From abandonment to adoption

A young woman stares at white walls with toys lined up on shelves in the Social Welfare Institute of Lu’An, China. Cubbies boast children’s paintings of flowers and rainbows, and a message on the wall reads “Every child is an artist” in both English and Chinese characters between multi-color polka dots.

This orphanage looks and feels very different from the one that she grew up in, which was more like a doctor’s office than a home for children. Or so she was told.

Sarah Felt doesn’t remember anything about her orphanage or about the first four years of her life. The director is giving her and her mother a tour of the new facilities. She takes them to a room on the first floor and presents a group of four or five orphans. A girl who looks like she’s in middle school catches Sarah’s attention. Even though Sarah is only five-feet tall, she has to bend down to talk to her. They seem to have some sort of unspoken connection. Then, a translator reaches for Sarah’s arm and whispers something that stuns Sarah. The girl is actually 25-years-old.

Though Sarah’s not one to cry, she almost does. The girl was probably there at the same time she was 17 years go. They might have played together. If fate, or the adoption agency, hadn’t favored Sarah, that could have been her life. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing herself homeless and hopeless, a life she could have had but thankfully did not. And for this young, growth-stunted Chinese woman, life was not likely to get better. As she looks back down at the girl, Sarah thinks to herself, what are the chances of a 25-year-old with special needs ever getting adopted in China?

“That completely broke my heart,” Sarah recalls later. “She’d been there her whole life. It just made me realize how lucky I am — that could have been me if I hadn’t been adopted. I could have been there all those years.” She stops the story abruptly and looks down, still trying to process the emotions. She can’t quite shake what her life might have been if she had never had been taken from China.

The Abandonment

It’s June 1997 in Lu’An, China. A newborn girl is crying and alone, left on the steps of a government building. The country’s one-child policy made this a common scene, where couples abandoned their baby girls and walked away.

What happened next no one knows for sure. The biological parents made sure of that by abandoning their baby at night. What we do know is that whoever left her wanted her to be discovered. Government employees would be coming into work the next day and were obligated to pick up the baby discarded on the stair steps and take her to the closest orphanage. It was not the first time this had happened and for more than a decade, it would not be the last.

Maybe the infant’s mother waited and watched from a distance until morning. Maybe she cried. Or maybe this Chinese couple was happy to be rid of this economic burden and didn’t look back. Maybe the parents couldn’t face the guilt of the decision their government forced them into —to give up their own flesh and blood or face the legal consequences. Whatever their reason, Yang YiLi was abandoned and adopted, later to grow up Sarah Felt of Houston, Texas.

More than two decades and a cultural divide later, Sarah Felt, now a 21-year-old college student is going back to China for the first time. She wants to see the spot where her birth parents left her and visit the orphanage where she spent the first four years of her life.

“To be honest, I don’t know what to expect. I really don’t have any memories of that time, so I don’t know if it will trigger memories ... I’m not sure what I’m going to feel,” Sarah tells me at lunch in April, a few months before her trip.

Questions about her biological parents

When I met Sarah, I never would have guessed she wasn’t born in Texas. We met on the first day of class in kindergarten at Second Baptist School in Houston in 2003. With her braids, her pressed blue jumper and light-up shoes, her love of Disney, and her laugh and accent-free English, she seemed just like any other student in the grade, albeit a few inches shorter. I was five, and she was six. Now, we’re both juniors at the University of Texas at Austin, and we lived in the same dorm the first two years of college.

Before her 10-day July trip, organized by the Chinese government and the adoption agency her mother Sally Felt used 17 years ago, Sarah and I talk in the dining hall of our all-girl Scottish Rite Dormitory as the end of sophomore year was approaching. As she fiddled with her fork and picked at her salad, Sarah opened up to me about what was on her mind. She told me she liked what the Chinese government was doing to try to make reparations— creating an all-expense-paid Chinese pilgrimage, a so-called birthright “vacation” where former orphans could come revisit their home country. But she also said she didn’t know how or what to feel about her pending trip. She had those appropriately anxious flutters in her stomach one gets before a major life event, but in this case, the “butterflies” were less like monarchs and more like moths because truthfully she was afraid of what she might find in China. I asked her if she thought about looking for her birth parents when she went.

“There definitely have been times where I wonder, and it’s like ‘Oh, where are my parents? I wonder what their situation was,’” Sarah sighed and put down her fork. “I don’t think we’ll ever know because basically there’s no trace of them.”

If she did find them, would she even want to meet them? She stared at the salad dressing coagulating on the lettuce on her plate. “It’d be weird. Are they even still alive? . . . If I could, I would want to. I would want answers from them. It would be nice to have answers.”

Sarah is not the only one who wants answers. More than 120,000 children were adopted by foreign parents after being abandoned like Sarah- or forcibly removed- as a result of China’s one-child policy. In 1979 to curb the growing already 970 million member population, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping mandated that Han Chinese families, the ethnic majority, could only have one child.

Cultural preference deemed boys worthier, so female babies were sometimes literally tossed out with the bath water. Up to 250,000 children were abandoned each year. Exceptions were made here and there, but until the policy’s relaxation in 2015 after 36 years, the Chinese government had prevented over 400 million births. They saw the solution in abortions, forced sterilizations, and infanticide - murder. Ironically, in this case, getting abandoned was the easy way out. Being born a girl in 90’s China was often fatal.

When Sarah met Sally

Sally Felt first met her daughter in a hotel in Hefei, China. Sarah was four years old, and Sally was 57. Sally had flown 7,600 miles from Houston to Shanghai and then Hefei to make it to a nondescript hotel near the airport that became the setting for the most memorable meeting of her life.

She should have been tired, but she wasn’t. Sally’s eyes were wide open and her pulse was racing in the kind of cardiac flutters you only get when you know your life is about to change. Sally brought her 21-year-old niece with her, and together, they were just two Americans in a room full of foreigners, people like them, eager to start their families with the children that other families had discarded.

Minutes passed, and staff from the adoption agency called Sally and took her to see the children. She was the first inside where she found dozens of orphans clinging to their nannies. Passing child after child, she scoured the room, trying to find the little girl who matched the photograph of the toddler in her crib the agency had given her over a year ago. There was only one more nanny left. Sally rushed to her and smiled. She had found her daughter, and the tears made good on their promise to run down her face as she bent to pick her up. Although the adoption agency told her that Sarah was four, she looked more like she was two. That was the first hint for Sally that Sarah would face a lifetime of health problems. But Sally hardly noticed as she held her daughter for the first time.

She embraced her and looked at the other families having the same overpowering feelings as they found their children. From abandonment to adoption, these children were about to embark on the greatest adventure of their lives. Some would never look back. Others would. They would be thankful for the adoptive parents who didn’t look like them but had saved them, yet they would always wonder why their birth parents did what they did.

From needles to nosebleeds: A difficult adolescence

A 12-year-old Sarah is standing in her pajamas against the white walls of her kitchen as her favorite Disney Channel show, “The Suite Life on Deck,” plays on the TV. The monitor reflects blue against her wire-rimmed glasses that slide down her nose, and on any other occasion, her heart rate wouldn’t be thumping like the beat of a “Queen” bass line. Her mom helps hold up her T-shirt as Sarah pulls down the waist belt of her favorite flannel pants to expose her belly button. Inhaling sharply, she slides a dime-sized syringe into her stomach and slowly pushes the plunger. She doesn’t wince. In fact, she doesn’t even blink as the injector accidentally nicks her skin on the way out, and a drop of blood hits the counter’s white tile.

If people ask, she stands exactly 4 feet — though the tape measure may beg to differ. And she’s praying that these nightly injections of Human Growth Hormone may one day change that. As the shortest one in her class, her goal is to one day grow to at least 5 feet tall. She rotates the injection spot every couple of nights: arm, abdomen, thigh, arm, abdomen thigh. At one point, she stops feeling it go in anymore. She never misses a day, not for the next three years, even as she starts her freshman year of high school.

These nightly needles are just the first step in a long series of health-related obstacles. In 7th grade, her tear duct becomes obstructed. While most of her peers are applying mascara for the first time, a doctor is shoving a blunt metal wire through a tube up her nose into her eye and spraying saline. The summer before her senior year of high school, doctors operate on her jaw, and she has to eat blended food for six months.

Uncommon resilience is common for Sarah

If you ask her about her health struggles now, she shrugs and jokes.

“I got used to it,” Sarah likes to say. “I’m very resilient, or so I’ve been told.”

She lives with a congenital heart disorder and Turner syndrome, a chromosomal disorder which affects her height, her reproductive ability and her appearance. Her jaw is small and receding, her skin is childishly smooth, and her neck is wide with a low hairline on the back. Just taking a look at her, some people can tell something is wrong. If that wasn’t enough, she also still experiences health problems that doctors attribute to the malnourishment and lack of care in the orphanage.

“It’s hard to tell what resulted from being adopted and having that delay in language and cognitive development and what comes from the Turner syndrome. It kind of all meshes together,” she said.

The worst problems started when she hit middle school. She was hardly growing, and she wasn’t going through puberty. Doctors later discovered only half her jaw was growing, making her face slightly lop-sided and creating a lisp. She theorized this was the reason dentists had been struggling to straighten her teeth even after she’d worn braces for six years. She keeps a positive attitude about all her medical struggles. To call her aggressively optimistic would be an understatement, and in all my years of knowing her, I’ve only seen her cry once and that was because she slipped on some gravel and skinned her knee on the playground in 3rd grade. She loves to laugh, and she’s the master of disguise in masking hurt with humor. Only someone as strong as she is could have survived an adolescence characterized more by needles and nosebleeds, doctor’s visits and disappointments, than regular teenage angst.

One more thing: Doctors say Sarah can’t have babies. So she plans to follow in her mother’s footsteps and adopt children internationally. Sally adopted Sarah’s 17-year-old sister Olivia from a foster home in Guatemala. To Sarah, Sally Felt represents the new American family — a single mother with two children from different hemispheres.

Friends call Sally a Supermom. Besides traveling across the world at 57 to change Sarah’s life, she did it alone. She helped with homework, chauffeured, and went to every school musical or Chinese club ceremony. She would lift the shirt and hold Sarah’s hand as she injected herself with hormones. She would dry tears and hold her daughter when she was taunted by bullies.

“What’s really helped is my mom,” Sarah says. “She’s always been a good source of support throughout everything.”

Confronting the past

We’re sitting on her Austin condo balcony on a crisp Monday night. Looking the image of Austin casual, she’s wearing leggings, a jean jacket and the silver cross necklace she wears every day that her mom gave her when she was baptized. Before our visit, she set up pink-striped padded lawn chairs so we can people-watch while we talk. She and her two roommates have strung Christmas lights across the railing of the balcony. It feels very much like a home.

A car passes on the street. It’s November now, and even months later, talking about the July visit to her orphanage with her mother is intense.

She’s telling me about another orphan she met, a little girl who would play blocks with her. She would give Sarah a block, and Sarah would put it together. Then she would take it back, deconstruct it, and give it back to her. Sarah laughs as she tells me she put that block back together maybe 10 or 15 times.

“Trust me, I would have wanted to take any of those sweet kids home,” she says.

Sarah and her mother are glad they went back to where it all started. Sally had been nervous before the trip, worrying that it would bring up unpleasant memories for Sarah.

“But that was not the case,” Sally says. “She was greeted and treated so well … It could not have gone better.”

The orphanage had been revamped, and Sally’s worries were alleviated when Sarah still couldn’t remember. No unpleasant memories were triggered, and Sally could finally breathe. To Sarah, the visit was more like a family reunion rather than ripping off an emotional Band-Aid. The staff treated her like a celebrity.

Now we’ve moved to the kitchen table, talking about the future. Sarah hopes one day to use her speech pathology major at UT to help other children, especially orphans like her. She’s flipping through photos from the trip on her phone. She zooms past photos from the Great Wall, photos of her and her mother grinning, of her orphanage, until she hits her target. In the photos, she’s wearing a forest green Tyler’s T-shirt and leggings, looking more like the Austinite in China rather than the Chinese orphan in her homeland. Aha—here it is. She stops and shows me a picture of a construction site. It could be anywhere. But it’s the site of where the building used to be, the building where she was left as a baby.

“It wasn’t till then that it sunk in that I was abandoned,” Sarah says. She tells me she stood in the field and just stared at it as cars zipped by, hardly anyone in sight. There was no sign to commemorate the likely dozens, maybe hundreds of children, especially little girls, who had been discarded like trash on the steps that no longer exist. It was anticlimactic, especially because she had been building this up in her head for weeks, months. She wasn’t disappointed- just surprised.

The confrontation with her past wasn’t the challenge she was afraid it might be, and when encountering what could have been a lifetime of hurt, Sarah did what she’s always done - she turned the other cheek. She turned her back on the bitterness as she walked away from the same spot her parents had 21 years earlier. She’s faced and finished with her past, and now she can focus on her future.

“This is a normal thing that happened, at least in the early 2000s. It was very common for kids to be given up for adoption (like this) … It definitely made me appreciate my home here more because if I had grown up in China, who knows what would have happened?”