Brian Stuy

It is fair to say that no name evokes as swift reactions in the Chinese adoption community as the name Brian Stuy.

The father of three adopted daughters from China, Brian and his wife, Lan, who is from Guangzhou, have made it a life's work to conduct research for families who hope to learn more about their children's earliest days. In the course of conducting this research, they have found birth parents, recorded lengthy interviews with orphanage directors and analyzed abandonment patterns in many provinces. Their work has led them to question much of the central story that propelled so many people around the world - the U.S. in the lead - o adopt children from China.

Brian is not shy about his views, which have been quoted extensively. He believes that most healthy babies could have found families within China. He has been outspoken about what he sees as a system rife with corruption. He is confident that many, if not most, Chinese adoptees will want birth family information at some point in their lives and he believes that parents should seek it out for them, before, as he says, "the trail gets cold." Not everyone agrees. is critics say that Stuy is too quick to cry corruption and that he is impatient with adoptive parents who do not share his views. His fans applaud him for asking hard questions about how China's adoption system works.

Here, Brian talks about what led him to adopt from China, about his Mormon faith and his decision to leave the church, and about why he still believes that China's efforts to control its population growth made sense.

For more on Brian's views, you can visit his site: http://research-china.weebly.com/