As some readers may know, adoptees experience temporality in unique ways. In April 2024, I found out that my birth mother, who I had been searching for died in 1995 (29 years ago). I was in middle school, wholly unaware.
My two friends in Hong Kong, Winnie and Wilson, helped find a person with the same name and same birth date as my mother, but there was still a small chance that it wasn’t her and merely a coincidence. The headstone had a photo of the woman. It was hard to match with the one picture that I had, creating an ambiguous loss, not fit for a social media post or any discussion, really.
After visiting Hong Kong in June, I am now certain she has passed. In an amazing feat, we found her surviving husband (who is not my father). He told my friends her story. From them, they told me what he said.
It’s a brutal and angering story not limited to Chinese culture but one that is replicated across societies. It involves extreme heteropatriarchy, classism, and ableism at the familial, institutional, and Hong Kong state level.
Searching as adoptee can make you feel like being a detective. You must piece together your own past, something that you should possess but because of how adoption operates you do not. It also feels like ghost hunting because you don’t know if this person or family really exists. You might have tried to call or pray to them, hoping to will them into your life, but for so many of us, that call or prayer is left unanswered. So we imagine, dream, or have nightmares.
In my return trip with my family, I was able to visit her grave. For the first time in more than 42 years, I was in the same space as her. As the incense burned, I spoke to her. “Mom, I’m sorry for how you were treated and sorry that we couldn’t meet in person. I hope that someone was there to care for you when you passed.”
Luckily, her second husband, Mr. Wong, did take care of her, especially as her health deteriorated due to cervical cancer. Apparently, just days before she died, she asked her husband to take her to Po Leung Kuk, the last orphanage (out of four) where I lived before being adopted to the United States.
I had visited Po Leung Kuk twice before in 2013 and 2015. During my visits, they seemed welcoming and kind, unlike other institutions within the adoption industry. They had given me my records but told me that they could not release information about my birth mother because of privacy laws. This made sense, legally, even if I disagreed with the spirit of the law. But now that she passed, I was able to access this information.
Po Leung Kuk agreed to provide documents from my file that included my birth mother’s name and information. But they also asked if they could invite the media. I had already enlisted media — an uneasy but often necessary decision for many searching adoptees. At face value it seems mutually beneficial: adoptees get publicity about their search, while media gets a compelling story, but too often media sensationalize our stories.
In my case, the media team tried to photograph private information on documents that I had finally received access to. The videographer instructed me to stroke my intake photo of me as a toddler, a completely contrived action conveying a representation that only he desired.
The administrator in charge handed me an envelope with documents as the media team filmed me flipping through them. She smiled, seemingly pleased with herself, the benefactor who has bestowed such a gift to me—documents that should have been mine all along. A couple of the documents had information about my birth mother, but most of them were solely about me. Why were these not given to me nine years ago?
This is what it feels like to have your past and your life controlled by administrators and bureaucrats. They choose what you can see, what you can possess, and what you cannot.
In my meeting with Mr. Wong, he told me another revelation. I had two half siblings. He did not know their names but figured they were one and two years younger than me, and that they had also been placed at Po Leung Kuk. My mom had actually tried to visit all three of us before her death.
Shocked, I emailed Po Leung Kuk. Eventually they confirmed. Yes, this was true. A secret they would have kept if my friends and I had not found Mr. Wong.
This is the news story that you’ll need to run through Google Translate. I did not tell them that I had met Mr. Wong the night before. I did not tell them I had already found first cousins. If I had, my story would not have been compelling for them. Adoptees hold silly poses and say words we do not mean in order to get small pieces of what belong to us, for our story to be told, and to continue searching for people and things that we have lost despite the many gains of adoption.