“I remember my teacher in China asking our class to write essays about how great our parents were, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what that was like. I was brought to an orphanage when I was five months old, so I never knew my birth parents. It was hard growing up there. I didn’t feel like I mattered at all. Nobody ever saw anything special in me. Then, when I was 12, I got the news that someone in America was going to adopt me. I didn’t want to show my feelings on the outside because I didn’t want to hurt the people who took care of us at the orphanage, but I was so excited. I would finally have somebody I could call my Mom and Dad. They traveled to China and stayed for two months, and the first time I met them was at a hotel. I was really nervous. I had never seen pictures of them and didn’t know what to expect. The first time my new Mom saw me, she hugged me, which I thought was very strange because in the Chinese culture, parents don’t hug their children. They don’t say, ‘I love you.’ I found out too that they had a biological son who would be my brother. He had told his parents that he really wanted a sister, so that’s one reason they decided to look into adoption.
“The first year in America was hard because I didn’t speak any English. My new parents took care of my basic needs, but other than that, they didn’t know how to communicate with me except through physical touch, like hugs and holding me on their laps while they read me stories. They would always say ‘I love you’ whenever I left for school, and they taught me how to say ‘I love you’ back to them. If not for them, I don’t know what would have happened to me after I was too old for the orphanage. I probably would not have gotten to go to college. I would probably have been on the streets, but now I have a college degree and I’m an accountant. The adoption changed my life.
“I went from not knowing how to love people or what love felt like, to parents who love me and made me part of their family. I’m thankful for them and for my brother. My parents also taught me that there is a God out there who loves me, who took care of me before I even knew who he was.”
“The first year in America was hard because I didn’t speak any English. My new parents took care of my basic needs, but other than that, they didn’t know how to communicate with me except through physical touch, like hugs and holding me on their laps while they read me stories. They would always say ‘I love you’ whenever I left for school, and they taught me how to say ‘I love you’ back to them. If not for them, I don’t know what would have happened to me after I was too old for the orphanage. I probably would not have gotten to go to college. I would probably have been on the streets, but now I have a college degree and I’m an accountant. The adoption changed my life.
“I went from not knowing how to love people or what love felt like, to parents who love me and made me part of their family. I’m thankful for them and for my brother. My parents also taught me that there is a God out there who loves me, who took care of me before I even knew who he was.”
RSS Feed