I am an adoptee. Some people find this term problematic and objectifying, but honestly? I don’t mind it. On the contrary, I appreciate its succinctness. However, because some people don’t like it, I try to use this term only to reference myself.
My adoption was closed, and I knew very, very little about my birthparents for most of my life. Most of what I know now is thanks to my sisters, with whom I was reunited (after a series of strange and unlikely events) at the very end of 2007. They are both wonderful people who have welcomed me with open arms, and expressed great joy at finding out I was alive (they had been told I died at birth), but they were the first to say how fortunate I was to be adopted. To put it in bluntly, and without going into all the unpleasant details, my birth family was completely effed up. There is no question I was far better off being raised by my adoptive parents.
I’ve always known I was lucky, because I had great parents who always gave me their unconditional love and encouragement. Unlike some adopted people and most of the adoptive parents I know, however, I don’t think of the whole matter as preordained, or even especially Providential. To be quite honest, what strikes me most about my own adoption, despite my faith, is not the All Powerful Hand of God directing me to the care of my adoptive parents, but rather the total and almost frightening random roulette of adoption placements. I could have ended up with anyone, and my life would have turned out radically different.
In terms of my birthparents, I certainly dodged a major bullet. I’m grateful to be adopted. I think I always will be. But transracial adoption, as the New York Times article notes, can also cause plenty of confusion and identity problems for adopted kids. (You may say that lots of kids have “identity issues” throughout adolescence. Fair point. It doesn’t negate the particular issues faced by adopted youth, however.)
Because my parents are Caucasian, I had no choice but to talk about adoption from a very early age. People noticed right away that I looked different from my parents, as well as different from 99.9% of the other people in our town, and so — ah, the “good old days” before “political correctness”! — they asked me about it, naturally. Even before I started school, I remember the questions: Where were you born? Where did they get you? Do you know who your real parents are? Don’t you want to know?
In response, I always drew from my standard repertoire of pat little answers, all designed to keep the conversation light, positive, and brief. I was on constant spin control. I came to think of myself as a kind of spokesperson for adoption; not only did I have to explain what it was to the ignorant, I had to take it a step further and become its vocal apologist. I could tell how unnatural the whole thing seemed to many of the people who asked me about it, and thus it became my goal to make my life and my family appear as “normal” as possible. (In my family, trust me, that was one tall order.) To do that, I had to convince them that adoption itself — and transracial adoption in particular — was “normal.” Yes, I am Asian, and yes, my parents are white – so, what’s the big deal?
My role as unofficial adoption spokesperson meant that I couldn’t ever focus on the differences between me and my adoptive family, and of course, that was the last thing any of us wanted to do. My parents pretty much raised me exactly as they would have raised a biological white child, to be “colorblind,” to believe that race meant nothing and how I looked wasn’t important. As a result, I had no connection to my Korean heritage, and thought of myself as “basically white” for most of my early life.
Yet I couldn’t ignore the fact that how I felt and how I looked were two very different things. I didn’t feel like a “real” Asian — I almost wished I could, but I knew I was an imposter there. And yet I never felt totally white, by which I mean, totally accepted. According to the survey of 179 people adopted from Korea as children, referenced in the Times article above, my experience was fairly typical of transracial adoptees of my generation. Quoting Heidi Weitzman, from the article:
“I didn’t want to do anything that made me stand out as being Korean. Being surrounded by people who were blonds and brunets, I just thought that I was white.” It was not until she moved to New York after college that she began to become comfortable with being Korean.
“I was 21 before I could look in the mirror and not be surprised by what I saw staring back at me,” she said. “The process of discovering who I am has been a long process, and I’m still on it.”
Ms. Weitzman’s road to self-discovery was fairly typical of the 179 Korean adoptees with two Caucasian parents who responded to the Donaldson Adoption Institute survey. Most said they began to think of themselves more as Korean when they attended college or moved to ethnically diverse neighborhoods as adults.
The mirror quote — the whole article, really — hits very close to home. I didn’t fully realize how hard and, yes, damaging it was for me growing up as one of very few nonwhite kids in my town until I had quite a bit of time and distance from it. But if I’d ever allowed myself to think about it at the time, rather than stubbornly and desperately ignoring it, I know I would have realized how much it affected me.
I always knew I was adopted, and once I understood what it meant, that was easier to deal with. But when I went to my tiny all-white parochial grade school, and of course had a hard time making friends or bonding with anyone except my teachers, that’s when the really fun symptoms started. I began fervently wishing for blue eyes and blond hair. I avoided opportunities for socialization, like recess, instead asking for a pass to the library. My grades never suffered — I loved reading and studying — but by first or second grade I had started twirling my hair at school, an anxious habit, and eventually enough fine hairs broke off to leave me with a tiny bald spot. I made myself stop and my hair filled in, but my parents were (quite rightly) convinced there was a problem. Enter Charlotte, the excellent play therapist.
Charlotte was great, but I don’t honestly remember much of what we talked about. I certainly don’t remember having any big “breakthrough” moments when I said, okay, this is The Problem, now I can fix it. I know that after a year or so with her I felt much, much better. I still hated my school, and I didn’t have many friends at school, but I had friends outside of it, through soccer and Girl Scouts and children’s choir. The years passed, and eventually I got to go to the big public middle school and then the even bigger high school, which was a Godsend, truly. I was still surrounded by white people, but they were different white people, and there were a lot more of them, so I could start afresh.
Like Weitzman, with every move into a somewhat larger school or community, I’ve grown more comfortable with myself as a Korean. I had a couple of Asian (Vietnamese and Japanese) friends in high school (there were perhaps six or seven of us in the entire school, including full and half-Asians), which ended up being a big deal to me, as they – perhaps because they had Asian families to connect them to their heritage and remind them of it — were actually proud to be Asian. When it was time to choose a college, I went to one that was one-quarter Asian. There, for the first time, I had a lot of nonwhite friends, and my features didn’t draw any attention, positive or negative. By the end of my freshman year, I’d stopped hating what I saw in the mirror.
Ever since, I’ve lived in a series of east coast cities, and while of course I always feel conscious of being minority, I’m not alone any longer. And I am proud of who I am. I have a lot to learn, so much it overwhelms me sometimes, but at least I’ve gotten over the worst part, the hatred of being Korean — which was nothing but self-hatred. I have come a long way. All the same, I sometimes wonder how easy it would be to slip back into it, into feeling that old isolation and shame. I know I’ll never again live in a small white town, and I know I won’t raise my daughter or any children — biological or adopted — in one, either.
How is the experience of a transracially adopted person of color different from the experience of other minorities? All minorities in our society, after all, face discrimination or prejudice or ignorance to varying degrees. But many of them live with and are raised by people going through the same thing, and have that connection, that clan, natural allies and people who personally empathize. I know a few things were harder for me because I was adopted. When one of my classmates made fun of me, using a fake Asian accent I never had, pulling his eyes back into slits, my parents couldn’t really understand what that was like. Until high school and college, I didn’t have any Asian friends — or nonwhite friends, for that matter — who could understand, either.
Still, like many people within the adoption community, I do consider myself a strong supporter of adoption. I have worked as a professional adoption advocate, and my husband and I would love to adopt a child (or children) one day. Sometimes, at the gym, I catch Adoption Stories on TV, and I get a little weepy on the treadmill. I feel awed and inspired by our friends who have adopted from other countries, and I think they are phenomenal parents.
I also believe that the “ideal” would be for more countries to establish ethical, transparent, and thriving domestic adoption programs, allowing more children to be adopted by parents within their own country and culture. Currently, however, domestic adoption is far from a realistic option for the vast majority of children in many, many sending countries, due to a variety of economic, cultural, and political factors. The U.S. is one of only a few nations whose citizens enjoy both the financial ability to adopt, and a general cultural openness and friendliness to adoption. And for many thousands of orphaned and abandoned children worldwide, their only chance to have a family of their own and escape institutional/foster care is through intercountry adoption.
For these reasons, and I suppose for personal ones — the respect I feel I owe my parents, as well as the many adoptive parents I know — it is impossible for me to disapprove of transracial adoption, or to even want to. I think it is a good thing, and can even be a great thing, if parents commit themselves to living in a diverse area and helping their children maintain connections to their culture and (this is key!) real relationships with people who share their background. It helps that far more emphasis in today’s adoptions is placed on learning about the child’s country of origin and the importance of “culture keeping” — which can be awkward, yes, but also worthwhile for the whole family, and far better than the void experienced by past generations of transracially adopted people.
As for the inevitable experience of racial prejudice, white adoptive parents must realize that just because race is a “non-issue” in their family, that does not mean it is a non-issue to everyone else. There will be comments and questions aplenty, trust me. Helping a transracially adopted child learn to deal with insulting, invasive, culturally insensitive, or outright racist comments is critical. It’s not about giving back as good as you get, or even developing a “thick skin”; it requires constant education, discussion, and active combating of racism, as a family. And the recognition that it won’t be easy.
As for those detractors of intercountry and transracial adoption who say, look, white people just don’t know what it’s like and they can never understand…I get where you’re coming from, believe me. We all have those days. I love my parents, and we still can’t talk about race; every time I try, they usually laugh at me. But I keep trying. And they keep loving me.
To make an imperfect comparison, should interracial marriage be universally disparaged because the white partner may not fully grasp what the nonwhite partner goes through? I don’t think so. I think that, while interracial marriage may present unique challenges, it’s also one of the few opportunities a white person has to truly be “in the trenches” alongside a person of color, sharing their experiences — good and bad — out of love and an honest desire to share their lives.
Transracial adoption may do — and I think does — the same thing, for many white adoptive parents who love their adopted kids more than they love their own lives, and fiercely guard their health and dignity and look out for their best interests. They are natural allies and anti-racists, if they can get themselves (or be helped and encouraged!) to that point. Maybe the empathy for and solidarity with people of color isn’t always instantaneous; certainly it doesn’t grow without real and conscious effort. But for many adoptive parents, and more every day, I think it’s there for their children, along with a bottomless well of love and support; and that — particularly for children who once had no real family, no permanent home, and no true advocates to call their own — can only be a good thing.
Recently, I received my copy of the Zondervan catalog. In one of the circulars, there was an advertisement for a book called Deadly Viper Character Assassins: A Kung Fu Survival Guide for Life and Leadership.
