The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
@4 OUR CHINA STORIES *4 0 Robin Bell Adoptive Parent Pennsylvania Daughter's Adoption place: Guizhou Province, Zhenyuan Social Welfare Institute Adoption date: March 25, 2005 Age at adoption: 2 years old. This story may be a bit different from the typical "feel-good" story of a child adopted from China but I feel it is important to share nonetheless. Once you read my story, you will understand why I choose to use a pseudonym here and also why I am keeping our family, including our 12-year-old daughter from China, anonymous. I assume there are people in my family, including our daughter, who may prefer not to be so public with our story nor know all the details of our story. In the past, I have shared my concerns about our daughter's adoption on other online forums. To protect the privacy of my family members, I have never used our daughter's name or even the first initial of her first name. I do not post any pictures or use my children's names on any public forum linked to me. I never changed my name when I married and I am hoping this protects my daughter and other family members' privacy. My daughter was born in 2003. Initially, we were told by our adoption agency that our daughter was in the orphanage at the Zhenyuan SWI in Guizhou Province. After another family with a referral from the same SWI requested additional medical information about their child, we were told that the children were in foster care. After I adopted my daughter, I got a lead on the snail mail address of the foster mother. I learned that my daughter had been in foster care from the time she was "found," until May 25, 2005, the day we adopted her. My daughter's finding ad and abandonment statement both say she was found at 4 months. The foster mother says my daughter was a week or two old, at best. It didn't escape me that 2005 was the peak year for international adoptions to the U.S. from China (see U.S. State Department statistics). My daughter came from a fairly rural town, in a fairly rural province, Zhenyuan County in Guizhou Province. I have heard some people say that Guizhou is one of the poorest provinces in China. I believe that poverty comes into play as to why my daughter was relinquished. We now live in the East Coast of the U.S.
Oral history with Robin Bell regarding the adoption of her daughter from the Zhenyuan Social Welfare Institute in Guizhou Province, China regarding her doubts about the truthfulness of the stories given to adoptive parents about how their children were abandoned.
Relationship to this item: (References)
Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.