China

China is the known country of Wen’s birth and adoption, but the story gives her origins there through a small, intimate archive rather than a complete family history. The photographs Eric and Andrew brought back from China connect her to the orphanage where she was left anonymously, while Wen’s later study of Chinese offers a continuing way to approach a place and a past about which much remains uncertain.

Geographic and Biographical Context

Wen was born in China and adopted by Eric and Andrew. Her dads wonder whether her eighth birthday, then six days away, marks her actual birth date or one assigned by the orphanage in Hubei Province. The uncertainty makes China both a concrete point of origin and the location of a gap in her personal record: even the date that would ordinarily anchor a child’s early history may not be known.

The account identifies the orphanage as the place where Wen was left anonymously, but offers almost no information about her biological parents. Andrew has speculated that they may have been too poor to care for her and hoped she would have a better life elsewhere; this remains his conjecture, not a confirmed explanation. China thus enters Wen’s history through what can be established—birth, abandonment, adoption—and through the questions the surviving record cannot answer.

The Adoption Photographs

The photographs Eric and Andrew kept include images of themselves in China and pictures of the three of them at the orphanage. In one, they hold Wen, then small enough to be wrapped tightly in a blanket, with only the top of her head and her eyes visible. The images give Wen a view of the beginning of her family life that cannot be supplied by memory alone.

Her response to the photographs is complicated. She was shaken by pictures of herself before the surgeries that repaired her cleft lip, fearing that the baby in them was her real self, now lost or hidden. After her dads comforted her, she asked them to put the pictures away and said she would never look again; instead, she repeatedly retrieved the wooden box from beneath their bed. Looking first at the photographs of her dads and then at those of herself, she gradually became less frightened by the unfamiliar baby face. China is therefore present not only as a place of adoption, but also through an image record Wen revisits as she tries to understand continuity between her infant self and the person she has become.

Cultural Connection and Unanswered Origins

Eric and Andrew have been open with Wen about her birth in China and adoption, bought her books, and encouraged her to learn about Chinese culture. In January, they enrolled her in a Chinese school in addition to her regular school, where Saturday-morning classes teach her to read and write Chinese. This education gives her a practical cultural connection to her birthplace without pretending to resolve the mystery of her biological family.

Wen rarely asks about her biological parents, and almost nothing is known about them beyond the account that she was left anonymously at the orphanage. Her connection to China consequently holds two truths at once: it is part of the family history she shares with Eric and Andrew, and it marks the limits of what that history can tell her. The story treats that uncertainty alongside her curiosity, her repeated return to the photographs, and her parents’ efforts to make knowledge of her origins available rather than withheld.