Chinita

Soccer/football/fútbol has been part of my life for a long time. I started in the in-house city teams when my hometown jumped on the suburban soccer bandwagon, graduated to travelling teams when I was 10, and eventually made my way up the ranks to a select team that played at the state level and participated in tournaments both in the US and abroad.

I also played three years on the varsity team for my high school. High school, though, was not the best of times for me socially, and I was never really comfortable within the team, whether because of other people or just because of my own lack of self-confidence. By the time my senior year rolled around, I was fast falling out of love with the game.

At the time, though, I was also fast falling in love with Spanish. I had an amazing Spanish teacher who really worked to facilitate connections between us Spanish-learning students and our Latino peers. Through an after-school conversation class, I became fast friends with a guy who, after hearing about my ambivalence towards school soccer, informed me that his aunt coached a team that was looking for players.

That was seven years ago, and ever since then, I’ve spent almost every weekend of my summer and winter vacations playing soccer on fields across the metro area with the yellow and blue of Mexico’s famed Club América on my shoulders.

From day one, my teammates took me in, accepted me as a teammate, and talked to me like I was Mexican. It took me awhile to get the hang of their coarse, slang-driven Spanish, and to this day they still tease me about how quiet I was for the first few years, how they thought I was so shy but now they realize I was just watching, listening and learning. I introduced myself as Julia, the J pronounced in Spanish fashion as an H. The mismatch between an ostensibly Spanish name and my clearly Asian features prompted my teammates at first, for convenience, to call me Chinita (literally: little Chinese girl).

It’s funny because, in the past, being called Chinese or Japanese used to offend me. And the willful ignorance of people that continue to mix up China, Japan and Korea still bothers me today. But I realized very early on that, far from trying to offend me, my teammates were instead extending their acceptance of me in a unique way. ‘Chinita’ was both an acknowledgment of my Asian roots, and an acceptance of me into their circle of friends. They probably don’t realize it, but that name, that acknowledgment and acceptance, was a major turning point in my ability to be comfortable and confident in my own identity. They gave me something that was uniquely mine, that wasn’t just another label of ethnicity or race or how I came to be in the States.

And I think what I take away most from the whole experience, looking back on it, is that without that kind of thirst for identity and belonging that adoption had instilled in me, that uncertainty about where I fit in, I might never have had the guts to walk into an all-Mexican team and an all-Mexican league. I think that, far from being a hindrance or a handicap, that uncertainty about and desire for belonging and identity was for me a positive force, something that opened up a door I never would have even looked for otherwise.

Yearning for belonging and identity isn’t unique to adoptees. We all want to feel like we have an identity, like we belong to something. A nation, a region, a state, a sports team. Collective identity is important to us.

For international adoptees, I think we are in a unique position in that we have the opportunity to seek out belonging and identity. Because so many of us are born in one nation/culture/society and raised in another, we don’t feel as intrinsically bonded to one or the other. Many adoptees seek out belonging and acceptance in their birth countries, and I think that’s fine, I think that for some adoptees that’s what works. But I also think that seeking identity in other places, whether it’s an adopted country or something more personal, like a job or a sport or religion, can be equally positive and shouldn’t be disregarded as any less valid.

I’m proud to be a Korean-adopted Spanish-speaking American on a Mexican futbol team in Minnesota. At dinner a few weeks ago, when my teammates and I were talking about how long I had been on the team (almost eight years), Cecy turned to Saby, our captain, who spent a couple years playing for another team, hit her on the shoulder and said, “Mira Julia. Fiel a la América.” (Look at Julia. Loyal to América).

I belong.