what i wished i knew about the one-child policy

pei ja anderson

This summer, my parents and I saw the premiere of One Child Nation, a documentary that revealed the brutal human implications of China’s one-child policy regime and its legacy. As a Chinese adoptee, I thought I was prepared; I knew I was one of the hundreds of thousands of unwanted baby girls born under this policy. Children were discarded and left to die while others fell victim to infanticide. International adoption had saved a portion of a population of girls who would otherwise have been killed. What I was not prepared to learn was the prevalence of abduction: that there were babies who were torn from intact families and used as a tactic by the government to extort money from families who could not afford protection from the corruption of the one-child policy. My mind began to spiral.

It was five in the afternoon when my family and I watched co-director Nanfu Wang interview a Midwestern couple: a mother and father of three adopted girls from China, who had started a company with an online database to connect adoptees to their birth families using adoption records and DNA. Their business is powered by the desire of adoptees, like me, seeking answers. We see shots of the couple’s office and various Excel spreadsheets charting adoption agencies, provinces, Chinese foster families, as well as hundreds of headshots of baby girls. 

It was standard practice for orphanages to take these baby pictures to send to soon-to-be adoptive parents. Pixelated on their computer monitors and hung up all around the office were photos of children with shaved heads in white onesies against maroon cloth backdrops. At this point, my dad shook my shoulder gently and my mom laugh-cried in tears as we turned to each other knowingly. Inside a photo album sitting on the top shelf of my mom’s closet was a picture of me, just like this, red backdrop and all.

It was the picture which, my parents, after receiving it in the mail, had cherished and shared with friends and family during the 24-month process it took to adopt me. The kind of photo shown to you so often during childhood it becomes a memory. Seeing these headshots, my photograph, multiplied across the walls of these strangers’ homes, was a punch to the gut. My adoption was no longer mine. For the first time, I was made to confront the fact that my story wasn’t unique or individualized or special; it wasn’t the beautiful, cut-and-dry narrative that I had been told my whole life. I was a faceless, nameless girl born under China’s one-child policy. 

The story of my adoption has been told to me countless times and, in turn, I have recited this story to countless people throughout my life. This is the elevator-pitch: there are no records of who my birth parents were or why I was put up for adoption. For cultural and political reasons lots of baby girls were given up by their families during this time in China, but fortunately, I was given a wonderful life by parents who loved me. My mom and dad like to say that they were always my parents and I was always their daughter; I just happened to be born a country away. 

I had never put my adoption into historical context because there was never a need to. There was no reason, before this, not to be satisfied with the story I grew up knowing and believing. My parents were honest people, my adoption was never hidden or made secret. I didn’t know other sides of the story existed until then.

The film progressed and my thighs inched further and further off the edge of my seat as I leaned into the screen, watching this documentary dismantle piece by piece the story I thought I knew by heart. In gruesome detail, the film created a new version of my story. Women were carried to their local family planning officials in ropes, bound like pigs, to be forcibly sterilized. Doctors performed late-term abortions against mothers’ wills. Healthy newborns were killed minutes after being birthed on the operating table. The bodies of maggot-infested babies piled up in dumpsters and on highway medians. 

In the next scene, Wang’s uncle recounts how he was coerced into abandoning his newborn child at an outdoor market. He describes how, after the birth of his only daughter, his mother, so compelled by the party’s policy, told him she would commit suicide if he didn’t give the baby up.

That there was loss and violence on the other end of the story did not make sense to me. I had never known the unimaginable sacrifices or intimate pain these women faced. Selfishly, I couldn’t help but think there was a possibility, among so many that seemed to be unfolding, that I could have been an abducted child. I had imagined the reasons why my birth parents may have given me up, but with each revelation in the documentary, the possibilities grew infinite. Hovering above it all was the guilt I felt for leading the privileged life of an “all-American girl.” I was ashamed for even being curious. 

When the movie ended, the lights came up in the theater and I booked it to the bathroom. Hysterically, I pulled at paper tissue to dry my eyes and compose what little dignity I felt. I was glad to be alone. I didn’t want to walk out with my parents by my side for fear a fellow audience member would notice that we were a real-life manifestation of all the multi-racial families they had just seen: a white couple with an Asian child. I didn’t want to be looked at as an accessory of white guilt, and I especially didn’t want to admit to my parents that this is how I sometimes felt next to them. 

The fabric of my identity was unraveling before my eyes and I could do nothing to stop it. I didn’t expect to be falling apart in the public bathroom of a movie theater and I certainly didn’t expect the crippling sense of shame that stayed with me for weeks after. 

The documentary had provoked a litany of questions, to say the least. Two weeks later, in search of consolation and answers, I checked out Nicole Chung’s memoir, All You Can Ever Know, from the library. The memoir is a reflection and meditation on adoption and how being an Asian adoptee has shaped her life. I finished the book in one sitting and found myself in uncontrollable tears. Alone in my bed in the middle of the night, I continued to read through sobs that seemed to be pulled out by the truth of her words. Chung had managed to articulate the anxieties and discomforts about adoption that I’d never had the courage to voice. The door of my childhood that I had marked “Do Not Disturb” for twenty years was beginning to crack open.

After finishing the book, I was emboldened with a new set of vocabulary, a language to talk about adoption that I had never possessed before and never realized I lacked. Finally, I had the words to fill the silences that punctuated the drive home from the movies the day my parents and I went to see One Child Nation. 

I would have said, “My curiosity of wanting to know more about my birth parents never stemmed from a belief that you weren’t enough.” I would have told them, “We owe it to each other to have conversations about the fact that my existence is irreparably tied to the political agendas and propaganda of the one-child policy.” 

For fear I would hate myself if I was different, my parents insisted on my sameness. The story I had told people growing up had always held an underlying defensiveness about it. I presented myself to people as the natural, biological daughter of two Caucasian people, no further questions. Out of fear someone would hurt me, they blinded me with love that protected, but erased the distinctions they never knew would be important for me to accept in order to gain a fully-realized understanding of my adoption.

I am just beginning the process of reconciling this new story with honesty and forgiveness. I am learning that thinking critically about my adoption doesn’t threaten the place in my family in which I have always felt secure. That criticizing my parents or putting into question their love for me or my love for them was a futile task, but being diligent in learning more about Chinese culture and history was necessary. Being adopted was a part of my identity that did not have to be a point of shame or pride, but exploration. It was not the simple story of heroes and villains I thought it was, or wanted it to be. It feels possible, now, to question this story without feeling like I am erasing myself or the pain that I now know was silently carried in the lives of people who lived under China’s one-child policy.