Wu Keyuan, 8, was featured last year in China’s Unwanted Children, a documentary about a medical orphanage. Thanks to that film, he now has a forever family. Yap Vong Hin and Lim Poh Lian fell in love with him instantly. The realized how horrible it must have felt for him to be waiting for a family that may never come.
He was born without external ears and ear canals. Wu wears implants to help him hear. He just learned to talk a few years ago. Just a couple of days after he was born, his parents abandoned him outside a hospital. A woman took him home to raise him but brought him back to the orphanage when he was five.
Wu has been living at Alenah’s Home, a medical foster care center in Beijing with 20 other children. Caretakers worried that he would age out with nowhere to go. According to Chinese law, when a child turns 14, he or she becomes unadoptable. “I just think, ‘Please hurry up and come,’ staff member Zhang Jing shared through tears in the documentary, ‘because he’s so big now. All the children he grew up with have left. It’s just him now.'”
It took 10 long months for his adoption to be finalized. During that time, he Skyped with his parents many times. They sent him letters often and a photo book he could use to learn more about his family. When the wait was finally over, he boarded a plane to Singapore to meet his siblings for the first time.
His parents say he is very affectionate and is happy to help with household tasks. Wu is learning to speak English, and he attends church with his family regularly. The videos in the documentary have been an inspiration to many. Yap Vong Hin says, “If this in any way helps other people to understand the whole adoption issue and have their hearts moved to do something, it would be more than worth it.
Some 900,000 children are born in China with disabilities each year. That’s a 70% increase in birth defects in the last 20 years.
