She Suspected She Was Adopted. It Turned Out She Was Right.

In 2019, Davida Ross Hu wanted to travel to England, so she applied for her first passport. The process did not go as expected — in fact, it reshaped her family history and triggered a move to another state.

“When I applied for the passport,” she recalled, “I got a response letter requesting 10 proofs of identification.”

She pulled together bank statements, insurance cards, school IDs, work IDs — rifling through old files and boxes, looking for anything that would help prove her identity. She gathered just enough to satisfy the request and, eventually, received her passport.

But the process of proving who she was to the passport agency sparked a change in the way Ms. Ross Hu understood her own identity.

And there were clues. She remembered that she had asked her mother why there were never any pictures of her as a baby, she said: “Whenever I had asked before, she had told me they burned in a fire.”

Ms. Ross Hu, who was 37 at the time, said her mother had never mentioned the subject of adoption. But when she considered the idea, it didn’t seem impossible. “It made sense, in a way,” she said. “Because growing up, I never really bonded with my mom.”