A couple who painstaking raised their baby boy with sensitivity towards his culture when they adopted him, discovered they'd made an awkward mistake.
TikTok user @mrsmedeiros regularly shares shocking stories she finds on Reddit, with one of her most recent being one of a white couple who adopted a baby from an Asian racial background.
When they were first matched with the baby, they were smitten and promised the birth parents they'd raise him well, reports Daily Star.
"We assured them the child would be loved which was the truth because we instantly fell in love with our baby boy," they said.
After eight months, they began to feel "twinges of guilt" that they hadn't made more of an effort to connect their "perfect Chinese son" with his cultural roots.
So, they befriended people in the Chinese ex-pat community near where they lived, including a couple who became their son's "aunt and uncle" figures.
They enrolled him in Mandarin classes, the country's official language, and even took him on numerous family trips to China.
However, whilst helping him fill out his college application 17 years later they discovered they'd made a major mistake.
The man said: "Digging through my office for the needed paperwork, I came across his adoption papers and it was only then that I saw it.
"Something so obvious, so painfully, brick-to-the-face obvious, something that neither my wife nor I, in the stupidity of our youth, had registered..." - his birth parents' surnames were "Park" and "Kim" – meaning he was Korean, not Chinese.
Since being shared, the video has been liked more than 2.9 million times on TikTok.
Despite their colossal error, the video was flooded with thousands of comments of people who praised their efforts.
One said: "Well hey, Mandarin is one of the world's most spoken languages so they did good."
Another said: "You guys had the intention though", while a third added: "Right idea... wrong execution."
Whereas a fourth exclaimed: "IM CRYINGGGGGGGGG."
And: "I imagine party conversations like, 'Yeah I'm Korean, speak Mandarin, and I have white parents", commented another.
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