Long lost twins reunited youtube korean
In the end, my editors and I were in agreement: It was out of the question to write a story that exposed a 9-year-old girl as being a stolen Chinese child. Did I have an obligation to tell the Chinese birth parents where their daughter was? Did I owe it to the adoptive family to keep their privacy? “She and her family are still deeply grieving her husband’s death and I don’t think she is ready or able to deal with this at present.”
The chat room moderator contacted me on behalf of the adoptive mother basically asking that we back off: Through the obituary, I got the names of the couple’s adult children. I later learned that the adoptive father had died the year before at the age of 66. As soon as they learned of my queries, they removed the photos from the internet. I reached out to the American family, but it was quickly apparent they didn’t want to cooperate. I mailed the page to Hunan, with an offhand note saying these were adopted girls and just maybe one resembled their daughter. I arranged the two photos on a page with random images of Chinese girls plucked from the internet. I didn’t want to raise false hopes for Shuangjie’s family, so I borrowed a technique from police procedurals - mug shots. On the website were two photos of the girl I suspected was the missing twin - a blurry head shot of a toddler with thin hair and downcast eyes, another of a smiling 4-year-old in a puffy blouse. God is a Father to the orphan, and is just waiting for us to care for them the way He does.” On Adopt the World, a website she created to help families adopt, the mother explained how their faith guided them: “When God births His passion in you, it doesn’t matter what the obstacles are.… It had to be because it was and is His will. They were an older couple, both previously married with children. The parents were evangelical Christians who had two adopted girls. Along with the concerned moderator, who let me join the group, we flipped through photos and descriptions. I began to search.Įventually, I found a Yahoo chat group for parents who had adopted from the Shaoyang Social Welfare Institute, the orphanage where I was certain the twin had been taken. I moved on to other news, but Zanhua had laid down a challenge that would be hard to resist. My story on officials abducting babies ran in September 2009 along with a story about the stolen twin. “Come visit again, and next time bring our daughter.” “I wouldn’t know where to look.”Īs I got ready to leave, she brightened up for a final farewell. “She could be anywhere in the world,” Zanhua told me. In fact, parents from the U.S., Netherlands, Spain and Great Britain were flocking to China to adopt.) (I never found evidence to support such claims.
Zanhua thought her daughter might have been adopted overseas, but she’d also heard rumors that babies were taken for organ donations. In February, during Lunar New Year, she traveled from Texas, where she had been adopted, to meet her birth family and her twin sister. In 2002, a 2-year-old girl was confiscated by Chinese officials because her family had violated the one-child policy. “‘She’s always asking me, ‘When will you get my sister back? Where is she?’” Her mother, Yuan Zanhua, told me her daughter still grieved for her missing twin. She sat next to her mother on a plastic stool outside a wooden shack. She had a heart-shaped face and a pouting mouth, lips turned downward to mark her discontent. Her name was Shuangjie - “double purity,” in recognition of her status as a twin. I met the twin who stayed with her parents when she was 9 years old. But one day when the girls were almost 2 years old, five men working for family planning stormed the house, restrained the aunt and took away the screaming toddler. She and her husband then fled to another province with one twin while leaving the other with an uncle and aunt. The mother had given birth in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government. Twins are normally permitted, but this family already had two older daughters. One of the families I met in a village wedged between rice paddies in Hunan province had lost one of their twin daughters. I went to investigate, traveling to remote mountain villages, sometimes leaving the car to hike because the roads were impassable.
But reports were surfacing that government officials were snatching babies to satisfy a lucrative adoption market.
The prevailing wisdom was that rural Chinese had essentially thrown away their female babies because the law limited them to one child and they preferred boys. In 2009, as a Beijing-based correspondent, I traveled the backwaters of central China to learn more about the origins of the more than 80,000 girls who had been adopted in the United States.