A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
When China banned international adoptions last month, it closed a three-decade window where about 160,000 Chinese-born children were adopted abroad. About half of them were brought to the United States, and many are now adults. NPR's Emily Feng spoke with some of them.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: News of China's ban trickled out in September to shock and outrage, especially among families in the process of adopting children from China. But adoptee Tessa E. Osborne felt something different.
TESSA E OSBORNE: I feel like I had this huge sigh of relief, because I'm glad it's over.
FENG: Relief that more children born in China will no longer have to go through her lifelong feeling of displacement.
OSBORNE: I'm, like, still wearing the body of what my culture is, like, the lineage and everything on me every single day. But I don't even know what it means.
FENG: Most Chinese adoptees, like her, were girls - abandoned or sometimes forcibly taken from their parents due to China's then-one-child policy. That was a 40-some-year-old law that ended only in 2016. It limited couples to just one child each, and they often hoped for boys. Violators of that law could be fined, forced into abortions and sterilized. Osborne says she spent years trying to mentally process how her life was changed because of an impersonal policy.
OSBORNE: And how much I've lost because of it, knowing that, like, my birth mother and my birth father and my whole lineage has lost me.
FENG: All the Chinese adoptees NPR interviewed for this story said they had supportive parents. Most had good childhoods. They acknowledged they might have faced a tough, uncertain life if they had not been adopted from China, and they worry about orphans left there. And yet, most of them expressed ambivalence if not outright happiness that China was stopping international adoptions.
HANNAH JOHNS: Two truths can be held at the same time.
FENG: This is Hannah Johns, who was raised in Texas after being found on a street corner in China.
JOHNS: I can be grateful, and I can have a great relationship with my parents. But I can also still critically question the systems that caused my adoption.
FENG: Like many adoptees, Johns says she grew up with no one who looked like her.
JOHNS: I got called China Doll. I got called Ching Chong.
FENG: That lack of what researchers call racial mirroring, being surrounded by people and family who look like you, is one of the factors behind higher rates of mental health challenges that adoptees experience.
EMMA RADY WANROY: And that all can really stem back to that first initial point of separation.
FENG: This is Emma Rady Wanroy, an adoptee who grew up in Colorado. She is now a therapist who specializes in working with other adoptees, and she cautions adoption is not a happy ending. It's the start of a lifetime of wondering.
WANROY: Adoptees have all these, like, dangling questions that hang above them that we don't really get answered ever.
FENG: Anna Stollman is one of the adoptees who supports the ban but says she does feel sad because her questions of identity - not white like her parents and not quite Asian enough either - are now magnified.
ANNA STOLLMAN: This kind of felt almost like the final blow of not belonging, I guess. Like, our story is over.
FENG: All those mixed emotions are what Leah Burns, another adoptee, calls holding the both/and within herself - both having a positive adoption experience...
LEAH BURNS: I can have a great life, love my mom.
FENG: ...And also being sad and bitter.
BURNS: Toward a system that was established before I was even born, I can hold the both/and.
FENG: And acknowledging and trying to find peace in the contradiction.
Emily Feng, NPR News, Taipei, Taiwan.
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