The Chinese Adoptees Who Were Stolen. As thousands of Chinese families take DNA tests, the results are upending what adoptees abroad thought they knew about their origins.

n 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.

Zhou and his wife were having marital difficulties at the time, which may have made him an easier target; Family Planning tended to exploit such vulnerabilities. There are discrepancies in his various accounts, but he told me that officials asked for fines equivalent to almost five hundred dollars, more than a year’s income for the family. They also wanted Zhou’s wife to undergo a tubal ligation, which was a common enforcement mechanism at the time. He agreed. Zhou told me that his wife and Mia were housed in a hotel overnight awaiting the operation, while he went off to try to borrow money. When he returned the next day, both had vanished. Zhou was told that his wife, frightened of the procedure, had run away with the baby. But then officials said the baby had been sent to the local civil-affairs office, which had transferred her to an orphanage.

The township officials strung Zhou along for months, then years. They stalled, saying nobody could help him until after the upcoming Lunar New Year, when most Chinese offices are closed. Then they demanded that he retrieve his wife, still on the run, to undergo the sterilization.

Zhou’s wife was found and had the operation, but the baby was not returned. His wife didn’t come back to him, either. He went to the county orphanage to try to find his daughter, and then to a larger orphanage in Changsha, two hundred miles away. Security guards in Changsha wouldn’t let him through the gate. Eventually, officials told him, “Your daughter has already gone to America.”

After so many lies, Zhou didn’t believe it. Overseas adoption wasn’t publicized inside China. To many Chinese, the idea that a baby had gone to the United States was as preposterous as if she had gone to Mars. But Zhou, unlike many others in his situation, understood the law well enough to know that officials had no right to take his child. Dragging his young son along, Zhou travelled around Hunan looking for the girl, filing petitions with various disciplinary committees that oversee the conduct of Communist Party officials. In 2005, a women’s federation helped him file a lawsuit against the township. The court ruled against him on the ground that he couldn’t prove he was the baby’s father, because his marriage had not been legally registered. (It was common for couples in rural China not to bother with the registration requirements.) The lawsuit, along with the search, cost him thousands of dollars, which he raised by selling almost all of his belongings.

Although Zhou was illiterate, he implored everybody he met to write up and post his story on online forums. Those accounts were picked up by various online publications, and even in Taiwan, which is how I came to know about Zhou. By the time I interviewed him, in 2009, he was raising pigs and living with his son in a shack that he’d patched together out of corrugated tin. It had been seven years since his daughter was taken. Still, after we spoke, he used to telephone my office in Beijing frequently, asking for my help locating her. He spoke in a rapid, high-pitched Hunan dialect which my Chinese assistants strained to understand. (Mao Zedong, also a Hunan man, was nearly incomprehensible to many Chinese.)

“I miss my daughter all the time,” he told us. “I know if she’s gone to America, I can’t get her back. I’m not trying. I would like to get a picture of her, the cellphone number of the family who adopted her.”

I wanted to help. I had been able to before, managing to track down the identical twin who had been snatched in Hunan Province, after her family in Texas posted photos online. But, in that case, I’d had a good idea which orphanage had handled her adoption and a sense of what she looked like, because I’d met her twin. She had also turned two by the time she was adopted, making her older than most of the children who were sent abroad. Zhou’s daughter had been the same age as thousands of others, and we knew very few details about where she had been taken. It seemed hopeless.

Finding Mia Griffin is one of Brian Stuy’s proudest achievements. Based out of Lehi, Utah, Stuy and his Chinese-born wife, Longlan, have connected nearly two hundred and fifty birth families in China with adoptees in North America and Europe. The number of “matches” is increasing each year, as adoptees realize that it is possible to find their birth families. In 2023, the Stuys announced twenty-nine matches. Last year, the number shot up to sixty-one.

Stuy, a strapping, outspoken outdoorsman with blond hair faded to silver, has done as much as anyone to puncture the assumption that American adoptive parents rescued their daughters from the garbage heaps of China. That has made him an at times unwelcome figure in the adoption community. As Mei Fong, the author of the 2015 book “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment,” put it, he is as popular in the adoption community “as Al Gore at an OPEC convention.”

Raised a Mormon, Stuy was an equity trader by profession and a dedicated environmentalist who believed that zero population growth was necessary to protect the planet. Initially a strong supporter of China’s one-child policy, he felt that adopting would allow him to reconcile his convictions with the communal imperative to raise a family. He and his first wife went to China to adopt a girl in 1998. After that marriage ended (largely over his decision to leave the Church), he adopted another girl as a single father and a third with Longlan, his second wife.

Thrilled with fatherhood, Stuy was bursting with curiosity about his daughters. Who gave birth to these marvellous children, and why did they relinquish them? He expected that they would ask these questions in the future. The Mormon Church teaches that ancestors are reunited in the afterlife. Although he was no longer a believer, he still respected the importance of family history.

In 2000, he travelled back to China hoping to learn more about his eldest daughter, Meikina. He didn’t expect to find her birth family, but he wanted to see her orphanage and the place where she was picked up. The orphanage arranged an interview with one of two women who were listed on the paperwork as having found Meikina outside a government office. The woman told him about hearing the baby crying, then finding her inside a cardboard box, with an empty bottle, some powdered milk, and crumpled currency. It was a heartwarming story, but entirely a command performance. Later, Longlan went to investigate and was told the woman had been instructed by the orphanage director to placate this foreign parent who was asking too many questions.

Around that time, the first complaints about Family Planning officials’ snatching babies were surfacing. Some birth parents, such as Zhou Changqi, were tricked. In other cases, officials used brute force, as with the twin I wrote about. She had been grabbed after a group of men overpowered her aunt. In 2005, a scandal broke with the arrests of a family of traffickers in Hunan Province who were selling babies to orphanages. Because the practice was illegal, the orphanages had falsified paperwork, claiming that the children had been left at a market, at a factory gate, outside a hospital, on the side of a busy road. Sometimes caring families did deliver babies directly to an orphanage, but that information was also concealed, to prevent the birth parents from being charged with abandonment.

Stuy was certain that many adoptions from China were not what they had seemed, and he thought that other parents needed to know the truth. He began posting his findings in adoption forums on social media, and in 2005 he started a blog. Soon, so many parents were asking for help that Stuy, who by then had left private equity and was running a dog day-care center, turned his adoption research into a full-time business. Before a baby was put up for adoption, local authorities placed paid notices in newspapers as a way to satisfy a requirement that they look for birth families before placing children up for adoption (no matter that the birth parents were unlikely to see these newspapers). The Stuys, who travelled to China frequently, searched archives and recyclers for the ads, and then sold them to adoptive families eager for more information about their children.

For families with the resources and the nerve, the Stuys organized trips to China, helping them hire interpreters and drivers and teaching them how to look for more information. The families would usually start at the supposed finding location. (“The holy finding spot,” one adoptee wrote in a 2023 blog post, “was the mythical place where your birth mom last saw you, last kissed you good-bye and held you close.”) They looked for witnesses or, better yet, whoever was said to have rescued the baby. They tacked up posters and handed out flyers, hunted down police reports and implored local newspapers and television stations to run tearjerking stories about the adoptee looking for her mom and dad. They put out queries on social media.

But the searches typically failed. “The families would get very grumpy, very impatient,” a Chinese guide working with the Stuys said. (She agreed to an interview on the condition that her name not be used.) “The percentage who found their birth families this way is very small. The orphanages made up the finding locations.” The Stuys came to believe that roughly ten percent of adoptees were taken from their birth families under duress. For a far larger number—as many as ninety per cent—the Stuys estimate that the information provided to adoptive parents was inaccurate at best.

The Stuys changed their approach. By the twenty-tens, inexpensive, consumer-friendly genetic tests were widely available and adoptees were submitting samples, most often looking for health guidance. They rarely learned much about their birth families, because there weren’t enough Chinese samples in the databases.

In 2013, the Stuys started a nonprofit, DNAConnect, to test more birth families. When they travelled in China, they frequently encountered birth parents and siblings looking for missing children; they now asked those families to submit saliva samples. Once the samples were evaluated, the Stuys transferred the results to a larger company that compiled information from multiple testing services, to identify any matches with adoptive children abroad who had profiles in the system. (They are currently using GEDmatch, a company that attracted some notoriety in 2018, when police in California used its data to identify Joseph James DeAngelo, nicknamed the Golden State Killer.) It turned out to be an efficient way to search. At last count, the Stuys had collected samples from thirteen hundred and sixty-five Chinese birth families—and one out of six of them has matched with an adoptee who submitted DNA to a testing service.

Stuy sometimes gets negative reactions when he’s trying to match an adoptee with a birth family. He recalled one painful case in which a young woman in China, having thought that she had located her sister, reached out to him. The adoptive father blocked contact. “They left her to die on a street corner,” he wrote to Stuy, saying that his family did not want any further interaction. “Obviously, the adoptees are angry,” Stuy continued. “The problem is that many of the stories they were given are fiction.”

The use of genetic testing to connect birth families is catching on in other countries that sent children abroad, Cambodia and Ethiopia among them. The most advanced efforts involve adults who were born in South Korea; they number some two hundred thousand worldwide, making them the largest population of international adoptees. The South Korean government issued a landmark report in March, admitting that its adoption records were often manipulated and fabricated. But Chinese orphanages had no records at all of birth parents, and most clues that adoptees find are red herrings. That makes China the hardest target for adoptees seeking birth families.

The nonprofit Nanchang Project was started in 2018 by two mothers who had adopted babies from Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province, although they are now turning over the group’s management to adoptees. Nanchang helps adoptees submit blood samples to a database run by the Chinese police, which the police claim will help combat crime and facilitate reunions of missing children. Human Rights Watch has reported that the database likely contains a hundred and forty million genetic profiles—roughly a tenth of China’s population—and alleged that it was designed as a surveillance tool, especially for ethnic minorities.

The Nanchang Project has deftly managed to skirt sensitive political questions, avoiding discussions of fraudulent records and children who were taken from their families. It has been involved with the matches of nearly a hundred adoptees with their birth families, and some of the reunions it has facilitated have been covered by Chinese television and social media. “It’s about the joyous reunion with the now adult adoptee who has come back to China,” Erin Valentino, one of the founding mothers, said. “They’re spinning it in a positive light.”

One impediment for adoptees initiating searches is that many Chinese, even to this day, know nothing of international adoption. They believe their missing children are still in China, and as a result some balk at giving genetic samples to foreigners. They can also be reluctant to provide blood samples to the Chinese police, suspicious of revealing personal information to authorities.

There are psychological factors as well. For birth families, relinquishing a child was not only shameful but a badge of poverty. In some families, it might be a closely held secret. But many people have been emboldened since the one-child policy was lifted, in 2015. Almost every researcher and every journalist who has explored this issue has been struck by the lingering grief among birth parents, even those who chose to surrender their children.

For adoptive parents, reactions are mixed. I’ve encountered some who are passionate about finding their children’s birth parents and often keener than the children themselves; others are afraid of the intrusion on their own family dynamic. One of the selling points of adoption from China was that it promised adoptive families an extraordinary measure of anonymity. “Because child abandonment is illegal in China, birth parents leave no trace of their identity,” one adoption agency boasted on its website. An unusually candid adoptive mother, Jennifer Doering, told me, “We didn’t want to be here in America with somebody coming forward and saying, ‘That’s my child,’ ‘That’s my grandchild.’ ” But, while looking for records of her daughter’s adoption, Doering came across a photo of her daughter in foster care with another girl who looked identical to her. It turned out that her daughter had a twin, who also was adopted. That discovery led to a flood of other revelations about birth relatives. “Once you see something like that, you can’t unsee it,” Doering said of the photograph.

China ended international adoption in September, in large part because of declining birth rates. That leaves a population of a hundred and sixty thousand Chinese adoptees, about half of whom are in the United States. For many of them, the discovery of a birth family can be terrifying, forcing them to recalibrate their sense of their place in the world, often at an age when they are already struggling with their identity. Failing to find birth parents can also send adoptees on an obsessive chase. “It takes a huge mental toll on each person searching,” Cassidy Sack, one of the co-directors of the Nanchang Project, said. She has been looking for her biological family in Chongqing for almost eight years, so far without success. Others don’t want to look for family, fearing that they won’t like what they find. They worry that their birth family might expect money or filial devotion. “You have to be careful about what doors you open. You have to ask yourself, ‘What is the need I’m trying to fulfill?’ ” an adoptee in her mid-twenties told me. “I don’t have that need.”

And then there are those, like Mia, who stumble on their birth families inadvertently. Testing sites promise users confidentiality, as well as the right to opt out of finding or connecting with relatives, but Stuy admits, “Any time you put your DNA out there, there is a chance of finding something you didn’t want to.” Still, Stuy pitches adoptees on the wisdom of testing. “There are multiple layers to your search. You might locate your birth family and want nothing to do with them, but at least you will know something of your life story. Otherwise, you always have this question at the back of your mind.”

Today, Mia Griffin is twenty-four, with an impeccable complexion and large eyes. She is tall and athletic. She wears minimal makeup or jewelry, other than a nose piercing and a gold snake pendant for her birth year of 2001. She bought it for herself, soon after discovering that her Chinese family had been looking for her.

For Mia, reconnecting with her birth family has been a gradual process. After receiving the notification from 23andMe in September, 2022, she went home to her parents’ house for the weekend. As she recalls, they seemed happier about the revelation than she was, although her father joked, “I hope you’ll still call me Dad.” Together, they conferred with Brian Stuy. He explained that he and Longlan had read about Zhou Changqi’s long search and arranged for him to submit a DNA sample.

“Yours is one of the most heart-wrenching stories I’ve heard,” Stuy told Mia.

Mia set up an account on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese messaging app, which has a built-in translator. Soon she received a message.

“Hello, my name is Zhou Jiahai,” the user wrote.

“You are my cousin?” Mia wrote back.

“I am your brother,” he said. “You’re my sister. Our dad’s been looking for you. We waited years to hear from you.”

Mia’s brother, two years older and now working as a hairdresser in Guangdong Province, briefed her on their family’s story through an exchange of translated texts. How he as a young child accompanied his father on the futile search. How their mother never returned to Zhou and for years refused all contact with her son. She blocked him on WeChat, Jiahai told Mia.

Mia was less successful in communicating with her father. She managed to send him some photos—a head shot, a portrait of herself in her college-graduation gown—and showed him her tennis racquet and ukulele. She was trying to explain her life and hobbies without words. But between Zhou’s illiteracy and unfamiliarity with smartphones, they didn’t get far. She tried again and didn’t get a response.

I chatted with her for more than two years about my going out to Indiana and setting up a video call with a live interpreter. Finally, we arranged the visit for late January, during Lunar New Year, the traditional time for families to get together. Mia’s brother would be staying with their father for the holiday and could help with the technology.

Accounting for the time difference, we scheduled the call for 7 A.M. We sat down at the round kitchen table in the apartment Mia shared with another student. The call connected without a hitch. Zhou Changqi stared at us from seven thousand miles away. Sitting beside him was Jiahai, unmistakably Mia’s brother.

Even on the small screen, it was evident that the Zhous lived in poverty. The backdrop was the brick wall of an uninsulated village house. I doubted that they had any kind of heat, as father and son wore heavy coats. I could see thin streams of their breath.

Zhou did most of the speaking. Now sixty-eight, he had close-cropped gray hair and an upright posture, though his teeth betrayed his poverty. He spoke confidently, and was less overwrought than when he used to telephone my office in Beijing.

He told Mia in some detail the steps that he had taken to look for her, though he glossed over some of the more painful aspects.

“They told me at first that your mom took you. Then they said you went to America. I didn’t believe them,” he said. “After a few years, I started to lose hope. It had been twenty years. I didn’t hear anything. And then there was such a surprise.” He apologized for not replying to her messages. “I wanted to talk to you, but I don’t speak English,” he explained.

Mia listened quietly, her eyes watering slightly. She didn’t have a prepared speech, but she knew exactly what she wanted to say. It was her own apology.

“I wanted you to know I’m happy and I like my life,” she said. Addressing the interpreter, she explained, “I might have more things and more opportunities as an American, but that doesn’t mean their life wouldn’t have been good enough for me.”

After an hour, we ended the call, promising to resume the following morning, this time with Mia’s parents. The next day, we set up in Mia’s family’s cheerful house, where every room I entered was festooned with Christmas decorations. We propped the iPhone on a cannister of Dunkin’ coffee on the kitchen counter. Mia and her mother, Mary, perched on stools. Mia’s father, Bill, was away on a trip and was patched in to the call.

The conversation began with an almost ritualistic exchange of thanks and yet more apologies.

“We are so sorry for what happened initially. We are just very, very happy that you finally got to see her. We pray and hope that we can get together and you can hug her,” Bill started out.

Zhou said, “I want to express gratitude to both of you, because Mia has had a good education and she has received a lot of care from both of you.”

It was a more joyful encounter than the first. Mia was herself again, confident and exuberant. She held snapshots in front of the screen for her father and brother—of herself as a toddler, and with her parents and friends. She showed them her driver’s license and her first passport. Zhou showed a photo of a cousin and introduced his mother, in her nineties, who was in the room with him and said hello.

They joked about Mia’s personality. She was often headstrong and feisty, qualities Mia now thought she’d inherited from Zhou.

Zhou laughed. “I’m the same. If I start something, I have to finish it, no matter what people tell me.”

“I’m proud of him for how persistent he was, though I’m really sorry he had to go that long looking for me,” Mia told the interpreter. She spoke about her demanding job, working with troubled teen-agers. “I took his spirit, and now it’s in me, and I spread it to the kids who need it in America,” she said.

The discordant note in the conversation was what to do next. Zhou followed up on a question that he had asked Mia in their first call—whether she was interested in making a short visit to China, or even spending a year abroad studying Chinese. Mia’s parents were enthusiastic, inquiring about airports and potential itineraries. But Mia demurred, citing the pressure of her job and her studies.

Zhou was obliging. “I don’t want to interrupt her studies. I know how important it is. I’m illiterate, but I want her to be educated,” he said. He even offered her money—twenty thousand Chinese yuan, about three thousand dollars—to help with her tuition. Mia politely declined.

After we finished the call, Mary spread out the documents that she and Bill were given when they collected Mia in China. The “abandonment certificate” was from the orphanage at Changsha First Social Welfare Center, where Zhou had gone looking for Mia and been turned away. It said that Zhang Ying Xi (the name Mia was given in the orphanage) was picked up from the street on January 2, 2002, and sent to the orphanage. “Her birth parents and other relatives have not been found,” it read.

We examined the dates, comparing them with what Zhou Changqi had told us. It was clear that baby Mia had been taken just before the Lunar New Year. She must have been transported very quickly from the hotel where she had been staying with her birth mother to Changsha. A report on Mia’s health, obviously preparing her for adoption, was dated March 6th. The Griffins received the referral to adopt her in late April and picked her up in mid-June.

By then, Zhou had barely started his years-long search. It was clear that the authorities had never had any intention of returning his daughter.

When we drove away from her parents’ house, Mia was quiet. She seemed exhausted and a little depressed. When I suggested that this was a happy ending to the saga, she snapped back at me. She was right to. Her Chinese brother had lost much of his childhood. Her father lost his savings, possessions, and his wife. After so many years of grappling with rejection and anger, she was processing the early tinges of guilt about her father’s prolonged search. “I was playing soccer in Indiana while he was looking for me,” she told me.

No, it wasn’t a happy story. But, as she put it later, “better a hard truth than a soft lie.” ♦

This is drawn from “Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins.”