The consequences are laid out in an astonishing documentary, Found, that I watched last weekend at its New York premiere. The film echoes themes raised by movies such as Ricki’s Promise and One Child Nation about the tangled nature of Chinese adoption. However, it starts with the movie’s director, Amanda Lipitz, discovering that her niece, an adopted Chinese girl called Chloe, has decided to use the DNA testing service 23andMe to get information about her genetic heritage.
When Chloe gets the results, she discovers — to her great shock — that she has two cousins, Lily Bolka and Sadie Mangelsdorf, living in the US who were also adopted as Chinese babies, seemingly without any roots. Their three American families are very different and live hundreds of miles apart (one is Jewish, another evangelical Christian and the third Catholic). But the teenagers bond and, armed with their DNA results, decide to head to China to look for their birth mothers.
To help them in this detective work, they hire a Beijing company called My China Roots, which was set up a decade ago by Huihan Lie, a Dutchman of Chinese heritage. Lie originally created his company to serve the overseas descendants of Chinese families who emigrated from their homeland because of political persecution or economic hardship. (Lie’s own family moved from Fujian and Jinmen to Indonesia a couple of generations ago, before going to the Netherlands.) “The overwhelming majority [of Chinese] left for non-pleasant reasons. Whether poverty or political it was never pleasant,” he explained to the FT in 2014.
Today, the onset of DNA testing has created a new entrepreneurial niche: My China Roots also places ads on social media in China asking mothers who gave up their babies years ago to come forward and submit DNA. This is then matched against databases such as 23andMe to help children who are looking for their birth mothers, and, if both sides want to be connected, identify them.