Years ago, two friends sat across from me at their gleaming kitchen table and asked if I thought they should adopt a child.
It might seem like a strange question to ask a fresh college graduate still years away from becoming a parent herself. But this couple happened to be weighing transracial adoption, and I was the only adopted person and one of very few people of color they knew. We had recently been introduced by mutual friends who thought I could tell them what it was like growing up adopted.
The hopeful parents began by asking if I had ever felt as though my adoptive parents weren’t my “real” parents. No, never. They asked if I had ever been in contact with my birth family. At the time, I hadn’t. They asked if I had ever had any “issues” growing up with white parents. For the first time, I hesitated. “What sort of issues?”
“Any sort,” said the mother-to-be. “Did you ever mind it? You know—not being white, too?”
I had learned how to talk about adoption at a young age. I thought of myself as an open book. But in truth I was out of practice, having spent the past four years at college. When I wasn’t in the presence of my white parents, few people had reason to ask where they had gotten me. And oddly enough, I couldn’t remember anyone ever asking, point-blank, if I minded having white parents, or not being white myself.
I looked at my new friends’ faces, so full of hope and excitement. In manner and appearance this earnest young couple could not have been less like my mother and father, and yet their good intentions, their devout Catholicism, their obvious longing for a child to love couldn’t help but make me think of my own parents. Already I could tell that they were good, kind people. I knew how much they wanted to adopt, how much they would love their child, how much they wanted everything to finally, beautifully work out.
“No. Not really,” I said.
As I gave a little shrug to emphasize the hey-no-big-deal aspect of my adoption, I was rewarded with twin beams across the table. They were relieved, yet not the least bit surprised. Of course I had been fine. Everything would be fine. That was the answer they had wanted to hear, the answer they fully expected all along.
*
As I think about it now, I know my lie of omission wasn’t just for them. It was for me, too. At 22, it still felt like a betrayal of myself, of my parents, of my birth parents’ choice to acknowledge the hard parts about being adopted by people who didn’t look like me, and being raised in a place where I never saw any other Koreans.
My parents and I always turned heads when we left the haven of our home. For as long as I could remember, I had been an unofficial spokesperson for adoption, answering people’s questions, telling them what they wanted to hear. Many, I eventually learned, didn’t want an honest account so much as they wanted an interesting, preferably heartwarming story. Plenty of adopted kids might not have felt or cared about or internalized that pressure, that attention, but for whatever reason I did.
When my new friends, friends who were planning to adopt, asked me what it had been like, I didn’t know how to tell them about the year and a half I’d spent in therapy, starting when I was seven years old. I didn’t want to say that my parents and my teachers had noticed me twirling my hair, the cowlicky black hair that made me so different from everyone else I knew, twisting the strands around and around the first joint of my forefinger so tightly that I couldn’t free them without yanking a few out. I didn’t want to admit that I had done this often enough to leave a tiny bald patch on the left side of my head, thoroughly alarming my poor parents. Even if I had been willing to share all of that, I would have then had to tell them why.
I couldn’t do it.
Sometimes it still sounds so trite, so trivial when I try to explain it now. Almost all the girls in my class had blond hair and blue eyes. I heard chink and Chinee on the playground at least once a week, from second through eighth grades, usually accompanied by pulled-back eyes and taunts in a sing-song, fake-accented voice. Until the age of nine, when we hosted two Japanese exchange students for a single weekend, I never spent any time with anyone who looked anything like me. I always felt anxious, exposed, like everyone was staring at me. If I’d been granted a magic wish, I would have chosen to be white in a heartbeat.
But while all of this is true, and less than ideal, I suppose, none of it really constitutes an explanation. The truth is, I still don’t fully comprehend why it all conspired to break me, for a little while. I just know that it did.
It had been years since I’d allowed myself to think about the playground insults, the hair-twirling, my sessions with Charlotte. It all seemed like too much to drop on a pair of lovely, well-meaning people who were still trying to talk themselves into transracial adoption. I reminded myself that I had grown up in a particular kind of place—an incredibly white sort of place—a few years before the spike in open adoptions and the celebration of “diversity.” There was no reason to think their child’s experience would be anything like mine.
Were my friends truly prepared to parent a child of color? Probably not, but then, neither was I. I had no idea how I would one day raise a child to understand and then somehow cope with racism. I did believe my friends would be good parents, just as I still wanted to be a good adoptee. I didn’t want to scare them. I didn’t want to be the one to make them question their dreams.
“Adoption is just another way to join a family,” I heard myself say. It was such a relief to utter those familiar words; it was a relief to lay the whole matter to rest. “Love is the most important thing. I know that I was very lucky, and your son or daughter will be, too. Try not to worry. You’ll all be fine.”
They both grinned at me. “Talking with you is so reassuring,” the mom-to-be said with a happy sigh. “I hope our kid grows up to be just like you!”
*
If another set of white adoptive parents asked me those same questions today—Should we adopt? Could we be good parents?—I still wouldn’t say no. Those answers are so often unknowable. I might say that I no longer think of adoption in terms of good or bad, but realistic and unrealistic. I would explain that my own parents tried very hard to be good parents, and in many ways were good parents, and we did not have a single honest conversation about race until I was in my late twenties and are still dealing with the consequences of that.
I don’t know why it once seemed so important to prop up adoption at all costs, to polish its image and conceal just how much I wrestled with my missing heritage and history. But I suspect at least part of the answer lies in the foundation built up, over long years, by other people’s questions, their biases and expectations. As an adopted child and a person of color, I understood from a young age what I was supposed to be: happy, agreeable, quiet, and grateful. No scars, no holes, no chip on my shoulder. It was easy to meet those expectations, much of the time, once I taught myself to ignore the slurs, once I finally stopped hearing them.
It was certainly much easier to fall in line than to open up and show everyone—regardless of how well I knew them, how much or how little I trusted them—my greatest fears, my deepest questions, the biggest and most vulnerable gap in my armor. If I shared that I’d been called a gook for years, wouldn’t other people then see me that way? If I admitted that I was a victim long ago, isn’t that how they would always think of me? If I came out and said that I was still angry sometimes, that I grieved the parts of myself that adoption had erased and rewritten, the things no amount of love could ever fully compensate for, would that be the excuse they needed to pull away?
*
I know more than a few adoptive parents who are trying their best to meet the challenges of transracial adoption with open-mindedness and humility. I would never call them heroes, as some do—that’s even worse than saying they are “generous” for adopting—but I do admire them. They think, they listen, they want to learn. Solidarity is not automatic, but these parents show me that it is possible in many adoptive families. Yet some of the stories I hear about transracially adopted children are all too wrenchingly familiar.
His new teacher told him, “Your name and your face don’t match!”
She came home crying because a boy at school said that Chinese people eat dogs and sleep in the dirt.
He asked me why God didn’t just make him white, like us.
She asks me if every Black woman we see is her mom.
Something happened in my mid-twenties when I realized that I was still hearing anecdotes like this. It made me furious; it flipped a switch inside of me. Maybe I had changed, maybe adoption had even changed, but a lot of people had apparently learned nothing, and too many adopted kids had no one to guide them through the trenches.
I still believe that all children need and deserve loving families. I still believe adoption can be a good and rewarding option for children with no other recourse to stable, nurturing family-based care. But these days I’m far more willing to call attention to the challenges of raising children of color in a fundamentally racist society. I tell prospective adoptive parents to take a good, hard look at their social circles, their neighborhoods, their churches, their communities and think about how those places and spaces will look and feel to their child. I ask them what they’ll say when their kids hear slurs and taunts from bullies, and how they will answer tough questions about the persistence of racism and a playing field that is far from level. I recommend books and blogs by adoptees that don’t mince words about the fact that love has never actually been enough for anyone. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers; these are things I fret over all the time, too, raising two multiracial kids myself. I’m well aware that it’s not easy, and that my girls have inherited a messy and ambiguous legacy from me, their mother who is not white but has never been a “real” Korean.
While I strive for empathy, I don’t try particularly hard to be comforting anymore. I worry more about adopted kids than I do about their parents’ feelings. I can be blunt. When a white adoptive dad mentioned that he just doesn’t think race is on his son’s “radar” (“I don’t think he even notices it, frankly”), I told him about my three-year-old daughter’s strong preference for Asian women. She knows the other Asian women aren’t me; she also knows they are like me in some way. Her big sister was noticing and commenting on racial differences at an even younger age. “Race is on your son’s radar,” I promised him. “Even if you think it’s not an issue for you, it will be for him.”
Some adoptive parents, I’ve found, are genuinely eager to talk about all of this. They understand that their good hearts and good intentions cannot safeguard their children against prejudice, loss of culture, or the harm that can be inflicted by meaningless “colorblindness” masquerading as tolerance. But I know that others no longer find me reassuring, and are probably actively hoping their kids don’t end up like me. A few have suggested that I haven’t gotten over my childhood issues. Some have even insisted, with perfectly straight faces, that transracial adoption, along with interracial marriage and mixed families, are “cures” for racism.
While I think most people would agree that adoption should be about the child and not the parents, the way the discussion is framed often puts the focus on the latter: the hoops they have to jump through (which too many people view as outrageous and unfair); the disappointments they have to endure (from birth parents who change their minds to “ungrateful” adult adoptees who question the system); and, of course, the enormous sums they must pay to adopt infants here in the U.S. or children of any age from abroad (please visit our adoption fundraising page!). In a way, it makes sense that theirs is still the dominant narrative—it is the most accessible, the least challenging. It’s easy to comprehend someone’s longing for a child in the here and now; it’s far more difficult to consider that child’s perspective, especially if it should change in the future, and question what might be missing at first from a white parent’s toolkit. But making a few people uncomfortable with frank talk about race and adoption is a small price to pay for the conversation itself. We need this dialogue, one that recognizes adoption not as the culmination of someone’s wish to become a parent, but rather the beginning of an adopted person’s individual journey—a journey that will be hard at times, joyful at others, and will hopefully lead to understanding and wholeness.
Tags: adoption, childhood, family, national adoption month, nicole soojung callahan, race, transracial adoption
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This is great. Thank you, Nicole.
Thanks for sharing this, Nicole. I really appreciate how you lay out here how you actually felt and the tension with how you were/are “supposed” to feel.
If folks are interested in reading more perspectives from adult adoptees, I highly recommend Gazillion Voices http://gazillionvoices.com/
Thank you for writing this, Nicole!
Thank you as always for such a thoughtful article. I especially love the part about realistic v. unrealistic. That’s such an honest and accurate way to put it.
It’s really helpful for me to frame it that way in conversations! You can’t know what adoption will be like for a specific kid, but you can try to prepare yourself and have realistic expectations and goals.
Oh Nicole. This is so thoughtful, compassionate, and valuable. You’ve interwoven your personal truth with the complex realities of transracial adoption beautifully. Thank you.
thank *you*, Maureen.
Thank you for sharing! I recently watched a documentary about transracial adoption that deals with much of the same territory. Perhaps you have seen it? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446819/
I haven’t seen that one, but there are some other great documentaries out there — I particularly recommend Angela Tucker’s story of her reunion, CLOSURE, and ALL the films by Deann Borshay Liem.
My [relationship redacted] was adopted from Korea, and his mother goes around telling people, “Oh, I think everyone felt sorry for me for taking this on.”
TAKING. THIS. ON. UGHHH. I want to punch her. So reading this in your essay was great: “While I strive for empathy, I don’t try particularly hard to be comforting anymore. I worry more about adopted kids than I do about their parents’ feelings. I can be blunt. ”
Really glad that you are blunt and put all of these complex issues out there. So many people are just looking for pats on the back.
:/ I don’t even know what I would say to that.
Ehhhh. I don’t think there’s anything you can say to someone who thinks she’s can’t possibly be racist because she has adopted outside of her race. But at least you put something besides smugness into the minds of people who are contemplating it.
I can’t (or, horrifyingly, I totally can) even comprehend of people who would make the adoption/raising of their child a story all about them, rather than thinking about what’s best for kids. ://///
I think propping up adoption when you are adopted is necessary when you are young because acknowledging it’s something other than good some how feels like your life is a lie. I remember feeling personally offended when I would hear stories of adoption gone wrong. Some times it still does.
I am not going to pretend to know what it’s like to be raised by parents of a different race but I do know what my feelings are like and I didn’t look that different from my parents. It’s like there is a hole in your life. Even if you don’t acknowledge the gaping hole it’s still there.
A couple years ago I was able to connect with my biological mom. (She’s actually coming to see me tonight!) I cannot explain the relief I felt once that hole was filled. I kept telling my husband, “I finally feel whole. I finally know who I am.”
Good luck with your journey and thank you so much for sharing.
Have a good visit with your mom!! <3
For various reasons, I have never met my birth mother. But I’ve met my father and my sister and it’s been extraordinary to close that circle, to have my kids know things about their roots that I never did.
I am a transracial adoptee, part of the same wave of Korean adoptions of the 1970s. And my feelings about transracial adoptions have become a lot more complicated over the years, though my childhood was much easier than Nicole’s.
I’m glad that you had that experience of relief from a feeling of loss. My brother (also adopted) had the same feeling and the same experience of meeting some of his biological family. I just want to be a counter-example: not every adoptee feels the lack of a biological connection as a gaping hole. I don’t. I think that’s also an important part of my experience as an adoptee and, more, one possibility about adoption that I don’t see in the dominant USian cultural narrative, so I always feel the need to say it: not everyone feels that way. But there’s no way to predict whether people will, either.
definitely, the personal is not universal! I wouldn’t have described the feeling as a “gaping hole” — even now that sounds a bit dramatic, so. It was just the feeling that something was missing. And it started out small, relatively, and started to grow only when I became pregnant with my first child. A lot of adoptees never get to that point, as you say! And some feel the loss far more keenly than I did and have no way to access birth or family history.
I love this. Thank you so much for writing and sharing it.
This has so much strength and power and honesty. Thank you for putting so much hard work and emotional labor into your writing, Nicole. I hope that you benefit from it too, when you give a lot to readers like you do here.
thank you! I am glad you found it worthwhile.
So interesting! Thanks for this.
I’ve thought about this a lot–I have an aunt who is biracial and was adopted at a time when my mom’s family’s neighborhood pool had just desegregated. So, REAL rough but my grandparents definitely had a love is enough type of attitude towards it rather than an active one and my aunt says it definitely messed her up. When my cousin was born, my grandmother even started doing some kind of active overcompensating–like, saying “oh he’s such a smart baby, he gets that from me” and that kind of thing.
This is honestly what most adoptive parents were told to do in past generations — some are probably still encouraged to NOT think so critically about race/culture beyond “expose your adopted child to food/music/art/etc.” (not that those things aren’t important! But that’s the easy, fun part, whereas few people enjoy talking with their kids about racism). My parents were told, “just assimilate her into your family and everything will be fine.” Of course they had the best intentions and I’m sure your grandparents did too! It’s just not enough, and even when you KNOW that, it is incredibly difficult to talk about these issues.
Yeah, totally! And at that time, there pretty much weren’t any transracially adopted adults so what are you going to go on? It’s a logical first attempt.
This was wonderful and thought-provoking. Thank you for writing this.
I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for writing it! I’m not close with anyone who’s adopted so it’s really interesting for me to read about perspectives that I don’t get otherwise.
This is so interesting and important. Thanks, Nicole, for sharing.
Thanks for writing this. Any chance for any book or resource recommendations for a related situation? My daughter’s best friend (9) is adopted (from South America), and I’d like to find a book for my daughter to read to help her understand potential issues. There are lots of books written specifically for adoptees that might work, but I haven’t found one that seemed appropriate for this situation–they are either aimed at younger kids, or at more mature teenage topics.
My then-11yo really liked a book called ‘Kimchi & Calamari’. Main character is (duh) a Korean adoptee who is 13 and being raised in an Italian family. It wraps in the typical mid-school identity questions. My niece, who was born to my sister, got it for her 5th grade reading log and said it helped her to not ask my kid (who we adopted) some questions because the answers were there.
Good works of fiction about adoptees, for thoughtful young readers, are surprisingly thin on the ground. I have never found the perfect YA book that really takes on these issues (would love to write such a book, ahem). I’m going to do some more searching and will let you know if I come up with anything.
The Year of the Baby, by Andrea Cheng, is a great one. The main character, Anna, is a Chinese-American girl whose parents adopt a baby, Kaylee, from China. Kaylee doesn’t gain weight at first, so Anna tries all sorts of strategies to help Kaylee eat. (Spoiler: Kaylee starts eating and everyone’s happy.) Anna reflects on her own identity as Asian-American, and processes some sad feelings about what her sister’s first months of life might have looked like. The book is funny and smart, too, and I think it portrays adoption is a refreshingly balanced way.
I read this book with a friend’s 8-year-old daughter who’s adopted, and she really liked it.
Julia Alvarez’s Finding Miracles, maybe? I liked it when I read it a few years ago- not sure that it’s super sensitive, but it’s well written.
This is so beautifully written and it struck home pretty intensely for me as the white mom of mixed race kids. Thank you for writing it.
right there with you with the mixed-race kids. thank you for reading.
This is so relevant and beautifully written.
I have an adopted sister, and what I find particularly frustrating when I look back on that process was how little social services wanted my mom (and I, to a lesser to extent) to ask any kind of questions that went outside that paradigm of happy grateful kind being whisked into their perfect forever home and we all lived happily ever after the end. The active discouragement I’ve found to be really prevalent and it’s doing so much damage.
Lack of support to talk about/explore the hard topics is a very real thing in adoption, then and now. What haunts me more than anything might be how little support my birth family received before, during, and after. A lot of bad things were happening, and they met with social workers, and no one asked the right questions.
This is so great. Could you share your list of blogs with us? My girlfriend and I regularly talk about the idea of transracial adoption and would love to have more resources about it.
yes, I will come back to this later and share my blogroll, I promise!
Gazillion Voices
Lost Daughters
The Adopted Life
Light of Day Stories
there are many, many more, but these are some of the blogs I read the most. Also highly recommend work by JaeRan Kim and Matthew Salesses and Andy Marra and many others I am probably forgetting.
Yay thank you!! We will check them out.
of course they all have blogrolls too — have fun in the rabbit hole. 🙂
whew, this was great. thanks for sharing, nicole. this part:
If I shared that I’d been called a gook for years, wouldn’t other people then see me that way? If I admitted that I was a victim long ago, isn’t that how they would always think of me? If I came out and said that I was still angry sometimes, that I grieved the parts of myself that adoption had erased and rewritten, the things no amount of love could ever fully compensate for, would that be the excuse they needed to pull away?
was like a punch in the gut.
CHILDHOOD AMIRITE
thanks for reading, and for your kind words!
Brilliant as always. Thank you for sharing so honestly and eruditely!
thanks, Rachel. <3
Thanks for taking such care with this piece. And with the PAPs you have been blunt with, in hopes of helping them see realistically what they’re doing.
No degree of honesty about what it felt like could have stopped me from adopting my child, because I thought times had changed and she would be raised in a less racist country than you were.
Figuring out how to make that partly true, in her little corner of it anyhow, has become the project of my life. Because that’s how wrong we were. You could have hit me in the head with a brick 15 years ago, and until my child had been racially profiled while I was standing next to her I was never going to get it.
Your support, and the support of other adopted people, in the form of some difficult truths–it’s invaluable, and my dream for my daughter is that she grows to be as capable of speaking her truth as you are.
What an incredible piece that speaks to the lifelong complexities of race and identity as it relates to adoption. Your articulate words demonstrate the realities for many adopted people and the spectrum of feelings felt simultaneously. From a fellow KAD, thank you for sharing publicly. #flipTheScript
Thank you, Tara!
Nicole, thank you for writing this, and more power to you. I’m raising a mixed race child, I’m Caucasian, the other parent is Asian, and parents who think their children aren’t noticing race are kidding themselves. Race is one of the first things babies notice (hello, science)! And I think it should be part of conversations with children (all children, not just non-white kids). I still remember having two neighbor Asian kids who were adopted by Caucasian parents just stare and stare at my spouse and the oldest one did ask if he was his father. I think they were fascinated to see and adult Asian and that really just kind of broke my heart but I’ve never quite figured out how to talk about it.
We are raising our child in a town with a pretty non-diverse population, so we’ve gone out of our way to get a school where there are several other mixed race kids in the class, and we talk about race stuff the same way we talk about other things in our house (factually, but age appropriate). The conversations aren’t always easy but I think they’re necessary as a parent, whose job is to raise a well equipped person for the world their child will live in.
I could probably reel off a list of every Asian I ever spotted in my hometown, including the family that owned our favorite Chinese restaurant. I would always, always stare at those Asians I saw — once in a blue moon — and in retrospect it must have really creeped them out, poor people.
Going to a college that was 1/4 Asian was so transformative. I don’t think I could ever go back to an all or mostly white environment. I knew I was definitely not raising my kids there, but of course it’s hard to choose and sometimes you can’t.
Thank you for this essay Nicole!
For other Toasties interested:
I’m a big follower of Shannon at peaceshannon.tumblr.com – a very different perspective, as she’s a Korean adoptee who actually went on national TV there (!) to find her birth parents and now is a activist in South Korea for adoptees & unwed mothers whose kids are at risk of becoming adoptees without their consent or knowledge.
I love this wonderful story by Andy Marra, another Korean adoptee who found her birth mom and is also a story about her transition: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-marra/the-beau…
I’m not an adoptee myself but I am Korean, so I really try to pay attention to as many views about Korean adoption as possible from adoptees since it’s has numerous cultural issue/s not just in Western countries where adoptees grow up, but in Korea where the dehumanisation of the children (and their birth mothers) start.
I’m a KAD and I love peaceshannon’s blog too. She does so much in Korea (what Korea should have been doing for decades, but the adoption industry has been very strong there).
If anyone else is interested, I also recommend these adoptee blogs:
redthreadbroken.wordpress.com,
danielibnzayd.wordpress.com,
theadoptedones.wordpress.com
and many more.
Like Nicole eloquently wrote, I care more about the adopted children’s feelings than their parents’ feelings too. Each of their voices are distinct and unique, but express themselves in their own way too, while addressing some very important adoptee matters.
Thanks Tigrisparty for paying attention to Korea’s role in the baby export business. Here’s an eye-opening documentary/news segment from a few years ago that you might have seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vm5C9YxET8
thanks for adding these recs; I too am a fan of Shannon’s and Andy’s work!
Thank you- from a mom.
I just got married (my husband and I are both white men), and adoption is on the eventual agenda (though we’re in no rush). I deeply appreciate this article for giving me a list of things to look out for when we do adopt, whether transracially or not. (The fact that it’s beautifully written helps.)
I’m really glad it was useful to you!
This is an absolutely necessary piece. The idea of “love is not enough” needs to spread like wildfire through our culture – love is not enough to stop racism, to “save” people from themselves, to make a relationship work, to raise a kid, to do anything, really. Thank you.
Seriously–I love The Beatles, but “All You Need Is Love” is NOT good life advice.
My husband and I are white and my son and daughter are Chinese. Thank you for your candor. We are fortunate to live in a very racially diverse area, but I need these reminders to keep having these discussions with my kids.
definitely — we live in a racially diverse area too, and it hasn’t stopped us from receiving the strangest comments and questions from people. I’d much prefer to live in a diverse place than not, obviously, but it’s no buffer.
What a great article. I’m Caucasian and adopted from the US foster care system as opposed to from abroad but so much of this still holds true for me. Starting in 4th grade I was harassed every single day at school for being adopted. “Your parents didn’t love you.” was thrown at me almost every day. It happened once or twice before that but I grew up in an area with a LOT of adopted kids who had my back. After we moved I was on my own.
My adopted family is Irish Catholic and very involved in that community and culture but every time I say I’m Irish I know that I’m lying. I have no idea what I am. We THINK my dad was Native American but we have no idea if it’s true. I’m nearly 25 and it still bothers me that I don’t know. Because I am white I don’t have racist people harassing me but the loss of knowing your family history and what culture you family comes from is still hard. It’s something people take for granted.
I have learned to explain to people that while I don’t regret my adoption at all that doesn’t mean it was easy. I was abused by a family member during high school to the point where I begged to be sent to boarding school. I felt like an outsider in my family at times. I suffered a lot of loss in the first few years of my life that left me with severe PTSD and depression. But I love my family and despite their flaws I would not trade them for anything. Adoption will never be perfect because life is still life and sometimes life sucks. But it’s a lot better with a family to share it with.
I’m so glad you have a great adoptive family in your corner, and I’m also sorry that shitty kids said shitty things to you. It is hard not having a family history. It’s one reason I reconnected with my birth family in my late twenties, although even after doing so, there’s still so much I don’t/will never know! Thank you for reading and sharing your story too.
This was an incredibly eye-opening article for me. Thank you so much for sharing your personal feelings and experiences here. It’s such an important conversation to have.
Thank you.
Great, great article. When I first started reading the writings of adult adoptees or adoptive parents trying to be aware and critical of the systems (although the latter often AFTER they successfully completed their adoption) I was so shocked by how much reality different from the dominant narrative, how many more difficulties and complications and traumas are rife for adoptees than I realized. I had also pretty much swallowed the “isn’t it great of the parents to adopt” narrative, which now makes me nauseous.
Something a bit beyond the scope of this piece but still worth thinking about for anyone interested is how much corruption there is, especially in international adoption. There is a LOT of money involved and the interests of those with money are protected first and foremost – which is not the adoptees or their birth parents. Plus this has created a supply and demand economy of children that leads to trafficking, and it has led to an emphasis on orphanages and adoption to “provide aid” rather than providing resources to birth parents. My Fascinating Life: The Wall – A Map of Adoption Ethics (http://my–fascinating–life.blogspot.com/2011/10/wall-map-of-adoption-ethics-according.html) is a good place to start finding out more about the process, I think.
That post is really helpful.
Also, (ahem) outside the scope of this piece is a lot of material that people who hope to adopt can really benefit from reading. So, sadder but wiser–it’s not really a surprise that we figured out our kid had been trafficked AFTER the adoption, considering where we had to go/what we had to do to determine some of the facts. The international adoption industry is very effective in preserving itself, by hiding the facts until money has changed hands.
And that’s really more than I want to say here…because Nicole’s essay touches on what adoptive parents did/do/oughta think about, a little.
But it’s full of insights about how it feels to be that child, the one who has been acted on by a (deeply corrupt & avoidably disastrous) system that often forgets to center children, who grow up to be adopted people who create their own narratives to explain what happened to them. And that story is a lot more complicated than ‘this thing happened when I was a baby’.
I would think the “isn’t it great of you to adopt those poor children?” line would also be very troubling to all but the most clueless adoptive parents. Like, what is a person supposed to say to that? “Yes, aren’t we swell?”
Thanks for posting that link; I’ve come across that blog before but hadn’t seen that particular post!
Nope. We’re supposed to say ‘The Lord called us, and we answered.’ This was explained to me when I responded (out of my child’s hearing) with ‘No, adopting my kid was all about me.’ I think it’s funny that the truth is such a horrible thing to speak aloud that it’s considered an assault on the senses of the person who asserts that Adoption Is God’s Promise.
File under Things I Learned In The Home Depot in Pocatello, Idaho.
That was a trip, IYKWIMAITYD.
“She had fallen apart rather than stand up for herself, and moving on meant that I had to leave her far behind. Even now, if I’m honest, I know that I still blame that girl, more than anyone else, for not being strong enough.”
This!!! I can absolutely relate to this. And it’s heartbreaking.
Great piece. Not enough people talk about the hard parts of adoption, thank you for this Nicole.
Thank you for sharing as Erin said not enough talk about the the hard parts. Being different affects my son greatly, no one really understands except those that have been through it. Too many people with the Love will conquer all and make it all better viewpoint. Love is not enough for any child.
Korean adopted by loving white people into a community populated by other very white people (mostly German, a little KKK) here! Thank you so much for this.
This was really great and moving: it hadn’t occurred to me before how drastically the perspectives of adopted children are erased in so much discussion of adoption but your piece brought it into focus, that it isn’t even just about children vis-a-vis loving parents and whether they can or can’t “cope with the challenges of (interracial) adoption” (ugh) but that children are human beings who I have to cope with a whole world out there.
Thank you so, so much for writing this. I’m a twentysomething Korean adoptee who, like many others, grew up in a predominantly white town and am still coming to terms with how to talk about race both on a personal and societal level. Your article put into words and really crystallized so many things I’ve only just begun to think about.
I’m so glad you read and liked it, thank you. There is a LOT of support out there for talking about/exploring these topics in the adoption community. Which is one thing I wish we’d all had when we were growing up.
Thank you so much for telling the truth. The truth isn’t always pretty, but it’s beautiful in it’s way. Thank you for telling an honest tale.
This is great and so necessary. Yeah, it’s great that these parents love their kids, but as long as you’re not white in America, you’re definitely going to notice race. Love isn’t going to be enough. I’ve spent most of my life in white-majority spaces, and I have to struggle with stereotypes, microaggressions, and slurs all the time, and it was psychologically damaging. I can’t imagine how it would feel not even having parents or siblings or other relatives or at the very least a community of the same race/ethnicity around who can get where you’re coming from.
This is also a great blog: unsungvoicesexperience.tumblr.com
Yes, one thousand times yes.
The idea that of course we were rescuing a kid was the only narrative we got from day one — turns out later down the road that some of the things were told by multiple social workers were either exaggerations or outright lies. I love my sister and I wouldn’t trade her for the world, but for her own sake, I wish like hell there had been so much more effort to help her mom.
To a certain extent, it feels like social services saw her and her siblings as a group of young, white, healthy kids that were very adoptable. And I think that had a lot of terrible, terrible influence on how her family’s case was treated.
Thank you for sharing your feelings. As a white mom with 2 Chinese daughters at the tail end of our large family, it’s a good reminder for me. It’s not enough for us to go to a Chinese festival once a year, race needs to be part of our dialogue. It’s easy for me to feel like it won’t affect my girls because they have each other, or because my second grader is one of 6 Asian girls in her classroom, or because we live in a VERY diverse town, with Vietnamese neighbors right next door. I appreciate posts like this for snapping me out of my false sense of security.
SUCH an important piece. Thank you. I cringe when I see other adoptive parents at both ends of the spectrum: Love is Enough”We don’t see race!” or Constant Othering “Our beautiful China Doll!”. I have a friend who insists her daughter has “no interest” in her birth family because she has never mentioned it. Hello? She has never mentioned it because YOU have never mentioned it. There is no credible scenario in which your 12 year old daughter has “no interest” in her birth family. But there is a credible scenario in which she doesn’t want to hurt you. Ugh. We talk about my girls’ birth families regularly. Sometimes I know I’m bringing it up ham handedly, but whatever. Because it makes the point that I’m okay talking about it.I tell my girls all the time that there is nothing you can do or say that I cannot handle. You cannot hurt me because you have feelings for and about the woman who brought you into this world. How could that ever hurt me? I wish I knew her too. It’s a hole in their lives I cannot fill. I can only acknowledge it exists and love them through it.
Please keep writing, Nicole. Keep these perspectives coming.
“While I think most people would agree that adoption should be about the child and not the parents…”
Nicole, I think you’re right that most people would agree with their words, but I think that you have also totally identified that most people do not agree with their actions.
I think our society pays good lip-service to being child-focussed, but in actual fact is all about what is good for adults. I have no experience with adoption, but let me tell you, I think that divorce and family law is ALL about what is good for the adults and not the kids.
Nicole, thank you for writing a very interesting and heartfelt article from a perspective that needs to be heard more often. My white partner and I are raising 4 children, her two biological daughters, my biological daughter and my adopted black son. We are pictured in the dictionary under “Mixed Family”. We live in a racially integrated community, but I am certain our kids hear and see things that we wish we could shield them from. I need to be more aware of their feelings and ask better questions. Thanks
Wow, this is so eloquent and informative about an issue that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. You especially illuminated what bullshit it is to ask any adopted child their feelings on being adopted (outside of a confidential situation like therapy). Of COURSE they can’t and shouldn’t feel obliged to tell you what’s really going on.
I’m so glad you’re bringing the focus to the children, not the parents’ feelings. It’s so frustrating that the balance of power is always on the latter’s side.
I’m also glad you had good parents who recognized you had a need they couldn’t themselves address and so they found a good therapist for you.
Thanks so much for writing this! I was adopted from China and raised in an all white family/community. As a college sophomore I’m still struggling with issues of identity and how to talk about race.
I mentioned this above, too, but the online adoption/adoptee community is pretty awesome, and no matter how you feel about your own adoption you can find people in your same boat who will listen/talk with you! You might already be involved, but if not, it’s there, and that’s something I really wish I’d had as a teenager.
also, if you ever want to email me, I’m happy to talk too! nikki at the-toast dot net
I had specifically avoided reading the comments section to this article because I’m not familiar with Toast or its comment community. While I loved the article, I sort of assumed that the comment section would prove to be a disappointing way to be reminded that the internet comment sections can’t be productive or rational. So wrong!
So, as a prospective adoptive parent who may wind up with a cross-racial adoptive placement, two kinds of thanks are in order: 1) to Nicole, for a rather extraordinary essay, which I will immediately be passing around at the group sessions with other adoptive families; and 2) to the Toast community who replied here with additional insight, meaningful perspective, and directions to further resources! What strange mystery world is this, filled with rational folks offering insight and perspective without shrill judgement and irrational anger? Whatever it is, I’m sure glad I ran into it. Thanks, everyone.
Moderated comments sections are great, no? And The Toast community is the greatest of all.
Thanks for reading; I’m glad you found the essay helpful!
Yeah, I seriously doubt you were creepy. I’ll bet all of the grownups knew what was up. We still get massive stares from teenage Asian boys (white lady + asian man = really fascinating) no matter where we go and it doesn’t bother us too much. We would love to live somewhere more diverse, but yeah, sometimes you make hard choices. It could be worse than a smallish college town on the west coast, which is tolerable but not ideal. However, I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to raise a non-white kid in some other places. We actuallhy do go out of our way to take our child to visit family in Asia and the Bay Area because I think it’s important for both my child and my spouse to be places where they’re not “other” once in a while. TBH, the worst remarks we’ve had have been from other Asians (but I figure they’re just being more upfront than other people).
I have a small amount of what could count as Asian ancestry, and M. Siniichulok is mostly Asian, but for the most part we present as a White lady/Asian man couple, and we got lots of stares and mutterings of disapproval when we lived in the United States. (In Toronto, our configuration is much more common and nobody finds it outrageous, or an outrage, the way they often did in the United States.) We’re trying to figure out where to move in the US to make it easiest on him/us and Little Siniichulok. I’ve also noticed that many people we know are extra-invested in seeing which one of us Little Siniichulok looks like at any given time, as if our genes are duking it out and one race or the other must “win.”
The Pacific Northwest has a ton of interracial (often involving some Asian) families. I love the northwest, and it is also super white and has some drawbacks, but in terms of white lady/Asian man-presenting couples, you could blend right in.
This is a wonderful article. Thank you very much for sharing. My daughter is 7 years of age, and we discuss adoption, race, bullying, and other issues that she will face. Your insightful and helpful article will allow me to share another adoptee’s viewpoint with my daughter so that she won’t feel alone and so she’ll understand it’s ok to share these feelings with her father and I without worrying about hurting our feelings or us judging her.
As a POC and adoptee, I can’t thank you enough for publishing your story. It’s the first thing I’ve ever read about adoption that has ever resonated with me and it’s so very important to challenge the AND YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL narrative. It’s so much more complex than that. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
thank you for reading; I’m glad you found something in it to relate to. adoptee solidarity!
Thank you, Nicole, for this beautiful, real piece and all the other resources in the comments. I often think that transracial adoption might be a part of my family’s future and I’m trying to learn all I can.
We think and talk a lot about fostering and adopting, which could involve a transracial placement, though it might not. So when I think and write about these issues, I am thinking about my own possible future, too! I’m glad you found my piece valuable.
Nicole, I too send my thanks to you. As an adoptive mom of an Asian daughter, we have faced racial issues throughout her 21 years of life. We moved to be in a more diverse area/school system, I have always talked about these issues with her and friends, but nevertheless the race issue remains. More than once, I have replied to the “Oh, she’s so lucky” comment: “What’s so lucky about losing your mom to death, your nuclear family and extended family to adoption, your heritage, history, culture, language and religion?” That’s not to say we don’t have our second family together that’s loving and treasured, but loss is a part of adoption.
This morning I shared your article with my daughter and I’m looking forward to discussing it with her. Thank you so much for your insight.
Thank you very much for this beautiful piece, Nicole. My comment regards those prospective adoptive parents you describe, who reminded me of myself, 25+ years ago, when I was beginning to think and learn about adoption. Twenty-five years later I have two sons, each adopted at birth; both were domestic adoptions, both same-race, both completely open adoptions (full identifying information exchanged). My sons are now in their 20s and have forged their own adult relationships with members of their birth families, separate from and in addition to our “family relationship” with them, and my own personal relationships with them. But 25 years ago I was battered, bruised, scarred by infertility and medical interventions and the torment of repeated failure to become pregnant; aching and yearning for my child, and earnest and naive and filled with the wild hope that adoption would lead me to him or her, and believing without question that the means by which my child would join my family – by adoption or by birth to me – was irrelevant.
What, in retrospect, I wish I had understood then is that for parents who come to adoption following infertility, it is vital that they “bury” and grieve for the baby who would have been born to them, before they become parents by adoption. The only thing you know about the children you will adopt is that they are *NOT* the children who would have been born to you. Let those forever-unknown children go, let them rest in peace, and then turn and open your eyes and ears and heart to the miraculous human being about to come into your care and your life, whose unique gifts and quirks and joys and sorrows will thrillingly unfold themselves to you over time. When I understood this, when I realized that this was the acceptance required of me in order to know and respect my children and their birth parents, and their connections to their birth roots, I began to grow into the mother that my sons needed, the mother who could help her kids learn that while our family was formed in an unusual way, “different” doesn’t mean “lesser” or “worse,” and that our being thrilled with the family we have – which we wouldn’t change a thing about – doesn’t mean it’s not also very sad that my children didn’t grow up in their birth families, or that I couldn’t gestate or give birth to these two children who I love with all my heart. To me, Nicole, your focus on “realistic vs. unrealistic” is exactly right and a gift to both the prospective parents and the children they will parent. Thank you again.
Utter truth. Demographically, we are different and the city I grew up in is different, but well meaning white (and light brown) parents who did all that they could but also didn’t do enough? Check. People being horrible because you don’t look like your parents? Check. People asking you for confirmation that being well meaning is all it takes to cure racism? Check. And better said than I ever could. Thank you for writing this.
so wonderfully written, thank you. I’d love to see the blogs by adoptees your were talking about if you wouldn’t mind publishing them…I can always search myself too! 🙂
I linked to some of them above…somewhere. Lost Daughters is a great place to start. There’s also Gazillion Voices magazine. The first adoption blog I ever read on a regular basis was Harlow’s Monkey, which isn’t updated much anymore, but the archives are EXCELLENT.
I linked to some of them above…somewhere. Lost Daughters is a great place to start. There's also Gazillion Voices magazine. The first adoption blog I ever read on a regular basis was Harlow's Monkey, which isn't updated much anymore, but the archives are EXCELLENT.
The Pacific Northwest has a ton of interracial (often involving some Asian) families. I love the northwest, and it is also super white and has some drawbacks, but in terms of white lady/Asian man-presenting couples, you could blend right in.
There has been a lot more open talk about race in recent years, so I understand why you might feel scared. I wanted to share with you since my experience was the opposite. I had two beautiful biracial daughters who are now 25 and 28 years old. I was a white woman married to a black man in the late 80's when it wasn't particularly common. We always lived in diverse multi cultural neighborhoods and this was never a big issue. I think that keeping the dialogue open about their race helps. I know it also helped that we have friends from all walks of life, all ethnicities, all socio economic statuses. I wont say they (or we) never faced any looks or questions, but primarily it was just not a big deal. My kids were talking about this recently, and they agreed that they never felt shame or fear because of their mixed race.
Most work days, my time is a mixture of scanning emails from placement workers across Texas who are pleading for a foster home for hard to place older children of color; and engaging in conversation with prospective adoptive parents who beam across my desk as they tell me about how they want to adopt a young child. Many of these people are indeed “trying their best”. But I live with the sobering reality that for the most part, doing our best is simply not enough. Nicole’s essay made that painfully and abundantly clear. The love and commitment of many of our foster and adoptive parents is something that I honor and respect, and am daily amazed to behold. But honestly, sometimes it seems that the level of insight and awareness among caregivers about the needs of foster/adopt children in interracial placements seems little different than when I began this work over 30 years ago. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the impact of my daughter being wiling to teach her dinosaur father about the complexities of her own interracial marriage, this essay might have only mildly picqued my interest. Instead, Nicole stopped me in my tracks and made me weep from a place of deep sadness about the shortcomings of both my self and my profession. Thank you Nicole for both your courage and willingness to speak truth. I take renewed conviction from your words.
Thanks so much for sharing this! I will share this with my darlings. 🙂 I wish you the best!
NICOLE how did I only just see this? I loved this. Thank you.
thank you L_Bear!
I think what made me angry wasn't their honesty (and I always find it hard when white people get praised for their honesty – when black people are honest they are told they are aggressive, too angry, crazy, etc.) – it was the fact that it seemed their concern about their racist neigbourhood started at the exact same point where it might start to affect their personal lives. White people should always be concerned about the racism around them.
thank you L_Bear!
Great article Nicole. We need more frank conversations like this out there. The stigma and the shame surrounding so much of this will begin to disappear only when it is brought to light like this.
I related to your article on a personal level. Many things I’ve thought myself but never really said out loud. I’m adopted from Souel Korea however my Caucasian parents were not strong in marriage and thought adopting would fix their problems. They were divorced by the time I was in the 5th grade. I was basically the only Asian girl in my entire school coming from a very dysfunctional home life. Lots of abandoment issues yet I had a strong sense of devotion to be loyal to the only family I had ever known. I can now say I am grown up with a wonderful family which includes 3 grown successful daughters and 2 grandsons. This life has taught me to have such strong family morales and values. I’m over protetive and can be to loudly opinionated but my strength keeps me going in this sometimes crazy world we are blessed to live in. Thank you for your truthful article.
Great article, thank you for sharing your life. I appreciate you openness and I’ve learned a lot from reading your article 🙂