My name is Zoe Guttendorf, but for 18 months of my life I was known as QingMei Yuan (院庆美)and lived at Mother’s Love in Nanning, China. For the past three decades, I have become accustomed to confused stares as strangers match the name to my face to which I quickly qualify, “I’m adopted,” and proceed with the conversation. Growing up, adoption was often an afterthought, something I didn’t frequently dwell on as I believed the time spent pondering would hinder me in other pursuits I wanted to accomplish.
Born in 1995, the founding year of the orphanage, I learned just how lucky a hand I was dealt in life after reading about the limited selection process transferring babies from state-run orphanages to Mother’s Love time when I stumbled across a book called Hidden Treasures: A Letter to the Children of Mother’s Love, Guangxi, China. Hidden Treasures documents the deep and palpable scars left by the infant abandonment crisis and one-child policy on everyday Chinese citizens. It is also a personal letter from Kit Ying Chan, the book’s author and founder of Mother’s Love, to the 1,500+ young people who were adopted from Mother’s Love and an accounting of this critical part of their history and identity.
Adoption changed my life story in ways I could never have imagined or even thought to dream of. I grew up on a farm in a predominantly white, rural town in Upstate New York known for having more cows than people. After graduating as the valedictorian of my small public high school, I then went on to attend an Ivy League university. At Dartmouth, I committed myself to my studies in neuroscience and astrophysics as a confused undergrad who loved to learn but had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. Upon graduation, I finally left the harsh and snowy winters of the northeast and moved out west to San Francisco to work at a startup before joining the investment side as a healthcare venture capitalist.
After spending countless years chasing down an idea of “success” and mulling over my future, I had rarely taken the time to learn about my past and where I came from. Ironically, I would consider myself a naturally curious and driven person, but that curiosity was always pointed ‘forwards’, not ‘backwards’ to where my story began. It had always been a black box to me, and since my adoption, I had never returned to China. As I sat at a career juncture however, I couldn’t ignore the growing urge to explore this aspect of my identity and self. Sometimes you need to move ‘backwards’ in life before you can truly move ‘forward’.
I had never heard of Mother’s Choice before this past year but started to piece together the connection between Mother’s Choice in Hong Kong, Mother’s Love in Nanning, and Kit Ying Chan, founder of Mother’s Love and employee at Mother’s Choice. I sent a cold email to an online submission form trying to reach the author of Hidden Treasures. I sent a second cold email to an adoptee who shared her experience on returning to the orphanage with the founder in a blog written 10 years ago. The power of the internet, nothing-to-lose cold emails, and my online sleuthing skills did not fail me, and I successfully connected with them both.
In April, I took a leap of faith and boarded a one-way flight to Hong Kong to join Mother’s Choice as a Full Time Volunteer on the Fundraising and Marketing / Communications team for a year. Prior to moving, I had never set foot in Hong Kong and didn’t know a single person outside of the few Mother’s Choice staff I met on Zoom. It’s been a whirlwind job and geography change, but I am immensely grateful to the Mother’s Choice community for welcoming me with open arms.
The past few months volunteering full time with Mother’s Choice has provided me the space to reflect on my own heritage, learn from more adoptee perspectives, and immerse myself in a culture foreign to me, yet essential to my story. It has also given me the opportunity to give back to the community that has given so much to me. I have only just begun my root tracing journey to find my biological parents through DNA testing but have managed my expectations and feel this journey stems from curiosity rather than a need to feel ‘whole.’
It takes a village to raise a child, and I’ve been unbelievably blessed to have had two, one in Nanning, China and a second across the globe in Tully, New York.
While embarking on this adventure to return to my city of birth, I recently had an unexpected surprise of being reconnected with my Foster family who cared for me for a year while at Mother’s Love! We were able to chat over a video call with a translator present, and I plan to visit them later in the year. As one of three children they fostered, I am the first to return to China nearly 30 years later. I don’t know what to expect, but I believe that life sometimes has a way of funny way of working out and surprising you when you least expect it.