Chinese girls adopted by US and Dutch families find closure after reunion with birth parents
- Linde Welberg and Lianna Fogg were given up for adoption in China because of the country’s one-child policy – but vowed to find their biological parents
- Both felt pangs of separation, torn between two worlds, but found closure and happiness when they met their birth families
Growing up in the Netherlands, Linde Welberg knew she had the most loving parents a child could ask for. Yet she had always felt something was missing from her life. Long before her father, Wim, and mother, Mieke, told her she was adopted, she instinctively knew it.
“I felt a part of me was missing. I feared my birth parents might be dead. I cried to see them, asking if they’d left a note, phone number or address,” she says.
On the other side of the Atlantic, in the US city of Philadelphia, Lianna Fogg was going through similar turmoil. “I shared the same dream of every adoptee,” Fogg says. “Not just to find my birth parents, but to be accepted by them.”
The two young women have never met, but share a common experience. Put up for adoption as a consequence of China’s now-abandoned one-child policy, both have lived lives far removed from the circumstances of their birth. Each has felt pangs of separation and loss, torn between two worlds, despite being raised in loving homes.
Both have bridged the divide between them and their lost families, however, through dogged determination and the power of social media. Last year, the two young women visited China for emotional reunions which gave them a sense of closure.
For Welberg, the separation that came to define her life occurred in 2001, when Wim and Mieke Welberg travelled to Gutian county, in Fujian province, in southern China, to adopt her. She was just a year old; her name Lin Shupin. The Welbergs named her Linde after the linden tree, known in the Netherlands for its resilience. They returned to China in 2004 to adopt a three-year-old boy from Jilin province, whom they named Tim.