Forget about the price tags?

My first realisation that I carried a price tag on my back came in 1991, when I said goodbye in Bandung to a woman I believed was my biological mother, along with her extended family. She handed me a note explaining that she was ill, needed money for hospital care, and had to feed my supposed half-brother and sisters. The letter included a PO box and a bank account number. I was sixteen.

Price Tag 1

From the day I arrived in the Netherlands, I had wanted to find my biological mother. That wish lived in me as long as I could remember. But when I read that letter, the longing turned into responsibility. My parents in the Netherlands had already given me everything: a home, safety, an education, a future. Loving them came naturally. Gratitude did too. Because of that, I felt it could not possibly be their job to support the woman who had given supposedly birth to me.

It had to be mine.

As a child, I used to imagine going back to her one day, strong and successful, able to take care of her. If she had let me go so I could have opportunities, then I would have shown her that it had meant something. I would make her proud. But at sixteen, I barely understood how money worked. I had no way of carrying what suddenly felt like a moral debt. Yet the message was clear: if I wanted answers, if I wanted connection, there was a cost.

It was the first time I felt the weight of the tag hanging from me.

Price Tag 2

Years later, during my last meeting with Ms Utari, she told me she had “got” me through a child broker. I can still feel the cold that went through my body when she said it. A broker is not a volunteer. A broker earns. So what did that make me?

Bought.

As I continued researching my history, the thought became harder to ignore. Long before I had any say in my life, even before I left Indonesia in 1979, I had already been assigned a value. I was a “prospective child,” suitable for national or international adoption.

A child, but also a transaction

Price Tag 3

Once I belonged to the Kasih Bunda orphanage, things moved fast. I later learned how quickly a child could be made ready for the international market. Money would change hands. A village official might be persuaded to issue a new birth certificate. A doctor might be encouraged to declare a sick child healthy. Papers would be arranged, signatures collected, stories adjusted.

And when adoptive parents arrived, the expenses reappeared neatly on an invoice: administration, mediation, care.

Another price tag. Only this time it appeared on official receipts

Price Tag 4

I sometimes think the orphanage never imagined that we would come back as teenagers or adults. Why would we? In their view, Europe was the happy ending. A better life. Opportunity. Who would return to ask difficult questions about identity, history, or the families we might still remember? But we did return. And when it became clear how desperately we wanted information, meetings, translations, and guidance, a new service appeared: roots trips.

Assistance for a fee.

I am not against paying people for honest work. Drivers, interpreters, and researchers deserve compensation. We are strangers in the country where we were born; of course, we need help. What hurts is the imbalance. The sense that the same system can benefit you once by sending you away and again by helping you come back. Sometimes it feels as if the tag never left. So I keep wondering: when are we finally allowed to exist without a price attached to us?

Hush Money

When the Government of the Netherlands apologised for failures in past adoption practices, millions were reserved for an expertise centre on intercountry adoptions: INEA. It was meant to gather knowledge, support searches, and offer psychological and legal guidance. On paper, it sounded hopeful. In reality, many adoptees still struggle to access practical help. INEA often refers people onward, while grassroots groups, the ones with lived experience, continue their work with limited resources.

Maybe “price tag” is not the perfect term here. But sometimes it feels like money that smooths the surface, without lifting the weight many of us carry. Especially older adoptees who simply need financial help to search for their families. That support remains painfully hard to find.

I have moments when I fear the pricetag label will follow me forever. As an adoptee, you can be valuable in two countries at once, socially and economically. Yet inside, it can be devastating.

A person should never have to spend a lifetime trying to prove they are more than the amount once paid for them.