China's three child policy through the eyes of a Chinese adoptee

By Emily Couch

Before reading this article, we invite you to read besea.n’s editorial statement of capitalisation when writing about race, which can be found on our resources page. The author has chosen to use specific capitalisation in this article with full consideration of the different positions involved and the author’s own experiences.

On the 31st of May, the Chinese government announced that it would allow couples to have up to three children in response to the country’s declining birth rate. The new policy signals yet another step away from the well-known ‘One Child Policy’ (OCP) which ended in 2016 after more than 30 years of often severe enforcement.

The BBC’s coverage of the policy change focused on the trauma and tragedy that the country’s harsh regulations have caused its citizens. There has been no mention, however, in the BBC or other outlets, of how the news impacts the thousands of Chinese children adopted abroad. While of less international note than the 2016 change, this year’s announcement still elicited a host of emotions for me as a Chinese adoptee.

My British father and American mother adopted me from Hunan, China in 1996. Three years later, we returned to the province to adopt my sister. The mid to late 1990s saw a boom in international adoptions from China. In 1992, the Chinese government introduced a law allowing foreigners to adopt its orphans. Between that year and 1995, the number of Chinese children adopted by foreign parents increased from around 200 to approximately 2,500. In the year my sister joined our family, this number had increased to almost 5,000.

Since this increase in foreign adoptions coincided with the zenith of the OCP, it is a sad fact that most of the children given to orphanages were girls due to the cultural preference for boys. The demographic of the Chinese children adopted internationally reflects this gender imbalance. When I was a child, we belonged to an informal group for families who had adopted from overseas and the overwhelming majority of the other children were Chinese girls like me.

When the Political is Personal

Whenever China’s birth rate policy, and its relaxation, make the headlines, I think of how my story could have been different and of how political decisions can change our personal stories. I was able to visit the orphanage where I spent the first 11 months of my life: the Changsha No. 1 Social Welfare Institute and spend time with some of the children there. The relaxation of the OCP means that thousands of children like me, like the ones who are now in the care of the Social Welfare Institutes, who might have been given up for adoption, will now remain with their families. And even if they do not remain with their biological families, recent changes to Chinese law and public perception which makes it easier for couples to adopt domestically mean that it is much more likely that they will remain in China rather than be adopted by foreign parents.

*Me in the orphanage I was adopted from*

Stories like mine will slowly become less common. Pondering hypotheticals is rarely productive but it is hard not to wonder how my life would have been different if the government had relaxed the rules earlier. If I had stayed with my biological family, what opportunities would I have had? Would I have had the same interests as I do now?

On the whole, I am a proponent of nurture over nature, so contemplating my identity had I remained in China is a dizzying endeavour: had I grown up in a completely different cultural and socio-economic context, would even a modicum of the ‘me’ I know now have existed?

While I do not know my birth parents, I do know Yan Min – the machine factory worker who, along with her husband, found me in a basket in the stairwell of their apartment block. My parents had gleaned some vague information about her – but not her name or her exact workplace – from the orphanage staff. Through the persistence and local knowledge of their guide and taxi driver, they were able to find the factory where she worked.

Yan Min told my parents that she and her husband had wanted to adopt me themselves but were unable to do so because they already had a child. Eight years later, we visited her home. She cooked for us and did my hair, and she and her husband took us out for the day. Perhaps I was too young to fully appreciate the experience, but I do remember thinking that, had the One Child Policy not existed, they might have been my parents and this might have been my life.

Am I ‘Asian enough’?

Earlier this year, I wrote this piece for Foreign Policy in which I argued that the prevalent discourse on East and South East Asian identity is centred on a diaspora experience to which many people of ESEA heritage cannot relate. For understandable reasons, activism around ESEA representation highlights the many beautiful cultural traditions from the region which parents and grandparents who emigrated to the West have passed on to their children.

My parents have always been proactive in providing my sister and me with opportunities to connect with our Chinese heritage. We have also been lucky because my aunt married a Chinese man and this has solidified our ties to the region. Nonetheless, growing up in a White family and living in an overwhelmingly White area, I do not feel as connected to Chinese traditions or culture as, for example, a British-born Chinese person might. Although my parents gave me the opportunity to do so, I have chosen not to learn Mandarin. For these reasons, my identity as an interracial adoptee often makes me question whether I have a ‘right’ to participate in ESEA initiatives. I was even hesitant to join the besea.n community because I worried that other members might not consider me ‘Asian enough’.

*Me during my last visit to China, Guangzhou 2017*

Statistical invisibility

Western governments and societies have turned a blind eye to anti-ESEA racism for years but even now, as awareness rises in the wake of a surge of COVID-related hate crimes, anti-racist discourse often ignores the racism experienced by people of ESEA heritage in White or mixed-race families.

What struck me as I was researching this article was the conspicuous absence of any statistics on adoptions from the ESEA region to the UK. In contrast, there is a plethora of data on the topic in the US. It is easy to discover that, between 2010-2020, approximately 2,000 Chinese children were adopted by American parents or that – back in 2005 – the US accounted for 75% of the international adoptions from China that had occurred since 1992.

Searching for comparable data from the UK is a much more frustrating endeavour. The only statistics on adoptions from East Asia that I could find were from a 2009 study on adoptions of Chinese girls from Hong Kong in the 1960s and 70s. This is not surprising given that Britain is the lowest per capita adopter of foreign children compared to any other in the West. Just 58 adoptees arrived in 2015 – compared to 5,648 in the US. Nonetheless, the lack of data is disheartening. I am lucky in that my best friend, who I have known since early childhood, is also an adoptee from China – but the sense of isolation can still be very real. It is hard to feel part of a ‘community’ when, in official data, we do not exist.

*With my best friend Jasmine, also a Chinese adoptee*

Interracial adoption: Beyond the ‘White Saviour’ narrative

Compounding the feeling of exclusion is the largely negative perception of interracial adoption in the UK. 52% of adults who have already adopted or fostered, and those who are open to the possibility, would prefer a child of the same ethnicity of themselves. The interracial adoption stories that make the headlines are overwhelmingly negative, highlighting the neo-colonial undertones of the practice and the resulting trauma experienced by the child. While it is true that interracial adoption can be harmful – especially when White parents fail to educate themselves on what it means to have a child of a different race – the prevalence of these stories in the media erases the experience of those of us whose experiences are far less remarkable, but which are nonetheless valid and worthy of attention.

I have never seen my story as ‘tragic’, despite the difficult socio-political context that set it in motion. I will never know for sure why my biological parents were unable to raise me but the cultural context has always led me to believe that it was because they either needed a boy, or already had a girl and weren’t willing or able to pay the fine required for a second. I say this not with resentment, but with understanding – something that may be hard to fathom given the predominance of negative portrayals of adoption, particularly interracial adoption, in Western culture.

According to data collected by the World Bank, in the year of my adoption more than 90% of Chinese people fell below the poverty line. What little I know about my biological parents suggests that they were among China’s more than 500 million farmers. When they left me to be found in a busy apartment stairwell in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, they left a note containing two characters: 囍 – ‘double happiness.’ I find this detail profoundly touching, and it has only strengthened my belief that my biological parents – likely poor and working class – were doing the best they could for me in the difficult circumstances created by the government policy.

Too often, I encounter people who assume that I must be deeply traumatised by my adoption, and that I must surely have a profound longing to return to ‘my country’ and ‘my people’. There will always be elements of my experience as an ethnically Chinese woman that my White parents will struggle to understand, but I will always believe that being adopted has been my greatest stroke of luck.

While having parents of the same race certainly removes some difficulties in the relationship, to suggest that adoption by White parents – or indeed by parents of any other race – is always harmful at best prizes theory above the reality of the thousands of Chinese children who need loving homes and, at worst, valorises the idea of racial purity. There is a sad irony in the fact that, in attempting to condemn White colonial practices, this school of thought actually perpetuates the idea of racially homogenous families so prized in colonialist thinking.

Western culture is full of narratives that portray biological family as the bedrock of individual identity. This idea crops up in everything from the 1997 musical movie 'Anastasia' to the sweeping 2016 film 'Lion'. Media outlets regularly publish ‘heart-warming’ tales of adopted children finding their ‘real’ parents. The familiar saying that ‘blood is thicker than water’ exemplifies the Western assumption that there is something almost mystical about biological relation. These examples shape the way in which people who are not adopted relate to those of us who are.

I will never forget the time that I mentioned my adoption in passing to a friend to which she responded by hugging me and saying ‘I’m so sorry.’ The truth is that I have little desire to track down my birth parents, nor do I believe that returning to China would fulfil me. The UK is my home and, as far as I am concerned, my adoptive parents are my real parents.

Towards a more inclusive ESEA activism

If I were to write down all my thoughts about adoption, the result would be a book long enough to rival Tolstoy’s War & Peace. My journey as a Chinese adoptee is just a tiny fraction of the richly varied tapestry of ESEA adoptees. This piece follows an exceptional essay by Pippa Hollington for besea.n on her experience as a Filipina adoptee.

As hate crimes against ESEA people and communities have skyrocketed, I have had to confront questions of identity, belonging, and self-censorship in a more intense way than at any previous point in my life. China’s announcement of its new ‘Three Child Policy’ brought these questions to the fore.

As is the case in any heterogenous community, one of us cannot speak for all of us, but I hope that my reflections here might speak to others. I am grateful that we now have spaces like besea.n in which we can all be heard.

Emily Couch is an ethnically Chinese British writer with dual American citizenship.

She lives and works in Washington, D.C where she advocates for greater diversity in the foreign policy sector.

Her Twitter handle is @EmilyCouchUK and you can visit her website here: https://emilycouchwriter.wordpress.com/