FEATURE/Homeward Bound: One woman's search for her roots in Taiwan

By Tseng yi-ning, Tien Hsi-ju and James Lo, CNA staff reporters and writer

Yasmine Martin emerged from immigration at Taoyuan International Airport proudly displaying her Taiwan entry stamp in her Belgian passport.

"Taiwan... Yes, Taiwan. My People," an emotional Martin said to CNA just past the passport checkpoint inside the airport on Aug. 12, 2024.

She then broke down in the arms of her husband Rafael Leon Blanco.

Martin had just entered Taiwan for the first time since she left her native home on the same day 48 years ago as an 8-year-old to be with her adoptive mother in Belgium.

"When they chopped a stamp on my passport to indicate that I'd entered the country, I was hit by a wave of emotions," Martin said.

She was back in Taiwan to search for her roots, eager to find her parents and other relatives whom she lost track of before leaving Taiwan.

"I needed this search because I had an emptiness inside me that I absolutely had to fill," Martin said.

"I think I've been looking for it my whole life, even starting from when I was 30 years old or even earlier."

A lack of connection

When Martin left Taiwan in 1976, she was accompanied by nothing more than her native tongue headed to a foreign country to become the daughter of a single mother who was from a different world than her own.

"When I came to Belgium, she was 54 and I was eight," Martin told CNA.

Martin was selected from a Taipei orphanage at the age of 4 by her adoptive mother.

Because of various "paperwork issues," however, she was not sent abroad until she was 8, when she was already developing her personality and was able to remember her environment.

That only made it harder to adjust after arriving in Belgium, starting with learning a completely different language.

While her adoptive mother gave her a new opportunity in life alongside her adoptive Indian sister Josiane, Martin admitted that their inability to communicate meant that her mother could not get to know her and instead viewed Yasmine based on her expectations of a daughter.

That meant being "uncomfortably" dressed as a stereotypical little girl, something Martin remembered disliking.

"Being adopted changed me into a different person," she said. "I'm no longer myself, I would say. There was so much I had to overcome, the first being racism."

In an area where Asians were rare, the obstacle of racism meant she had to pick up French very quickly, she said.

Although she learned the language in just eight weeks, Martin said she paid an inner price for replacing one native tongue with another.

"It really bothered me," Martin said. "It is sad because my language [Mandarin] was the only thing I brought from my hometown. It was the only thing I possessed, [but] I had to relinquish it because people were making fun of me."

The journey begins

Martin's curiosity about her past surged after the birth of her eldest daughter more than 20 years ago, when one day the memory of her parents saying they would take her home bubbled up.

But when she told her adoptive mother of her intention to locate her birth family, it was met with disapproval.

"I believe that children like us, who were abandoned or even kidnapped, have the right to reclaim our identities," she said. "We didn't ask to be here [through adoption]. It was a fate imposed on us."

Martin would wait until her adoptive mother's passing eight years ago to begin the search for her Taiwanese identity, adopting various methods such as hypnotherapy to drum up deeply buried memories.

Those unearthed memories, along with a DNA test and documents left behind when her adoptive mother died, brought Martin closer to her roots.

A 'beneficial' upbringing

Among the documents were letters between her adoptive mother and Jordan Weng (翁節敦), the pastor who ran the Gospel Children's Home in Taipei that sheltered Martin until she was adopted.

She said she had fond memories growing up with Weng's family, who ran the orphanage in the current Sunday School building that has belonged to the Jinan Presbyterian Church.

"They might have shown a little bit of favoritism toward me," Martin said. "Perhaps because I had been there for a while. And, I was close in age to (Weng's granddaughter)."

The correspondence between Weng and her adoptive mother cast Weng and Martin's childhood in a different light, however.

"[I'm] not sure if they really liked me or if it was because I was their ATM," she said.

Pastor's questionable behavior

The letters revealed that Weng would often ask for money from the adoptive mother after she committed to adopt Martin but before she was sent abroad, so that Martin could stay healthy and well dressed.

She recalled having photos taken of her wearing pretty dresses belonging to Weng's granddaughter and then having to take them off again right after the shoots.

Although the sums may not have seemed like much to the Belgian woman at the time, they were still substantial for Weng, leading Martin to suspect that the four-year delay in completing the adoption process might have been due to more than just "paperwork issues."

There were other indications that Weng may have been acting unscrupulously, including legal documents showing that Weng was involved in court cases for alleged child trafficking.

It may also explain why when Martin's birth mother visited the orphanage to get her daughter back, Weng would not agree because the mother was unable to pay the "back fees" requested by the pastor for the young girl's care.

Homeward bound

Given the limited information Martin had, including the lack of a family name corresponding to her birth parents -- she traveled using the Weng family name -- the search for her Taiwanese family was always going to be a long shot.

Nonetheless, Martin began her quest with a visit to the 2024 Brussels Holiday Fair in February.

Lee Mei-yu (李美玉), an official with the Taipei Representative Office in the European Union and Belgium, told CNA that Martin and her family spoke with Taiwanese officials at the booth about her plans to seek out her family in Taiwan.

Lee said she brought up the issue with Taiwan's representative to the EU and Belgium, Roy Lee (李淳), who decided to lend a helping hand.

By August, Martin was in Taiwan, with several government agencies banding together to assist the search, including doing DNA testing to see if a match existed in Taiwan's database.

The DNA results were negative, however, and other leads failed to yield anything conclusive on Martin's Taiwanese family.

Because her father, who was allegedly from Nantou County, supposedly met her mother while doing his military service in Hsinchu County driving a truck, there was thought of trying to identify the father through military records, but the military did not agree to the idea.

Despite the unsatisfactory results, Martin's visit was "therapeutic," she said, and she intends to visit Taiwan again.

"I'm not afraid now to return to Taiwan, because I was able to meet all the different people that I encountered," she said. I have support, and I know that I am Taiwanese."

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