The Washington Post has a follow-up story about a woman, Mia Fleming, who recently reconnected with Chris Astle and Emily Yanich-Fithian — friends who found her as an abandoned baby two decades ago.

An initial article on Dec. 17 describes how the then-15-year-olds found her and how Mia later found them:

It was Sept. 6, 1989. They discovered the newborn wrapped in towels at the front door of a townhouse in their Fairfax County complex and took the infant to Emily’s, where her stepfather called police.

The whole thing was over pretty quickly. The authorities took the baby girl, who was later adopted. Chris and Emily, both 15, went on with their lives, although Emily often cried when she told people the story, and the two called each other every Sept. 6.

Twenty years passed.

Then, on Dec. 2, a college student named Mia Fleming sent them both a message via Facebook: Might they be the same Chris and Emily who had once found a baby left at a stranger’s door?

If so, she just wanted to say thanks.

After all these years, the little girl they had found had found them.

The story of Mia, Chris and Emily, recounted by the three over the past few days, is a nativity narrative for modern times. There were no heavenly hosts that warm afternoon in 1989, just the distant ambulance sirens after the call to 911. But the event seemed blessed all the same.

Mia was adopted by a British couple in Virginia, and she was lucky that both Chris and Emily are also on Facebook. Her relative ease in finding the two friends, who have kept in touch,  stands in contrast to some of the difficulties faced by Chinese adoptees living in the United States trying to find their birth parents, as described by the LA Times today:

Many who try to investigate are frustrated by their inability to speak Chinese and unfamiliarity with the culture, incomplete or erroneous orphanage records and bureaucratic obstacles. In 2007, a delegation of American adoptive parents visiting an orphanage in Hunan province were allowed in only under the condition that they promise in writing not to ask questions.

Unlike the trend toward open adoptions in the United States, in which adoptive and biological families are known to each other, adoptions in China are closed. And unlike many other countries that send babies abroad for adoption, China deems it illegal to abandon a child. The result is that in China unwanted babies — in most cases given up because of a one-child policy limiting family size — are usually abandoned anonymously.

In some cases, babies fell into the hands of child traffickers who transported them hundreds of miles away from their place of birth; family planning officials involved in those incidents tried to cover their tracks with false documents that made it appear the babies had been abandoned.

“The link with the birth parents for almost all the children adopted by U.S. families is forever lost,” said Changfu Chang, an associate professor at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., who has made a number of documentaries about China adoptions, including one featuring Chinese parents speaking tearfully about the babies they relinquished.

Obviously, there are additional difficulties, like language barriers, that these Chinese-born individuals face in trying to reconnect with their biological families — some of whom might not be as receptive to reconnecting as Chris and Emily were. But the incident with Mia shows how social networking sites can facilitate remarkable reconnections — a potential that has not been fully tapped in areas where internet access is not widespread.