Found

Adopted children seem to have unending questions about their identity; I speak from personal experience.  Now imagine learning that you were adopted from China by American parents. As time passes, your adoptive parents reveal painful bits about your history: that you were abandoned by a busy roadside in a cardboard box wrapped in an adult raincoat or left on the steps of a busy government building? Next, stop at an overcrowded orphanage with room after room of twenty baby beds per room and one “nanny?”

Netflix has a documentary called “Found,” focusing on three Chinese American teenaged girls who discover through the DNA kit “23 and Me” that they were cousins! The documentary follows the girls through a series of zoom meetings, discussions with their adoptive mothers/fathers, and finally meeting a young Chinese woman with a degree in genealogy and a passion for helping parents and adoptees find each other through the use of DNA research.

Through this emotionally tumultuous journey, the girls understood China’s One-Child Policy that was in effect from the late 1970s until 2016. Finally, the girls traveled to China, meeting with some families forced to give up their daughter (sons were prized as earners). However, they never got over the pain of that separation.

This documentary is worth viewing.

Below is a poem I wrote about an experience I had while teaching in Nanjing, China.

Fall Harvest Festival

Little pink bundle left on the street

faint feeble heart, uneven  

crying, gasping for breath,

calling for help. 

Who will come?

Who will succor the abandoned?

The hopeless?

Mother’s love absent, 

father’s protection forgotten

familial support blown away 

in the October wind. 

Time of harvest

damaged fruit like

refuse tossed

aside without thought.

A child is not a piece of bad produce.

Charged with doing no

harm, oath abdicated--sent

to die...alone-quickly forgotten.

No record of her life-

her death.

She never existed.

But God works in mysterious ways

sending an angel to

hold her softly,

gently. 

For the only time 

in her short life

she was

Loved.

For Jeanine Bsaraba

Nanjing, October 2015