Since 1946, almost a million children have been adopted internationally. Today, the majority of them have since become adults, and Manuelle Alix-Surprenant is one of them. As an international adoptee, a scholar, the founder and president of an adoptee advocacy organization, and co-author of a book highlighting the lives of adoptees, Manuelle’s talk draws on her academic research with children in orphanages in Haiti and her work with adult adoptees in Quebec. Once placed in institutions or in adoption, children find themselves circulating from one place to another without ever truly severing the ties with their biological families or country of origin. Therefore, instead of viewing adoption as a rupture between the past and present, Manuelle considers that adoptees and their biological parents experience parallel lives. Thus, she examines the ways in which children and their biological parents remain paradoxically present in each other’s minds through their mutual absence. In this presentation, Manuelle speaks from an anthropological perspective and directs our attention to the unique and valuable perspective on adoption that the adoptees themselves possess.