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Last year, my husband was diagnosed with serious coronary artery disease, and was told that his first degree relatives over 30 should be tested. At first, this seemed easy.
We thought his only first degree relative was our daughter, after his mother died, but in going through her paperwork, we found that he had a half-sister (whom we found), and, just yesterday, when we were going through more of the paperwork, we found a birth certificate for a sister my husband did not know he had.
Confronting relatives has given us four conflicting stories, and we do not know which is true: One, is that she died a few days after birth, but we can find no death record, two, is that she was alive and adopted by a Russian doctor, three, she was adopted by relatives in Taiwan.
So, we are here hoping someone in Taiwan might know who she is or what happened to her:
Cindy Dunn
About 37 years old
Born in NYC
Asian (Chinese/Hong Kong parents)
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Any of those stories could be true. However, as the Mom of a Chinese daughter, I am aware that intra-family adoptions among Chinese people are fairly common. While some might be formalized, others are informal.
If you know of any relatives living in Taiwan, you might want to start with them and ask if there were any people in the family who might have adopted this child. It would probably be easier starting there than going through Taiwan's and Hong Kong's social service agencies, and would probably be more fruitful if there's a chance that the adoption was informal.
Adoption by a non-Chinese person, such as a Russian doctor, would be unlikely unless:
a) The child's immediate family had some personal contact with the non-Chinese person. As an example, if this child had special needs and the family couldn't/didn't want to parent her, they might have let a doctor caring for her at the hospital adopt her.
b) The child was placed into an institution that participated in international adoption. International adoption has become common only in recent years, however, so this situation is less likely. Having met with some Russian judges who handle adoptions, I also know that adoption tends to be stigmatized in many parts of Russian society. If there is a Russian couple diagnosed with infertility, the spouses sometimes go to extreme lengths to hide the fact that they are adopting. They identify a child who "looks like" them. The wife may pretend to be pregnant by putting padding under her clothes and talking about morning sickness. And the couple may tell people that they have "gone to the hospital", when, in fact, they have gone to pick up the child. Although a Russian doctor, being well educated and possibly more cosmopolitan, may have fewer negative attitudes than the general population, my sense is that he/she would probably not have adopted transracially, unless he knew the family personally or was personally involved in the child's care.
Sharon
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