It’s not necessarily the first question I get, but it always comes up. On tour for my book, published in 2018, an audience member asked if I, a Korean American adoptee, am “still close” to my adoptive parents. When I said yes, they followed up, as if in disbelief: “So, you and your family are really OK?”
An interviewer wanted to establish right off the bat that I had “never felt unloved” by my white family “in spite of” my race. Another inquired as to how often we see each other. I’ve had people tell me they were “relieved” – even “pleasantly surprised” – to find that my book is “not angry or bitter”. At a reading, someone wondered if my parents were offended by any of the sentiments I had expressed around my transracial adoption: feelings of racial isolation and confusion, exacerbated by a childhood spent in overwhelmingly white spaces; a suppressed but stubborn curiosity about my birth family; the slow-to-evolve conviction that I needed to find a way to grasp for more knowledge, more truth about my personal history, than my adoptive family could offer me. (Before I could answer, my mother, who was sitting in the front row, piped up heroically: “No, we weren’t offended!”)
Sometimes, when I confirm that my family and I are not estranged, the person questioning me will visibly relax, as if consoled to learn that I genuinely love the people who raised me. But what if I had another kind of story to tell? Suppose we had conflicts we couldn’t reconcile, as many families do? Suppose I was angrier; suppose we weren’t in contact; suppose I didn’t even think of them as my family any more?
I now recognize some number of these exchanges for what they are: requests for reassurance, little tests I have to pass if I want to be perceived as anything other than a resentful adoptee, an ungrateful daughter, an angry person of color. My esteem for my white family, the strength of my connection to them, is what makes me feel safe, relatable, approachable to some. This, it turns out, is the price of admission, the prerequisite for whatever authority they are willing to grant me when it comes to talking about my own experience.
Not long ago, a woman who had read my book emailed to tell me to face the facts: my birth parents hadn’t wanted me. That I had complex emotions about my adoption, she said, was “an insult” to my adoptive family. “I feel so sorry for your good parents,” she wrote.
That word, “good”, and all that it implies, is fascinating to me. As an adoptee, I’ve been asked to make this distinction over and over: only one family can be “good”. Only one family can be “real”. So I must choose between the white adoptive parents that have been regularly portrayed (by others) as selfless saviors, and the Korean immigrant family that, by default, has been relegated to illegitimacy, selfishness, otherness. And if I am not prepared to choose and love only my white family and forswear all others, then I am unworthy of any family’s love.
For a long time, the weight of other people’s expectations made it far more difficult to consider how I really felt about my identity and the meaning of family. I believed I had to be a good adoptee: thankful, loyal, content. This pressure transracial adoptees might feel to be “good” can be directly linked to the belief that people of color should shrug off damaging, dehumanizing racism rather than call it out – that it’s our responsibility to not show anger, to reassure white people at any cost, to place their comfort over our own humanity. The presumption that transracially adopted people will express nothing but unqualified gratitude, feel nothing less than total comfort within the white supremacist frameworks we are exposed to, is fully consistent with the pattern of how race is thought about and talked about in this country: in America, it’s often considered worse to call someone racist than to say or do something that is actually racist.
Because I moved in entirely white circles as a child, I acquired a kind of instinctive understanding of whiteness, if not white privilege itself. I was in my late 20s before I really began to interrogate the ways in which I had been uniquely positioned, as a transracial adoptee, to adapt and make myself more palatable to white people. I started to wonder who I might have become otherwise, and how my adoption and subsequent proximity to whiteness could be used to bolster the pernicious racism at the heart of the colorblindness myth – how it could even be wielded against other people of color.
It took so long for me to realize that love for my family didn’t have to mean staying silent, that I had a right to my anger. I am still not always confident in owning it, but now, at least, I can recognize when it is just, even necessary.
When I was in my early 20s, a white man told me that transracial adoptions like mine were “the best way to fight racism”. I was in the midst of my own “good adoptee” campaign at the time, but I still found his statement shocking. I knew that I’d experienced plenty of racism as a Korean American adoptee, and that having a white family was no kind of inoculation – usually it just meant that I faced those battles alone. As much as they loved me, my family could not always understand or help me fight a form of prejudice they had never experienced.
I still meet a lot of people who want the story of transracial adoption to be a simple, comforting one: it’s an antidote to racism; proof that love conquers all. When you grow up being told how lucky you are to have been adopted, how “blessed” you are that your parents “took you in” and “brought you up as a Christian, in a country that actually values girls and women”, how freely can you talk about your feelings of abandonment or anxiety, your deep curiosity about your lost heritage, your encounters with bigots, the losses and pain you carry?
There is, of course, no singular, universal adoption experience: some of us are very close to our adoptive parents and some of us aren’t. Some of us might want to connect with our birth families and our cultures of origin, and some might not. We need to complicate the stories and notions around transracial adoption: what adoptees go through and how we are allowed to feel about our experiences, how race is relevant to our lives. We must listen to transracial adoptees and make room for their perspectives, including the ones that make some uncomfortable – because when it comes to the wellbeing of adopted people and their families, the truth will serve far better than even the most comforting of lies.
Nicole Chung is the author of All You Can Ever Know and the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine