Born of the Land 生于地 - Part 2

 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. 

Born of the Land 生于地 - Part 1

Charlotte and her searching / travel companion and Chinese adoptee friend, Willa Kurland, at the airport in Urumqi city, Xinjiang province, China, July 2016.

In China, names are an important marker of belonging. They mark tribal belonging and familial identity, and secure a place within an ancestral past. I came unmoored from all of these. 

At only two months old, I was found on the steps of 315 Nanmen Avenue in the Jingkou district of Zhenjiang, and taken by police to the local Social Welfare Institute (SWI). I had nothing but a small handwritten note stating the date and time of my birth. Like so many other abandoned babies of this time, most of whom were girls, I came under the care of the state. Not only was I without parents or any trace of my background, but I was also without a name.

For babies that arrived without names, common practice for Social Welfare Institutes was to give the surname of the current director, or to choose one of the hundred family surnames within China. For the personal names, the SWI often chose a name related to the location in which the child was found. In this way, as children uprooted from the identity of family, we were branded children of the land.

My Chinese name is  Zhou Jiangwen 周江雯. The second character of my Chinese name is jiang 江. In Chinese, jiang 江  means river, three tumbling droplets, descending like a waterfall. In some ways, it may be just a common element incorporated into mine as it is into so many Chinese names. But for me, it is also an indelible stamp of the land from which I come. It may come from the name of the city in which I was born - Zhenjiang 镇江. Or perhaps the name of my province Jiangsu 江苏.

It may even be a homage to the proximity of my birth city to one of the longest rivers in the world. As it turns out, jiang 江 is the second character of what the Chinese call the Yangtze - Changjiang 长江, literally “long river.” Rivers have long occupied a mythological status for the people whose lands and minds are touched by them. The people of Jiangsu 江苏 province are no exception. By the time the river snakes through the province, it has traveled the great majority of its thousands of miles journey from the highlands of Tibet to its terminal stretch, finally preparing to yawn into the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. As the Changjiang 长江 passes through each city, its fate intertwines with each individual whose life it touches. At the same time, the lives of each individual are woven intricately into the river’s body. Since I too was touched by the river, it would be fitting for my name to echo this grand body of water.

And so I too thought of myself for so many years - someone destined to be a child of the land where I was born. There was a blank spot where there should have been a beginning to my story, a question mark where there should have been the names and images of my biological parents. I wondered about them often, but with no concrete information to tie me to them, I felt that in many ways I was more of a child of the land that I so often romanticized about - China. Because of this, I felt a distinct pull to learn about this mythical land. I dedicated myself to learning about the history, culture, and language of China.

I often wondered, if I found my biological family, whether I would change my Chinese name. Over the course of 11 years of using the name given to me in the orphanage in Chinese classes and settings, I had grown rather fond of it. My name became a way for me to forge a second identity, a way to come into being in another self. In Chinese class, I could become Zhou Jiangwen 周江雯, someone with more of a connection to the land of my birth than the Charlotte Cotter who grew up in the suburbs of Boston her whole life. Without realizing it, my name had already taken on something of a special meaning for me.

In the summer of 2016, I was able to locate my biological family in China. It turned out that I needn’t worry about whether or not to change my Chinese name. When I found my family, one of the first questions I asked was whether they had given me a name before they gave me away. They said, no, they had not. 

My parents were still together, and still living in Jiangsu Province. At the time that they gave birth to me, they were involved in agricultural work and lived in a mud-hut in Huai’an 淮安,  China, a city about three hours drive from Zhenjiang 镇江. Today, they’re migrant workers, floating from city to city to find itinerant labor. I  have two older sisters and a brother, exactly one year younger than me. My family surname was Yan 严. 

But it was the name of the girls in the family that first caught my attention. My eldest sister’s name is Yan Jiangli 严江丽 , and my second sister’s name is Yan Jiangping 严江萍 . I have cousins Yan Jiangyan 严江妍  and Yan Jiangmin 严江民 . In Chinese families, it is common to have a family-wide naming practice, such as naming each brother with the number of their birth, one, two, three, and so-on. In the Yan 严 family, each daughter born is given the same second character - jiang 江 - the character for river. And so it became that I,  the so-called “lost and now re-found daughter,” Zhou Jiangwen周江雯 ,  seemed to fit right in. “What a funny coincidence! It must be fate,” they said. “No need to change your Chinese name,” they said. “Just change your last name to Yan 严,” they said. As if it were that simple.