Beijing (CNS)！Jenni Lee was adopted by her American parents 13 years ago. This is her 12th visit back in China. But this time, she hopes to find her birth parents, and she might get her wish in just a few days. "I don't blame them and I completely understand their difficulties. I just want to have a family reunion," said Jenni.
Residing in San Francisco, 18-year-old Jenni will study at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts this September. She recently found her file at the China Center of Adoption Affairs and is about to set off to find her parents in Shaotong, Yunnan with the information provided.
Jenni told her adoptive mother Hanni Lee about her findings and explained that she would always regard Hanni as her mother, yet, it is of great importance for her to find her natural parents. Hanni made a simple scrapbook of Jenni's childhood photos and early life experiences.
In Jenni's memories, her farmer parents abandoned her when she was four. After one year of living in an orphanage, she met her adoptive family.
Previous attempts to find her birth parents were in vain because she could neither remember their names, nor position her hometown in such a huge province. Although she hasn't planned on the future if she realizes her dream this time, she says, "I will definitely keep in touch with them."
Using strict background checks, around 110,000 Chinese children (girls being the majority) were adopted by foreign families since the Adoption Law of the People¨s Republic of China was put into place in 1991. Statistics show 75,000 children were adopted by American families, more than half of the total sent overseas.
Most of them left their birth parents several months after birth. The adoptive families often put great emphasis on their education of Chinese culture, through Chinese schools and Chinese festival activities. Some even invest great effort into picking up Chinese themselves in order to encourage the kids to speak.
Jenni's two sisters were adopted in China as well. Their parents insist that China is their first homeland and they should preserve Chinese traditions. They have had many Chinese teachers and their mother even studied Chinese on her own in order to cultivate a language environment. Moreover, a rule has been set that Chinese is a must in family communications.
During summer vacations, most American kids play basketball or swim. But the three sisters were required to fly back to China. In order to form a good habit of saving money, they were encouraged to earn the money for plane tickets on their own by teaching Chinese in the US.
Since the age of 14, Jenni has been volunteering in poor areas of Yunnan every summer, mainly teaching kids English and translating for American therapists in the orphan's home of Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan.
Every time Jenni went there, she would bring paintings of American kids' daily life to their Chinese peers, and vice versa. Throughout all of this, she has been happy to gain the support of her adoptive parents.
Speaking of the future, Jenni plans to pick an International Relations or International Economics major and do an exchange at a local university in Yunnan. "There is a Golden Bridge in San Francisco. We adopted kids are like this bridge, connecting our birth countries with the ones we live in now."
