Only Child

COHORT 1

“Would you rather have been aborted?”

To ask this question is to pretend we live in a world where women and trans* folx of color don’t have to fight for the right to plan their own families, to have futures and legacies with or without children. It is to suggest that questions of personal autonomy have simple yes or no answers.

I often say that I was made in China, assembled in the United States, but the brevity of that sentence is a false simplicity. When I am told to go back to my country or asked how I am able to speak English so well, two questions of the same coin's violence, I think of all the cruelties and histories that would have to unravel and unstain themselves from my life for me to call whichever country they believe the slant of my eyes or the night-black color of my hair belongs to my own.

During the 1970s, in an attempt to slow China’s rapid population growth, the government instituted a birth control campaign, and later, a one-child policy that instituted punitive measures against families with more children than the law permitted. Most of the children given up or aborted were female due to a cultural preference for males. As a consequence of the government’s efforts to limit the population, forced sterilizations and abortions, in addition to economic penalties, became a resort of the Family Planning Commission. 

I was one of the last of the 90’s kids, born in 1999 at the beginning of the American explosion of Chinese international adoption. Between 1999 and 2010, over 60,000 children were adopted by Americans from China, the most from any foreign country. The lives of myself and my mother before she became my mother fall flawlessly into the common characteristics of Chinese adoption during that period of time. My mother had never been married but had a doctorate in education. Like most other American mothers of orphaned Chinese children, was white, highly educated, and in her forties, and like most other Chinese orphans during the 90’s and 2000’s, I was female. 

In February 2001, I was adopted by my Irish-Catholic single mother and flown to the other side of the world to be raised as my mother’s daughter in semi-rural Pennsylvania. That was the main reason she had adopted from China, after all: to have a daughter. 

Once, a consequence of the one-child policy, I became an only child myself. I grew up with dance lessons, a room to myself, vacations to the beach every summer with my mother’s friend her daughter who she had also adopted from China, and a parochial school education.

For eight years, I went to Catholic school. It wasn’t until the eighth year that I learned the pro-life rhetoric of sin and the sanctity of life. We had religion class, but I mostly remember it coming from my English teacher. I don’t remember much of what the teacher said, only how she would straight look at me whenever she talked about adoption and then how it would feel like the entire class was looking at me when she would talk about the Catholic charities that prevented infanticide and forced abortions in developing countries. Like I was supposed to feel grateful. Like I was some kind of proof of life. Without reading between the lines, I was their success story, the poster child for everything they stood for. My life fell into their narrative just as easily as it had fallen into the circumstances of adoption.

But the truth is always more complicated. Of course I am grateful for the privileges of my life and my life itself, but you can’t ask someone living if they would rather have never existed.

I am here—both alive and in this country (which at times feels like a contradiction)—because I am adopted.

Writing: Erin Jin Mei O’Malley

Music: Noreen Ocampo

Art: Kelly Liu