(I Think) I Love You: The Parents I Never Knew
As an adopted kid, I was sure that I loved my birth parents and they loved me. But what does that mean when we’ve never known each other?
BY: RYANNE KAP
Xiangtan Social Welfare Institute, circa 1999. Photo courtesy of the author. // THE UNDERGROUND
When I was in eighth grade, I got a writing assignment as a punishment. My school didn’t use harsh words like “detention,” but I did get in trouble for forgetting my band instrument (a clarinet) for the third time that month. So instead of going outside for recess, I was stuck in a classroom with a few other kids. We were told to fill the time by writing something. But it didn’t have to be a paper about the importance of staying organized or the history of wind instruments. It could even be creative, if we wanted.
So I wrote a story about my birth mother. It was two pages long. After reading it, the teacher said she liked it and she wanted to know more.
Well, so do I.
Here’s what I know. Two months after I was born, I was found on the steps of an abandoned warehouse, along with a short note that listed my birthday (September 11) and my name (Baiyun; it means “white cloud”). I was promptly relocated to an orphanage, where I lived for nine months before my mom adopted me.
Copy of a note from the police station (with translation). Photo courtesy of the author. // THE UNDERGROUND
Growing up, I was obsessed with every detail, no matter how sparse. And when those details weren’t enough, I started making up my own. I wrote out the story multiple times, trying to fabricate character motives and arcs. In most versions, I imagined my birth mother as a tragic figure forced into giving up her daughter. She was usually on her own; my birth father wasn’t as easy to romanticize.
All this daydreaming was in large part due to a poem called “Legacy of an Adopted Child,” which has been circulating in the adoption community for years through Pinterest graphics, online forums, and probably an embroidered pillow or two. It tells the story of how two mothers—one biological, one adopted—both shape their child’s life.
“One sought for you a home that she could not provide,” the poem reads. “The other prayed for a child and her hope was not denied.” In the debate between heredity and environment, neither is the answer; instead, a child is just a product of “two different kinds of love.”
It’s the kind of narrative designed to soothe adopted children, to assure them that their abandonment was not only necessary, but from a place of love. And it absolutely worked.
I kept telling myself stories about my birth parents until they were practically saints. I imagined personality traits and backstories, like how he was the youngest out of all his cousins or how she really loved reading too. When I was 15, I sat in front of the mirror with a sketchbook and tried to draw them based on my features. I gave up about ten minutes later.
I spent most of my childhood in Strathroy, a small and predominantly white town. There were no Asian families for me to look to as a visual guide, and Googling “middle-aged Asian women” felt too strange (not to mention sexualized), even on Incognito.
Example of a Google search. Photo courtesy of Google.
And while there were Asian parents in some of the shows and movies I watched, like Mulan and Jake Long: American Dragon, it didn’t help that they were all animated.
So, for most of my life, my birth parents have just been abstract concepts. I know nothing about their appearances, personalities, or whether they’re even living or not, but that’s never stopped me from loving them.
Except I’m not really sure it’s love at all.
As an adopted kid, I wanted to fill the gap my birth parents left in my life. Mostly I did that through stories or sketches, but when that didn’t work, all I had was this horrible sadness. An article from the Paediatrics & Child Health Journal explains that “[a]ll adopted children grieve the loss of their biological family, their heritage and their culture to some extent.” It’s normal, and it’s expected, and it sucks.
I mean, it wasn’t an all-encompassing sorrow; it was just something that sprang up whenever my cousins were complimented for looking like this or that aunt, or when my friends talked about the specific time of day they were born, or sometimes when Mother’s Day or Father’s Day rolled around. Occasionally it came out of nowhere; I remember lying in bed when I was ten, crying just because I was thinking of them.
But I couldn’t understand grief separately from love. I thought that in order to miss someone, you had to have loved them first. And I thought I loved them because they first loved me. After all, they did keep me for two months. Long enough to make sure I was okay. Still, there’s no way of really knowing what my birth parents felt, or what the circumstances were.
I can at least guess, though; after all, I was born during the era of the one-child policy. Enacted in 1979, the policy was designed to curb the growth rate of China’s enormous population, which numbered 969 million at the time.
In her personal essay for The Washington Post, Ricki Mudd’s birth parents share that it was “terrifying” to have an “over-quota child.” Her birth father says, “If the government knew, you would be in trouble. People would come to your house, remove all your grains and do anything they could to you. And sometimes, they’d destroy your house.”
The policy was also enforced through forced sterilization and abortions. Nanfu Wang, who co-directed a documentary about the one-child policy, explains that most of the officials and midwives who carried out these processes felt they were simply performing their duty.
“Most people said ‘I don’t have a choice, this is my job, this is for the greater good, there was nothing we could do,” Wang says. “They felt that they had no choice whether to allow a baby to be alive or dead.”
I’d always thought about the children as the victims, and forgotten about the parents completely. As much as I wanted to credit their sacrifice, there was still an element of resentment. I should’ve realized the policy punished them too.
By the end of 2015, the policy was eliminated altogether. It was about 18 years too late for my generation. The damage had already been done. China’s population is now facing a sharp decline, which is likely to result in a variety of crises in the near future. Furthermore, the policy—combined with a cultural gender bias that favours sons over daughters—has resulted in a significant gender gap.
As of 2016, China had the world’s most imbalanced sex ratio at birth, with about 107 boys for every 100 girls. The policy also encouraged female infanticide and the abandonment of baby girls. For many years, the majority of Chinese orphans were female.
Today, China is still scrambling to reverse the devastating effects of the policy. In 2015, a universal two-child policy was introduced, though time and financial concerns still make it challenging for many couples to have more than one child. An economics professor at Fudan University in Shanghai recently suggested allowing women to have multiple husbands (and therefore multiple babies).
It’s all too little too late, especially for the generations of Chinese adoptees displaced by the policy. Most likely including me.
Me with one of the nannies at the orphanage, Liu Li Pin. Photo courtesy of the author. // THE UNDERGROUND
But regardless of the circumstances, it’s impossible to truly love people you’ve never met. It’s idealization, it’s projection, it’s hollow. But when you’re missing a part of yourself that you never really got to know, and will probably never find again, projected (fake) love is all that you have. I would’ve rather had my fake, one-sided relationship than acknowledge there was no relationship to begin with.
And that came with its own hang-ups, mostly guilt for wanting one at all. Through no fault of my family’s, I’ve often felt bad just for thinking about my birth parents. I’ve never wanted to imply that my mom isn’t enough for me, or that I don’t think of my Dutch family as my real one. But when it comes to a lost heritage, it’s not about who or what is “enough.” That’s not even how you measure this kind of loss.
As much as I love my family, there are questions I have that they can’t answer. I belong to a whole history that I’ll never get to know. And, as horrible as it feels to admit, there are days when I wish I wasn’t the only Asian one around.
It’s difficult enough knowing you’re not biologically related to your family. Not even being the same race adds its own struggles.
Once, while I was working at the Sarnia Farmers’ Market with my cousins, an old man approached us and started to make conversation. As one of the regulars at the market, he knew my grandpa, who’d been running a stand there for about 30 years or so.
“So,” he said, “you’re Frank’s grandkids?”
We smiled, nodded.
“But you’re the real granddaughters, right?” he said, pointing to my two cousins.
None of us knew what to say. We stayed quiet. I felt myself smile reflexively. The man moved on. When I told my mom, who’d been just around the corner and had missed the whole exchange, she was furious. It occurred to me that I should’ve been too. Instead, I felt small. And afraid that maybe, somehow, he was right.
The fear that you don’t belong is pervasive and hard to shake off. Being Asian only amplified that for me. I move through the world differently than my Dutch family members, a fact that sometimes made me want to minimize my race or ignore it altogether. I’ve frequently joked about being a white girl in an Asian body, as if that would make me fit in better.
Part of the fantasy of my birth parents is having people who intrinsically understand that side of me because they share it.
So, while I don’t really love them in a real, concrete sense, I’ll always have a connection to them. They’re important to me, even if I never meet them. And I’ll always think fondly of them, the way you do about complete idealizations.
I’ll most likely be grieving my birth parents and my heritage for the rest of my life. Being adopted is not something you grow out of, though I’ve often wished it was. But I can at least focus on the love I do have, for family and friends and everyone I’ve met because I never knew my birth parents.
If I was ever lucky enough to meet them, I would thank them. I will always be so grateful that I got to be raised here, even if that means missing out on a different kind of life altogether.
If my birth parents are still out there, I hope they’re doing well. I wish them good health and happiness. And—to paraphrase the great Whitney Houston—above all, I wish them love.
