HUMAN TRAFFICKING, MONEY FOR BABIES?
The Chinese Adoptees Who Were Stolen
As thousands of Chinese families take DNA tests, the results are upending what adoptees abroad thought they knew about their origins.
May 23, 2025
Photograph by Akilah Townsend for The New Yorker
In September of 2022, at the start of her senior year at Indiana’s Purdue University, Mia Griffin was working in her bedroom, laptop propped up on her knees, when an e-mail came in from 23andMe saying that her genetic testing was completed. Mia was not in a hurry. She’d bought the kit a year before, when she’d seen a sale on Amazon. It was an impulse buy for which her enthusiasm had quickly waned. It took months before she got around to spitting into the tube and mailing it back in the prepaid package.
When she logged on, all seemed as anticipated. The test listed her ancestry as 99.9 per cent East Asian and Indigenous American. (At the time, the two were lumped together by the company.) No great surprise there—she had been adopted in 2002 from China, one of more than a hundred and sixty thousand children sent abroad to the United States and other countries in the course of three decades. Not knowing her family’s medical history, she had taken the test mainly to find out if she had a heightened genetic risk for cancer, and she was relieved to learn that she did not, although the test showed a propensity for lactose intolerance and an allergy to cats, two things she already knew about.
Mia knew that finding family was a possibility, but it wasn’t on her mind. She clicked anyway on the tab that listed genetic relatives. There it was at the top of the list: Zhou Changqi, born in 1956.
👇A VERY LONG STORY...
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