Charlotte with her biological family (surname 严) in Zhenjiang city, Jiangsu province, China, August 2016. Left to right: (Standing) Charlotte's biological 2nd oldest sister, Charlotte, Charlotte's biological younger brother, Charlotte's biological oldest sister (Seated) Charlotte's biological mother, Charlotte's biological niece (baby of her oldest sister), Charlotte's biological father.
In sharing my story of reunion with others, many people have mentioned “fate.” In many ways, I agree with them. How could it not be fate? To search through 1.3 billion people and find the two I was looking for with nothing but a place and a tiny little slip of paper was something akin to impossible. Oh, how I want to believe in fate.
But, there are places where I feel the word “fate” simply doesn’t fit. Firstly, the character jiang 江 is incredibly common in names, and it is also commonly placed as the second character. That both my family members and I would have jiang 江 as my second character is in fact not so incredible. Perhaps more importantly though, to say it was “fate” is to neglect the role that my own choices played in finding my birth parents. “Fate” implies that I was fated to reunite with my biological parents again in this life without my having to do anything.
In many ways, that did not resonate at all with how I saw my searching journey. In fact, in searching, I felt paradoxically both more in control of my destiny and completely out of control than ever before. It had been my choice to search. I had put those posters up on social media. I had decided to trust that journalist enough. Had I not chosen to search, I would have not found. (*) For one of the first times in my life, I felt that I could make decisions that could dramatically impact the direction my life was taking.
(*Of course, some of this is completely an illusion. My ability to search in the first place was dictated by the financial resources that my parents offered me.)
Yet my search was also more random than ever. So many factors were completely out of my control. Who was to say that there would be a small slip of paper stuck to the note that was left with me on that day, on which was scribbled the name of the hospital where I was born? Who was to say that the address they left in those hospital records was still their house 22 years later? Who, most importantly, was to say what I would find? It seemed that in this random mass of chaos, I was randomly able to put together an ad hoc path towards reunion. Both this sense of control and randomness indicated to me that there really wasn’t any sort of pattern or entity drawing people inexorably together.
And yet, one moment in my searching journey stands out for me. At one point, we were all sitting in the house of my biological father’s eldest brother - our family patriarch and my paternal uncle. My brother was leaning off the faux leather couch dangling a smoke in his hand. My cousin, Yan Jiangmin, the daughter of my biological father’s eldest brother, wore a chic pixie haircut and designer clothing. She looked at my biological brother for a moment, then gazed at me, and said to my brother, “Isn’t it funny? You’ve changed someone’s entire fate.” He shifted his eyes away, laughing softly.
In that moment, I did somehow see my life intertwined with his. We were both born with the hope of being a son. It was just that one of us was, and one of us wasn’t. And in the circumstances we found ourselves, that made all of the difference.
In the sense that fate is the confluence of individual decisions and the circumstances in which we find ourselves, then I suppose it was fate and it is fate that brings me here. There was a scenario that took place where I did find my biological parents, and there are a million scenarios where I easily could have gone without finding them. But regardless, there was something that connected us, whether or not I chose to pursue it. In that sense, I identify more with the Chinese word yuan 缘 for a set of intangible ties that draw people together more than I do with the Chinese word ming 命, which seems to me much more of a harshly dictated version of life, destined to march forward to a teleological outcome no matter the choices we make.
I see my connection with China in the same way - the junction of choice and circumstance that join together to create an undeniable connection. Even though I reunited with my birth parents, I still feel that, more than I am their child, my tie to my heritage is better understood by seeing me as a child of the land, a child of the river that sustains it. It is as if we are falling together in tandem like drops of a waterfall, like the three drops that make up the river in my name. But I do not think there has to be necessarily only one rigid outcome or one set way for me to connect with China. I have choices at hand. My future with China is mine to name.