Last month, I wrote an article about being adopted by a British couple during the era of China’s one-child policy. Three days after the story ran in a national newspaper, my phone buzzed with a flurry of messages from a friend who had sent me a TikTok post by an influencer telling her life story to camera. Twenty seconds into her video, my jaw plummeted. She had recited entire sections of my article, word for word, to her 20,000 followers. She didn’t even have the courtesy to give me a credit.
When I wrote that piece, the idea of exposing personal details of my life to scrutiny or criticism was terrifying. Even so, it felt right to share this story in the hope that others might find comfort if they too had had similar experiences. What I wasn’t expecting was for someone to take my words and claim them as their own.
