Matching Room Details

Here are a few interesting details regarding the matching room, written by a 13-year-old adoptee who recently toured the facility. Go here for the full story.

"One of the things most unique about this trip was the visit to the “match room.” We arrived at a large building with lots of staircases. We went up to the 6th floor. This was where we had been matched with our adoptive families. We saw all the paperwork that parents needed to do to officially adopt us. The supervisor told us that if we were born after 1990, we could look and try to find our file. A nice Chinese woman asked me what year I was born. I answered 1993.
We walked over to a table and she spoke Mandarin to the girl sitting there. This girl scanned a sheet of paper looking for my name. I was so excited when she found my box of papers. Most of the teens were able to see their boxes. On the front of the box both in English and Mandarin was my name, my province, and my date of birth. The boxes were thick with papers and pictures of our (adoptive) parents looking much younger than now. We had a few giggles over those pictures.
We showed each other our papers and our baby pictures from the orphanage. Then we went on a tour of the building and saw the rooms with paperwork on past and current matches. There was one room with big bulletin boards all around it. Each board had tons of pictures of orphans who had been adopted. All the children were so adorable and we felt happy that they all had families now. None of us had even known about the match room so seeing that part of our family story was really special."