In celebration of Adoption Awareness Month this November, Sky Siu, CEO of Mother’s Choice, joined RTHK Radio 3’s ‘Brunch with Noreen’ to talk about adoption in Hong Kong, share more about the work of Mother’s Choice, and reflect on how we can all help every child grow up in a loving family.
Sky and host Noreen Mir explore the difference between adoption and fostering, common myths and stigma around adoption, and why redefining ‘family’ beyond bloodlines matters so much for children who need care.
Listen to the full interview on RTHK’s website: ‘Brunch with Noreen’, 21 November 2025, Part 2, from 05:19 to 25:30.
Here are some hightlights:
Noreen
Let us talk about the adoption process here in Hong Kong. Some of us may not be so familiar with the different routes. I have often heard that people can perhaps go through Mother’s Choice, your organisation, or perhaps through the Social Welfare Department. Can you walk us through it?
Sky
Before talking about the process, it is interesting to mention one of the big myths that I hear a lot: many people do not really know the difference between adoption and fostering.
The idea in both is that you are inviting a child to join your family. In Hong Kong, we have been talking a lot about fostering and foster care. But the big difference is that adoption is a permanent legal transfer of parental rights from one family to another, whereas in foster care you are not transferring any legal parental rights. You are temporarily offering a home environment for a child while they are waiting for their birth family to make a decision about what to do. That is a very important difference that really needs to be cleared up.
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Noreen
Let us talk about the cultural aspects of adoption. What are attitudes towards it here in Hong Kong? What have you seen throughout your time at Mother’s Choice, or simply from living in Hong Kong?
Sky
To be honest, it really depends on the family, but generally speaking, our community in Hong Kong is not always very open to adoption. There is often stigma or myths about children who are placed for adoption that they are ‘damaged’, ‘broken goods’, or that they come from very bad roots. That stigma is quite difficult for families who are considering adoption, because it affects how they are perceived.
But this is not really true. A lot of these children may have been placed for adoption at birth. We often get calls from hospitals and go straight there after a baby has been born.
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Sky
I also think there is still a bit of stigma around what it means to have a family and what ‘family’ means. In the past, perhaps more of the expatriate community in Hong Kong were open to adoption. Now, more modern local families are starting to consider it because they have seen friends or neighbours go through the process, and they can see with their own eyes that the myths and stigma are not true.
Personal testimonies and lived experiences of adoptive families, when we have more and more of them in our community in Hong Kong, really change the way we think about what family looks like and how it can be formed.
The funny thing is, Noreen, that in the old days, when many people were quite poor. For example, my parents’ generation, informal adoption was actually common. My dad often says he had a ‘grandma’ who was not really his grandma, but she lived next door and basically raised him and his seven siblings. She was the one who was around, who fed them, and even gave them pocket money.
So sometimes the label of ‘adoption’ changes how people feel, but culturally, we are actually a society that has practised adoption or kinship care in many informal ways.
Noreen
Exactly, it takes a village. It absolutely takes a village.
Sky
It really does.
Noreen
It goes back to nature versus nurture, and nurture always wins. It is the environment, the things that you teach the child, the things that we learn, and the love we receive from our family that really pave the way and change the trajectory for someone.