ALIEN NUMBER A045359159

Written May 6th, 2016

I was adopted in 1995 at the forefront of the Chinese adoption movement. Several years later adopting from China would explode in popularity, but when my parents came to get me the entire process was mostly overseen by small agencies. My parents came in a group composed of six families, and several of those families ended up receiving girls who were in the same orphanage as I. We have kept in touch with our adoption group, but only sporadically; reunions were much more common when I was younger.

Raised in Portland, Oregon, I grew up surrounded by a primarily white community, my parents’ enthusiastic attempts to keep me connected with my Chinese heritage dying quietly in the face of my own disinterest. Their insistence that I not forget my culture, while well-intentioned, only served to remind me that I was not who I wanted to be—that is, I was not white; that I was different. I’m your kid now, I sometimes wanted to tell them. Why does being Chinese matter? For the longest time I was unwilling to acknowledge my origins and my race, the culture that forms some personal, fundamental base of my identity diluted only to what made me interesting in the eyes of my peers: “I am an orphan—I was abandoned.” It helped that this narrative fit neatly in with the heroes and heroines populating the fantasy stories that I often read. Otherwise, until college, the closest I ever came to reconnecting with China was in the after-school Mandarin class offered by my private Montessori school. Eventually, when the money and interest ran out, I stopped taking them.

I was lucky enough to be adopted into a family that did not blink twice at my race. My grandmother taught English all over the world, and my cousins are half-South American, their mother—my aunt—from Ecuador. My parents never tried to hide details of my adoption from me, and indeed returned to China a few years later to adopt my younger sister Zhen Zhen (珍珍, or precious pearl). Lacquered, intricately carved trunks that my parents had brought back from China sat upstairs in our house; inside were my baby clothes, my adoption documents, souvenirs that had never been displayed. I loved to go through the clothes especially, pressing them to my face and inhaling the smell of China that still lingered—mothballs, synthetic fabric, a slightly sweet smokiness. I was too small to lift the lid of the trunk by myself, and so my mom would have to accompany me, pulling out items carefully and telling me the stories behind each. My parents’ willingness to share with me the details of my adoption was, in retrospect, invaluable. I have always felt safe bringing up the topic, and even now, as I get ready to visit China on my own, I know I have their full support.

However, what they could not make up for was the natural ‘othering’ that occurred because I looked different, and because of the way I was raised. Being Chinese and having a Chinese name distinguished me from my peers when all I wanted to do was fit in. I did not feel different from the society that surrounded me. I listened to American folk songs, John McCutcheon and Woody Guthrie; I grew up reading English authors, J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis. Even though there was a part of me that knew it was okay to be different, I didn’t want to be. It was deeply frustrating to be reminded of my race in the way people treated me, and it was disconcerting to realize that what they saw—a small, quiet, Asian girl—was not the person I felt like I was.

The reluctance to associate with anything that might mark me as ‘too Asian’ reached its peak in high school. This coincided with my arrival into public school, and my reaction, when confronted with the (admittedly not very impressive) diversity of inner southeast Portland, was to alienate myself from anything remotely other. The American public’s perception of Asians was never explicitly stated to me, but I unconsciously absorbed it anyway in the media I consumed and jokes that I heard. How common, back in the 2000s, was it to rag on the cheap products made in China? Common. How frequently were there stories with strong Asian representation, never mind leads? Not often. How stereotyped were Asian students? Hugely—usually nerds obsessed with manga and anime. For the longest time I wouldn’t even go near the manga section of my library. When I eventually did, it was always furtively, ashamed and terrified that someone would see me and think the wrong thing. If I had to be Asian, I didn’t want to be that Asian. Even now, 21 years old and far more comfortable with my identity, it’s hard to shake the gut reaction of shame and hyper-consciousness when I walk into a manga section of a bookstore or library. Often, I leave quickly.

In high school, the way that Asians (and people of color) seemed to gravitate towards each other scared me from trying to relate. In truth I looked down upon them—often all that I saw was their imperfect grasp of English, and for an insecure teenager who prided herself on her advanced literacy and writing skills, the fear of being lumped into such a group was more than enough incentive to stay away. “I’m, like, the whitest Asian I know,” I would say to my white friends, trying to sound joking but really just bragging. It was something I would say a lot. It was important to me that they didn’t forget, that they didn’t begin to see me the way I saw other Asians. As time wore on, as I became friends with Asians, grew interested in the cultures (though I still struggled with differentiating between the collective ‘Asian’ vs. Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and so on), and began to see past the racist stereotypes I had internalized, it also became a way for me to hold onto the certainty of my American identity. By liking Asian things, it felt like I was betraying the myself I thought I knew.

The One-Child Policy and the circumstances surrounding my adoption provided fodder for stories and research projects. I wrote a story, “Her Logic” (which is included in this final project), for the Writers in the Schools program my sophomore year. It went on to win the Glimmertrain Award for Prose in the WitS anthology, and I read the story at a fundraising event, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, at Powell’s Books. At the time it was undeserved—I wrote and invested time into the story only to get my WitS teacher off my back, and later when I realized how much people liked it, because it gave me opportunities. There were times when I felt like a fraud. “I don’t even care,” I would tell my mother. “It’s so funny to me that other people care, because I totally don’t.” And I didn’t. Not right then. But the piece opened up the possibility for caring. It forced me to think seriously about my adoption and the One-Child Policy for the first time in my life. I would go on to write my IB History paper on the OCP, and though it took me a while to come to terms with the curiosity I felt, the cautious overtures into Chinese culture that I wanted to make, I think it would have taken much longer had I not written the piece in the first place.

By the time I reached college I was in a love-hate relationship with the ‘Asian’ part of Asian-American. Colorado College made an immediately unfavorable impression on me when first year housing arrangements came out. They had placed me with another adopted Chinese-American student, obviously assuming that we would find some kind of connection in our shared background, and I resented the implications of the gesture. It was exactly the kind of pigeon-holing I was so afraid of and that I was desperate to avoid. In the end, it was exactly what I needed. Emily’s background was different from mine—she gravitated towards Asian communities, not away from them, and the new perspectives she gave me on being Chinese, being adopted, and identifying as Asian, began to trickle down to me and challenge my opinions. By the end of freshman year I had begun to truly embrace my race, no longer afraid to be seen with a group of people who looked like me; by the end of sophomore year, and with Rashna Singh’s class* under my belt, I knew without a doubt that going to China and exploring my place there was something that I had to do. The jump from being reluctantly curious to wanting to know more seemed abrupt, but in retrospect I think the curiosity and desire had been building up for a long time, perhaps all the way from when I first opened the trunk that held my baby clothes. Will this trip answer the questions that I have, or will it just bring up more?

Somehow, I think it will be both.

* Asian American Literature: Memory and Migration