What I don’t tell people about adoption
I was destined to be a world traveler. In the past three years, I’ve traveled to four different countries and will add a fifth country in March of this year. From traveling around Southeast Asia in one summer to living in China for six months straight, I’ve spent almost a year of my college career abroad.
I loved every minute of my time abroad. From the amazingly diverse Asian cuisines that you can find in the small city-state of Singapore to the beauty of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, I’ve been able to experience some of the greatest moments of my life. I’ve also experienced some of the toughest challenges in my life, particularly during my half-year stint in China.
The only thing I wanted to do when I was younger was read and travel back to China. Yep, you read that right: travel back. If you weren’t aware, I was actually born in China. But, China back then was a rather unwelcoming place towards children. The One-child Policy, which was in effect from the early 80s to 2016, supposedly prevented 400 million births. These numbers have been criticized, and many academics argue that China didn’t even need to implement the One-child Policy because the birth rate was already in a natural state of decline as living conditions and education for women improved.
Of course, the One-child Policy did not come without its consequences. I am sadly just another statistic. Between the years 1999–2016, 78,257 Chinese children were adopted by Americans out of a total of 267,098 children worldwide. Those that were adopted were overwhelmingly female. And now, China is facing a crisis of a gender imbalance. The surplus of men in the country is estimated at 30 million.
So, where does that put me in all of this? Am I simply an unintended consequence? Am I extremely lucky AKA #blessed? Am I too white to be Asian and too Asian to be white? Well, here’s the truth: I’m all of those things. And while I am so very grateful for the life I’ve been given through adoption, I recognize that my life story is one of loss, unwise governmental policy and pain.
#Blessed?
One of the first reactions I get when I tell people I’m adopted is, “Wow you’re so lucky.” I know that they’re trying to be nice, but what do they actually mean by “lucky?”
“Lucky” is the word to describe someone who has just won the lottery. Like, not just the $1 scratch-offs, but the entire Mega Millions with the multiplier. They just became a millionaire. So, I think that people are using that word incorrectly.
I will acknowledge that yes, I am “lucky” in the sense that I was given a chance at a better life because I wasn’t left behind in the orphanage. There are some children who were never given a good home in another country, and I’ve been able to get a college education and thrive in America.
Am I simply an unintended consequence? Am I extremely lucky AKA #blessed? Am I too white to be Asian and too Asian to be white?
But, at what cost? I would argue that the “lucky” lottery winners are actually losers. While they do get the money, they lose their privacy (in most States you can’t claim the prize money anonymously) and have people begging them for money left and right. They also have a lot more taxes to pay, and they usually go onto “My Lottery Dream Home” and buy a house worth $3.5 million when their lump sum payout was only $10 million. No, don’t do that! You’re going to have to pay property taxes on that house for the next however many years until you go broke.
Similarly, yes, I’ve been given so many different opportunities while living in America. But I also have to live with the fact that I will most likely never know who my birth parents are, my broken Mandarin means I’m a laughingstock when I’m in China and I live with a name that makes people automatically assume things about my identity. When you win the lottery, you pay the consequences.
Bananas and racial identity
I have been called a “banana” before. If you don’t know what that means, it’s basically someone who is Asian on the outside and white on the inside.
Yep, that pretty much sums it up right there. I am, according to the scientists at 23andMe, 96.2% Chinese, 2.4% Korean, and 100% East Asian. For all my Chinese-American friends, I’m mainly Southern Chinese, particularly from Guandong, so maybe I should start learning some Cantonese 🙃.
But I’ve never been comfortable with being called a banana. It’s kind of like being called a sell-out. Why can’t I be both Asian and “white” at the same time? It’s why I don’t specifically like labeling myself as Asian on all those surveys and forms that ask you to pick your race. Yes, I’m 100% Asian, but I’m also 100% American.
It wasn’t until I went to China in 2017 that I understood just how American I was. When I got there, all my white friends would say, “Nǐ hǎo,” which means “hello,” and all the Chinese aunties and uncles would go, “Wow, your Chinese is so good!” Meanwhile, I would try and order some boba or buy fruit at the small market near our dorm and the Chinese aunties and uncles would look at me as if I had an extra limb growing out of my body.
So, ironically, it was only until I traveled to Asia that I understood to the full extent my American identity. And how much I LOVE being an Asian American. For all the microaggressions I’ve faced over my lifetime, I wouldn’t wish to be any other race.
When I was younger, I really wanted to have long, curly blonde hair and blue eyes like my mother. All the models and actors had blonde hair and blue eyes, and I just wanted to fit in. The only person I remember from my childhood that looked like me was Brenda Song, and she played the dumb heiress London Tipton on the Suite Life of Zach and Cody. So, it wasn’t always the best type of representation for Asian Americans. But it was something. (Side note, if you want to read my thoughts about the Oscars, I have a whole blog dedicated to Hollywood minority representation.)
Now, I’ve grown comfortable in my own skin, including the fact that my hair will just never be curly. No matter how much hairspray I use, it will proceed to straighten out over the course of fifteen minutes. Of course, there are moments when I hate that my identity has to be so confusing, and I get frustrated when the cashiers at grocery stores assume my mother and I are making separate purchases, but I’ve become a lot more secure in my identity over the past few years. One reason for that change has been an Asian American lit class I took last year where we read books from Asian-identifying authors featuring Asian characters in the US South.
So, where do I fit?
I’ve come to accept the fact that I will never fit into the nice little boxes on the Census. I both hate and love China at the same time, and I feel personally attacked when people call China a bad country. At the same time, I also get deeply frustrated when China complains about its population crisis and overabundance of males.
My Mandarin, no matter how much I work to perfect it, will be tinged with the accent of a non-native speaker. I will never 100% be certain of my roots. Thousands of girls from China are in my same situation, but we’ve only just started reaching an age where we want to speak up about our situation. We’ve had a lot of help from the Korean adoptees when it comes to dealing with our identities, so I have to thank them for being the guinea pigs and growing up in America during the 70s and 80s, a decidedly less open time to discuss racial identities.
And I’ve decided that being adopted isn’t a blessing or a curse. It just is my life story. Whether or not the story about me being found in a train station is true or not doesn’t matter. I want to believe that my birth parents are alive, but there is also a good chance of them having already passed away. I choose to believe that we get to write our own destinies and that we are not bound to our origin stories.
In the last lines of Monique Truong’s book Bitter in the Mouth, narrator Linda states, “We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.” So, I choose to believe the story I’ve been told because it’s the only one I have and no one can take that away from me.
