China just ended international adoptions.
A friend shares a link to the NPR article and, to be honest, it’s the first I’ve heard about it. It’s not that I’ve trained my algorithms away from news like that — almost the opposite. I obsessively search for information about the keyword “adoption,” I’ve read “Primal Wound,” I’ve watched “One Child Nation.” (And “Big Bird in China” — we can talk about that later.)
But this article isn’t about the same keyword “adoption” that I search for, and it clunks into my phone as impersonally as my Duolingo app telling me to practice “Chinese,” as impersonally as the websites for old adoption agencies with pictures of pandas and the Great Wall.
The headline reads: “Hundreds of families in limbo after China ends overseas adoptions.”
“Made it out in the nick of time!” I text my adoptee group chat.
It’s funny because many people imagine us as having escaped, that our country of citizenship looks upon our country of origin as a place from which we needed to leave, so the narrative of “lucky” is pervasive across our childhoods. It’s funny because we’re 30, and inside jokes take time, and it took decades of learning in order to laugh.
Over the next few days, the news from the States is all about the American families who were midway through the process, many of whom had already been matched with a child, and are left without answers.
The headlines posit the American families as the main characters, explaining their future adopted children as part of a process with much deeper roots in international trade and politics. They’re not wrong. Adoption is an economy, and when you’re looking at it stateside, from the narrative of “lucky,” there are “plenty of children in need.”
As I’m not an expert on the global stage or any kind of scholar of adoption — many are — my reaction to and understanding of this decision are rooted mostly in what it implies for the people I am…
Read the full article here
