I am a child who first belonged to a country that I can barely remember and whose family history is nonexistent in every possible way.
As an international adoptee from China, I was brought to the United States at nine months old. Left on the street of Qingyuan City, I came to America without a note, and a doctor at the Social Welfare Institute estimated my birthday.
My experience is far from uncommon. With limited knowledge of their family history, international adoptees often struggle to make sense of their identity. In recent years, multiple companies that allow customers to send a DNA swab or tube of spit have risen in popularity. People curious about their ancestry receive a pie chart with several colors telling them what countries they come from and a list of possible relatives, however distant.
Still, DNA is not a substitute for the family history that, both medically and orally, can only be passed down from one generation to the next and cannot be shared through blood or by taking a test. It is the hope of developing a sense of belonging and understanding of how their parents and grandparents have shaped them into the person they are today that drives international adoptees to take a genealogy test.
So, what does all of this mean for adoptees? Growing up in homes where their family is of a different race, many international adoptees are also transracial adoptees. Transracial adoptees focus more on their adoptive identity and on searching for biological parents than other adoptees. As they become teenagers and adults, many adoptees wonder what their life or community would have been like if not adopted.
Due to a lack of documented family history, many young adoptees will struggle and question the extent to which inherited traits from biological parents versus traits that are developed later on influence their identity. Did they inherit their dislike for brussel sprouts from their biological mother, or was it acquired from their upbringing? Was cystic fibrosis inherited from their parents or a result of their environment? Is the country they currently reside in their home, or is it the country that they were born in, with blood from their ancestors coursing through their veins?
I can speak firsthand to this experience that many other adoptees are forced to live with. Each time that I go into a doctor’s office, I must fill out a series of forms on a clipboard about my family history. I often write “adopted, no family history” at the end of the form, where I have crossed out the section dedicated to asking about possible inherited conditions. Unlike everyone else at the doctor’s office, I cannot tell whether my family has a history of high blood pressure. Instead, I can only say, “I am adopted, so I have no family history to go off of.” The doctor often just says “okay” and continues, but it’s clear that I and so many others are vastly different from every other patient who walks through the doctor’s office doors.
With a lack of knowledge about their history, adoptees may try to fill such gaps. One method to discover more about family history is a DNA test. Companies such as 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and FamilyTreeDNA provide an opportunity to learn what areas of the world one’s ancestors hail from, genetic traits such as eye and hair color, and the likelihood that one might have said traits. Given the ability to find out more about one’s genealogy through DNA tests, there may be few alternative methods of verifying their results, including testing with other companies or taking blood tests.
Worldwide, 26 million people have received a genetic ancestry test, a number that, for now, is considered small, equivalent to the population of Shanghai, China. As companies process the DNA from spit in a tube, they make copies of the DNA and splice the DNA strands into smaller segments, which are then genotyped and sorted. Then, they look for a single nucleotide polymorphism, one letter where your genome sequence is different from another, which can be used to compare and figure out with whom you share similar ancestry. On the surface, this answers all the questions an international adoptee has.
However, errors can be made throughout the process. Genetic tests only look at portions of DNA known to have variations instead of the complete picture, missing out on possibly crucial segments of DNA and resulting in a lack of data as DNA testing continues to evolve, which could lead to different or incorrect results. As a result, it’s impossible to ensure that the report someone receives tells the complete picture of their ancestry and genetics.
At the beginning of 2021, I took a genetic ancestry test. I was initially identified as being of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Chinese Dai descent. However, once more information was in the database to compare DNA, my report changed later that fall to 100% Chinese, specifically within the Southern provinces of Guangdong and Hunan. While 23andMe was initially inaccurate, testing allowed me to find distant cousins and an estimation of each province my ancestors may have come from.
I can only hope that one day ancestry testing can fill the gaps of knowledge that adoptees face.
Adoptees have always had a higher stake in taking DNA tests because they lack other methods of verifying their identity. Without the ability to ask their biological relatives, nothing else can provide such history, leaving many without complete answers. It is crucial to acknowledge this truth that many international adoptees face, and I hope there will one day be a time when these questions can be fully answered.
Image by Zhu Liang is licensed under the Unsplash License.
