When the group flew home from China in February 2019, they were already planning a follow-up visit to the United States for Shuangjie. Months later, the author visited Esther in Texas to discuss logistics, and Esther sent gifts for the Zeng family to be hand-delivered on the author’s planned return trip for Lunar New Year 2020. That trip was canceled on the morning of January 25, 2020, when contacts inside China confirmed the novel coronavirus was spreading far faster than the government had admitted. Days later, Changsha reported its first cases. On February 7, 34-year-old Li Wenliang, a Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been officially reprimanded for warning colleagues about the virus, died of the disease. When his death provoked nationwide grief and fury, the Chinese government responded with sweeping lockdowns, mandatory health-tracking apps, and a near-total suspension of international travel.

Diplomatic relations deteriorated sharply. The United States accused China of obstructing investigations into the outbreak’s origins. China promoted claims blaming Americans and stirred waves of anti-US sentiment. President Trump used “China virus” rhetoric, further straining relations, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross publicly framed the outbreak as an economic opportunity for the United States. Nearly the entire US press corps was expelled from China; those who stayed, including Alice Su, the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief, faced physical assault and online harassment.

China faced more setbacks as domestically produced vaccines proved less effective than hoped. The government implemented a zero-COVID policy that confined millions to their homes, with workers in protective suits enforcing closures. After a fatal apartment fire in Urumqi, where residents could not flee their locked-down building, the largest nationwide protests in decades erupted. In December 2022, the government abruptly lifted all restrictions with no preparation; epidemiologists estimate that 1.4 million people died in the five weeks that followed. In January 2023, Xi Jinping assumed an unprecedented third term, after constitutional term limits had been abolished.

China has since reopened but the atmosphere has changed. Demick notes a strong cult of personality around Xi, curtailed academic freedom, and an economic slowdown marked by collapsed real estate values, falling foreign investment, and sluggish consumer spending. More starkly, China’s population began shrinking in 2022 for the first time since the Maoist famine, recording 9 million births against 11.1 million deaths in 2023. The same Family Planning apparatus that once forced sterilizations and abortions now offers cash incentives and household appliances to encourage childbearing—a reversal Zanhua describes as deeply hypocritical. In September 2024, China formally ended its international adoption program, citing insufficient domestic supply and shifting global norms.

During this time, the oldest Zeng sister, Ping, has had a third child without penalty. Zanhua returned to Hunan during the lockdowns to care for her ailing mother, took a factory job manufacturing cellphone cases, then quit for better prospects; her son now earns double her former salary as a mechanic. Her mother has since died. Yan left work as a barista and became a hairdresser. Shuangjie’s private kindergarten was permanently shuttered by the pandemic; she later worked at a government kindergarten, then shifted to teaching calligraphy. She lives with Yan in Hubei Province, is learning to drive, and remains unmarried—a choice Zanhua endorses.

In the United States, Esther and her sister Victoria worked at the supermarket checkout through the pandemic, occasionally encountering anti-Asian hostility. Esther’s wedding photography career has since flourished; she shoots primarily on film, travels nationally for commissions, and is active on social media. She married in 2022 and introduced her husband to the Zeng family via video call. Lunar New Year video chats in 2024 and 2025 showed a renovated Zeng home and a visibly contented Shuangjie. Esther and Zanhua now communicate regularly through photographs and emojis, their bond deepening despite the language barrier. Esther still has recurring nightmares of being chased, possibly connected to her early abduction, but navigates her adoptee identity with notable equanimity. When asked if she plans to return to China, she confirmed that she does, but wants to visit Italy first.

The once seemingly impossible task of locating Chinese adoptees’ birth families has been transformed by social media and commercial DNA testing. What felt in 2009 like searching for a single grain of sand in a country of 1.4 billion has become, in many cases, achievable. Several hundred successful matches have been documented, with the number growing rapidly.

The older approach involved adoptive families flying to China, hiring local guides, and posting notices near the child’s reported finding location. It occasionally worked: Fourteen-year-old Haley Butler of Nashville was tapped on the shoulder by a stranger who recognized her resemblance to a cousin’s daughters, leading to a same-day reunion with her birth father. But such outcomes were exceptional because orphanages routinely falsified finding locations to conceal the purchase of trafficked babies.

Brian Stuy, a leading figure in adoptee searching, matched 240 adoptees with birth families by early 2025. After years of shoe-leather investigation, Stuy concluded the future belonged to genetics. In 2013, he and his wife Longlan launched DNAConnect, collecting DNA from Chinese birth parents and uploading the profiles to commercial databases. The Stuys hold profiles for more than 1,300 birth families; their annual matches rose from 29 in 2023 to 61 in 2024. A separate nonprofit, the Nanchang Project, co-founded by adoptive mother Erin Valentino, uses a Chinese National Police DNA registry to similar effect.

A particularly resonant case involved Zhou Changqi, a Hunan father whose infant daughter disappeared in 2002 when his wife escaped government detention to avoid forced sterilization. Zhou submitted DNA to the Stuys in 2013. Years later, his daughter took a DNA test and, on an impulse, checked a box to look for relatives. At the top of her results appeared an unfamiliar name listed as “Father” (284). Through Stuy, she learned her father had been searching for her for 20 years. She then connected on WeChat with her brother, Zhou Jiahai, who explained the family’s history of poverty, displacement, and loss.

Not everyone wants to be found. Esther’s sister Victoria explicitly declined to investigate her own origins, reasoning that she had no unmet need. Many adoptees fear rejection, worried about meeting financial expectations, or dread being perceived as disloyal to their adoptive families. Moreover, genetic testing can produce unwanted revelations.

Demick recounts several stories of successful searches. Adoptive mother Jennifer Doering, who had chosen China specifically for the finality of its adoptions, inadvertently discovered her daughter had an identical twin, which ultimately led to the birth parents’ identification. Adoptive father Wesley Hagood’s obsessive and ultimately unproductive years of searching through flyers, surreptitious teacup DNA collection, and attempted hacker recruitment were all rendered unnecessary when his daughter simply took a 23andMe test in 2015 and matched a first cousin. One birth couple left a note with their abandoned daughter asking her to meet them on a specific bridge on a holiday date; after years of vigils, they reunited with their daughter, violinist Kati Pohler, in 2018. Yale student Jenna Cook spent 2012 in Wuhan meeting 50 families who might have been hers, and though she never found her own birth parents, she documented a grief that had spread across the entire country.

In China, searching is politically charged: It implicitly indicts the one-child policy, which remains officially sensitive. China is thus unlikely to establish anything resembling a formal truth and reconciliation process, given the Communist Party’s pattern of suppressing uncomfortable history. Yet Demick hopes that open discussion and a centralized DNA registry will be permitted, so that those adoptees who wish to know their origins can find them.