The news of the Olympics winning gold and silver has been bombarding in turn during this time.
But there was a championship, and we cheered briefly, but we stopped talking.
Women's 100m Butterfly Final.
Hannah Margaret McNeil narrowly defeated China's favourite Zhang Yufei by 0.05 seconds to win the gold medal.
Canadian player.
Long black hair, yellow skin, familiar Asian face.
Soon, reports highlighted her special ties to China
Born in Jiujiang, Jiangxi in 2000, he was abandoned by his biological parents and adopted by his Canadian parents in an orphanage at the age of 1.
This is another identity that makes netizens feel embarrassed.
What does her victory have to do with us, and how should we react?
The world-famous McNeil in the pool.
What is drawn is a trace of the times.
It also reflects more Chinese girls who have a similar fate to her.
They can no longer be avoided.
01
No one would have thought of it.
The girl standing on the world's highest podium today.
21 years ago, it was an abandoned, "superfluous person".
From McNeil's upbringing.
You can feel that the most powerful force that shapes a person is not blood, but love.
In Canada, training an athlete often requires a family to pay a lot of money and effort.
McNeil said in interviews that her achievements are the result of her family's joint efforts.
When she was two or three years old, her mother noticed that she was very interested in the swimming pool of her new home, so she sent her to the swimming pool.
Sure enough, her extraordinary talent was discovered.
After McNeill's own choice to become a swimmer, after years of arduous training, her parents stood firmly behind her.
Her father got up early every day to send her to training, and her mother took care of her diet.
Every time they go out to play, the parents will always try to be there and watch their daughters gallop in the pool.
At the 2019 World Championships in Gwangju, South Korea.
McNeil won the championship in the final 50m sprint, where her parents hugged and cried in the stands.
The support of his parents for McNeill is not only swimming.
At the age of 5, he began to learn violin and also played clarinet.
Cultural knowledge also fell, studied psychology at the University of Michigan.
She is optimistic and cheerful, and she is also very interesting.
Because of her myopia, after winning the Olympic Games, she only saw her ranking in half a day, and her face was incredulous, surprised and excited like a silly child.
She is also very loving.
At the Gwangju World Championships, she wrote "Never give up" on her hand along with the runner-up runner-up, cheering on Japanese athlete Rihanako Ikee who fought against leukemia.
Before McNeil, we were more familiar with a player.
Morgan Herder.
At the 2017 World Gymnastics Championships, at the age of 16, she won the women's gymnastics all-around championship.
The first Chinese women's world all-around champion in history.
Elegant and neat movements, confident aura.
Especially when she shows a bright and confident smile, radiant.
Morgan was born in Guangxi, China, and came to live in Delaware with his adoptive family at the age of 2.
Morgan's mother was an ordinary nurse and a single mother.
When she was a child, her mother took her to try all kinds of things, gymnastics, ice skating, football, softball...
Originally, I just wanted her to make more friends and cultivate hobbies.
Unexpectedly, Morgan showed a strong talent and love in gymnastics.
At the age of 13, she reached the 10th grade of amateur gymnastics in the United States.
The choice of the daughter, the mother's undisputed support.
Raising a gymnast, a working-class single mother bears a huge burden.
Not only is it financial pressure, but also the hard work of taking care of her daughter alone.
In order to take care of her daughter and work, she needs to travel back and forth every day.
She said: "I only have this one child, I only have Morgan. ”
Every time I saw Morgan and his mother together.
Even if they look very different, they still can't stop the inner intimacy.
You'll find that Morgan is always smiling happily.
She had many friends in her life.
She loves Harry Potter the most, and after winning the World Championships, she was even lucky enough to receive congratulations from Rowling.
They grow up happily and healthily, have the opportunity to discover their talents and hobbies, and freely choose the path they want to follow in life.
They shine today.
It is even more obvious that the regrets of those children who have been abandoned.
02
McNeill and Morgan, because they stood on the world's highest podium, their lives can be paid attention to.
It also makes us not know how to look at them for a while.
The girls, who have similar stories to McNeill and Morgan, are already a large special group.
Instead of feeling that the identity of "abandoned baby" is humiliating, people want to avoid it.
What should be done more is to understand them and face them squarely.
Look squarely at the history behind them that created such a special fate.
One morning, a cardboard box/basket in the alley contained an abandoned baby girl.
Parents who spend some thought may leave a note with their names and birthdays.
In the documentary "Jiangnan Daughter", an abandoned baby search documentary produced by Tencent News, a local old man recalled the story that kept reappearing over the years:
Some people want to have a boy
Born another girl
He placed her at the entrance of the commune
△ Source: Documentary "Daughter of Jiangnan"
The reasons for throwing away girls are mostly similar
At the risk of violating policy, you want to give birth to boys, but you keep giving birth to girls.
In the era of poverty, the family did not have enough to eat, so the daughter became the one who was abandoned.
For an outcast who has no choice, the best way to wait is to be adopted by a kind family.
In 1992, China stepped up its opening up to the outside world, and the Adoption Law opened up for intercountry adoption.
As a result, the abandoned girls have the opportunity to integrate into overseas families.
In the first decade or so of opening up for overseas adoption, China attracted a large number of overseas couples to adopt orphans in China because of the standardized adoption procedures and the large number of healthy baby girls.
Since 1999, the United States alone has adopted more than 80,000 Chinese children.
Of these, girls account for 84 per cent of these orphans.
In 2007, China improved its adoption law, further raising the threshold for overseas adoption.
With the progress of social concepts, the economy develops.
The abandonment of baby girls is becoming less common.
In less than 10 years, the number of adopted children in China has fallen to half of what it used to be: from 34,529 in 2010 to 17,510 in 2017, according to el-Petra.
But those children who are adopted will not be so easily cut off from the place of birth.
In 2012, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported the story of Jenna, a Chinese-American girl from Yale University, who returned to Wuhan to look for relatives.
Jenna was adopted by the American couple in 1992 and was one of the first children to go overseas.
There is only one simple but poignant account of her origins: a baby girl was found on the side of the road at the Zongguan Subdistrict Office on March 24, 1992, and then sent to a welfare home by the staff of the department.
After Jenna returned to China to find her relatives, as many as 50 families contacted her.
They all wanted her to be their daughter who had also been left near that road.
Twenty years after the opening of intercountry adoption, the first children, represented by Jenna, grew to adulthood.
Over the years, as the girls who were once adopted grew up, you would always see news reports of their cross-border searches.
Their return to search is the confirmation of the history of the past.
Facing up to that history is also the first step to facing them squarely.
03
In 2011, a documentary, Middle Ground, focused on several Chinese girls who had been adopted into the United States.
XiaoFang was born in a mountain village in Yunnan.
She was five years old when she was abandoned by her parents (perhaps bigger, she herself wasn't sure) and had memories.
I was adopted when I was five years old
Regarding her abandonment, although Xiaofang said with a smile, the bitterness in her tone could not be hidden:
My father really needed a son
I was a mistake for him
I shouldn't be a girl
To this day, she remembers her birth mother having long gray hair, always braided in braids.
She always remembered that lie, too
On the day she was lost, her birth mother said to her, "I'm going to see your grandparents and I'll be back soon." ”
However, Xiaofang did not wait.
In the documentary, you can see the love of her adoptive parents for her.
They let her learn Chinese and get in touch with Chinese culture.
Two cakes are prepared for each birthday party, one with Chinese characters written on it, and the birthday song will be sung once Chinese version.
But whenever Xiaofang celebrates her birthday, in a lively and cheerful atmosphere, she is always the moment when she doubts herself the most.
I don't know my exact birthday
Because our birthdays are all set by the orphanage
Many times, Xiaofang is always confused.
It was as if he was neither American nor Chinese.
I think I'm a kid stuck between two countries
I don't know what made me
Jenna Cook was also one of the first girls mentioned above to return to China in search of relatives.
She was so good that she was admitted to Yale University.
A big part of the reason is that she has forced herself to work hard since she was a child.
For example, Jenna's adoptive mother said she knew she was the only Chinese child in the white town.
For them, since they have been sensible, they are destined to find themselves and their parents different from other children and parents.
Who am I? Where the hell am I from? Who gave me my life?
A problem that does not need to be considered for the average child.
But this is the doubt that these girls have been generally haunting since they understood things.
In the documentary, she cried and said something like this:
I always try to do everything to the best of my ability
to fill the forsaken thing
An episode of Phoenix TV also interviewed a girl who was adopted overseas.
She confessed that she would still be afraid of being abandoned again, which was a lack that no matter how much love her parents had, it was difficult to fill.
I was afraid they (adoptive parents) would abandon me too
Because you've heard you've been abandoned
You will be afraid of happening again
In a sense.
They are lucky.
Escaped from poverty, escaped from the original family of son preference, was carefully loved, could feel the warmth, and had a broader path of life.
Some have been trained to become masters, admitted to world famous universities, and become world champions, which is unimaginable.
However, in their bodies, the word "abandoned baby" also carries too many dilemmas that ordinary people cannot understand.
Insecurity, inability to integrate into minority identities, confusion about where you come from...
Their lives are far more cold and warm and self-aware than we think.
As a bystander.
Whether it is their identity, they are regarded as flood beasts that we are ashamed of.
Or desperate to get a little bit of credit from their achievements.
When we look at them again and again with the word "abandoned babies", does it deepen their predicament, their embarrassment.
For mcNeill.
Bless them with a better life after an unfortunate start.
Applaud their goodness, kindness and beauty.
Just as McNeille was asked by a reporter about the identity of Chinese, she said calmly:
Yes, I was born in China and adopted at a very young age, so I'm Canadian and grew up in Canada, which is only a very small part of my life journey, and it has nothing to do with swimming.
There is no need to see them as a sudden presence between the two shores of the Pacific.
There is no need to emphasize or avoid their birth.
In their stories, the most noteworthy places are nationality, nationality?
In Sir's view, this is just a touching story of losing love and finding love again.
Compared with other children adopted from welfare homes, they went to a stranger environment, far away from their homeland.
But whether it's in China or overseas, no matter what kind of achievements are achieved.
Isn't it comforting enough to be able to regain a family and reap meaning in a fate that has been abandoned?
When they have long left the identity of "abandoned babies" behind.
Please stop putting a single label on their faces.
Why not say it generously:
Good looking, congratulations for you.
The picture in this article comes from the network
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