[New Tang Dynasty News, Beijing time, April 26, 2024]A controversial pastor and a cryptic arrangement half a century ago brought Yasmin… Martin has a happy family in Belgium, but she still spent 20 years trying to find the broken family ties in Taiwan. She laughed and said, “The DNA test proves that I am 100% Taiwanese.”
During an interview with a reporter from Central News Agency, Yasmine Martin had tears in her eyes most of the time. She spread out a stack of yellowed documents and letters and expressed her urgency and difficulty in finding relatives and friends in Taiwan.
The difficulty is not only because she was sent abroad for adoption as early as 1976, and the personnel connected with Taiwan have completely changed, but also because the pastor who holds the key information about her search for relatives, Ong Chiet-tun, has been involved in legal disputes and has not been heard from for decades since he came to the United States. . The reporter traced back the early newspaper news and found that there were other Taiwanese children who were in similar situations to Yasmin and were sent abroad by Ong Chietun.
Because her Belgian adoptive mother taught her that she was “abandoned by her biological parents in the United States” since she was a child, Yasmin never thought about rediscovering her roots when she was growing up in Europe. She even had vague memories of being in a kindergarten in Taiwan when she was a child, and even suspected that it was her own imagination. It wasn’t until after her adoptive mother passed away that she found the letters and adoption documents exchanged in Taipei and used hypnotherapy to open up the dusty and fragile memories. She also used DNA testing to connect possible distant relatives, and then she pieced together the story of her childhood.
Yasmin’s father may have come from a prominent local family in Nantou. When he was serving as a soldier in Hsinchu and purchasing ingredients, he met his mother who was working at a vegetable market. After the two gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock, the man’s family did not agree to get married. The woman’s parents were unable to raise their granddaughter for several years. Because of the burden, she was sent to the Evangelical Kindergarten run by Ong Chietun in Sanchong City, Taipei County before the restructuring.
While she was in the nursery, Ong Chiet-don had begun to correspond with her Belgian adoptive mother. In her letters, she mentioned the complicated adoption procedures and hoped for donations. Yasmin’s parents also wanted to take the child back, but because they could not pay the foster care fees required by Ong, they had to continue foster care.
About 3 or 4 years later, when he failed to obtain the consent of the biological parents for adoption, Ong Chiet Dun arranged for a “guardian” and named Yasmin Ong Renyi on the official document. It was suspected that a forged document was used. She was sent to Belgium in a deceptive way.
Yasmin found some photos of her adoptive mother in the kindergarten from the information hidden during her lifetime. The innocent children who were smiling and taking pictures may have had a happy time there. Even the granddaughter of the pastor who played with her back then wrote a letter. When I went to Belgium to greet her, the letter called her “Xiaoqian”, implying that her biological parents may have given her a nickname with a similar sound.
The past is gone, and Yasmin has lived happily with her husband and two children in Belgium for many years, but she still has the idea of finding her roots.
She said that after her eldest daughter was born more than 20 years ago, the image of her biological mother looking at her with tears in her eyes suddenly appeared in her mind. Another time, her biological father bent over and looked at her and said, “I will take you home one day,” and asked her to start from there. I woke up crying from the dream, feeling that I had not been abandoned, and began to wonder about the truth about my life experience.
She tried her adoptive mother several times, but was rebuffed each time to discuss the subject. Until her adoptive mother passed away and the Internet began to develop, Yasmin, with the help of family and friends, combed through old documents and launched an investigation. However, because she grew up in a French-speaking environment, she could not understand the Chinese and English of the information left by her adoptive mother, and she had to keep in touch with her. When she met the pastor’s granddaughter, she lost contact with her after asking for information about her biological parents, which caused her to suffer a lot of setbacks.
“DNA testing is the key,” she said. This convinced her that she was Taiwanese and connected her to an 80-year-old cousin who was related by blood but had immigrated to the United States. Although “Nantou”, “Chen’s surname”, “maybe The information from her cousin, including “a relative who served as the mayor of Lugu Township”, was still vague, but it gave her hope and she and her family decided to go to Taiwan to look for relatives in August.
Yasmin’s husband, Rafael Leon Blanco, told CNA that while he knew his family clearly, his wife knew nothing about it. He could sympathize with his wife’s feelings, and the children also wanted to know about their maternal grandparents. Therefore, as a coach of Viet Vo Dao, he strongly supports Yasmin in finding her roots, and he also took the opportunity to lead a group competition in Vietnam to inquire about Taiwanese connections.
Yasmin was not the only one whose fate was changed by Ong Chiet Tun. Searching Taiwanese newspapers from the 1970s, one after another sensational headlines were related to him, “Priest faked charity, adopted orphans for sale”, “Entrusted care for suspected abandonment, Ong Chiet-tun was transferred to justice”, “Population black market”…
The reported cases were similar to Yasmin’s, including the biological mother who wanted to visit the child after she put her child in foster care, but Weng said she was lost and demanded a foster care fee of NT$500 per month; and after reports from the Taipei City Government and an American, respectively, Prosecutors alleged that Weng sold 12 children to foreigners for prices ranging from US$300 to US$600, and was suspected of committing human trafficking and forgery of documents. Although no record of the verdict of that year has been found, he can indeed be called a controversial figure.
The stationery on which Ong Chietun contacted Yasmin’s adoptive mother was printed on the original address of the Evangelical Kindergarten before it moved to New Taipei City, which is where the Jinan Church was located on Zhongshan South Road in New Taipei City. Now when visiting the place, when Ong Chietun was mentioned, the church staff immediately showed that they were no strangers to the name, and took the initiative to emphasize that he had nothing to do with the church.
It turned out that the Jinan church had accused him of occupying a private kindergarten there, and Weng moved away after many years of disputes. Although newspapers have published Weng’s lawsuit several times, there was no online “meat search” half a century ago. It is conceivable that people continued to leave their children to his care without knowing it.
After hypnosis, Yasmin slowly picked up some memory fragments, including watching her playmates being put up for adoption one by one in a kindergarten, and a pair of brothers who were never adopted. She once helped them shampoo and remove head lice, and also There are impressions such as the lighthouse near my grandma’s house.
She emphasized that she had no intention of pursuing and blaming anyone. She only hoped to find her relatives in Taiwan and the partners she had spent time with in the kindergarten. She and her family do not dare to hold on to the extravagant hope of finding relatives and friends when they first arrive in Taiwan in August. They hope to make every effort to find clues, including being interviewed on TV.
It has been more than 20 years since she started searching for her family, and the information she has obtained is still very limited, but Yasmin said she never wants to give up. Towards the end of the interview, the tears that had been in her eyes finally fell down, and she told the reporter that her memories of Taiwan, including the smell of the roadside stalls, had come back.
The representative office in the European Union and Belgium stated that it is willing to assist Yasmin, who does not speak Chinese, in finding her relatives. If you have any clues about her relatives and friends, you can contact the email [email protected] or leave a message on the following website https://www. taiwanembassy.org/be/contact_us.html; If you can communicate in English or French, please contact [email protected].
(Reprinted from Central News Agency/Editor: Xia Mingyi)
Tags: DNA test Belgian woman revealed Taiwanese tearfully pieced childhood memories Taiwan find relatives Yasmin NTDTV
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