a brief update: families, of all kinds.

I apologize for the month-long lapse in posts.there has been a lot going on - a health crisis, my partner and I arranging for our families to meet for the firs time, changes to my body that have set off some serious dysphoria...not to mention the pressure of working and saving for my Korea trip, processing the ways race, gender and "trendiness" of need functions in crowdfunding, and of course, receiving my first letter from my birth mother.

while my adoptive parents were in town, I told them about finding my birth mother. I wanted to tell them face to face. I wanted to tell them - I'm not sure why. looking back, I probably shouldn't have. my partner's family was also in town, and they were treating us really poorly, so in contrast, my parents seemed to be behaving brilliantly. anyway, I told them I was not ready to and did not want to talk about it. the next day, my mother says: "I know you said you don't want to talk about it but -" and then proceeded to tell me that they were 100% supportive and excited for me. 

she was unable to respect my wishes because she needed to center herself in my experience. she needed to reassure me (and herself) that she was a "good" and supportive adoptive parent. in order to do so, she had to violate my trust. she had to make it about her. 

she tells me that when I'm ready she is excited to hear about it. my experience serves to enrich her existence.

in an adoptee's life, it is almost never about us. our needs. our experiences. there is always someone else trying to project their narrative, their interpretation of history, onto our bodies.

perhaps you have seen a post floating around where a white adoptive mother made her adopted daughters hold up white board signs with fucked up things people have said to her about them. TO HER. ABOUT THEM. literally projecting her needs onto their bodies. it got a lot of praise. I don't know why. it is viscerally repulsive to me. a white woman printing words of hate onto the bodies of her transracially adopted daughters. (i'm not linking to it here because i don't want to give it any more attention)

she says she wanted her daughters to know that people said these things out of ignorance, not meanness or hate. but isn't racism mean and hateful? words like "ignorance" delegitimize the pain of our experience. calling it ignorance tells me that I shouldn't feel bad when someone calks me "chink" or mocks my eyes or hair or shouts "5 dolla! me love you long time!" across the street. saying "oh, he didn't know better" teaches me that people who hurt me are really just good people so there must be something wrong with me. "ignorance" tells me I'm too sensitive. it teaches me to never trust my instincts. to keep unsafe people in my life because I have to give them a chance. it makes me wonder what i did to deserve people treating me so cruelly.

it draws a line in the sand, when white adoptive parents claim "ignorance" instead of racism, instead of hate. it draws a line between white and brown. when white adoptive parents claim "ignorance", they are taking the side of the racism. they are dismissing the pain of their children in order to avoid personal discomfort.

their needs, ahead of ours.

how do we protect ourselves when we are not free to name our enemies? how do we feel safe when the faces that taunt us tuck us in at night? 

I am constantly reminded, unpleasantly, of what my adoptive family is capable of, and what they are not. our relationship has improved as I have come to expect less of them. I think that is a good thing. realizing the limitations of family - of all kinds of family. of adoptive family, of family of origin, of chosen family, of friends, of community. no one of these spaces can be all things to me. and I would be cheating myself if i tried to push one kind of family to be all things. I am too complicated for that. I deserve better than that.

one thing I have come to love and appreciate at this time in my life is my queer adoptee family, and by extension my queerean family. but truly, the queer adoptees who have my back (and heart) right now are life saving. 

사랑해요. you give me strength.

lies our mother(s) were told

there are great fictions in adoption, particularly in transracial, intercountry adoption. Domestic adoption, as well, is full of lies: our child welfare system is corrupt and ruled by the same racism, classism, ableism, colonialism, xenophobia and misogyny of the international adoption world. but korean adoption is where I live my life, so that is where I shall begin.

lies told to birth mothers:

you have no choice

you have a choice

your child will be better off

your child will be loved

you will be better off 

adoption agencies care about your child

your family will disown you

you cannot raise this child

god wants you to abandon your baby

you will forget

you will survive

you will feel no guilt

you cannot ever tell anyone

this is your fault

lies told to adoptive families:

it's almost as good as having your own

it's better than having your own

these babies have no baggage 

these babies are cuter/smarter/more exotic

if you adopt an Asian baby then you are Asian too

attachment issues? what are you talking about?

racism? isn't that over?

god meant for you to have this child

it's cool/trendy/humanitarian

it will be easy
adoptees feel no different than biological children

your child was anonymously abandoned/some other fiction that makes the child seem more adoptable

you don't need to know anything about race to be a good parent

I feel like these barely scratch the surface.

my parents' home study called them "cold and aloof". the local agency told them not to adopt an older child because they have too many issues and it would be too hard on their family. as an infant, I was deemed to be a clean slate with no issues as long as they fed me korean food once a year and bought me a couple of books. there was a four page typed note given to them by the adoption agency. I've tried to read it but it makes no sense. it's really just lies and excuses. it is handwritten titled "The Final  Answer". as if there was anything "final" or "answer" about what it means to be adopted.

it is a heavy load. this memory i can't recall but that lives in my bones. the feeling discarded, feeling abandoned. being an orphan before i knew what that meant. the fear of being not good enough. the way that everyone I ever met wanted to know why and how I was abandoned. elementary school teachers, friends, their parents, strangers. everyone. they all said I shouldn't feel any different. so when I did, that shame was all my own.

the conflation of racist yellow peril myths about china with korean adoption. make no mistake, these systems are different. the social issues in korea that contribute to child abandonment are different than in China. and china only started adoption in the 80s, korea has been doing it since the 50s. but don't expect white people to know that. I was told that I was lucky because Korea hated girls and I was lucky I didn't get killed by my parents or sold into slavery. I was told that I was lucky a lot.

they call us "chosen children" because never say who does the choosing.

my parents still don't understand racism. my mother thinks that because she has "always been drawn to Asian things" that means she a) isn't racist and b) is qualified to parent an Asian child. neither of these things is true.

more lies.

my father is "colorblind". he is educated and worked for a long time in business. now he writes books about business, teaches classes, gives lectures. he is used to bring the authority figure inside and outside of the home. he argues with me about the validity of my experience while also insisting I am a "white girl".

lies.

as privileged white people my parents have the luxury of dismissing anything they don't agree with by looking down their nose at it. when I sent them to an exhibit of adoptee art at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian American Experience (sidebar: my mother insisted on calling it the "Wing Luck"), they told me after that "it wasn't a very good museum". after many hours of my crying they admitted that actually the exhibit made them feel bad and they just wanted to dismiss it.

that was the last time I ever tried to talk to them about adoption.

it was only as I wrote my first letter to my birth mother that I even thought about what life must have been like for her. it was the first time I though that she must have suffered all these years, not knowing what happened to the child she never knew.

that is one of the many lies we adoptees are told. birth mothers are painted flat and simple. a place, not a person, not a relationship. 

but birth mothers are not machines, we are not blank slates, and adoptive parents are not saviors.

and every day is to reclaim a little bit of truth.

displacement

two weeks ago, i flew home for christmas with my partner and my entire family. one week ago, i arrived back in Seattle. today, i'm starting to write about it.

this trip, much like everything else in the past six months, was full of realizations.

one of those realizations is that a big part of why my sister and i don't get along is birth order. she was the youngest, the baby, until she was 7 and i was adopted. at first, i was a prop, a way for her to get praise. she actually brought me into school for show & tell once. but once i started showing her up, i became the competition. she's been in competition with me ever since. now in her 30s, a successful lawyer, married with two kids, a homeowner - she still feels the need to compete with me. she will still complain about how i scored higher than her on the SATs or point out to my family that she's still Catholic and i left the church when i was 13.

she picks fights with everyone in my family, but particularly likes to bully me in and then point out my instability if i lash out.

i am the first born, the oldest. i just found out, i have to younger half-siblings: a sister (20) and a brother (15). i think i've always felt and acted like the oldest sibling, i just never had the context before. my bestie and my partner are both eldest siblings - i am a nurturer, a caretaker and a fierce protector. 

this trip i refused to engage my sister when she baited me. it was draining, frustrating, painful. having my partner there helped me to decompress after a days interactions. my sister is a hateful person. she is racist, fatphobic, ableist, queerphobic, transphobic, classist. she is selfish, self-centered and cruel. she never takes responsibility for her actions. she throws tantrums that are worse than her 3-year old.

she has shamed me my entire life. i see why now. she feels - she needs to feel - that am inferior to her. that i was a waste of money and effort. that i should have never been adopted. that she should have never been displaced from her position as the baby, the princess, the center of attention.

i see that now.

it's a strange place that i am in. for the first time, seeing clearly that her vitriol stems from her own issues, not mine. for once, i was the calm, mature older sibling that i was meant to be. i stood my ground. i loved and cared for her children, who she regards as nothing more than props, dolls to dress up and then casually dump on family members to care for when she doesn't feel like it. i gave her more of myself than she deserved.

and it felt good to not end up fighting for my right to exist with her. but it took so much out of me. i'm still recovering, and i don't really know where to begin. but this feels like a start.

there's a calm that comes from knowing i am in fact, the oldest, and that i have the chance to be a better big sibling to my dongsaengs than either of my adoptive siblings ever were to me. there is strength to that thought.