CC GRANTS IN WRITING: THE PROPOSAL

Submitted March 25th; Approved April 5th, 2016

My proposal is this: to go to China and trace my adoption story and my heritage. Eventually I will visit the city where I was born (Jin Hua—金华), but for the most part I am focusing on how I fit into a culture and a country that are both mine and not. The specifics of the proposal, beyond the reservations that I’ve made and the trains that I’ve booked, are flexible. I decided that they have to be, because there is no saying what kind of experiences I will have or situations I will encounter. I want to leave room for the unexpected.

This is also a journey of identity. I took Rashna Singh’s Asian-American Literature: Memory and Migration class during the 2015-16 school year, and was profoundly influenced by the different ways in which I saw writers like Ha Jin and Kyoko Mori address their own hyphenated identity. It made me realize that the distance I had previously believed to be insurmountable—between myself and the place where I was born—was just as valid for me to begin exploring as it would be for an Asian-American immigrant. The writing I included in this final project will cover a wide variety of topics that are all a part of this exploration: fleeting moments and impressions that I want to capture, like the first moment of arrival; deeper reflections on the alienation I will no doubt feel in China (in America, people see me as Asian; in Asia, they will see me as American), and a look at the questions I have been harboring for a very long time. Do I have any right to try and connect back to my Chinese heritage, when I was only there for three months? Is this a culture and a people that will, or perhaps should, remain inaccessible to me? Do I even want to try and reclaim it? If so, what does that reclaiming entail? Do I want to try and track down my birth family? Where do the difficulties and complexities of my own identity lie, and where, in the Asian-American hyphen, do I want to fall?

I do not know what this trip to China will result in; at its heart, it is my cautious foray into a world that I want to be a part of and a link that I want to restore, but I am not sure how much I want this—my Chineseness—to become a formative part of my identity. This trip, then, is meant as an exploratory journey, processed through writing, that will influence how I perceive my identity and place in the world in the future. Writing has always been my go-to method for processing experiences and moments, but this trip will challenge me in ways that I have never imagined. How do I describe seeing the orphanage where I was brought after being abandoned on police station steps? How do I record the moment where I begin reaching out to a world built on customs entirely different than the ones I consider “mine”? How do I reconcile the fact that it is unthinkable to a Chinese or an American person that I do not speak Chinese fluently, and where does failure to meet expectations leave me? I have so many questions—about the politics of adoptions and orphanages and this entire system, the other adoptees, China, myself. This trip may not give me the answers I am looking for, but it will give me a way to work through my questions—no matter how difficult the process is.