DIANJIANG: On an empty concrete lot in southwest China, Loulee Wilson scoops a handful of rocks into a bag – a memento of where she believes she was abandoned as a child.
Wilson, an American college student, was born in China but was donated by parents who believed they feared violating the country’s one-child policy, which saw families penalized for having more children until the strategy was ended in 2016.
Soon after her birth, she was found outside a now-demolished factory in the city of Dianjiang, brought to an orphanage and later adopted by a couple in the United States.
Now 19, she is among a growing number of Chinese adoptees returning to their native country to track down their biological parents and understand where they came from.
“If I (find) them, it would be incredible. But I don’t know if I can,” she told AFP.
According to State Department data, over 82,000 children born in China have been adopted by American families since 1999 — mostly girls, due to China’s cultural preference for boys.
Many were handed over in the 2000s, when Beijing tightened birth restrictions and laws on overseas adoptions were relatively lax.
As these children reach adulthood, they create a “very, very high demand” to be reunited with their birth families, said Corinne Wilson, Loulee’s adoptive mother.
She is the founder of The Roots of Love, one of a cluster of organizations that have been established in recent years to reunite adopted children with relatives in China.
In June, the Wilsons set out to find birth families in rural Dianjiang, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) from the big city of Chongqing.
And some communities fear unearthing a traumatic past hidden among the sleepy villages and rice paddies where birth quotas were once fervently enforced.
Under the one-child policy—in practice a jumble of various birth restrictions—Dianjiang couples were often allowed a second child if the first was a girl.
But officials have cracked down on unauthorized births, threatening to demolish homes, confiscate livestock and impose astronomical fines, villagers told AFP.
“We were forced to do it. We had no choice,” said carpenter Yi Enqing, 57, who hoped to track down a young daughter who was put up for adoption in the early 1990s.
“I’m afraid she wouldn’t accept us now. She must have some grudge in her heart,” he told AFP in his sawdust workshop.
In one village, a middle-aged man spits into a beaker while his wife tearfully remembers the daughter they last saw as a baby in 1990.
“I’ve been looking for it for so long, but I can’t find it,” she said as a Roots of Love assistant carefully sealed and wrapped the saliva sample.
The samples are sent to a laboratory where their DNA is extracted and compared to existing databases.
If there is a match, Roots of Love will put long-lost relatives in touch, such as last year when twins were reunited with their mother after nearly two decades of separation.
Reunification can trigger complex emotions for adoptees, who experts say often struggle with mental health issues related to identity and racial discrimination.
“It’s losing your identity, your native culture, your native language, your biological family,” said Cassidy Sack, an adoption volunteer with the U.S.-based Nanchang Project, which has reunited dozens of birth families since 2018.
“That was the life you were meant to live. And then, beyond your control, decisions were made for you and you were taken to a new land.”
China started the one-child policy in 1979 due to fears that its population would grow uncontrollably.
It is estimated to have prevented hundreds of millions of births, but was condemned for its enforcement, which in some areas included forced contraception, abortion and sterilization.
The policy has also been blamed for increasing infanticide, fueling child trafficking and permanently skewing China’s gender ratio.
“It has caused serious mental trauma to many Chinese people,” independent demographer He Yafu told AFP.
Beijing has officially eased birth restrictions since 2016, and from 2021 Chinese couples can have three children.
However, the country’s birth rate has continued to decline, leaving the number of young people to care for a growing elderly population continuing to dwindle.
