Being American

When I hopped on a plane to Madrid, Spain in September 2009 for a job teaching English, I didn't go with grand visions of having the time of my life or anything like that. I had just finished a nine-month stint in Taiwan's super-urban capital of Taipei, and while I was glad for the opportunity to have another experience abroad, I felt like I'd barely gotten my feet back under me before having them swept right out from under me all over again.

I knew, too, that while Europe is considered cultured and historical, particularly by Americans, racism has been and continues to be an underlying problem.

Suffice it to say that knowing this, and telling myself that I would have to deal with some people's ignorance, was not enough. People ignored my requests for change in the bus station in Madrid. Clerks at the grocery store in the city I was living in wouldn't answer my questions. The servers at the bread counter wouldn't serve me. The worker at the immigration office tossed my papers around and refused to believe I was an American citizen even though I had my passport. The pharmacist I went to when I was so sick I could barely walk sneered at me to "get myself cleaned up" before I came back.

I came home at Christmas, only halfway through my contract, and I don't regret it at all.

Walking out from under the umbrella of our parents' white privilege is maybe one of the most difficult learning points for transracial adoptees. As kids, we benefit from being part of a "white" family and we get used to being treated as part of the majority by virtue of our parents. For me, when I went to college, I had to traverse a rather steep learning curve to come around to the understanding that being away from my parents meant being judged by my appearance and treated as a member of the group that I appeared to fit into. I struggled a lot with issues of race, ethnicity, social justice and the like, trying to figure out where I fit in as a Korean adoptee with a "white" last name and no Asian culture to speak of.

I think my experiences in Spain could have made me really bitter, could have made me "regress" so to speak, to a teenage-style, angsty mood. Thinking of myself as an American yet being treated like a Chinese immigrant worker was both frustrating and angering.

But it was also humbling. Some of my closest friends here in the States are immigrant workers who struggle with prejudice every day. It was one thing for me to relate them at the level of being a minority in the US. It was another for me to be able to relate to them at the level of being treated like garbage because of the color of my skin.

It also made me more aware of my American identity, and in many ways, much more proud of it. In my defiance to the people in Spain who treated me with such disdain, I found a level of comfort and pride in my American-ness that I hadn't had before.

I still consider myself a Korean-American adoptee. But now I don't add the "American" as a kind of afterthought, or a simple label for my nationality. I consider it as much a part of my identity as my Korean ethnicity, my Italian and German last names, and my fluency in Spanish and Chinese. And despite what some people (adoptees and non-adoptees alike) might think, I see this as a good thing.