Yep, he didn’t speak a lick of English when we brought him over. My sister first met him when she was volunteering in Chinese orphanages and helped translate in the beginning. It was rough, but compared to friend’s with similar adoption stories we got off very very easy. He’s a great kid now.
No contact with birth parents. He was abandoned as a newborn (suspected shamed teenage pregnancy) and put in a foster home. He had boiling hot oil spilled on him in said foster home and was poorly patched up by an army camp doctor. Then tossed into a “special ed” sort of foster home full of mentally retarded children, run by Christians for children who have very poor chances of being adopted (China has the one-child policy in place, everyone wants a “perfect” child).