By Yvonne Gee

Wonderful to spend the day with these lovelies yesterday at our HKAN meet up. Fascinating accounts by two members of their recent search for family members in HK.

It’s been ten years since Julia Feast first wrote, inviting around 106 of us to participate in her research project, examining the long-term impact of trans-racial adoptions, some fifty years after the formal adoptions by British families had taken place. Around 75, participated which is a rare and high response rate. The survey explored the impact the adoptions had had on our lives (how it may have impacted our personalities; life choices; and mental health) both as adults and as children growing up in a different culture and the various family environments into which we’d been placed.

There had not previously been any research examining the long term impact of adoptions on adult adoptees, so this was a first and therefore significant for social science observers. Also really significant for us, as many of us were unaware that there were many others who’d also been ‘exported’ from HK to be placed with UK families.

In the main the research found that we’d fared pretty well, despite some of the circumstances and difficulties some had encountered and had to overcome.