Amy Cubbage’s first foray into parenthood began as it had for tens of thousands of American families before her: in a hotel room in China.
In 2008, Ms. Cubbage and her husband, Graham Troop, had just been handed a 2-year-old girl named Qin Shuping, who was living with a foster family in the southern Chinese city of Guilin. The couple from Louisville, Ky., had waited more than two years to be matched with a child.
But in that hotel room, in a country the couple had never been to before, the toddler was inconsolable.
“I cried because I was like, ‘What have we done to this child?’” Ms. Cubbage recalled.
More than fifteen years later, the toddler is now known as June Cubbage-Troop, a freshman at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh who is on the acrobatics and tumbling team.
“I used to think about my birth parents, but not really anymore because I’m happy and I love my parents,” Ms. Cubbage-Troop, 18, said. “I’m pretty content with my life.”
China announced this month that it was halting nearly all foreign adoptions, marking the end of a program that forged several generations of American families. More than 82,000 Chinese children have been adopted in the United States since 1992, around the time the program began, according to the State Department.
Several of those adoptive families said they were glad that the program was coming to an end, recognizing that it was a glaring byproduct of a harsh policy restricting many Chinese families from having more than one child. Though most treasure their adoptive experience, many also see the program’s abuses and the underlying trauma that came from removing children from their birth parents and culture.
Many participating parents and adoptees described the phaseout as bittersweet. For tens of thousands of aspiring parents, particularly single people and gay couples, the program for years offered a relatively straightforward path to starting a family, free of the bureaucratic hurdles that often bogged down the adoption process elsewhere. It also provided an opportunity for Chinese children with special needs to receive the medical and financial support overseas that they needed to thrive.
The need for international adoption in China had also seemed obvious. Between the late 1970s and 2016, China limited many families to one child because of overpopulation concerns. Many of the orphans were baby girls who, adoptive parents were told, had been abandoned because of the harshly enforced one-child policy as well as the traditional Chinese preference for boys.
The program’s reputation was tarnished when reports emerged that some babies had been abducted by traffickers or seized by family planning officials during the enforcement of birth restrictions. The babies were then sold to orphanages, who marketed the children as orphans to unwitting foreign families who were willing to pay relatively large sums of money.
International adoptions from China have slowed since peaking in the mid-2000s, as China’s economy has grown and more money has been allocated to support orphans. Nearly all foreign adoptions in recent years have involved children with disabilities, according to the Chinese government.
Brian H. Stuy, a father of three girls adopted from China, grew critical of the program over time and now runs a company that helps Chinese adoptees collect information about their adoptive histories and their birth families. He believes there is still a need for international adoptions of children with medical concerns, but said that he was ultimately glad the program was over.
“As it relates to the adoption of healthy young infant girls, it should never have existed,” he said. “There was never a need.”
Many Chinese American adoptees also expressed mixed feelings. The experience of being adopted is often described as one of both immense gain and profound loss of one’s birth family and immediate environment. That loss is amplified in international adoptions because adoptees are often severed from their birth culture and language. And all of that has been compounded for Chinese American adoptees, many of whom have been unable to verify their date and place of birth, the names of their birth parents and how they ended up at an orphanage.
As a child, Charlotte Cotter knew that she had been adopted from an orphanage in Zhenjiang, a Chinese town famous for its black vinegar. She knew that she was 5 months old and one of about 20 babies swaddled in thick layers in the chilly orphanage nursery when she was adopted.
Ms. Cotter came to learn more years later, when she experienced something rare for Chinese American adoptees: Through Chinese social media, she was able to track down her birth parents. During a tearful, if slightly awkward, reunion in China in 2016, she was finally able to get answers to some long-burning questions.
Her birth parents, both farmers, told her that her birth was technically illegal under the family planning policies. They said that they had passed her to an intermediary, believing she would be given to a well-off military family in the area who could not have children of their own. Her birth parents said they had no idea that she had ended up in an orphanage and adopted abroad.
But meeting her birth family also raised more questions for her. One year after she was born, she learned, her parents had another child — a son — whom they kept. Why had she been the one given away? What would her life have been like if she had grown up with her birth family?
Ms. Cotter, 30, said that she had tried not to dwell on such questions and had largely come to terms with her adoption. In 2011, she co-founded a nonprofit to connect Chinese adoptees around the world. And like some other Chinese American adoptees, she has taken a special interest in China. She focused on East Asian Studies at Yale University, is now fluent in Mandarin and has traveled to China numerous times to study and lead volunteer trips.
“In everybody’s lives there are different forks where you could have gone one way or another, and sometimes you have control over them and sometimes you don’t,” Ms. Cotter said. “This one just happened to be particularly dramatic.”
Before adopting Charlotte, Brenda Cotter attended a conference in which she heard Korean American adoptees speak about the challenges of growing up in predominantly white communities in the Midwest. One adoptee, she recalled, described living in constant fear of being approached by Asian people and being deemed to be insufficiently Asian.
“It got me right in the gut,” Brenda Cotter, a retired intellectual property lawyer in Newton, Mass., said. “So we tried as hard as possible to make our children feel comfortable saying and feeling, ‘I’m 100 percent Chinese.’”
She and her wife, RuthAnn Sherman, enrolled their daughters, both adopted from China, in Chinese cultural classes. They made books for the girls making clear that they had birth families in China. They celebrated Chinese holidays like Lunar New Year as well as Christmas and Hanukkah. And they took a family trip to China so that the girls could learn more about their birth culture.
Other adoptees, however, were raised in areas where they saw few other Asians and had little access to resources or support for navigating racism, including within their own families. Some have described struggling with questions of identity as well as feelings of alienation and depression.
“Lots of people told me to go back to my country, lots of people also told me I was not Asian enough,” said Camille Wuesthoff, 28, an adoptee who was raised by white parents in suburban Florida. “But my parents were not equipped to raise a Chinese baby — they were not able to help me understand the racism and discrimination that I was experiencing.”
Finding birth parents in China was already difficult, but some adoptees worried that the end of the international adoption program would make that even harder. Under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the country has taken a more authoritarian turn in recent years. Huihan Lie, founder of My China Roots, a company that has worked with more than 150 Chinese international adoptees hoping to track down their birth families, said that local officials who might have gone out on a limb before now had little incentive to act because of concerns about attracting unwanted attention from higher-ups.
Some adoptees want the Chinese government to apologize to its adoptee diaspora or at least acknowledge their pain and trauma. They have held out hope that China might one day begin an official investigation into the abuses within its international adoption program, as South Korea did in 2022 with its own program, which preceded China’s.
Questions remain about what will happen to the country’s orphans with medical needs. The government has acknowledged that Chinese families have traditionally been less willing to adopt children with disabilities than international families have been.
“It’s still a mind-set problem. Chinese adoptive families still want a completely healthy child,” said Ren Yan, who works at Lupin Foster Home in Shanghai, which cares for orphans with congenital diseases. “So if it ends internationally, there will be a large number of children who will be stranded in welfare homes.”
Ms. Ren said the children at her foster home mainly came from poorer provinces that lacked sufficient medical resources, such as Henan, Guizhou and Jiangxi. She estimated that half of the 100 children admitted since the home’s founding in 2011 had been adopted, nearly all by American families.
Since 2008, June Cubbage-Troop has had 11 surgeries for a cleft lip and palate. It has hardly been a hindrance. At the age of 4, she started taking gymnastics and by high school was training 25 hours a week. At Duquesne, she starts her days with 6 a.m. weight-lifting sessions.
And while her parents made it a point to expose her to Chinese culture and food growing up, she will now have the opportunity to establish her identity on her own. She has bonded with her roommate, a teammate who is also a Chinese adoptee, over makeup techniques specific to Asian features. Next on her to-do list is to join an Asian student association.
“I want to learn more about Asian culture and be around more people that look like me,” she said.
She has also set her sights farther afield. She has already found a study abroad program that will allow her to spend a summer in Guilin, the city of gentle rivers and limestone peaks where she was born.
Siyi Zhao and Zixu Wang contributed research and reporting.
