Until last year, I told everyone I was born in Chicago. Every school form, all of my college and job applications, and even my medical records listed my birthplace as Illinois. That was a lie. I was actually born in Hong Kong to a woman I’ve never met. And until last year, more than 60 years after my birth, I kept my adoption a secret.
Through the decades, I lived a nice suburban life with a husband and three children, while continuing to let people believe I was born to the attractive, accomplished couple whose 1943 wedding photo sat on my mantel.
I was ashamed I was adopted, just as my parents were ashamed they adopted me.
Bound by traditional Chinese cultural beliefs, my parents were compelled to swear my brother and me to secrecy about our adoptions. The shame and stigma surrounding infertility and adoption were more than they could bear.
Confucius and his followers believed a woman’s greatest duty was to bring a son into the world. My mother couldn’t produce a son, much less a daughter.
Mom convinced me to keep her secret by telling me that everyone would think my birth mother was “a prostitute” ― that I was conceived in shame. The truth was she didn’t know my birth mother. She only knew her own fears of being seen as an inadequate woman.
In 1959, the woman who brought me into this world bundled me in a basket and placed me in a Hong Kong stairwell near Sai Yeung Choi Street, a bustling region of the British colony. I was 4 days old. A passerby called the police, who transported me to St. Christopher’s Home, the largest non-government-run orphanage on the island. Officials at the orphanage named me Yeung Choi Sze, after the street where I was found.
Three black-and-white photos sent from an adoption agency were enough to convince a Midwestern couple of Chinese origin to bring me into their family. Mom recounted the day I landed in America. In June 1960, she and Dad waited alongside six other couples at O’Hare International Airport for the…
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