to help, just to even talk about it. Even if it doesn’t provide any direct answers, it’s so refreshing to be like, ‘Okay, they get it — just a little bit.’”

A recent photo of Lust, her parents and her boyfriend Nick. Click on the photo for a larger version. (Photo courtesy of Maggie Lust)

Lust expressed that she had always wanted to adopt a child from China, but was not aware that the policy had ended until we spoke in February.

“Adoption is really important to me — I want to adopt a child domestically [or] internationally. I always kind of thought that I would, naturally, adopt a baby from China,” she said. “But I guess I’m not doing that anymore.”

Despite China ending international adoption in September of 2024, the number of children sent to the U.S. was already drastically reduced. International adoption was suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and no children were sent to the U.S. at all between 2021 and 2022. Only 16 children were adopted by American families in 2023.

This is part of a larger, global trend of international adoptions ending and trickling down. The Netherlands announced in May of 2024 that it would no longer let its citizens adopt internationally, Denmark made the same change made the same change in January 2024, Quebec suspended most international adoption applications in December of 2024 and Norway has been in talks to suspend and halt all foreign adoptions beginning in January 2024.

International adoption may come to a complete stop soon enough.