Paper Orphan

By Katie Lauder (she/her)
Adoptee
Nanchang Project Volunteer
From Hechi, Guangxi; Living in Chicago, US

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be an orphan in the eyes of the law. Typically when people hear the word “orphan” they picture a destitute, impoverished child, an Oliver Twist Charles Dickens archetype. One with no living relatives; that is the textbook definition of an orphan but with the massive spike of international adoptions in the late 20th century, “orphan” was redefined by governing bodies, seemingly to circumvent certain emigration, immigration, and guardianship legalities.

A minor cannot simply be transferred to a non-related adult stranger without the legal approval of their guardian and a governing body, much less be transferred to a random adult residing in another country. So what happens?

In the case of Chinese adoptions, so much anonymity and secrecy surrounded pregnancy and parentage during the One Child Policy era. Mothers avoided going to doctors or hospitals so that they would not be flagged for their “over quota” pregnancy/child, so typical avenues for official relinquishment of parental rights was not a realistic option. Thus, parents anonymously abandoned their children because they were caught in a contradictory situation: be fined for having an “over quota” child or be fined for abandoning a child. The anonymity and avoidance of detection by official networks resulted in a convoluted situation where the government could not definitively declare that a parent had explicitly relinquished parental rights or that a child truly had no living relatives.

However, the One Child Policy gave zero incentive to find a child’s relatives but gave 100% incentive to export the child out of the country in the name of “reducing population size.” Therefore, with the increasing demand in foreign countries for babies and the lure of financial incentives from adoption agencies, a new definition for “orphan” was needed in order to make the child eligible for export to another country.

At this point, though, the legal definition of an orphan was already morphing into something beyond a minor with no living relatives. From what I’ve learned about the consequences of the Korean War and Vietnam War adoptions, an orphan was not simply someone whose parents were deceased, but someone who could not be reunited with their relatives or whose background was unknown. The legal paperwork to make a child eligible for adoption to a foreign country was vague, with information either guesstimated or made up to appear as if due diligence was adhered to for both sending and receiving countries’ government approval for emigration and immigration, essentially the paper orphan was born, which was codified by the Hague Adoption Convention in 1993.

All this to say, I’m still processing my feelings and thoughts around being a paper orphan. Maybe it’s a feeling of dramatic irony that Chinese adoptees are “paper orphans” in order to immigrate to the US, while historically Chinese immigrants were “paper sons and paper daughters” to Chinese who were already US citizens/residents in order to immigrate. I hope this generates an interest for Chinese adoptees to learn more about the history of international adoptions so we can continue to discuss and share thoughts.

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