Loulee Wilson gathers a handful of stones in an abandoned concrete lot in southwest China and puts them in a bag as a keepsake from the location where she says she was abandoned as a newborn.
Wilson, an American college student, was born in China, but his parents reportedly gave him up out of fear of breaking the nation’s one-child policy, which penalized families for having more than one child until it was abandoned in 2016.
She was taken to an orphanage shortly after her birth and subsequently adopted by a couple in the United States after being discovered outside of a now-demolished factory in the town of Dianjiang.
Now 19, she is among a growing number of Chinese adoptees returning to their birth country to trace their biological parents and understand where they came from.
“If I (find them), that would be incredible. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to,” she told AFP.
“It’ll help me to find out more of my story.”
According to State Department statistics, since 1999, over 82,000 Chinese children have been adopted by American families; the majority of these adoptions have been girls because Chinese culture favors boys.
Many were turned over in the 2000s, when birth restrictions were enforced more strictly in Beijing and regulations regarding foreign adoptions were more lenient.
According to Corinne Wilson, Loulee’s adoptive mother, as those kids grow older, they are making a “very, very big demand” for reunions with their birth families.
She is the creator of The Roots of Love, one of several organizations that were founded in an effort to reunite adoptees with their Chinese ancestors.
“There is a part of them that is proud to be Chinese,” she told AFP.
