by Anti-Racist Parent Columnist Jae Ran Kim, originally published at Harlow’s Monkey
A couple weeks ago, I presented two trainings for MN-ASAP (Minnesota Adoption Support and Preservation) in southern Minnesota, and on the way home, I happened upon the song “Reflection” from the movie Mulan
Listening to the lyrics, it hit me that the words seemed to exactly capture my feelings as a teenaged, transracial adoptee. And to some degree, as an adult too. I don’t think I felt comfortable in my own skin until maybe two or three years ago, and it’s still an on-going process.
When Mulan sings “every day, it’s as if I play a part/Now I see/If I wear a mask/I can fool the world/but I cannot fool my heart” I can completely relate to that yearning to be able to be myself.
The other stanza that resonated with me was “Must I pretend that I’m/someone else/for all time/When will my reflection show/who I am inside?” that I still struggle with, with my adoptive family.
As long as I continued to be the happy, adjusted, no-worries adoptee, one that was All-American (i.e. white), then my adoptive parents and extended family were happy. Each little baby step towards emerging from that cocoon as a Korean person was met with resistance. I have often felt that I’ve had to pretend to be “someone else for all time” to make others happy. And if I stopped pretending? Then I was being a bad daughter. I was hurting my adoptive parents feelings. See, it was all about them. About protecting them. My feelings weren’t supposed to matter.
I know a lot of adoptive parents think they’ll do it “better” than my parents, or at the least, different. They’ll be more encouraging of their child’s cultural heritage by sending them to culture camps, buying books and movies with characters in their child’s culture or by learning how to cook their native foods.
All that is good, and I certainly would have appreciated more of that as I grew up. But – as much as I loved my parents and felt like I was part of their family, there were many, many times growing up when I just felt like I was playing the role expected of me and worked very hard to internalize any feelings of discontent, sadness or anger.
If adoptive parents believe that it won’t matter, that their love and culture camps will be enough, what will happen if it’s not? What if all the culture camps and Chinese New Years and trips to the Korean grocery store aren’t enough? How will they feel if their children one day reject it all?
Sometimes, they get angry with us when we speak about what our lives have been like, the disconnectedness and the issues of trust and abandonment we carry on long after we graduate and leave the home. They refer to us as ‘killjoys’ or assume we must be psychologically damaged and are the exception, not the rule. They point out all the “well-adjusted” adoptees they knew.
Those “well-adjusted” adoptees might feel the same way we outspoken ones do – only maybe they’re still playing the part, wearing the mask of unhappiness, wondering when their reflection will show who they are inside.
Even today I’m often caught off guard when I see myself in pictures and look in the mirror. Somehow I still have to re-frame my mind to see myself for who I really am. Changing my name helped. But it won’t erase all those years of feeling like cutting my face out of family photographs so I wouldn’t have to be reminded that I didn’t fit in.
Lyrics to “Reflection” written by Matthew Wilder and David Zipple
Look at me,
You may think you see
Who I really am,
But you’ll never know me.Everyday,
it’s as if I play
A part.Now I see,
If I wear a mask,
I can fool the world,
but I cannot fool my heart.Chorus:
Who is that girl I see?
Staring straight,
Back at me.
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside?I am now,
In a world
Where I have to hide in my heart,
and what I believe in.But somehow,
I will show the world what’s inside my heart,
And be loved for who I am.Who is that girl I see,
staring straight
back at me?
Why is my reflection someone I don’t know?Must I pretend that I’m
someone else
for all time.
When will my reflection show,
who I am inside?There’s a heart that must be free
to fly
That burns with a need to know
the reason whyWhy must we all conceal
What we think
How we feel?Must there be
a secret me
I’m forced to hide
I won’t pretend that I’m
someone else
for all time.When will my reflection show
who I am inside?When will my reflection show
who I am inside?
—
Jae Ran Kim, MSW is a social worker, teacher and writer. She was born in Taegu, South Korea and was adopted to Minnesota in 1971. She has written numerous articles and essays and is most recently published in the anthology “Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption” from South End Press. Jae Ran’s blog, Harlow’s Monkey, is at http://harlowmonkey.typepad.com/
As the adoptive mother of a transculturally/transracially adopted child, I think that for sanity’s sake many of us have to think, “I can learn from other people’s mistakes and I can do better.” I think we HAVE to believe this to shoulder on. That’s NOT to excuse those adoptive parents who dismiss the voices of adult adoptees but to try to explain that sometimes it’s incredibly hard to hear that we are helpless to help our kids.
My take on this is that my responsibility isn’t to heal Madison but to hear her. I hope that I have the strength NOT to attach myself to her happiness and make her somehow responsible for ME and my feelings as she struggles to make sense of her identity. I don’t know if I’ll be successful with this — she’s only two, after all — but in many ways it seems that adoptive parenting is parenting plus. All of the things that I feel are important for my (bio) son — loving support, loving detachment, giving him room to be who he is, having the strength to withstand his ugliest emotions, unconditional acceptance — seem even more important for my daughter, whose needs (by virtue of her complicated arrival to her family) may be even bigger.
I do know that she owes me nothing — not her happiness, not her love, not her success. Of course I want these things for her but I’m not looking to my kids to prove my worth as a mother or to prove that the grand experiment of being their mother was a success.
I just hope I can remember that when the going gets tough. Right now it’s all theory.
Jae Ran-
The message in this post is incredibly personal, and I thank you for sharing.
I want to say I feel for you, I want to say the family you build for yourself is one of the most affirming you will ever know, but…
that does not mitigate the moments in which you felt all your growing emotional consciousness was not affirmed.
I will say I am glad you are here to share as you do, lending courage and insight to my own journey through this life, through parenting (my mosaic family), through befriending and seeking to enter into each moment with a heightened consciousness of working to respect what each person brings into the room with them.
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Thank you for sharing your feelings as an adopted adult in a transracial/transcultural family. I appreciate your insight as I am a mother to a son who was born in Guatemala an adopted as an infant. We also have a biracial biological daughter (aa/cc) and find your entire site to be informative.
I hope you will blog again about your experience(s) in a transracial family.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and feelings.
Steph
Adoptive Family Forums
http://www.adoptionfriendly.com
As a very concerned older sister of two adopted transracial sisters whom I love more than any humans I have ever encountered, I am seeking any means possible to help inform my family on ways to responsibly 1)be a white family raising Chinese American children 2) how to not forget the debt we owe to the women in China whose babies we have taken (as in finding ways to support the organizations there and in the US to stop the things that led to the current very complex and messed up situation)
…and I am seeking any advice I might be able to get on web sites, books and organizations. I know that ultimately it will be listening to my sisters with an open heart and open mind, but I want to find a way to to help them find their voices on their race and adoption. I want to know how to help them find and accept that anger as they grow older. They will be the only ones who can do this ultimately, but I want them to know that we accept and love them through every transformation they take, and I cannot do that if I am not fully informed. I would be very grateful, as I am at a place of confusion, guilt and love, on this very very complicated issue and want to find any way to support these amazing children to grow into the brilliant women I know they will someday be.
Thank you.
There is definitely a dichotomy in being adopted into a family of different ethnic origin. But I wonder if one’s depth of insecurity comes more from deeply hidden memories of abandonment or withdrawal from one’s mother than from being “different” from those around us. I am an American-born Korean with little, if any, comfort with Korean culture. My parents tried to instill Korean culture in me and my two brothers, but we were so resistant because of our peers, who didn’t really make us feel different.
In retrospect, I can see that my struggle with identity came from various places, but they were all externally influenced, just as other people’s insecurities are. It takes remembering those influences and handling the emotions they caused to get rid of our insecurities no matter who we are. As an “ethnic” person in a dominantly-Caucasian society, I realized how my looking different from others molded me, and I didn’t like it. It made me “special”. But the truth was, I wasn’t. I deserved nothing more than anyone else. I had to handle my disgust toward people who didn’t understand what it was like to be stared at for being Oriental; I had to get rid of my anger towards my parents for raising me a little different from my friends; I cried cups (rather than buckets) remembering incidents that hurt me and made me feel different. I did this talking with people who I trusted, but mostly from writing in journals, then reading their entries until I became comfortable. If you write in a journal and are unable to read it without feeling discomfort, whatever you wrote (or remembered) is exactly the root of an insecurity. But we can’t let embarrassment or fear keep ourselves from healing by avoiding it.
Truthfully, deep inside we are not different from each other. On the outside we are different, even in our personalities. But inside, in the way we make decisions, in the ways we react to pain and with emotions, we are all the same. We are not better or worse than anyone.
By the way, I’m working on becoming more comfortable with Korean culture by using Rosetta Stone to learn Korean.