humansofnewyork:“I think she started to realize that it wasn’t going to happen for her. She was in h
humansofnewyork:“I think she started to realize that it wasn’t going to happen for her. She was in her forties. She hadn’t met the right person to start a family with. And after her third failed insemination, she had enough money to try one more time, or adopt. So she chose to adopt. This was the 90’s, and China had just begun to loosen their restrictions on international adoption. So she travelled there with a group of eight other families. The adoption lawyer gathered everyone in the hotel restaurant. Then he walked in a circle, and handed each family a small piece of rice paper. On the paper was written a name, a birth date, and a date of abandonment. My mother describes that piece of paper as the first time she ever met me. She gave me three names. My first name is Zoe, which means ‘life.’ She kept my Chinese name FuMian as my middle name. And my third name is Suni, which means ‘long awaited little darling.’ Ever since that day it’s just been the two of us. As a young child I wasn’t able to fully understand the concept of adoption, but I knew we didn’t look alike. And my children’s books had titles like Families Are Different and The Color Of Us. But Mom was very open about my history. She always did her best to incorporate Chinese elements in my upbringing. We celebrated Chinese New Year. I took Mandarin classes. There was Chinese artwork hanging in our house. As I grew a little older, I started to ask a lot of questions about my birth mother. But Mom never felt threatened by it. She encouraged it. She told me to write letters and keep them in my journal, to let my birth mother know that I was doing OK, and that I was happy. We even invented a name for her, so that she would seem more real. We called her Mei. Whenever we talked about Mei, my mother would show me that original piece of rice paper. It shows my birthday as March 7th, but my abandonment was two weeks later on March 21st. Mom always made a big deal out of those two weeks. She told me that it proved how much Mei loved me. And how she knew she couldn’t keep me, but she wanted to care for me as long as possible. So that I would be strong enough to move on.” -- source link