So many unanswered questions - transracial late-discovery adoptee Ryan

I was 18 when my parents told me I was adopted so I’m what’s known as a LDA - late discovery adoptee. This news really messed me up. After learning of my adoption, I kept it a secret from everyone else in my life for another 12 years. I traveled a lot, lived in Ibiza, had a busy life - managing to ignore it. When the COVID lockdowns hit, I couldn’t avoid it any longer. From that point, adoption has ruled my life. That’s why I decided that I had to trace my roots and am now on a reunion journey.

A theory I was told was I was found in a street in Morocco and taken to a hospital. I was adopted by my Moroccan father and English mother and brought to live in Scotland. While they were going through the complicated process of adopting me, I spent some time with a foster family in Morocco. This is about as much as I know. I always wondered why my skin was darker than my siblings and could never work out why. There were so many unanswered questions.

I took a DNA test and the results only identified a 4th cousin - which is not a good match. I’ve applied to be on the TV show Long Lost Family twice, but have not been successful so far. In June, I took a trip to Morocco to try and find more information about my adoption. Every single piece of information is valuable to me. I believe that everyone deserves to know where they came from.

It’s hard work trying to find information in another country and in another language. I don’t speak Arabic so I need to have someone with me to interpret or via phone which has its cha;llenges. I met my foster family and they were positive about the likelihood of me tracing my birth family. I visited the hospital I spent time in, and saw my name in a court register. However, getting more information is difficult. I was sent to five different offices and then back to where I started. Each place I went, I was either told I had to go somewhere else to get the information I wanted, the person I needed to see was on holiday, the files were in an old archive, or the information didn’t exist. At the hospital, they requested money from me to get the information I needed. You have to be careful not to get scammed since there are a lot of people trying to make money out of you.

I appeared on some national television programs in the hope that someone watching would know something about me, but nothing came of it. In Morocco during the 1990s, there was shame around women having children outside of marriage. They could get in trouble from the authorities and lots of babies are abandoned for that reason or because of poverty. One thing I noticed while in Morocco is despite the poverty, the people looked happy.

I’d like to meet my Moroccan family and thank them, but I don’t know if I will ever get the chance to do that. I know there are many barriers to finding out who my birth parents are. I’ve tried going through the embassies, but ended up waiting months and months for a response. They don’t seem to be able to help much. You need to be persistent, but it’s very draining. For now, I’ve hit a dead end and feel in limbo. I need to go back to Morocco but it’s expensive, so I’ll have to save up more money.

Although I was taken away from my roots, I love Scotland. I am close to my adoptive mum and she’s been a huge support to me through this process.

I struggle to know where I fit in – my adoptive family, Morocco, Scotland, and even with other adopted people. There are moments where I think that everyone else is happier and more solid than me. But I know I am hard on myself. I try to be spontaneous to keep my head above water but find myself crashing. I may push people away and self-sabotage. However, I have ambitions to be successful and to have a family. I’m not sure how to achieve this yet but I have hope.

In July 2021, I decided to share my experiences publicly. I posted a YouTube video, talked to the press, and published my story on my website. I find it healing to talk about my situation and keen to share my story.

Even small pieces of information that I can find about my biological family means a lot to me. There is always the chance that someone listening, watching, or even reading this, will know something which will really matter to me.

About the author

Ryan Anderson is a foundling and a transnational, transracial, and late discovery adoptee (LDA). Found on the street in El Jadida, Morocco he was adopted age 3 months then brought to Scotland age 6 months, in between this time he was fostered with a Moroccan family. He first found out he was adopted at age 18. Since 2020 he focused on personal development, to then become became open to share his story at age 31.

More info from Ryan

Searching for Truth guest blog by Yuna Silverstein

I always knew I was adopted—not because I thought I looked different from my parents (because I really didn’t think so), but because my parents always read me stories about it. I was part of the first wave of Chinese adoptees, a mass exodus beginning in 1991 (I was adopted in 1998) characterized by mostly female infants who were filling China’s orphanages due to the One Child Policy in effect from 1979 to 2015. It has been estimated that about 110,000 children from China have been adopted internationally, with most adoptees now living in the United States like me.

From the very beginning, Chinese adoption had a very strong sense of community, centered around the almost religious belief that Chinese baby girls were unwanted and abandoned by their birthfamilies. This had been the adage the world news had been spreading, echoed from every corner of the globe. Indeed, the stories that my parents read to me at night, written specifically for Chinese adoptees, told of the night that my birthmom needed to sneak out of the house and place me in a public place so that I would be found by a nice policeman and taken to the orphanage in the morning. My parents could not with a child get into the details of why exactly my birthmom would need to do all this in secret, but they tried to place any blame on the Chinese government and the law, wisely deciding early on that my birthparents should be given the utmost love and respect, and should not be painted as the villains. There was never any reason to doubt this story as all Chinese adoptees, including me, were given official abandonment documents that said when and where we were abandoned.

Growing up around Philadelphia, there were plenty of Chinese adoptees in the area. I absolutely never felt that my family was not normal because we were a demographic in our own right with our own get-togethers. The neighborhood I grew up in and the public schools I attended were extremely diverse—something I appreciated much more as I grew older. Because of this, I was not bullied for my race or for being an adoptee. Being adopted was normal for me and I was always a little surprised when my friends’ parents looked like them. I don’t recall any friends ever seeming surprised that my parents were white and most often when I told someone I was adopted they didn’t blink an eyelash because it was just so normal.

The Chinese community welcomed us adoptees with open arms. At Chinese school, they made a special language class just for us adoptees and our adoptive parents. Someone in the neighborhood made an all Chinese adoptee traditional dance troupe and there were plenty of Families with Children from China (FCC) events to go to. I mention these experiences because when I tell people that “I am a transracial adoptee with white parents,” I think there’s an automatic (and rude!) assumption that I’ve been “starved for culture.” Yet, for all of these programs, some of which I enjoyed more than others, I drew my largest sense of identity from growing up with other Chinese Americans. I very confidently identify as a Chinese American woman and I’m just as Chinese as any of my Chinese American friends.

Given that I didn’t think being an adoptee was particularly special, for years I had no doubt in my mind that adoption was not affecting me. While I was always very open about wanting to find my birthmother in particular, I was also very aware that China was the most populous country and that under the circumstances of the One Child Policy it had been made impossible to track her down. My birthmother was not allowed to give birth to me, or allowed to keep me, or allowed to bring me to the orphanage—hence the only option was to abandon me in secret. This meant I had no names or addresses to go on! I was also always very sad to believe I was abandoned, because that is such an ugly word that carries with it unwanted, with absolutely zero context of what my birthmother had to go through. I also had to make peace pretty early on with the fact that I had no idea what my given name was, as my Chinese name was assigned to me systematically by the orphanage, as was my birthday.

But I was still “in the fog.” I had no idea about pre-verbal PTSD, separation trauma, or hypervigilance, why I sat by the exits for a quick escape, or why I had panic attacks when I felt my safety was threatened by seemingly ordinary things. I also had no idea that I had insecure anxious attachment, meaning that I was really, really close to my parents. It was what made it particularly difficult my first year away from home at college. Cognitive behavioral therapy really helped me to sort through many of these very early thoughts and feelings, because it is very powerful just being seen and understood.

I came “out of the fog” after my first year of college and my journey of self-discovery quickly accelerated, especially when I learned that my orphanage, like most others, had actually forged abandonment documents and actively prevented birthfamily reunions. (I highly recommend watching One Child Nation to understand more.) To make a long-story short, though it had been pounded into our heads that we were abandoned, the truth in the majority of cases was that our birthparents relinquished us to individuals who could be trusted to bring us safely to the orphanage. This changed everything. Yes, there were abandonments, but they were forced abandonments because the law gave birthparents no choice. There were also police confiscations of infants and children for families who violated the One Child Policy. So many things actually happened in China that I’ve tried to document. So many women were forced to undergo abortions and were forced to be sterilized. Because of censorship in China, much of this was only known in pieces to the outside world, and now because of DNA matches, we are finally getting the truth about what happened.

Looking back, I suppose it could be fate that I was adopted from the Dianbai orphanage in Guangdong province, because this was how I knew of the Stuy family who organized a few Dianbai reunions. For years, Lan and Brian Stuy have been working to unite birthfamilies and adoptees via their organization DNA Connect. Suddenly, the impossible was unbearably possible. Adoptive and birthfamilies were coming together and the lies each side was fed were finally being scrubbed away. It is so painful to want something so much, but I can’t help but hope that I’ll get a match someday too. Even if I never get a match, there is something liberating about knowing the truth about what happened to us collectively so many years ago in China. It may not seem like it should matter to my current everyday life in America, but it does, because I am so much more solid in who I am. I cannot begin to express how much lighter I feel to finally, finally learn more of the truth.

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You can read more and connect with Yuna at her blog, Hello Noble Soul

Photo credit: Rawdyl at Unsplash

Alone - a guest blog by transracial adoptee, Debbie Nahid

I was born in 1968. My mother had concealed her pregnancy for eight months when she boarded a plane in the Middle East bound for London. On her arrival, she visited a doctor in a Harley Street clinic and asked for help to give birth secretly. The doctor contacted a private adoption agency who agreed to place me with an adopted family in England so she could return to her homeland and escape the threat of an honour killing. If her family discovered she was pregnant with me, we would have been killed to protect their honour and reputation.

We spent ten days together in hospital before I was removed and taken into temporary foster care. My mother had signed all the relevant documents but she had named a father on my birth certificate and it was this that prevented my adoption into a family. At two months, I was handed over to the care of another foster mother who had been deemed unsuitable by social services and desperately longed for a baby of her own.

I was taken on a train to Suffolk and raised in a rural community of white English people. My mother was a single woman who did not have any extended family or partner to support her. I did not look like her; I had thick black hair, dark brown eyes and a tan on my skin that never faded. I felt like an outcast not only in my town but in my own home too.

My mother refused to tell me the truth about my birth and I was raised to believe that she was my biological mother. She also claimed that my father had come from Iran and apparently died before I was born. She did not have a photograph of him or myself as a newborn. I can remember questioning her many times but she would not discuss how I came to be in this world.

I grew up feeling extremely lonely and isolated, not just by my physical difference but also by her inability to be open about my existence. Social workers used to visit our house regularly but I was never told that I was the reason for these visits; I thought they were just being friendly when they asked about racial abuse I was experiencing at school. My mother used to tell me that the social workers were bad people who wanted to destroy her life and I believed her.

When approaching sixteen I discovered the truth. My mother woke me one night to tell me I was not her real daughter but she would not explain how I got there to be with her. In that moment, my whole world froze before me. I felt empty and frightened. I did not know who I was and I needed to find out. She told me that the name I had been known by for sixteen years was not officially mine.

A social worker came round to explain that I had a different name all along, a foreign name and that I was ‘a foreigner’. I wasn’t given any counselling or support during this period and it has set me up for a lifetime of mental health issues. I don’t think you will ever understand how it feels to discover you are not the person you thought you were. Everyone and everything becomes a lie.

I began to run away from home and each time I did this I was picked up by the police and taken back to the place I was running from. I eventually made it to London where I found the adoption agency and met with the woman who helped my birth mother. However, she didn’t want to help me and insisted I should drop any idea of searching because I would put my mother’s life in danger as the threat of an honour killing was indeed real. She also said that my mother had ‘moved on’. I was bereft, with no one to turn to and nowhere to go.

There is no help for an intercountry adoptee, which is essentially what I was - no helpful social worker, no access to records and no intermediary. The only way I was able to trace my birth family was by travelling to go in search of them, which at the time was to an extremely dangerous region, as a war and then later an invasion all hampered my efforts but didn’t stop me from pursuing the truth.

I found my birth mother when I was twenty four years old. She was married and had four children. I was afraid that she would reject me all over again, but she didn’t. She wanted to meet me. I wasn’t aware that my arrival would trigger her shame and guilt for having a child out of wedlock in a Muslim society. At the time, I was overwhelmed by my own feelings and it felt like rejection when she insisted on pretending I was somebody else. It was deeply upsetting for me to have found my birth mother after years of searching to then have to pretend I was someone else. It felt like another lie.

For the first time in my life, I was in the same home as my biological mother and my half sibling. I saw likenesses and mannerisms; I saw a physical resemblance that connected us all and yet they were strangers who had a different upbringing to me. They were raised in a different culture to the one I had been brought up in. It wasn’t just about colour, it wasn’t just about race, it was about a cultural identity that I found difficult to partake in because it was so unfamiliar to me. I may have appeared the same as them but my mindset was completely alien to theirs. My birth mother was a woman who had grown up in a restrictive society and this prevented her from openly acknowledging me because she feared the consequences.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get long enough to know her because she died quite suddenly and by the time I received the news, it was too late - she had already been buried. I would spend the years that followed trying to build a relationship with my half-siblings and trying to reach out to my birth mother’s relatives who did not want to build any relationship with me. They wanted to keep my identity a secret to protect their family honour, which meant rejecting my existence.

I think my life would have turned out differently if I had always known the truth about my adoption because it wouldn’t have been such a shock. I didn’t know then that I was led by trauma and living a traumatic existence. I was searching for honest people but I only found deceptive ones. I had a right to the truth because it is my history, my biology and my genetic code. From the moment I was born until now everyone who could give me information has tried their best to withhold it from me, using the threat of an honour killing as a justification.

Now I am a grown woman with children of my own and I am searching for the truth about my biological father’s identity, so my story continues....

I Grew Up White - guest blog from This Adoptee Life

I grew up white.

White-washed, absolutely.

But, also white.

Not my skin.

Not my heritage.

Not my looks.

Not my history.

But me.

I grew up white.

Not because I was ever white, but because I only ever knew white.

The fact that I was born in Colombia was always just and only that, a fact.

Minimal efforts were made on my own part and that of my parents, for me to actually have any tangible connection to my first country, culture and/or history.

And I don’t know if my white, very typically Swedish parents would have ever been able to instill in me a sense of being Latina. Even if they would have tried harder.

Any attempt made by them to talk about Colombia, I met with distance. It seemed almost ridiculous to me, hearing my adoptive mother speak of typical Colombian cumbia being played on the buses in Medellin when they were there to pick me up, or of the typical Colombian soup they tried while in Colombia, as if she knew what she was talking about. Yet, her short vacation in my first country gave her more of a sense of knowing the country, than I myself could muster up since I remembered nothing from there. That bothered me and I rejected the topic, although I yearned for it, but not from them. Seeing my mother close her eyes and enjoy the rhythms of Andean music and the sounds of the pan flute as if she could feel it in her soul, seemed to me a huge act of trespassing. That music was mine, that was music I should be able to connect to. It came from my roots.

And I had no recollection of it.

I grew up white.

I grew up Swedish.

It was all I knew.

Not all I felt. Not all I wanted.

But all I knew and all I had experience of.

And I thought I blended in.

A perfect example being when my friend, whose older sister joined the mid-90’s trend in Sweden of becoming prejudice towards immigrants, expressed a certain sympathy with those views, and I was told they didn’t apply to me.

And I found myself continuing being friends with her.

What caused our friendship to end was far more shallow than her slightly agreeing with the racist views of her older step-sister.

I grew up white.

It was all I knew.

It was all I saw.

It was all I had experienced.

But I was never white.

Why does this matter at all?

It matters now more than ever.

It matters because as the world is having difficult conversations about race, I am ill prepared as a person of color, to speak about life as a person of color, because I never lived as a person of color.

And at the same time, my white experience is not mine.

Why does this matter?

It matters now more than ever because as a mother of color, with children of color, I am even more ill-prepared to raise them as people of color, since I have not lived as a person of color, but have had the so-called “privilege” of growing up white.

A privilege that is now more than ever showing its shortcomings.

I grew up white.

I am a person of color.

My experience does not match me.

Just being able to say “I am a person of color” took me 35 years. I don’t know how many more years until I can actually say that I know life as a person of colors.

And why would I want that?

What does it matter?

If I have had a good life and so many opportunities, what does it matter?

It matters now more than ever because stripping away my culture, my history and my heritage from me, placing me to grow up in a country and culture where I would not fit in or feel at home, I am now running a similar risk of disconnect to my children’s reality as the one I grew up with.

And that matters now more than ever, because I feel extremely inadequate in teaching them about where they come from and instilling in them a sense of pride in themselves as Latinas, because what I from growing up white I don’t care to teach them, and what I should know as a person of color, I simply don’t.

And in all of this, I think what has always bothered me the most about my adoptive mother looking ridiculous to me when she, as a white Swedish person speaks of Colombia with more experience than I, is my fear of being considered similarly disconnected and ridiculous if ever I claim Colombia as mine and myself as Colombian.

Or, myself as a person of color…

Baby Amanda

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Amanda was born in Colombia and under circumstances unknown she became an adoptable child. At age 2, she was adopted to Sweden, where she grew up. Amanda moved to the US at age 20. Today she lives in San Diego, after many years in NJ. She runs her own business as a translator and an adoptee centered blog called This Adoptee Life on her free time. 

Via her blog, Amanda works to support and help adoptees find their voice and tell their story, inviting fellow adoptees to write and share their story, in their own words, alongside Amanda’s own story as a transnational, transracial adoptee. 

Please, read and follow Amanda’s work and story on any, or all, of the following platforms:

The Adoptee Life Facebook

Instagram This Adoptee Life

Twitter - This Adoptee Life

This Adoptee Life on YouTube

Amanda from This Adoptee Life

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So much gratitude to Amanda Medina, founder at This Adoptee Life™ for this jaw-dropingly great post. I’d love to hear your thoughts and will pass all comments onto Amanda.

Meet Twayna Mayne: comedian, black woman and transracial adoptee

Introducing transracial adoptee and host of the adoption and fostering podcast Loco Parentis, and the writer and comedian behind the Radio 4 series Black Woman.

Twayna and I first met on Twitter when she released her podcast Loco Parentis in 2018. Since then Twayna’s gone on to write and perform a comedy show on Radio 4 called Black Woman where, as well as talking about black British identity, she also talks about being a transracial adoptee growing up in the UK in the 90s.

Twayna and her older brothers were adopted into a white family and their two younger brothers were adopted into another family just round the corner. Officially Twayna’s paperwork went through when she was 14, and she remembers going to the High Court in London “to be adopted”. 

In episode one of her Radio 4 series Twayna talks about being an adoptee and specifically a transracial adoptee. Recorded in front of a live audbnwich I enjoyed a few chuckles at Twayna’s adoption jokes, although – as you’ll know if you follow me on Twitter – woe betide any non-adoptees joking about adoption! The power of humour is truly amazing, and I often feel much lighter after having a good giggle with my adopted friends about it all. Twayna’s humour is bang-on the money, and I really admire her and anyone who has the courage to bring niche topics such as adoption to the mainstream, particularly in a stand-up comedian capacity.

Twayna’s Radio 4 series covers how it felt to be one of only a few black children at her school, and how she also experienced a level of white privilege as a result of being brought up in a white middle class family. She challenges the number of white people who say they want to adopt a black child, and says “If transracial adoption is no big deal – and I think it is – then we should all be able to get in on the act…It’s time to stop romanticising adoption, particularly of children in care and ethnic minorities.”

The Black Woman series is highly recommended and I hope Radio 4 commissions Twayna for a new series. You can also check out her other episodes on identity and representation, gender and sexuality and colourism.

As I mentioned, Twayna and I first met when she launched her Loco Parentis podcast. As one of the only UK-based adoption podcasts by an adoptee, I was delighted when it launched. I recommend all the podcast episodes, particularly the episode with Marleigh Price on race, identity and how adoption is a lifelong journey and not a singular event. Twayna and Marleigh talk about the feeling of straddling multiple worlds that adoptees and care experienced people often talk of feeling, where we feel like we’re responsible for managing the emotions of both our adoptive parents and biological parents. Managing these complexities can be very exhausting for us. 

Marleigh’s dad’s family didn’t know she existed until she was in her 20s. She talks about how being adopted cuts you off from the rest of your extended family: aunties, uncles, grandparents, etc. Twayna says she identifies with this as, although she was adopted with two brothers, and their other two brothers lived locally with a different adoptive family, they had no contact with their wider biological family until adulthood. There’s been a lot of talk recently on Twitter and at conferences such as the One Adoption conference I spoke at in February 2020 about challenging the norms around contact with first families, including siblings, after adoption. Twayna presents an important point: if your siblings are in touch with your bios, this can be quite awkward if you don’t want to be in touch with them. The interview also touches on some of the joys and challenges experienced after reunion, with Marleigh talking about discovering she dances like her cousins, but also ruminating that 30 years of separate experiences cannot be overcome immediately just because you are ‘blood’.

The Loco Parentis podcast is rated 5/5 on Apple Podcasts and Twayna’s guests include many familiar names from the UK adoption and fostering landscape including Martin Barrow, Andy Elvin from TACT and Professor Anna Gupta from Royal Holloway University. As well as professionals, she also interviews some of her friends who have been adopted or care experienced, including fellow comedian, writer and actor Sophie Willan, With her podcast guests, Twayna’s style is relaxed and informal - more like a conversation over a cup of tea than a formal interview.

I really urge you to have a listen to both the Radio 4 series and the podcast. As Twayna herself says: “I hope you enjoy it, and if you don’t - it’s on you.”

Photo by Matt Stronge.