There’s also this story: Google “Heidi Bub”, or check out these links:
http://www.daughterfromdanang.com/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/daughter/peopleevents/p_heidi.html
http://www.adopting.org/heidi.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/daughter/sfeature/sf_mail.html

And also:
http://operationreunite.com/default.aspx
http://operationreunite.com/RealReunions/Heidi.aspx

OK, had to do some digging, since the original has kinda gone off the beam:

http://mortimersmom.diaryland.com/050302_5.html
http://mortimersmom.diaryland.com/comments/1109910973.html

Wow…some story! Yeah, that could happen, and my heart goes out to that poor family…

First off, there’s no ‘Fong’ in anything about Meredith. All of the kids that went through that orphanage were named ‘Jiang’, and Mere’s name wouldn’t mean beans to them *unless* they had access to the orphanage records. Good luck with that!

Second, there’s the language barrier. To search for a child who was adopted internationally, they would have to have to be proficient in English at the least. Burbling parental on-line stories are all written in idiomatic English – if they’re English speakers and if they are posting anything on the internet at all! To track down details like “Jiangmen” and the finding date and whatnot, they’d have to be able to read and understand whatever form the information was in. And I know from Sisterfar that lots of people adopt from China from other countries than the USA – and people who don’t speak English!

Third, there’s the chance for the birth parents to recall what the baby looked like and compare and contrast that with an older child, which is harder than it seems.

OK – assuming that everything goes perfectly. Let’s say that they get enough details that they can figure out that Meredith was adopted by this couple in suburban Chiago, and they have an email address and so on, and they have a English-speaker around in their trust, and so on – what then? Do they trust that the other couple won’t blow a gasket and turn them in and be annoyed at this couple who WANT THEIR CHILD! (Well, not really, but you can imagine people who would get that defensive.) And would Mr and Mrs. Fong be able and willing to put the resources into dropping everything and coming over to America on the basis of their feelings about a long-lost child, who won’t know them from Adam and Eve?

I dunno.

In our case, there’s a BIG lead of information. See the following:
http://journal.memnison.com/2007/03/14/chinese-anyone/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/738907.html

http://journal.memnison.com/2007/03/14/another-version-of-the-story/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/739286.html

http://journal.memnison.com/2007/03/14/geleisi/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/739335.html

http://journal.memnison.com/2007/03/18/naming-conventions/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/739827.html

http://journal.memnison.com/2007/04/13/sisterfar-in-the-papers/
http://jrittenhouse.livejournal.com/747195.html

The Live Journal stuff is the more heavily commented versions; I cross post everything here over there.

Short version is that there’s a trail a mile wide in the Chinese newspapers (and particularly in the Jiangmen newspaper that gives the names and photos of BOTH adopting families, finding details and general ideas about where both families live! Heck, there were finding details that the guys at the paper got out of the orphanage that WE didn’t have!

In any event, if anyone was likely to hear from the birth parents with that sort of information lying around, it would be us. Now, granted, the bulk of that story is absolute bull dung, as noted in my postings, but – would the parents know that? Naaaah. And this is the closest we have to a sheep in our house. Wooly, yes, but canine.

Going on about this.

When I was in China, I was amazed at the crowding, and at the rapid growth of the cities, and how far things had come. Since I keep a very close eye on news about China, I am still more amazed at what I see, and I wish I had the money and time to visit and see more of it all for myself.

I have been on the Internet in one form or another since the early 1980s. I was trained as a lawyer, but developed a deep interest and aptitude for tech and computers waaaay back – and have had some sort of PC around since 1983. I consider myself pretty savvy on the subject of tech and the internet, but I also realize that most people aren’t. I don’t expect people to have internet addresses here, and I am still in wonder that they have internet addresses in some small village in the hinterlands, knowing the crush of rural poverty.

(My father was a total gearhead, and he started off with his love of cars around 1929, buying a Model T to take it apart and put it back together again in the countryside outside Chillicothe, Ohio. He had been a farmboy, and he left the farm eagerly to work in the factories in Dayton, Ohio, because it was less awful and better paying than anything on a farm. He always looked at my Mom’s romantic notions on farming a plot of land as ‘you gotta be kidding – farmwork as FUN?’. So I look at all of the people who desert the rural areas of China to work in the Pearl River Delta and so on and – yeah, I know where that comes from.)

Another movie recommendation: NOT ONE LESS, which really speaks to this whole rural to city part pretty well. I love Zhang YiMou’s stuff.

Anyway, I’m rambling. In any case, without much evidence, the birth parents are the ones who will have to look. And maybe they will get up the desire to do so. Which means that they wold have to understand the internet, and understand what they are looking for!

For example….

Yep, that’s the heart of it, in my mind. They read stories like ours, and think it sounds dreamy. They don’t realize that even with those dreamy stories, there’s the heartache where a little girl is shuddering with tears in your lap, crying out “I WANT SISSSYYYY”. And Sissy is 700 miles away, with her own set of tears. And the next reunion is months off….

And you realize that all your odd money and vacation time feeds that relationship. You don’t begrudge that, because the absolute delight that those two have in each other is like seeing twin beacons of young joy together, but it is a very big, intense, hairy deal for all concerned, a relationship that is quite central to them. You didn’t MAKE that relationship, you allowed it to grow, but it is there and very major to your daughter’s happiness. And you mess with it at everyone’s peril.

I also feel that people have no serious idea just how futile a lot of the searching would be, or – well, in my own mother-in-law, I’ve been blessed, but I can’t say that about my other in-laws nearly so much. When you marry someone, you are adding their family to you as part of your family – no matter how much of a PITA you may think Uncle Ned is, the kids like him, so you take a deep breath and Deal With Uncle Ned. And so on.

There’s a wonderful movie called AVALON, about an immigrant Jewish family in Baltimore, and their family’s relations over the years, It speaks to a lot of this, where the wonderful atmosphere of a big happy family group can fall apart and be poisoned by the darndest things. That it’s hard to keep up that equilibrium, but it’s hard to be without the closeness and warmth engendered in the grouping.

Meredith also had (in first grade) a friend named Jessica – her mom and dad had met in university in Nanjing, and they had come over here to make a life for themselves in America. Jessica’s house was huge, in a nice suburb – and the parents were getting ready to bring over Jessica’s maternal grandparents.

But the friendship foundered because Jessica was not happy with her situation. Her parents worked long hours in the Chicago loop as programmers in a high-end financial firm, and they didn’t have much time for her. They loved her dearly, but were living the American dream in their own way, and must have been paying a heck of a mortgage on that house. BIG house.

Jessica’s grandparents spoke no English and Jessica little Chinese. Her parents were pushing her hard to learn Chinese and this and that, and were starting to push hard on all of the filial piety levers. Jessica saw Meredith, who was taking Chinese with me in weekend classes, more or less for the fun of it, and saw the amount of fun Mere had with us and the freedoms she had, and looked at her future – and ended up hating Meredith for it. She wanted nothing more than to be as Americanized as possible, with parents who had a good deal of time to putter around with her – and Meredith wanting to be more Chinese with the help of her gwailo parents? Just too much.

I Agree that sooner or later, you will find more of these birth parent reunions happening, and I seriously thin it will have to happen more from the birth parent end than the adopted kid end – because there’s not that much evidence to go on. I have no idea what evidence you have (you’re welcome to contact me via e-mail to discuss this) but I doubt it’s much, as most adopted families are lucky if they know anything that detailed about the finding circumstances. There’s usually no note, and the information we had about Meredith was ‘outside of a “holiday farm”. Well, the entrance to the ‘holiday farm’ turned out to be right outside of the front door of the orphanage! (What ‘holiday farm’ turned out to be was something akin to a cross between a petting zoo and a park that recreates what a working farm is like…)

And truth be told, if it wasn’t for the Internet, we would never have found Mere’s sister Mer. And it was the oddest turn of events that I even looked at their site at all; they had went for #2 child, and came back, and posted tons of ‘come see the new addition to our family’ messages all around, including to the DTC group and the one for our orphanage! I said – oh, yeah, I remember those guys – they named their kid Meredith, funny that – and took a look. Normally, I IGNORED those sort of messages. Yes, it’s a baby. Big deal. But this one, I did look at….and dropped my jaw at the resemblance of the kids.

In the Sisterfar group, that’s something similar to a bunch of the situations – that, or the parents of both sets went and picked up the kids at the same time from the same orphanage, and say – how odd, our kids look amazingly like each other. Then they do a little more digging, and….

All of the other cases would not have happened without the internet, by and large.

As to the birth parents, you and I know about the lack of resources and internet availability in China, but that China is booming and growing…

At the same time, people are going to search. There will be no stopping them, no matter how hard the Chinese government might try. I think the Chinese adoption community likes to keep its’ head in the sand about these issues, but before long they are going to be smacking us in the face whether we like it or not. I think we need to start talking about what needs to be considered when contact happens. It is better to be prepared and not need the preparation than to walk headlong into a situation that can rapidly turn disasterous for our children.

It probably also won’t be long before birth parents start searching too. I have a friend who met a Chinese birth mother who had emigrated to Canada who was clearly still very distraught about the child they didn’t keep. (It is difficult to explain, she took down her old posts, but you can read my take on the story here: http://american-family.org/2005/03/04/holy-shit/) If she or her husband were just a tiny bit web savvy, it is totally concievable that they might be able to locate their child if she was placed in a western country.

While the majority of birth parents lack computer access, China is changing rapidly. The odds that our children’s siblings in China will have internet access is not unimaginable. Just this week, I located email addresses for two different individuals in my daughter’s rural finding town which probably has less than 5,000 people.

Birthparent contact in an international adoption would be complicated, but there are many countries in which American adoptive families regularly have contact with birth families (Russia, ethiopia etc.). It is not the same as a domestic open adoption, but I don’t think that more knowledge is necessarily a bad thing in the long run even if it makes life more complicated in the short term.

The points you make are good ones, but there is a lot of wiggle room for each adoptees’ personal circumstance. As parents, we have to decide what is in the best interest of our own children. In 10 or 20 or even 30 years, I am the one who will have to look L in the eye and explain the choices we have made that impacted her entire life, so there is a lot for me to think about.

In the case of the kids, look-alikes alone doesn’t cut it, as siblings can look quite different. There’s a ton of other factors involved that we went through in checking out ‘the meteorite that fell in our backyard’, including DNA testing. Not all DNA tests are all that accurate or good; there’s one outfit I know of that does OK testing but mostly, their methodology for doing it stinks. I’ve seen WIDE inaccuracies in the DNA testing that made me very unsure as to what the heck they were doing.

There’s the whole issue of cultures and life styles. We lucked out; Mere’s twin’s family are very nice people and have been good about all of this to the max, with everyone’s first concern being the kids and their interactions. I’ve seen situations where the two families in a similar separated twin situation couldn’t stand each other – politics, rules of the household, idiosycracies, etc. Think of the worst in-law stories you’ve ever heard.

Add into this with the birth families the whole cultural gulf between modern Americans and a farm family in Guangdong, say, and – wow, that would be hard to deal with. You ‘grok’ that better than most, I’d bet, but most Americans are blind to anything outside the ‘American’ norm, whatever the heck that really is.

Meredith has *never* had any racial problems from the kids her age, and only the usual boy versus girl stuff for her age group to deal with. The main problems in regard to race in her mind are the ‘mommy doesn’t look like me and I wish I could fit in that way’ department,. but nobody’s ever said that to her. (She gets far more annoyance at class because she’s the Class Brain, and she gets tired of kids asking her for the answers in class.)

Actually, the thing that does bother me a lot is in regard to these ’searchers’ getting so het up that there HAS to be a pony under that pile of horse manure that they’ll get themselves in trouble; there are people always looking for the gullible out there, and this would be a prime area to work in with no guarantee of really accurate results.

I don’t really understand the fascination with the idea of searching for siblings in the China adoption community. I think there were a few too many separated twins stories showing up around the same time and it caught a lot of people’s attention. I really do believe there will be a good number of adoptees who end up searching for birth families in China. A lot of them will be disappointed, but I am sure there will be more than a handfull of successes too.