(Wired) – More and more Chinese adoptees in the US are trying to reunite with their birth parents. For Youxue, it took more than a decade, and a remarkable coincidence.

Decades earlier, the conditions that shaped this family’s life were set in motion by China’s one-child policy. The government’s population control program, enacted in the late 1970s, turned family planning into state-mandated decisions about which children were allowed to exist. In the ’80s, rural parents were allowed to have a second child only if the first was a daughter. Families who violated the policy received large fines and other penalties, sometimes sterilization and physical violence.

Today, there are more than 82,000 Chinese adoptees in the United States, most adopted between 1999 and 2016. More than 60 percent of the children adopted in that period were girls. The majority of adoptive parents are white, wealthy, and well educated. Because child abandonment is illegal in China, very little documentation connects Chinese adoptees with their birth families. (Read More)