Here is a journal entry of the most important day of our trip to China. On this day, I visited my old orphanage for the first time and got to meet my foster family. My twin sister and I were adopted from Wuhan, China at 13 months old. In 2013, my old orphanage invited my family back to China to see the place I lived in for the first year of my life. The government was planning to tear it down later that year which is why the orphanage director invited us back. This is the first time that anything like this has ever happened in China because of government regulations.
Day 5: When we got to the orphanage, we were welcomed by dressed up girls who sang and danced for us when we walked through the doors. Then me and Allie (my twin sister) went up to the front of the main stage for a rehearsal of Edelweiss and it was very confusing. Then, all of the important people who worked for the orphanage came through and gave speeches. There were reporters everywhere and cameras! It was so annoying because it felt like it all for the media. Then Allie went onstage and gave her speech, which Dad was recording, and he started crying. :( So because Allie did the speech and she was first born, she was interviewed alone afterwards. This made me a little jealous but it was okay because Mom had me interviewed with Allie. Then everyone got a tour of the orphanage and we went to the nurseries and playground but we never got to actually play with the orphaned children still living there. There was a baby girl that I was rocking and she was so cute! I actually started to cry because it was so emotional since these orphaned babies and children will probably never get adopted since they were mentally disabled. Then we went back to the welcoming room and watched a play by these little adorable orphan boys with makeup on and animal costumes. Then we had lunch and then got to meet our foster mom and foster sister. They recognized us the moment they saw us, but I didn’t realize who they were until a translator told me. It was truly amazing and intensely emotional. I also got to meet my nanny who took care of us for three months before my foster family came. My foster mom gave me a jaded necklace shaped like a bunny because we were born in the year of the bunny. My nanny gave me a traditional chinese pen. It was very hard to talk to my foster mom because the reporters kept interrupting and were interviewing her instead. So my foster sister talked to us. She said she was 16 when we came and that we were taken to the hospital a lot since we were so sick. I had no idea. Our foster mom didn’t talk much because our translator, Jessie, was not very good but she was a volunteer so she didn’t know she was going to be our translator. Then I got to look at my birth files and found out that I was born an hour and a half after Allie. I also learned that our birth mother kept Allie three days and only me one day since the first born matters more, which is hard for to come to terms with. Our foster sister also said that I used to love to go on these rocking horse machines that were in front of stores and that their cousin made me a wooden horse! This explains why I’m so obsessed with horses. (I used to own a horse and rode horses for 7 years) I felt bad since I didn’t really talk to my nanny, but the reporters were super pushy. 我爱你 (Wo ai ni) means “I love you” in Chinese, which I learned from our translator, and we kept telling our foster family this. We learned that only 2 people could come so our foster dad couldn’t come. Our foster sister also said that Allie was the naughty one and used to take my toys and break them. LOL! It was very, very hard to say goodbye when we left. I cried a lot! :( Afterwards, we went back to the hotel and decided not to go to the group dinner so we went to the Shangri-Lai Hotel for dinner, which was where mom and dad stayed when they first adopted us.