In September of 2022, at the start of her senior year at Indiana’s Purdue University, Mia Griffin was working in her bedroom, laptop propped up on her knees, when an e-mail came in from 23andMe saying that her genetic testing was completed. Mia was not in a hurry. She’d bought the kit a year before, when she’d seen a sale on Amazon. It was an impulse buy for which her enthusiasm had quickly waned. It took months before she got around to spitting into the tube and mailing it back in the prepaid package.
When she logged on, all seemed as anticipated. The test listed her ancestry as 99.9 per cent East Asian and Indigenous American. (At the time, the two were lumped together by the company.) No great surprise there—she had been adopted in 2002 from China, one of more than a hundred and sixty thousand children sent abroad to the United States and other countries in the course of three decades. Not knowing her family’s medical history, she had taken the test mainly to find out if she had a heightened genetic risk for cancer, and she was relieved to learn that she did not, although the test showed a propensity for lactose intolerance and an allergy to cats, two things she already knew about.
Mia knew that finding family was a possibility, but it wasn’t on her mind. She clicked anyway on the tab that listed genetic relatives. There it was at the top of the list: Zhou Changqi, born in 1956.
“You inherited half of Zhou Chang’s DNA,” the report stated. “Predicted relationship—Father.”
Was that a mistake? Or a scam? She clicked on a button indicating that she wanted to connect. Within minutes a reply came back from a man named Brian Stuy, who runs a nonprofit based in Utah connecting adoptees and birth families. He explained that he’d been given a DNA sample on behalf of Zhou, who didn’t speak English or own a computer. Yes, her father.
“Does this mean he has been searching for me?” Mia asked.
“He has been. Desperately.”
Mia would later tell me that she could only compare the experience to a car accident. Before the screams, before the sirens, time stood still. And yet something immeasurably huge had happened. She knew her life was irrevocably changed.
Back when China started allowing foreign adoptions, in the early nineties, there was no expectation that adoptees would ever connect with their birth families. The babies, mostly girls, were said to have been picked up at train stations, markets, and roadsides, where they had been abandoned by families fearful of the ruthlessly enforced one-child policy. They had no identification. Even the orphanages didn’t know who they were. And China, with its staggeringly large population—more than one billion—was so far away from the adoptive parents. An adoptee finding her birth family seemed no more likely than locating a particular grain of sand.
Those assumptions have been upended in recent years. Like it or not, and many do not, technology has compressed this vast world into an interconnected village. Adoptees who could only fantasize about their birth families are now identifying them through DNA testing and chatting with them online. Even more unexpected, Chinese birth parents and, sometimes, adult siblings are seeking out and finding their lost kin who were adopted abroad. The story of how Zhou Changqi of Hunan Province connected with Mia Griffin of Indiana provides a glimpse of the future—inspiring to some, frightening to others.
“The adoptee has been told so many times, ‘We’ll never be able to find your birth family,’ ” Stuy told me. “Then, when it happens, it is like a lightning bolt.”
I flew out to Indiana to see Mia Griffin in January, after more than two years of occasional texts and chats. She had been the one to contact me, wanting to know more about her birth father, whom I had interviewed in 2009, when I was based in Beijing for the Los Angeles Times and reporting on adoption. I was also keen to meet Mia, not only because of her remarkable story but because she was exceptionally articulate about the struggles faced by adoptees. She had majored in psychology and sociology at Purdue and was now pursuing a graduate degree at Indiana University South Bend, while working with mentally ill teen-agers in a court-ordered residential facility.
Mia grew up in Fishers, Indiana, a middle-class suburb of Indianapolis. She was adopted as a one-year-old by a couple named Bill and Mary, who were in their forties at the time. Bill was a real-estate agent and Mary a physician assistant who’d had a hysterectomy as a result of cervical cancer. Bill had a much older son from a previous marriage, but, for the most part, Mia was raised as an only child.
When she was young, Mia was fiercely competitive in sports and academics, excelling in both. She was eager to please, which she later attributed to an adoptee’s fear of being abandoned a second time. She lifted weights, played soccer and tennis, then, as an adult, turned to golf and pickleball: “Things that white people do,” she later told me. Her mother attempted to enroll her in Chinese-language lessons attended by a handful of adoptees in town, but Mia rebuffed the idea. All she felt from China was rejection.
There were moments of intense grief. She recalled that, when she was about eight years old, she would burst out crying, “Why did they throw me out like garbage?” She remembered a high-school outing where a classmate’s mother offhandedly commented “You would have to kill me before I gave up one of my kids.” Mia said nothing, but she understood the implication: “My parents didn’t care enough to fight for me.”
Mary tried to reassure her. She told Mia that her birth parents had delivered her to an orphanage, loving her so much that they wanted to make sure she was safe. This was untrue. At the time of her adoption, the Griffins had received a certificate that said she was abandoned on a street in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. “That was my made-up story,” Mary told me later. “I was trying to comfort her in some way.” When an opportunity came up for the family to visit China with other adoptees, Mia said that she didn’t want to go. Mary was relieved. “I didn’t want Mia to know she was found on the street,” she said.
Over time, Mia came to understand that her birth parents, like other Chinese couples, may have had little choice under the one-child policy, which terrorized families from 1980 until it was lifted, in 2015. By her teens, she felt she had moved on. She told me, “I had made my peace with the fact that I had the same story as everybody else.”
Before I moved to China, in 2007, I had no reason to doubt the conventional wisdom about adoption. If Chinese families were permitted only one child, they would want that child to be a boy, who would support his parents in their old age and perpetuate the family line. Girls traditionally married into their husband’s family, making them like “spilled water,” as a common slur went. Unwanted girls were left out on the street.
But disturbing reports were starting to trickle out from the countryside through Chinese social media—relatively uncensored at the time—about the officials enforcing the one-child policy. The enforcement agency, euphemistically known as Family Planning, had long been infamous for its brutality. If people couldn’t pay the crippling fines for excess births—up to many times a family’s annual income—officials would vandalize their homes, knocking down roofs and doors, and confiscate furniture, cattle, and pigs. Now, the rumor was, they stole the babies, too, delivering them to orphanages and likely receiving kickbacks in return. Although most fees were paid to the adoption agencies, which sent the money to state authorities in Beijing, adoptive families were required to donate three thousand dollars in cash to the orphanage that had fostered their child. Those orphanages, which were run by local governments, wanted to keep the money flowing. And Chinese adoptees had become so popular by the early two-thousands, not only in the U.S. but also in Europe and Australia, that there simply weren’t enough abandoned children to keep up with the demand.
I set out to investigate the reports of stolen children, travelling with a Chinese news assistant to places so remote that they were unreachable except by foot. In Guizhou Province, we scrambled up a rock-strewn mountain path to a village almost hidden in the clouds. In Hunan, we inched our way across a teetering makeshift bridge of logs to reach another village across a stream. The places had poetic names—Tianxi (“Western Heaven”) and Gaofeng (“High Phoenix”)—and crushing poverty. The people who lived there were among China’s most vulnerable, lacking political connections or knowledge of the law. Many were illiterate. There, we met parents who confirmed the reports that their babies had been taken, and who despaired of any chance of finding them.
I met one father who was so distraught when he couldn’t get his daughter back that he tried to slash his throat with a butcher knife. A mother was looking for one of her identical-twin daughters, who had been seized violently by a posse of officials. But nobody was as despondent as Zhou Changqi. Although we spoke only by telephone, he was one of the more memorable people I’d interviewed in seven years of living in China.
Zhou Changqi was raised in a family of rice farmers in Hunan Province’s Baishui township, but like other rural Chinese he frequently left the village to earn cash as a migrant laborer, usually doing construction work or mining. He was married in his early forties to a woman more than a decade younger from a neighboring village. The couple had their first child, a son, in 1999. When Zhou’s wife got pregnant the following year, they knew they were in trouble. Birth limits were enforced in the jurisdiction where you were officially registered, so Zhou took a job at a tungsten mine in the southern part of the province, hoping that his wife could give birth without attracting attention. That’s where the girl who became Mia Griffin was born, in May, 2001. She was a plump baby with bristly black hair, an easy smile, and a ready laugh. Family Planning caught up with them when she was about six months old.
