When I was 18 months old, I was adopted from the orphanage located in the Social Welfare Institute in Xinyi City, near the prefecture city of Maoming in the Guangdong Province.  When I was four or five year’s old, I asked my adoptive parents about my birth parents.  I wanted to know the names of my birth parents, their ages, and what they looked like.  I wanted to understand why they placed me for adoption.  My parents said they did not know the answers to any of my questions but agreed to help me locate my birth parents.

After autosomal testing became available, my dad had my DNA tested and entered in as many DNA databases as possible.  However, these databases were filled with DNA samples of individuals who lived in the West (i.e., the US and Europe). Very few of these DNA samples belonged to individuals of Chinese descent.  Fortunately, as these databases grew in size and number my DNA matched to two 3^rd cousins.  Both were young men (whose parents and grandparents had previously lived in Xinyi City) who attended college in America and were working in the US when they had their DNA tested.  I reached out to my 3^rd cousins and both were very helpful by providing information about their living relatives and ancestors.  We used this information to create family tree diagrams in the hope that the information on these charts would eventually intersect and point to my birth family, but they never did.

By chance, I made contact with another adoptee who was one of my distant cousins and who recently uploaded her DNA results in the 23Mofang DNA database.  My dad had been tracking the growth of this database for the past three years.  We were waiting until the 23Mofang database had grown large and mature enough before uploading my DNA data.

In August 2020, I uploaded my DNA tests results and my DNA matched to a 1^st cousin.  Although I sent the 1^st cousin several messages within the 23Mofang application, she did not reply.  So my dad reached out to a 23Mofang customer service representative and requested they reach out to the 1^st cousin to ask her to consider replying to my text messages, if she chose to do so.  23Mofang was happy to help and said they would try to make contact with the 1^st cousin.  Soon after 23Mofang made contact, my 1^st cousin replied to me.  Her surname was Zhou.  She knew her uncle had placed a child for adoption the same year I was born and so replied to my messages.  We exchanged WeChat IDs and began a conversation.  She put me in touch with her uncle’s oldest daughter and the uncle’s daughter and her parents agreed to take a DNA test.  The test results confirmed that the uncle’s daughter was my biological sister and her parents were my biological parents.

Although 23Mofang had already reunited two dozen children adopted domestically within China with their birth families, I was the first international adoptee who matched to a Chinese birth family via the 23Mofang DNA database.

I will be grateful to 23Mofang forever for contacting my 1^st cousin and helping me make contact with her.

I recommend that any international Chinese adoptee, who desires to reconnect with his or her birth parents, upload their DNA test results within the 23Mofang DNA database.  As my dad says, “It is not a question of if they will receive a match but when it will occur.  As the database grows in size, it is only a matter of time before that adoptee will connect with a close relative (i.e., 1^st or 2^nd cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparent, sibling, or birth parent).”

— Mia H.

Around the 1960s when China was suffering from a nationwide famine, a large number of children emerged in cities in the Yangtse River Delta like Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuxi. These children were sent by their poor parents who had no other choice but to hope the children could survive in modern cities like Shanghai. The children crowded the orphanages in the cities which though appeared to be rich places, were in fact running out of grains. To ease the situation in Yangtse River Delta, the government sent lots of orphans by railway to provinces in the north, including Henan, Shandong, Inner Mongolia and the three northeast provinces of China. Approximately 50,000 orphans were sent and they are known as “Shanghai Orphans” or “Yangtse River Delta Orphans”.

Ms. Wang Ai, a “Shanghai Orphan” living in Anshan City of Liaoning Province in the northeast of China, had learnt that she is adopted when she reached adulthood. But she didn’t start looking for her biological parents until 2007 when she read about an organization founded by “Shanghai Orphans” living in Anshan looking for their bio parents. Since then, Ms. Wang Ai has visited Shanghai several times with other “Shanghai Orphans” from Anshan but found no solid clues regarding her bio parents. She learnt that “Shanghai Orphans” did not necessarily come from Shanghai; some of the orphans in fact came from Jiangsu Province, Zhejiang Province as well as Anhui Province. Ms. Wang Ai even found her record from the Shanghai Orphanage but the yellowish archive card, which made her miss her bio parents more, didn’t shed any light on how she could find them. She didn’t even know whether her bio parents were from Shanghai or not.

In June 2020, Ms. Wang Ai did a DNA test. The test result unveiled that genetically Ms. Wang Ai is from Jiangsu Province and found a match of her first cousin in the database. Through the help of her cousin, Ms. Wang Ai found one of her sisters with whom she has 2647cM of shared DNA segments.

Two months after in August 2020, Ms. Wang Ai had a reunion with her bio family in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. Her bio parents who are over 90 years old and her five sisters were all over the moon. During the reunion, the family wondered whether the fates conspired against them. In the past decades, the bio family had visited Shanghai many times looking for Ms. Wang Ai while Ms. Wang Ai is living in Liaoning Province, almost 2,000 km away from Shanghai.

 Story from 23 Mofang DNA test