American teenager who was abandoned as a baby in China issues appeal to find birth parents
An 18-year-old American woman who was abandoned as a baby in China has issued an appeal to find her birth parents, a news website reported.
The woman, who was referred to only by her first name Erika, was found abandoned outside Hengyang Social Welfare Institute in central China’s Hunan province when she was just two months old, Thepaper.cn reported.
She told the news portal she had first visited Hengyang two years ago to find her parents but drew a blank that time.
Now, before she begins her studies at George Washington University in Washington later this year, she is once again trying to find her biological parents, she said.
She hopes to reach them online through a video she has posted, called “Looking for her parents who left her at the gate of the Hengyang Social Welfare Institute”.
Erika, whose Chinese name was Yang Bing, was born in October 1999, but was abandoned by her parents two months later.
She spent nine months in the Hengyang Social Welfare Institute before being adopted in August 2000 by a single mother in Indiana.
But, by the age of 16, Erika said she had started to question why she was not in China and where her birth parents were, the report stated. That year she decided to visit China.
“I am very supportive of her, and was not surprised she wanted to go,” her mother Roberta, who has since adopted another, now 12-year-old, girl from South America, was quoted as saying.
In late 2016, the duo travelled to China for one week in search of Erika’s parents, to no avail.
She has since returned twice in as many years to learn Chinese, but has still not found her biological parents.
A similar video was also posted online on Wednesday by 11 girls, aged between 12 and 21, from the US, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands, who are looking for their birth parents in southern China’s Hunan province.
