Dear Stranger
Fatherhood, like family, can take many forms—shaped by presence and absence, culture and memory. For international adoptees, our understanding of men and fathers is often filtered through the places we were raised—Western ideals, expectations, and narratives—while our ideas of Chinese fatherhood remain distant, shaped by fragments, questions, and sometimes silence. From this in-between place, we learn to hold multiple truths: that a father can be known or unknown, remembered or imagined, absent and still formative. This letter reflects on what it means to carry pieces of someone you’ve never met—and how, even without answers, we continue shaping our own definitions of family, care, and who we might become.
Dear Stranger,
I’ve learned many words for father: bàba 爸爸, fùqin 父亲, ādiē 阿爹, lǎobà 老爸. I don’t really call you anything in my mind; you’re a big mystery. I spent 9 months developing inside my mother, so I know I have a connection to her but I don’t know what my connection is to you.
I think I am a handsome woman, with a tall nose and strong jaw; someone called me a “classic Chinese beauty” and I wonder how much influence you have on my face.
There’s a lot of mythologizing around birth fathers in the adoptee community. Questions of involvement and respectability. I wonder how involved you were in my life. Did you decide I would be the child to relinquish? Was your relationship with my mother consensual? Are you a good man?
I’ve seen several accounts of faithful fathers who never gave up searching for their lost daughters and I wonder if you think about me the same way or if you think of me as just one of your many progeny in the line to get to a son. Do you know that I was found on a train traveling from the mountains to the capitol? If you lived in such a remote and rural area, why is it so hard to find any information about you? It feels like you’ve excommunicated me from the village.
I wonder if you finally got the son you wanted/needed. I wonder if he is a father yet, too. Through survival and spite, I’ve developed a strong sense of self sufficiency and many qualities an old Chinese man may not find suitable for a young Chinese woman. But I’m proud of myself and I think you’d have to be, too, in spite of everything circumstance has thrown at us.
Signed, Anonymous
Adoptee, 28
The views expressed in blog posts reflect those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the shared views of The Nanchang Project as a whole.
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