Chinese adoptees say they feel conflicted after China announces end to international adoptions

Chinese adoptees say they have conflicted feelings after China announces end to international adoptions.

After China announced earlier this month that it is suspending international adoptions, Maze Felix, a 28-year-old Chinese adoptee, said they were struck with a heady mix of “anger, relief, grief, confusion — all of it.”

Felix, who uses they/them pronouns, is among the more than 80,000 children who were adopted from China to the U.S. in the past three decades. They were adopted at the age of 2 by parents in Cleveland. And they’re not alone. From feeling relief that relinquished children can now maintain their birth cultures to mourning the end of a program that was central to their own experiences, Chinese adoptees say the new policy has only made an already-complicated experience feel even more complex.

Grace Newton, an adoption researcher and the author of the adoption-focused Red Thread Broken blog, told NBC News that regardless of whether adoptees feel positively or otherwise about the development, “there’s more to it than just that.”

“The feeling is just this mismatch,” Newton said. “How could this massive thing that has influenced so many parts of our life just simply be over on a policy level, when it can never really be over for us on a personal level?”

But given the range of opinions, ultimately it’s been important for many adoptees to find connection among those with their shared experiences, Newton argued.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/china-international-adoption-ban-adoptees-rcna172947

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