Have a little extra fun

When I went to Los Angeles for college, I had the following conversation countless times:

A: So where are you from?
Me: Minnesota.
A: No, I mean where are you really from?
Me: Minnesota.

I didn't set out with the intention of winding people up with my answer, and at times in the past I found questions like this ignorant, bordering on offensive. These days though, I just have to laugh at their confusion and revel in the fact that I'm challenging their assumptions and expectations without really doing anything except giving them a straight answer. Sometimes I even make a game out of it, to see how long I can continue answering "Minnesota" or "Minneapolis" before they come around to asking what they really mean.

My sister also came back from her study abroad experience in the Galapagos Islands with these gems of responses, especially useful for nosy strangers who, upon finding out you're adopted insist on asking:

A: So do you know your real parents?
My sister: Yeah, you know, I ate breakfast with them this morning

A: So do you know your real parents?
My sister: I don't know about you, but I live with my real parents.

The second one borders on being a retort. Sometimes that's necessary.

Sometimes though, it's nice to just sit back, add a little humor instead of anger, and watch people flounder in their own confusion. :)

Validity

I think it's unfortunate that there is such an inverse relationship between the validity of an adoptee's story and the degree of suffering/trauma/angst he or she discusses in that story. The more an adoptee felt ostracized, looked down on and left out growing up, the more honest and valid his or her experience is deemed. And if an adoptee doesn't express intense feelings of not belonging or strong desires to search for birth family, then he or she simply hasn't dealt with "emotional issues" or engaged in enough self analysis or is simply trying to please adoptive parents and/or adoption agencies by playing into their propaganda.

The only "truth" about adoption is that every adoptee's story is different. My sister and I had the good fortune to be adopted by the same family, to have contact with our birth family from day one, and to have parents who encouraged and supported our identities in all the different directions and iterations they've taken. Our level of suffering/trauma/angst didn't exceed that of the average teenagers growing up, probably didn't even equal it, to be honest.

But that doesn't make our experiences as adoptees any less valid, or any less true, and it doesn't make our views on adoption any less honest.

Intersections

I love the fact that my soccer teammates and I exist at the intersections of so many different identities. Gay, straight, Mexican, Korean, American, adoptee, immigrant, undocumented, working class, upper class, Catholic, Protestant, Americanista, Chivas loyalist, high school junior, mother of four. At training sessions, Spanish and English fly across the pitch, good-natured banter about hickeys on someone's neck combining with stories about getting pulled over by the police. Some of us cross ourselves after we score a goal; others tattoo our team loyalty into our skin. We are an amalgamation, a mish-mash, a true melting pot. We stand at the crossroads of identity and dare the world to tell us we can't be there.

I think too many adoptees get caught up in looking for one "true" identity in their birth family when the reality is that identity is as much, if not more, created, than inherent. For me, yes, there was a time when meeting my birth family was very important to me. The meeting itself turned out to be a much less profound experience than I had hoped. It wasn't an instant process for me to be able to recognize the opportunity my uncertainty in identity was presenting me.

I guess my point is this: just because I am Korean by birth, does not mean that my "true" identity is Korean. I think too much emphasis is placed on finding "original" or "true" identity by looking for birth family, especially for international adoptees. And I think adoptees shouldn't just be encouraged to seek answers in their past, but to seek identity and opportunity right where they are as well. Because we all stand at intersections of identity, whether we realize and acknowledge it or not.

On gratitude

The only time in my entire life that I was ever told I should be grateful for being adopted, it was my ultra conservative, Roman Catholic, staunchly pro-life aunt who was telling me so, and she didn't so much tell me as much as imply. I think she said something like, "Your parents did such a good thing by adopting you."

My parents themselves never said any such thing, never even implied that I owed them anything for having been adopted by them. At times in my adolescent years and even up through college, I think I imagined those kinds of sentiments into being, tried to find instances of such implications in my parents' past actions. Being resentful of one's parents is hardly an unusual thing, and that was the way my stereotypical teenage angst manifested itself.

But my aunt's comment ultimately just made me angry at her. Not at the institution of adoption.

I think gratitude is a sentiment that gets grossly misrepresented when it comes to adoption. If an adoptive parent expresses gratitude for his or her child, they are seen as objectifying their child. If they express gratitude towards the birth mother for making a tough decision, they're disrespecting birth mothers who didn't have a choice. And god forbid if an adoptee herself is grateful for the life she's lived. The poor thing must be brainwashed beyond belief to actually believe that her life with her adoptive family might possibly be better than the life her birth family could have given her.

I'm not saying that such sentiments are wrong, just that they're one sided. Certainly some parents who say they're grateful for their adopted child see the child as property, or a package of goods. And some who are grateful for the birth mother giving up her child don't have great respect for birth mothers. I still bristle a little when I hear prospective or waiting adoptive parents say how grateful they are to the birth mother because to my ears, it sounds a little bit like they're saying, "I'm grateful there's poverty in the world," or "I'm grateful female babies in China are still killed," or "I'm grateful the earthquake happened in Haiti and orphaned so many children."

But to assume that all adoptive parents think like this is, in a word, offensive. Adoptive parents are parents, period. They're no better and no worse than other parents. If a mother gives birth to a child and says, "I'm so grateful for this child," is she objectifying her child too? Just because parents become parents by adopting, doesn't make it less okay for them to express the sentiments of parents.

And why shouldn't adoptees be grateful? Why shouldn't all people be grateful? Maybe we as a society have just gotten into such a rut of finding everything that's wrong with our lives that we can't pick out the good things hiding in the midst. No one told me to be grateful, I decided to be grateful on my own terms. After living in China without central heating or reliable hot water or the ability to access uncensored information, I came back to the States grateful to have those things again. After spending a year in Taiwan, I came home grateful that I had been turned down for all the other scholarships and fellowships I'd applied for and ended up in Taiwan instead.

After a semester being treated like trash in Spain, I came home grateful beyond belief that I am an American citizen.

I'm not grateful because I think my parents "rescued" me or anything. I'm grateful because I have a good life, because I was able to get an education, because I'm healthy. To not be grateful for these things, when so much of the world has none of them would be, quite frankly, ignorant and offensive.

Happy adoptee

I feel like there is a fairly well-established sentiment within the adoptee community that "happy" adoptees are simply repressing their true emotions and aren't acknowledging that they're grieving the loss of their birth family/country/culture. We just don't feel comfortable opening up, or we feel like we have to conform/fit in so that we don't step on our adoptive parents' toes.

Sorry, but in my case, no. I'm not happy and content with who I am because I simply pretend my Korean roots and birth mother don't exist. I traveled to Korea twice. I met my birth family. I clashed mightily with my adoptive parents over both adoption-related and non-adoption related issues. I lived abroad for a combined total of two years, including stints in China, Taiwan and Spain. I faced head-on what the mismatch between my Asian face and my unaccented, American English got me in Asia, both good and bad. I endured the reactions my Asian features provoked in small-town Spain.

I was not particularly happy for much of high school and college, because I was struggling very openly with issues like identity and independence, issues that many adoptees (and, let's not forget ALL teenagers) struggle with. Ask my parents, and they'll tell you I stepped on their toes plenty and that I was NEVER the type to hide my opinions about things. My dad still maintains I would make a good trial lawyer because I'm a grade A arguer.

But I'm happy now, and not happy in the sense that I've simply shut away any of the issues I faced over the years. When the pharmacist in Spain sneered at me to "get myself cleaned up before I came back," I was reminded yet again that as a child, I enjoyed by extension my parents' white privilege, but once I leave home, I am always going to be judged by my outward appearance.

I guess it's just that I've learned to accept some very tough realizations. It started with accepting that my birth mother made a mistake, and then accepting that she didn't keep me. From there it was accepting things like being Asian on the outside but "white" on the inside, accepting that I would never be one hundred percent Korean, and accepting my American identity (a very, very recent occurrence, to be honest).

Acceptance doesn't mean resignation. I was furious at that pharmacist in Spain. I told my mother point blank that the sense of entitlement expressed by waiting adoptive parents after the Haiti earthquake infuriated me. I'll have a go at anyone who uses adoption as a catch-all solution to abortion.

But I'm not looking back at my past for whatever sense of completion I think we all feel at some level or another. I've been through my own struggles and my own identity crisis, if you want to call it that. Maybe the fact that some of us are happy doesn't mean that we're repressing our emotions or that we've somehow been brainwashed by the adoption agencies and our adoptive parents into accepting some rosy picture of adoption. Maybe it just means that some of us have worked through it, made a conscious decision to be okay with who we are and are looking forward now, rather than back.

"So what was it like growing up adopted?"

A few weeks ago, my sister (both biological and adoptive, a story for another time) called from California where she’s doing her master’s degree and told me about how she went out to dinner with a friend and two friends of that friend. She had never met these two friends of the friend before, and apparently, when they heard she was adopted, the first question out of one of their mouths was, “So what was it like growing up adopted?”

It amazes me how many times she and/or I have been asked that question and/or told, “Oh, I know someone like that.” From near-strangers, no less.

To be honest, I’m sure some of it has to do with honest to goodness ignorance. Adoption is way more on the radar than it used to be, but for some people, it’s still a foreign concept.

A lot of it, though, seems to grow out of this perception of adoptees as inherently odd, damaged, and/or troubled. And I can point the finger of blame towards a lot of places, the most obvious being the media. Movies about disturbed orphans wreaking havoc on their adoptive families or articles in the paper that point out this sociopath or that murderer is adopted. It’s intensely hypocritical if you think about it, because those same media outlets that don’t think twice about reinforcing the stereotypes of adoptees as damaged goods go all out to portray adoption as a lifesaving force when something like the earthquake in Haiti happens.

But to be perfectly blunt, I feel like I need to point some of the blame at adoptees themselves (ourselves). While I agree that being adopted adds an extra layer of development into the already-complex quagmire of trying to figure out where we all fit into the world, I don’t agree that it makes us that much more troubled or uncertain than the average person. At the extreme end of the spectrum, I think some people use it as an excuse to shift blame away from themselves, to avoid having to take responsibility for their actions. But even towards the middle of the curve, I feel like there is a tendency, at least recently, for adoptees to assume that role as the victim and to accept the idea that they’ve been traumatized and will spend their entire lives grieving for a birth family that they may never have known.

I don’t think we do ourselves any favors by stepping into that victim role, by buying into the belief that we are inherently troubled and need help just because we’re adopted. Yes, being adopted brings with it a set of emotions that can be difficult to articulate and difficult to deal with as we grow up, but then does anyone have it really easy growing up?

For those who were adopted at an older age, it is a very different story. Children who have memories of their birth families and/or their birth countries will grieve, because they have lost.

But for those of us who were adopted as infants, I don’t believe we’ve been traumatized. I do not believe it. We deal with things like racism and not fitting in and wondering about our birth families, but a Black child born to Black parents deals with racism, the girl in the wheelchair doesn’t fit in either, and the boy whose father walked out on the family when he was two years old wonders about him all the time.

It’s important that adoption be recognized as an imperfect process, as one that retains echoes of colonialism and tacitly condones things like the preference for boys over girls in China or the denial of benefits to children of single mothers in Korea. It’s important that people acknowledge adoptees’ experiences as real and valid and perhaps even as testaments to the imperfection of the system.

But I think it’s also important that the trials and troubles not be overstated, neither by adoption professionals and adoptive parents, nor adoptees themselves. If all the institution and the media hear is how troubled and damaged and unstable we are, how can we blame them when they turn around and portray us as such?