I arrived to Philadelphia on Friday and hunkered down in a La Colombe coffee shop until I finished my PowerPoint presentations. Conference festivities began that evening with a guided dumpling making session, in which we were able to eat some of the dumplings we made. The remaining dumplings were donated to the Asian Food Collective, a food justice organization dedicated to bringing culturally relevant food to community members in South Philly. Immediately after the dumpling dinner was an organized Mahjong event. I hadn’t planned on staying, but one table didn’t have enough players, and they quickly convinced me to play just one game. It has been many years since I played Mahjong. Luckily, one of the adoptees at my table had a strong familiarity with the game because her adoptive mother is Chinese.

The next morning, I gave my keynote presentation, which came from a paper that I am working on with my advisor, Dr. Gina Miranda Samuels, about the history of Chinese international adoptions. Because this history isn’t discussed in schools and I didn’t know what the conference goers’ level of knowledge would be, I thought this topic would be useful in rooting us all in a shared history and providing some of the context — the theme of the conference — for conversations that would happen over the weekend.

On the same stage, just fifteen minutes later, I presented on the Adoptee Consciousness Model, a project that Dr. JaeRan Kim, Dr. Susan Branco, and I have been working on for over three years now! While some were familiar with the model already, it is always interesting to share our work with new audiences and glean feedback from adoptees.

After lunch, I was able to simply be a conference attendee. I attended a zine workshop by Cal of Marcescence Magazine and Cam McCafferty, a mixed-race Chinese and white, transnational adoptee from Canada. Cam shares a powerful zine about their adoptee experience here.

Making this conference even more special than it already was, one of my dear Chinese adoptee friends who hadn’t initially planned on attending the conference drove over five hours to spend the evening with me. We got dinner in Chinatown (SAVE CHINATOWN) with some friends from the Network of Politicized Adoptees and watched the open mic show that was the evening entertainment portion of the conference. I was so impressed with all of the creatives who shared their talents through poetry, letter writing, dance, and spoken word. Many of the adoptees who performed were in middle or high school when I first began writing this blog, which was my primary tool to process my adoptee identity. As I immersed myself in the Korean adoptee community of Minnesota, I remember having a sense of waiting for my fellow Chinese adoptees to reach adulthood, to see who we would be and what we would contribute as a collective. A feeling of pride washed over me as I watched these artistic methods Chinese adoptees are using to process and express their adoptee identities. Moreover, the show reminded me of the power of creating something beautiful in a world and from circumstances that can be so ugly.

One of the highlights of Saturday’s open mic was viewing this short film by Leah Xiuzhen Rathe.

Another memorable performance was the concluding act, a drag performance by Cai Yan Pepper/Jaime Renman.

The conference concluded on Sunday with a panel on adoptees’ experiences when returning to China and a panel on birth parent search and reunion. I so appreciated these panels that were specific to the Chinese adoptee context, because birth search is so different for Korean adoptees who have some documentation and for U.S. domestic adoptees who do not have to confront language and ocean barriers in the process. However, because panelists had only been in reunion for a couple of years or less, long term implications and navigation of birth family reunion could not be discussed.

During my time on the advisory council for the KAAN Conference, there were a large number of first-time attendees each year as well as adoptees who were new to thinking about adoption in nuanced and critical ways, oftentimes culminating in what ACM terminology would call a rupture moment at the conference. One notable difference between this conference and KAAN was that no one seemed surprised or overwhelmed by thinking of adoption as being rooted in systems of oppression, inequitable policies, and complicated notions of family. I attribute this to the relatively young ages of Chinese adoptees, the majority of whom are Gen-Z, digital natives, and the oldest of whom are millennials, the first generation to grow up with widespread internet access. Because we have had access to adoptee resources and digital community at a much younger age, adoptee consciousness seems to be occurring sooner, too.

As I looked around the room, which was full of dark hair and youthful faces, I noticed the subtle ways people had accentuated their Chinese adoptee identities by donning delicate jade jewelry, red knotted bracelets, and tattoos of their Chinese names and Chinese themes. Because the setting was less formal than a hotel or convention center and because we were all relatively peer age (perhaps a 10 year age span, roughly early 20s to early 30s), the experience felt somewhat reminiscent of the Chinese culture camp for adoptive families that I attended when I was growing up, but this time without the parents.

As someone who’s been involved with Korean adoptee groups for a long time, I did feel like something was missing through not having multiple generations of adoptees there. Because Korean international adoptions have taken place over such a long period of time, the Korean adoptee community has varying levels of wisdom from within. I have learned so much from older adoptees sharing their life experiences and milestones that I have yet to reach; however, all of us at this conference have had limited life experience at this point. I wonder if this tight age range will result in our Chinese adoptee community considering issues more in the present rather than future casting. Additionally, I wonder how we will balance this need/desire to have a space of our own with the profound benefits of learning with and from adoptees who have been doing this work a lot longer.

One of the difficult parts of being such a truncated group, where we were all adopted within a relatively short time span, is that we are trying to lead while at the same time we’re still learning. Yet because our adoptee cohort is a relatively young one, our story as a group is largely still unwritten. The history I relayed in my keynote presentation is one that has happened to us, but now that we are adults, we are the agents in shaping what our continued Chinese adoptee legacy and history will be. I know this conference is just the beginning, and I can’t wait to see what we are going to do.

We are living in strange times where a permanent resident graduate student has been detained by ICE and a surgeon/professor has been deported despite a judge’s order. Both of these individuals have a legal right to be here. Just a couple of days ago, Republicans introduced a new law to ban Chinese international students from coming to the United States. In this anti-immigrant, anti-China administration, documented proof of citizenship feels more important than ever. Though international adoptees may not always be recognized by others (and sometimes by ourselves) as immigrants, the law sees us this way. If you do not have a Certificate of Citizenship, you can file for one for free as an adoptee at this website. Please, protect yourself.

I was adopted from Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China on June 17, 1997. I was three years old at the time and unable to anticipate what dramatic life changes were in store for me. For the last 27 years, adoption has impacted so many facets of my life – many of them out of my control, and some of them within. Through what I chose to study in college, who I sought out for friendship, what I choose to nourish my body with, how comfortable (or uncomfortable) I feel in certain Asian American spaces, and what I continue to pursue academically and professionally, adoption is a core part of me. It’s something I think about everyday – some days more than others – and especially a lot recently.

I was standing in my bathroom on September 04, 2024, aimlessly scrolling on my phone while brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed, when I stumbled upon the Nanchang Project’s Instagram post announcing the end of China’s international adoption program. They were the first organization to break the news publicly, and I was initially unable to find any other news sources that had reported on the topic. My first reaction was one of denial and disbelief mixed with some skeptical optimism that the news might be true.

The next morning when I woke up, several other adoptees and adoptive parents had shared the letters that were sent by the State Department to adoption agencies and to waiting families regarding China’s decision to close its doors to international adoption. Once I finally allowed myself to believe the news, like many Chinese adoptees have expressed, a myriad of emotions washed over me. Among the adoptees who responded to the Nanchang Project’s blog prompt about the end of Chinese international adoption, the primary feelings seem to be a sense of relief that others won’t have to experience international adoption, and instead, will have the opportunity to be raised in their culture and home country, as well as a heightened sense of concern about what will happen to our birth and adoption records in China. Other feelings adoptees have relayed are empathy for the families who were in the middle of the adoption process when this news suddenly came out, genuine concern about whether social services will be strengthened in China for children and people with disabilities (who were the primary recipients of the Chinese international adoption program in more recent years), confusion that something that has been so impactful in our lives can simply be “over” on a policy level when it can never truly be “over” for us, and a fear that, with no new members, our community may become even more marginalized. I have also heard from some Chinese adoptees who wanted to adopt from China in the future, so for them, there’s a sadness that this is no longer a possibility.

In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Grace Gerloff, a Chinese adoptee and PhD student in anthropology, highlighted the concerns about what the end of Chinese international adoption means for “future access to our birth records — if there are any to be found — or any of our documents.” I’m not convinced that our records would have been safer or suddenly made more accurate if Chinese international adoption continued. Orphanages close down or change leadership, which are times that files can and do get shuffled. In my case, the social welfare institute that I was adopted from still exists, but the building I lived in for over a year was demolished and moved to a new site in 2015. Because of the One Child Policy and the fact that most of us were relinquished anonymously, Chinese adoptees, for the most part, do not have any birth records held by orphanages, and the records that do exist are likely sparse with few meaningful details and often contain fraudulent and fabricated information.

If this is the case, why are these records so important to Chinese adoptees? More than just the documents themselves, they are the very first pieces of information about us and represent a lifeline to finding out who we were and who we could have become. These documents are relics of our individual and collective existence in China. Katie Naftzger, a Korean adoptee a psychotherapist in the Boston area, argues in her book that one of the most challenging parts of adoption is that we have “no words, no witnesses, no documentation,” which is a phrase that has stuck with me. While we may not have much documentation of our pre-adoptive lives, through documentary films, memoirs, and blogs like this one, adoptees are creating forms of documentation that serve as collective memory, proof of our being, and public acknowledgement of what happened to us. With the closing of China’s international adoption program, there is a fear that our records may disappear or “get lost in a fire or other natural disaster” (a not uncommon phrase when adoptees search) as China attempts to forget about this time period and forget about us, which would be a second rejection from a country many of us have held in our hearts. As China has done with other events in its history, I hope that the horrors of the One Child Policy and all of its aftermath will not be swept under the rug, and that we, adoptees, will not be relegated to a brief footnote in history, if present at all.

For me, the word random has felt particularly meaningful in the midst of all of this. So many aspects of adoption are random. Throughout my life, I’ve marveled countless times that simply because of different decisions by social workers here in the U.S. or by officials in China, I could have been placed with any number of families who adopted in 1996 or 1997. An even stranger realization is that I could have been sent anywhere across the globe and could have become Swedish or Spanish or Australian. Now with the closing of China’s international adoption program, I can’t help but think how random it is that I happened to have been born in this tiny blip of time, given the vastness of China’s thousands of years of history, where the country chose to send its children abroad for adoption – intersected with an even smaller amount of time where predominantly healthy girls were sent away. Adoptees know intimately what it means for our entire lives to be dictated by political whims, climates, and mistakes.

A question that I have grappled with throughout my participation at adoptee conferences and spaces is more than just recognizing and responding to the inherent traumas in adoption, how do we instill pride in a community that wants to become extinct? What does joy and what does liberation look like for such a community? Of course, this doesn’t describe every adoptee’s perspective, but as stated by Hannah Johns, a Chinese adoptee and social worker in New York, “the blunt reality is that there will be fewer families in existence like mine. And none will likely be created the way mine was ever again.” The news of China ending their international adoption program creates a sense of finality to the idea that we, Chinese adoptees, will go extinct. As families that are created through international adoption become rarer, they should absolutely be accepted and de-stigmatized as a less legitimate type of family; however I don’t believe that adoption should be normalized in the ways it has been again.

I agree with JaeRan Kim’s statement in her Lab Notes 21 that China closing its international adoption program represents “the end of transnational adoption as we know it.” After Korea, China has sent the second largest number of children abroad for international adoption. And since the opening of its program, China has been the largest exporter of children across the world in the last 30 years. With international adoption out of Korea at just a trickle now, the practice banned for citizens in a few European countries, and the end of adoptions from China, I don’t think that international adoption will be as widespread and systematically practiced again. And that’s a good thing.

I know that this news hit especially hard for many who hoped to expand their families through adoption, including some Chinese adoptees who assumed they, too, would adopt from China. International adoption is predicated on the positive assumptions that we are a global community with more in common than different and that nations will support other nations in times of need. It feels good to believe in these ideals. However, the way that international adoption has played out over the last 80 years has not upheld these values at its core, favoring instead the mass amount of wealth to be gained through the commodification of children and the personal desire of many people who have been desperate to become parents, oftentimes unknowingly at the expense of existing families. When corruption, trafficking of wanted children, coercion of birth families, and fabricated paperwork to create “paper orphans” occur in every single place that allows international adoption, they are not location issues rather ones that are endemic to and embedded within the whole system.

Some have questioned the sincerity of the intentions behind the decision for China to stop international adoption and claim that rising U.S. – China tensions are to blame. According to CNN, the ministry’s spokesperson Mao Ning relayed, “This is in line with the spirit of relevant international conventions,” as part of the country’s rationale. In addition to the current population crisis, which is undoubtedly a factor, and the already drastic decline of international adoptions out of China since 2005, Mao is correct that the decision does reflect trends in the shifting landscape of global child welfare. I immediately thought of the Resolution on the Rights of the Child , which was unanimously ratified by all member states of the United Nations General Assembly, including China, on December 18, 2019. As written in Section 1, point 22 of the resolution, the United Nations:

Urges all States parties to intensify their efforts to comply with their obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to preserve the identity of children, including their nationality, name and family relations, as recognized by law, to protect children in matters relating to birth registration, family relations and adoption or other forms of alternative care, recognizing that every effort should be directed to enabling children to remain in or swiftly return to the care of their parents or, when appropriate, other close family members and that, where alternative care is necessary, family and community-based care should be promoted over placement in institutions

I see the future of international adoption being much rarer, and when it does occur, at a more local level – perhaps Syrian children being adopted by relatives in Lebanon or Ukrainian orphans adopted by extended family in Poland. The current Chinese adoption law allows for international adoption only in the cases of step-parent adoptions and direct kin within three generations. I don’t think that children will cross such distances at such high rates again. And if that does happen, we will not have learned from the advocacy and life stories of the hundreds of thousands of international adoptees that currently exist.

While following the news on our honeymoon, my husband (wow, my first time using that word in writing!) asked me if I thought I would continue studying Chinese and international adoption if this truly signals an end to the practice or pivot in another direction. My answer is that I remain as dedicated as ever to creating work and knowledge that benefits my community, so that adoptees’ feelings and experiences are validated, so that non-adoptees better understand adoptees, and so that adoption professionals are better prepared to serve the needs of adoptees and their adoptive families. Moreover, I want Chinese adoptee to be able to see ourselves represented in the literature, not only as the child subjects of others’ research, but as the creators and makers of knowledge, and as whole individuals with all our strengths and struggles.

While no new Chinese adoptees may be created, studying Chinese adoptees is still relevant because little is known about the Chinese adoptees who have already been adopted and how we will continue to develop over time. In my opinion, there has been a real flattening of Chinese adoptees into a fictional single cohort. We’ve run with numbers and findings from initial “outcomes” studies on Chinese adoptees from the mid-2000s as if we can definitively know what lifelong outcomes will be from a 12-year-old. Very little has been written on disabled Chinese adoptees, Chinese adoptees who have been raised in large, Christian evangelical families, queerness and the ways Chinese adoptees are embodying fluidity of identity in multiple realms, and almost no attention has been given to the thousands of male Chinese adoptees. As we know from history, trends often occur in swells and dips. If ours is a fixed population, a finite group of people, it is even more urgent that our stories are preserved now, so that they don’t die with us, and so that the next time someone thinks dispersing children around the world might be a good idea, our truths are readily available.

The current trend in global child welfare is a shift from congregate care to deinstitutionalization for children who require out-of-home care as outlined in the 2019 Resolution on the Rights of the Child. Adoption Studies is pertinent to this area as well because some of the major actors, including adoption agencies and Christian organizations, who were deeply involved in promoting international adoption, are now at the helm of the new deinstitutionalization movement. Simply because an organization was successful at finalizing adoptions does not mean they will be successful at deinstitutionalization. While I ultimately agree with the principles of placing children in family-like care settings over orphanages, this will have to be closely monitored. Further, as it becomes more difficult to adopt internationally, people with the financial means to do so will likely turn to assisted reproductive technologies, including donor gametes and surrogacy. These alternatives raise many of the same questions that are involved in adoption — traumatic separation for the baby at birth, unknown heritage and parental identity, potentially intentional creation of transracial families, and all of the ethical quandaries involved in commodifying children.

In a similar vein to the idea that “our homeland is each other” (a quote that should be attributed to Mark Hagland stated at a KAAN Conference), I believe we are each others’ ancestors. I have been cut off from my ancestors in China, a filial relationship I may never know. However, I truly feel a kindred connection to the adoptees of the generations before me who have paved the way thus far and a kin-like responsibility to adoptees of younger generations and who are yet to exist. My promise is that I will do everything in my power to make sure that Chinese adoptees and international adoptees are not a forgotten group of people. In the wake of this news, it feels even more important to find each other, be in community, and let our voices be heard.

Cover image by Rudy Buhagiar at the Terracotta Daughters exhibit by Prune Nourry.

At the end of June, I was extremely honored to be invited to speak at a dinner meeting with the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (WHIAANHPI). This listening session was held in Minnetonka, Minnesota while members of the White House Initiative were traveling through the state to meet with other AANHPI communities in Minnesota.

The meeting began by Dr. Kim Park Nelson, a Korean adoptee and professor of ethnic studies, providing a broad overview of Asian adoptions to the United States. From this launching point, the rest of the group highlighted contemporary issues that we wanted the WHIAANHPI to consider on a federal level. Margie Andreason (Korean adoptee) and Mari Arneson (Chinese adoptee) from the Network of Politicized Adoptees discussed the importance of centering Asian adoptees in Asian American spaces. Han G-In (Korean adoptee) and Jon Jee (Korean adoptee) spoke about cultural and community connection for adoptees through the arts. Rachel Koelzer (Korean adoptee) from Adoptees for Justice talked about the urgency of getting the Adoptee Citizenship Act passed. Lisa Ellingson (Korean adoptee) highlighted the need for more lifelong post-adoption support services. Heewon Lee (Korean adoptee) talked about medical disadvantages for adoptees with unknown health histories. Finally, JaeRan Kim (Korean adoptee), Lindsay Pluger (Indian adoptee), and I spoke about mental heath and racial isolation for Asian adoptees.

After the formal speaking portion of the meeting was over, we enjoyed a special off-menu dinner prepared by the Marriott’s chef and were gifted presidential Hershey’s Kisses.

I was heartened to learn that many of the members of the WHIAANHPI were already somewhat familiar with issues regarding citizenship, discrimination, and health equity discussed by the adoptee presenters and that they listened to our statements and suggestions with such attentiveness. This event also reaffirmed for me the power of collaboration and what is possible when we all come together to share our skills, passions, and knowledge. It was so wonderful to be able to advocate on behalf of my Asian American adoptee community in this way.

If you are interested in knowing specifically what information we shared with the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, please read our collective statement below:

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Public Submission on Asian Adoptee Needs and Experience to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (WHIAANHPI) Commission

Submitted by Asian American Adoptees: Margie Andreason, Mari Arneson, Lisa Ellingson, Han G-In Brooke Newmaster, Jon Jee, JaeRan Kim, PhD, MSW, Rachel Koelzer, Heewon Lee, MS, CGC, Kim Park Nelson, PhD, Grace Newton, LMSW, Lindsay Pluger

1 August, 2024

We wish to thank members of the WHIAANHPI Commission (Teresita Batayola, Luisa Blue, Sonal Shah, and KaYing Yang), WHIAANHPI Executive Director Krystal Ka’ai, Deputy Assistant to the President and Asian American and Pacific Islander Senior Liaison Erika Moritsugu, who met with the Asian adoptee community in Minnesota on June 30, 2024. This written statement is our submission of remarks prepared for that meeting.

Background

There have been about half a million people adopted transnationally into the United States, and Asian adoptees constitute about half that number. The largest group of Asian adoptees were born in Korea (~117,000). The second largest group are from mainland China (~97,000).  Most Asian adoptees are adopted into white families. Though we are numerically dominated by Korean and Chinese adoptees, Asian adoptees are a diverse group. In addition to Korean and Chinese adoptees, there are over 10,000 Vietnamese adoptees, over 10,000 Indian adoptees, over 7,000 Filipino adoptees, almost 3000 Taiwanese adoptees, over 2000 Thai adoptees, between 700 and 800 adoptees from Hong Kong and a few hundred Japanese adoptees. Our experiences have also been shaped by the time period we arrived in the US: racial and cultural politics and practices as we grew up hugely influenced the way we were seen (or not) as Asian Americans, as well as if and how we have been able to access Asian and/or Asian immigrant communities as Asian Americans.

Asian transnational adoption began after the Korean War in 1953, and South Korea not only initiated the practice of overseas adoption from Asia but has maintained that practice more or less continuously ever since. South Korea’s 71-year history of transnational adoption to the US makes the Korean American adoptee population the largest and, on average, oldest of the Asian adoptee groups in the US. Korean adoption peaked in the mid-1980s, with more than 6000 arrivals per year in 1985 and 1986. Therefore, the oldest Korean adoptees could be in their 80s today. The largest generation of Korean adoptees are now entering middle age, and the youngest could still be infants. The second-largest group, from mainland China, began to arrive in the early 1990s and peaked in 2005 with almost 9000 arriving that year. This group of Chinese adoptees are now entering college and the workforce. The arrival of other Asian adoptee groups from India and Southeast Asia coincided with an intensified interest in overseas adoption since the 1990s, with the exception of groups of Japanese and Hong Kong adoptees who arrived earlier.

Though the Asian adoptee community is very diverse, current adoptee-centered research has reported several shared characteristics of these populations: 

• Most Asian adoptees report experiences of anti-Asian racism, and many are not supported in an Asian American community because they have yet to find that community. 
• Asian American communities have made efforts to embrace and understand Asian adoptees, but often the cultural differences between us are too great; there are a lot of misunderstandings and missed connections, perhaps because adoptees have already been effectively integrated into white families and are reluctant to be integrated into another cultural formation that may refuse to see us for our own experiences.
• Adoptees of color commonly talk about feeling “in-between” in that they don’t feel accepted by the white communities they were adopted into but also don’t feel they fit into their birth countries or in their constituent Asian American communities because of cultural barriers.
• Unfortunately, in-betweenness is characteristic of policy and services for adoptees. Immigration services have been uneven for adoptees, creating a crisis for those who never attained citizenship. Health services, including mental health services, are also lacking. Finally, recognition in terms of representation tends to be spotty and can be based in problematic stereotypes.

Our in-betweenness is not just self-imposed: adoptees’ needs for information, education and services are so poorly addressed that it is almost as if what is on offer for us is just a series of gaps. From our perspectives as adoptees, including those of us who are educators, we know that most transnationally adopted people have little or no access to their own histories— meaning both our personal histories and the history of adoption from our countries of origin. Though we have stories told by our adoptive families but these may or may not be accurate since much of the misinformation about transnational adoption was created for the benefit of adoptive parents and the adoption industry.

Efforts to meet needs specific to adoptees from the time they are adopted are commonly referred to as “post-adoption services.” In the adoption industry, these services have mostly been focused on supporting families with newly adopted children, but we have a more adoptee-focused and comprehensive vision for what these services could and should be. 

“Post-Adoption Services” for Adult Asian American Adoptees

There is a world-wide population of over 200,000 Korean adoptees, most of whom are currently adults. That population of adoptees has formed Korean adoptee networks in every country, including the US, where there is a sizable population of Korean adoptees. The first one was formed in Sweden in 1986. The oldest US-based Korean adoptee organization was established in 1996.  These organizations have been started and run by adult adoptees and have provided the programming that we wanted for ourselves rather than what adoptive parents or social workers thought we needed. These Korean adoptee-led organizations have been informally providing services to the Korean and other Asian adoptee communities since that time.

An international consortium of Korean adoptee organizations called the International Korean Adoptee Associations (IKAA) has been holding conferences for the global Korean adoptee community since 2004 and has represented the transnational adoptee community in the Netherlands at the Special Commission of The Hague Adoption Convention (the UN international adoption treaty) four times, in 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2022.  And on all but one of those occasions, of the hundreds of participants who were there, we were the only adoptee voice in the room speaking for adoptees, where Lisa Ellingson, representing IKAA, advocated for effective, adoptee-driven post-adoption services.

As noted above, many Asian adoptees experience racial and cultural isolation. In an analysis of census data, scholars Rose Kreider and Elizabeth Raleigh found that unlike interracial families, Asian adoptees were more likely to be raised like White mono-racial families. In fact, the average transnational transracial adopted Asian child lived in counties with less diversity than the average White child with White parents. Although Asian families may live in non-diverse communities, Asian adoptees raised by White parents are likely to have even fewer resources and opportunities for cultural permanency. This often leads to challenges with racial and ethnic identity and can complicate normative identity development. The numbers of Asian transnational adoptions are decreasing, in line with overall transnational adoption. The number of adoptions started to decline around 2004, and since then, children being adopted are much more likely to be older and to have one or more disabilities.

From the “post adoption services” viewpoint, some of what we want to draw focus to here is specific to adoption and adoptees and necessarily excludes everyone else. And it may be for that reason that adoptees seem to have been dealt with typically as a “State Department issue” or a “Health and Human Services issue” instead of through the Children’s Bureau. Asian adoptions are the minority in the US foster care system. The resources and programs for adopted children funded by the Children’s Bureau often leave out transnational adoptees, which means our mental health and well-being are not considered. 

However, there is significant overlap between our experiences and needs as adoptees and the experiences and needs of other Asian Americans. For example, we are building community through organizing. We are discussing issues of race. We are trying to understand our family histories and cultures through barriers and from very far away. And, especially now, we are also working with and raising the next generation of Asian Americans impacted by adoption. 

Mental Health Needs

Although we recognize that the lack of attention to mental health needs is a problem that extends beyond adoptee communities, we do want to point to some specific gaps we see within our communities. Specifically, we want to highlight findings from two published studies. Reyes et al. (2024) found an alarming rise in suicide among Asian American youth and young adults over the last 20 years, which is consistent with recent statistics from the CDC that show suicide is the leading cause of death for Asian American young people, a fact that is not true of any other racial group. Those of us in the adoptee community know all too well the statistic from a 2013 study by Keyes et al. study that shows adoptees are 4 times more likely to attempt and complete suicide than non-adopted individuals. Thus, Asian American adoptees sit at the crux of two identities that both have heightened risk for suicide.

The Covid-19 pandemic is another example that illustrates the additional vulnerabilities of Asian adoptees within the broader Asian American population. As Asian Americans, many of us experienced a sense of hyper-vigilance or anxiety in public due to the rise of anti-Asian hate and the preponderance of racialized speech about the virus. However, many Asian adoptees did not come home to safe environments at the end of the day in which they were met with empathy. Instead, our parents and relatives often espoused the same racialized rhetoric about Covid and denied the existence of racism all together. As people removed from our original countries and cultures, we often do not have the ability to code switch or the social capital to fit into Asian communities that may otherwise be supportive. Simultaneously, the attacks on Asians during Covid made it clear that we do not enjoy the same safety as our White families, despite having been brought up in them.

The CDC has recently identified racism as a public health crisis. The strongest protective factor that reduces the impacts of racism is community cultural wealth created through strong ties to one’s culture, family, and racial-ethnic community. When transracial adoptees are isolated within white families and communities and excluded from Asian spaces for which we have no natural entrance point, where can we turn but to each other? Transracial adoptees are at risk of experiencing daily racism both externally in the world and within in our adoptive families. This means that Asian transracial adoptees are potentially experiencing racism regularly at every point in our lives as babies, as children, and as adults. We don’t have any mental health treatments to combat racism in adoptive families. In fact, our national adoption laws, including the Multiethnic Placement Act (1994) and the Interethnic Placement Act (1996) legally prevent social workers from talking about race and racism with prospective adoptive families. 

Lack of knowledge and understanding of the mental health effects of adoption is often an obstacle to meeting the need for post-adoption mental health support. In order to be effective providers for adoptees, mental health providers need to examine and challenge their own positive and negative assumptions about adoption and develop an understanding of how the ramifications of transracial and international adoption affect adoptees’ lifelong experiences. Adoption-competent social workers should be trained in intervention models that adoptive families and adopted persons can employ.  It is important to ensure BSW and MSW curricula provide interventions and training around attachment-based, trauma-informed parenting approaches for children with a history of relationship-based trauma, including abuse, neglect, institutionalization, and/or multiple foster-care placements. Currently, there are not enough BSW and MSW programs that demonstrate this level of preparation. As a result, social workers learn on the job or on their own, meaning problems could arise for adoptees not properly supported with post-adoption resources. Organizations such as the NIH and CDC that provide health support need to open up more funding streams for mental health support, including programs that cover these topics. 

It is extremely important for Asian adoptees to be seen within the context of issues and experiences that disproportionately impact Asian Americans; however, it is also urgent to recognize that we are a minority within a minority, with unique challenges that require additional support. One possibility to ensure that the various needs discussed here are addressed is through greater inclusion in existing advisory bodies. We are invisible Asians. Only when we are represented in leadership positions at the national level can we be sure that Asian adoptees are being considered in the decisions that affect us all. 

Access to Genetic Testing and Health Equity

The gold standard employed to evaluate risk for cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological conditions, chromosomal disorders in pregnancy, and rare genetic diseases is family health history. For example, if there is a family history of breast cancer at 45, first-degree relatives can start mammograms at 35. This is vital information. Intercountry adoptees are at a disadvantage from the moment we are adopted due to missing, untranslated, incomplete and false adoption records. This means we do not have full and complete family health histories to help us access preventive screening and treatments. Without this valuable information, adoptees are relegated to being considered at average risk, which means many of us are barred from knowledge of our disease risks, and thus cannot access lifesaving care and treatments until we ourselves become ill. 

In collaboration with genetic counselors, adoptees can gain invaluable personal information about their risks through genetic testing. Currently, patients with a family history of more common diseases like cancer and rare disorders like cystic fibrosis can receive genetic testing more readily through insurance. But adoptees and others without family health history generally do not have coverage for these genetic tests and often cannot afford to pay for them out of pocket. Genetic testing can save lives. If a person discovers they have a high-risk cancer variant in the genes BRCA1 or BRCA2, they can begin screening for breast cancer at 30. Contrast this to when the average population should start breast screening: 40-45. Again, genetic testing can save lives. 

We encourage the Commission to advocate on behalf of the 500,000 intercountry adoptees here in the U.S. to create a pathway for adoptees to receive genetic testing from trained professionals. We argue that adoptees are an often invisible and underserved population. The Health Equity and Accountability Act of 2022 aimed to reduce health disparities in part by modifying eligibility and other requirements for Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurance. We strongly advocate for adoptees to be added to a new bill, similar to that one, in order to increase equity in health care by improving access to genetic testing and thereby improve the lives of thousands of adoptees.

Citizenship

The authors of this statement are privileged that our parents secured citizenship for us before we turned 18, or that we arrived in the US covered by the Child Citizenship Act (2000) so we could access US citizenship without naturalization, but not all adoptees’ rights and well-being were so protected. Since 1999, we have learned that many transnational adoptees, including Asian transnational adoptees, have been deported or scheduled for deportation because they never became citizens because they are not covered by the Child Citizenship Act and they were not naturalized by their adoptive parents before they reached the age of 18.

One such adoptee, Emily, was adopted from Korea and brought to the United States by her US citizen parents when she was only 3 months old. Her citizenship was not secured before she turned 18, even though her father was an American serviceman who served in World War II. For her entire life, Emily believed she was an American citizen. Now, she’s entering her senior years under ICE surveillance and can’t access her benefits despite paying into them for decades. She and other adoptees who live without citizenship are only growing older, since adoptees born after 1983 are protected by the Child Citizenship Act. The advocacy organization Adoptees For Justice is currently pursuing pathways to relief for adoptees without citizenship. For Emily and other Asian adoptees, this includes pursuing a gubernatorial pardon in their home state. Not only has the lack of citizenship hurt adoptees themselves, but their family members are also sick with worry and desperation at being separated. We are all terrified of what could happen if relief isn’t created for her and other adoptees during this current administration. Although there is no federal documentation of the number of transnational adoptees without citizenship, and therefore no way to know precisely how many in our community are affected by this problem, there is broad support in the Asian adoptee community to close the policy gap that has profound impacts for those adoptees who, through no fault of their own, were never made citizens.

Recognizing the urgency for Emily and adoptees like her, we hope the Commission will uplift the issue of adoptee citizenship to President Biden and encourage him to press Congress to pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act this year, given that this is an issue of keeping American families together, and the bill’s widespread bipartisan support. Furthermore, if President Biden were to voice his support of an inclusive bill to Senator Hirono and Congressman Smith, the bill’s two Democratic lead sponsors, it would go a long way in bolstering their leadership. Additionally, flagging the bill to USCIS and the State Department and asking them to approve the Adoptee Citizenship Act would go a long way in moving the bill forward, because we know their approvals are needed for the Judiciary Committee to move it. An inclusive Adoptee Citizenship Act would be monumental because it would positively impact adoptees and families on a widespread scale. We wish to highlight the creative and painstaking work we and other advocates for our community have taken to provide immigration justice to transnational adoptees, both through legislative advocacy and through individual relief strategies like prosecutorial discretion. Adoptees For Justice is preparing to file 10-15 applications soon. It would be helpful if the Commission or the Domestic Policy Council could ping DHS to remind them to prioritize adoptee cases. 

Asian Adoptee Critical Mass and the Arts

It is not by accident that we write to you from the State of Minnesota; this state has become recognized as a homeland of sorts for Korean adoptees where we believe at least 15,000 have been adopted and where Korean adoptees constitute over half of the Korean American population. The large population of Korean adoptees in Minnesota is due to a combination of several factors, including policy, racial politics, culture, access to international adoption agencies and the snowball effect. The concentration of Korean adoptees in the state has supported adoptee-centered resources for transnational adoptees even if they are not of Korean descent. Minnesota currently has at least four transnational adoptee-centered networking and advocacy groups and has become a center for transnational adoptee and adoptee of color cultural and intellectual production.

Because of the large number of Asian adoptees in Minnesota and the historical support for the arts here, there is a concentration of Asian adoptee writers, actors, dancers, and musicians in the state. This means many Asian adoptees in Minnesota were first able to access their identities as Asian adoptees as performers in or audiences of theater, dance or musical performances featuring Asian adoptee artists and/or Asian adoptee stories. One consequence of the large number of Korean adoptees raised in Minnesota is that the state has a high concentration of Korean culture camps for young people. Recently, these camps have been a space where adult Asian adoptees have taken on the role of teaching and mentoring Asian adoptee youth, including in arts instruction. As we have noted in several contexts, Asian adoptees are largely invisible both as Asian Americans in white communities and as adoptees in Asian American communities because of the racial and cultural isolation we tend to experience in our adoptive communities. This means our stories and experiences are often ignored, or worse, expressed as stereotyped tropes that render our experiences to be one-dimensional. Most Asian adoptees also do not have access to our biological familial history either because that information was either lost when we were adopted or refused to us because it is now owned by adoption agencies who do not see us as their clients. Given the absence of broad access within Asian adoptee communities to both our personal and group histories, access to adoptee-centered creative and cultural work is of key importance, especially in the absence of supportive post-adoption services.

We note the Minnesota context not so much to draw attention to the State of Minnesota, but rather to suggest that it is possible for Asian adoptees to be centered and better served in locations where Asian adoptees take agency and are supported by their communities to do so.

Asian Adoptees and Asian America

We assert that transnational Asian adoptees are Asian American, whether or not we are accepted by the broader Asian American community. We live with the common denominators of anti-Asian racism and stereotypes we all face as Asian Americans.  Often our stories and experiences are told by others and misrepresent us or follow harmful dominant narratives of adoptees that do not see our full humanity: the “helpless orphan” and perpetual “child that needs to be saved,” or the “troubled and angry adoptee” seen as too damaged to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, harmful attitudes towards us are often shared by non-adopted Asian Americans. In addition, such attitudes can also manifest in Asian Americans who disrespect Asian adoptees for “not being Asian enough.” 

The preconceived ideas of Asian adoptees held by Asian Americans and the general lack of interest in learning from adoptees not only invalidates our lived experience but erases our presence as Asian Americans. The understanding of what it means to be Asian American must expand to include Asian adoptees and the complexity of our experiences. Not only should adoptees be included when representing the Asian American community, we should be present at decision-making tables. We also need Asian American leaders to advocate for the inclusion of Asian adoptees when policies will impact us. When it’s not possible for adoptees to be present, we need allies who understand the complexities of our experiences. For instance, it is important that the Asian adoptee experience be part of the Asian American story as represented in the proposed Smithsonian Asian Pacific American museum, and that Asian adoptee subject experts and scholars be central to designing exhibits that represent us.  

Our community includes multiple generations of Asian Americans. We have contributed to Asian American history and community in countless ways, including our research, advocacy, art, direct services, and community building. It’s important that adoptees have the agency to speak to our own experiences and help drive policies that impact us. Having adoptee-centered spaces within the Asian American community has been critical in building our voice and power. Adoptee contributions to the Asian American community lift up all Asian Americans. Transnational Asian adoptees are Asian American and deserve to be considered in decisions and policies that impact the Asian American community. Asian Americans often remind the broader public how diverse our community is. Often, adoptees also fight to be seen and included within the Asian American identity. Our ranks include highly skilled and educated advocates who are experts in our community experiences.  Every group wants self-determination, and we want that too. It is our hope that we will be successful in being better understood and represented within our larger Asian American communities.

In this interview, I talk about my adoption story as a movie, the meaning behind the name of my blog, give advice to my younger self, and reveal what is healing for me these days. Watch the video below or read the full interview transcript.

Episode Transcript 

Voiceover

Introduction
00:00 –> 00:41
The Voices Unheard Program at Boston Post Adoption Resources is designed to empower adult adoptees in expressing their personal stories and to expand public knowledge and awareness around lived adoptee experiences. Our program goals are accomplished through this Adoptees in 3 video series; through narrative writing workshops; adoptee-created blogs; the use of the Voices Unheard journal; as well as through Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories, which is our annual live speaker’s forum dedicated to educating the greater Boston community through creative expression and storytelling.

00:41 –> 01:38
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Hello, everyone! Welcome to Adoptees in 3: Connecting Mind, Heart and Action. My name is Lillian Hexter, and I’m really happy to have Grace Newton here with us today. So, a little bit about Grace. Grace is a PhD student at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. She’s interested in questions of race, identity, belonging, and the meaning of family after de-kinning and re-kinning. Grace’s status as a Chinese transracial adoptee drives her passion and authenticity in her personal, professional, and academic work. Grace previously worked as Public Adoption Social Worker in Wisconsin and is currently an Advisory Council member for the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network Conference, also known as KAAN, and has authored the critical adoption blog Red Thread Broken for more than a decade. And for a little bit of background, Grace and I met way back in college at Macalester College, taking a class—

01:38–> 01:41
Grace Newton: Yeah, right in our 1st year.

01:41 –> 01:47
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Yeah, 1st year of college, anything you wanna add to your kind of bio or description, Grace?

01:48 –> 01:50
Grace Newton: No, that was wonderful. Thank you, Lillian.

01:51 –> 02:08
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Alright. Thanks for being here. Maybe let’s just jump into the 3 questions. Connecting Mind, Heart and Action. The 1st question is, if you were to make a movie about your adoption journey, what would you title it and why?

02:11–> 05:18
Grace Newton: Yeah, I’ve thought about this for a little bit since you sent the question and it’s really difficult, actually. I think that as you mentioned in my bio, I’ve authored this blog called the Red Thread Broken for, yeah, over a decade now, and I think that that really has become a large part of my identity. So, I think that my movie title would incorporate, like, this Red Thread concept in some way. So, maybe you know, like Red Threads of Reflection or Tracing The Red Thread to My Roots. I think that the idea of making a movie about your adoption journey, I guess. Well, I think it’s kind of interesting, because there are a lot of, like, adoption and adoptee documentaries out there. And—but I guess movie sounds a little bit more commercial to me and a couple of things that I was thinking about in terms of like movies or storylines is I feel like, you know, we love a good rags to riches story like Little Orphan Annie and Cinderella, and I think a lot of adoptees who start questioning adoption kind of dispel some of these common storylines that we like. So, for this rags to riches thing, you know, a lot of us do come from countries and families that are less resourced than the situations where we end up. And—and that’s kind of like the rags to riches story. But then, when we start questioning like, “Oh, wait! Maybe I would have actually preferred to stay there.” It kind of, I think, throws into question these, like, this story. And another one I think about is like the hero’s journey, you know, like Star Wars, and how there’s this like, call into the unknown and then you meet this like mentor along the way, and have what—go through these trials of like rebirth, and then—But then you learn whatever you’re supposed to learn from that like outer world. And then, like, return to where you came with this like infused knowledge. And I think of adoptees, who like repatriate, and it’s kind of like the—this disruption of the hero’s journey too. Like, “Oh, wait! You didn’t return? Like why didn’t you return? You were supposed to, like, make the full circle,” and I think there are a lot of ways like the adoptee, you know. I—I did go back to China, but I—which was part of an unknown, but I think the adoptee community itself was like an unknown world to me when I, like, first kind of jumped in and . . . So, I have returned from China. I live in Chicago, but I haven’t returned out of the adoptee community like that—that part of, like, the unknown for me when I jumped in, is like—is still where I—I sit a lot of my time. And so, I think, whatever movie this would be. Yeah, I would try to like, dispel like, these two like, common plots. . . and something with like the Red Thread.

05:19–> 05:28
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Nice, and for those who don’t know, and I might need a little reminder as well, could you recap a little bit what kind of the Red Thread is? How you came to name your blog that?

05:29–> 07:01
Grace Newton: Yeah, sure. So, there’s an ancient Chinese proverb, that basically says that everyone in your life, or—or like people you have yet to meet. . . you’re connected to them through this invisible red thread that can tangle and fray or knot, but it can never be broken. And—we kind of, is this, like, you know, assumption of predestined fate. And so, my blog is called Red Thread Broken, because what I think I really noticed was a lot of adoption agencies and adoptive parents kind of co-opting this Chinese proverb to basically say that they were fated to be the parents of these Chinese adoptees and—and I . . . my blog when I started it, and I and still I wanted to really kind of question that fate aspect and to really think about the idea that if adoptive parents are saying they’re fated to be the parents of these Chinese children, then what that also is saying is that we were fated to be in positions where our families couldn’t keep us. And—and you know, in reality there are a lot of like social, political factors that, in my opinion, have nothing to do with fate.

07:02 –> 07:22
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Yeah, thank you for providing that context about how you chose that name. I know, you started this blog back when you were 19 or so, and around when we met in college. Have you been happy with the name of your blog? After this, you know, decade of working on it? Have you ever thought about wanting to change it? Or do you ever get feedback on the name of the blog?

07:24 –> 07:42
Grace Newton: No, I’ve never thought about changing it. And I think that yeah, it still rings true with how I view adoption; how I want people to be thinking about adoption, especially across race and country borders.

07:42 –> 07:59
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Yeah, it’s also just kind of like a great catchy name for a blog. I feel like it’s memorable and meaningful. And yeah, easy to recommend to people. Okay, great. So, to move on to the second question of Heart —What advice would you give to your adopted younger self?

08:00 –> 11:35
Grace Newton: Hmm . . . yeah, I think I was doing a lot of reflection about my younger, 19-year-old self. You know, around last—at the end of last summer around the like 10-year anniversary of this blog. And—and . . . I think that when I was younger, I had a lot of anxiety about, like, the future, I guess, really—where I would end up career-wise if the relationships that I was investing in were going to pan out 10 years in the future. And I just remember so often wanting like a little crystal ball, and—and not necessarily that I would need to see all the steps in between. But just like—just to see that, “Okay, things turned out.” And I’m really happy to say, I think—I think things turned out for me. And so, I think that my younger advice to my younger self is that I would worry less about that. But I do know also I think, that part of my—my worry was that I felt like I had no blueprint or roadmap of what like being an adoptee looks like, and I remember my first KAAN conference when I was 20 years old, and I walked into this room for the first time full of . . .well, mostly Korean Americans, but full of like Asian American adoptees who are at various points in their lives, and some were professors, some—one was a dentist, some were architects . . . and I was, and I remember thinking like, “Oh, my gosh! Like this is what—what it could be,” and I—I think there’s, like, a term in the queer community called like possibility model. And I really like that idea of, like, a possibility model like this is one possibility for my future. This is one possibility for my future. Yeah, because I think that even when we were like our group in college we were peer age. And so, that was a new type of relationship that was really wonderful and beneficial but it still didn’t have that like future orientation of, you know, like, “This is what like middle-age adoptees look like. This is what all the things that adoptees do with their lives.” And so, I think maybe another piece of advice, and one that I have certainly benefited from is finding good mentors. I think that peers can be mentors. And also like, mentors in the adoptee community who are doing things that you might be interested in. And I think, you know, that’s not to say the adoptee community is perfect. There’s like a lot of squabbles and issues within it. But I would say that the success of my blog and —where I am now in a PhD program. I feel like so much of that is because of adoptee mentors who have guided me and provided opportunities along the way for me to develop into, like the places that I wanted to be.

11:36 –> 12:38
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Yeah, that’s really great advice to younger self. I’ve been thinking about the same a lot, too, with the pregnancy study that I’ve been working on and that’s kind of a theme that came up in the study. Is that because a lot of us had adoptive parents who didn’t have biological children. As we move into phases of our life like starting our own families, we lack role models who have gone through the same thing. And I think for adoptees, there’s so many areas in our life where we kind of lack, you know, racial mirrors or other adoptees or mentor figures and things like that. So, I think that’s a really powerful sentiment that yeah, finding these mentors and people that we can see ourselves in the future is—is really important. Okay, so our last question is about Action. So, how are you healing today? What works for you? And then tell me about the work that you’re doing in terms of healing. This could be kind of inner healing or if you have kind of an activist lens with healing. Yeah, tell us a little bit about your journey with this.

12:41 –> 19:32
Grace Newton: Yeah. Hmm, I think how I’m healing today. . .. Well, as I mentioned, I’m in the midst of a PhD program, and I’m also in the midst of wedding planning, and I think a lot of people would consider both of those things as forms of torture. But I also do think that they are both parts of my healing process, I think. I think first with my PhD research and work for me . . . I’ve been in these conference spaces and I have, yeah, had wonderful adoptee role models Kimberly Mckee, JaeRan Kim, adoptee professors who I met when I was quite young, and have like shaped the ways that I think and who I thought I could become. And so, as I am doing my PhD, I think one of the really healing things about that is not being just a consumer of research but being one of the people that is, in the process of making it and producing knowledge. I think that when I was in my master’s program, I was really disappointed with some of the research that I read on adoptees, particularly as children. And then now, I think about Chinese adoptees specifically because so much of Korean adoptee scholarship has been on Korean adoptees, which is natural, and that makes sense. But there, I think, has been a real flattening of who Chinese adoptees are. And I think there’s also been kind of an assumption that because the Korean adoptee population is more established that Chinese adoptees will kind of just use Korean adoptees as a blueprint. But I think that there are very, like, unique aspects of the Chinese adoptee experiences that I’m hoping to untangle and—and work through. And so, for me, I think, being yeah, being at the table, producing that knowledge and—and also just bringing issues for Chinese adoptees more to the surface. Those are all ways of, I think, healing in a way that you know, I think is—is trying to hopefully correct some of the assumptions and things that that I’ve seen up until this point. And so, that’s part of it. And I think, in terms of the wedding planning, too. I—I wrote a little bit about this on my blog, but I’m marrying a Chinese American person. And so, we’re trying to infuse a lot of Chinese customs. You know, red is like a traditional wedding color. We’re gonna have a tea ceremony. So, we’re trying to bring these like cultural elements into our wedding. And then we’ll have a lot of like Western, like, traditional Western wedding elements, too, because we were both like raised here, after all. But I think that . . . really, I think I’ve—I’ve been in this kind of academic heady space around adoption and Asian American issues for a lot longer than—in some ways I’ve been really involved in having, like Chineseness be a really meaningful part of my personal home life. I think, I always—I took Chinese language class and dance class growing up. I, at Macalester, I was a double major, and one of my majors was Chinese language, and so I was always trying to capture these aspects of my Chinese identity, and I remember feeling or expressing when I was younger, that I just really wanted to feel balanced in my Chinese and American identities, and I think that for me, when my Chinese components of myself, other than my appearance I guess, were always something that I sought outside, like outside in a dance class; outside in a Chinese restaurant; going outside for whatever Chinese peers I had. I think that there’s no way that it could have felt more balanced, and I think now that I share my like, home-life with another Chinese American. We cook a lot of Chinese food. I can throw in random Mandarin words when I’m talking and he understands and—and it’s like one of the first times that I feel like I’m not trying to be an educator to a partner of a culture that I already feel kind of incompetent in. And—and I think that also being with him, and having this relationship with his family too, I think, not only has brought Chineseness closer and like, more like, intimately into my life, but it also, I think—kind of like the adoptee world and these possibility models. I think it shows me . . . or reaffirms that, yeah, there truly is no one way to be Chinese, American, or Chinese enough. And there are some things that I knew about Chineseness that he, who was raised by Chinese parents, like didn’t know or realize. And so, then I think, like, “Oh, yeah.” Like, you don’t have to know it all. You don’t have to be it all. And so, I think that . . . kind of like both of those like in social work terms, we might say micro and macro lens. So, the macro level would be, you know, contributing to this research and this broader project, and then the micro level of, you know, healing at home and doing all these things in my home sphere that make me feel like I have more of a unified identity.

19:33 –> 20:28
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Aw, I love that! Those are such great examples of two different areas of your life of sort of healing and bringing your identity a little bit closer. I was thinking, too, about how what you shared in the Action section connected really well to the Heart section of the advice you would give to your younger self. Cause you mentioned, you know, finding mentors and role models, and both of the people you mentioned were Korean adoptee scholars. And so, I think it’s so cool that now you get to be that maybe mentor or role model for other people because I think you know for our generation there weren’t as many Chinese adoptee scholars and activists. And now you get to kind of be leading the next generation, which is so beautiful and awesome. Anything else you want to add to any of these questions, or any other kind of topics on your mind, or things that you think would be helpful to talk about?

20:29 –> 20:31
Grace Newton: No, I think that’s it.

20:31 –> 20:39
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Okay. Alright. So, before we wrap up, if people want to learn more about you, where should they go? How can they find you?

20:41–> 21:04
Grace Newton: Sure. So, my blog is Red Thread Broken. So, you can go to http://www.redthreadbroken.com. I’m also on Facebook and Instagram under Red Thread Broken. So, just search that. And then on Twitter, I’m a little bit different. My handle is @GracePingHua, so G-R-A-C-E-P-I-N-G-H-U-A.

21:05–> 21:12
Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Awesome. Alright, thank you so much, Grace, and stay tuned for our next Adoptees in 3: Mind, Heart, and Action.

It has been so meaningful to hear from so many of you that this model we have created resonates deeply and has been useful in processing various adoption events. This podcast episode describes the early formation of the idea and provides a preview of what we’re continuing to work on to expand and validate the Adoptee Consciousness Model. I hope you give it a listen!

Listen here: https://adaptedpodcast.com/2024/02/25/season-7-episode-13-adoptee-consciousness-model/

This past Tuesday, I received a phone call that I could have never expected. “Hi Grace, we have some really hard news to share,” my friend’s mother said, “Helen died.”

In the last few days, I’ve replayed this conversation in my head over and over, trying to make sense of how my beautiful 27-year-old friend could be gone. It still doesn’t feel real to me, and as I type this and re-read this, I am trying to let it sink in.

Do you believe in love at first sight? I typically don’t, but with Helen it was absolutely true. Helen often told people that we had known each other longer than we had even known our parents. While this is factually incorrect, she is the person I’ve known longest in the world other than my parents, and I think this misbelief shows just how intertwined our stories are. She was one year old, and I was three years old when we met because our parents were a part of the same travel group adopting from China in 1997. I loved her little smile, her plump cheeks, and her soft, silly noises. Even though I was just a toddler, she was my baby.

Throughout our childhood, our families reunited every fall at a culture camp for families with children adopted from China. We saw each other at least once or twice per year at this camp and whenever one of our families traveled to the other state. During the summer after my 3rd grade year, I stayed with her family for a week as Helen and I attended a weeklong Chinese day camp together. I looked forward to these sweet reunions every time, because Helen was more than a friend. She was my little sister. When Helen’s parents adopted from China again and she gained a sister of her own, we vowed that we would still be sisters, too.

Helen tried my patience in ways that only a little sister could. She would bounce on my bladder intentionally when I had to go to the bathroom, finding delight in my writhing facial expressions. I remember one time our families were sharing a meal at a Chinese restaurant. I looked down at my plate of potstickers, which had transformed into small, naked meatballs. And when I looked over at Helen, she sheepishly said, “your dumpling wrappers were crispier than mine!” Another time, our families were at an event at a waterpark with separate adult and child activities. When Helen whispered to me that she was going to leave the group to explore the hotel, she put my tiny brain in a conundrum because I knew I would get in trouble if I left, but I also knew it was my responsibility to protect Helen. Like a dutiful big sister, I followed Helen.

As we grew older, Helen and I had our awkward braces phase at the same time. I read a poem at her bat-mitzvah. I attended her high school graduation party and cheered her on from afar as she graduated college during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic. I was just days away from inviting her to my bachelorette party to celebrate my upcoming wedding. I haven’t and don’t know if I can remove her name on my wedding guest count list.

I am no stranger to death. I’ve written openly about the tragic losses of my grandparents and neighbors who played a pseudo-grandparent role in my life. As difficult as those losses were, they were expected due to age and disease. But Helen is my first loved one of my age who has died. The truth is I’ve never pictured my life without Helen. In adulthood, we continued to see each other once or twice per year (before Covid struck). We weren’t the kind of friends who talked in-depth every week or even every month, but I knew that we were always wishing each other the best and thinking of each other fondly. I also felt certain that we would always be there for all of the major life milestones because we had experienced our first huge life event together. When Helen started expressing interest in critical adoption literature and asking me questions about adoption, I was so excited about the ways that this shared identity and interest could mature our adult relationship and bring us closer together again. I am devastated that I won’t be able to see how her thinking would have continued to evolve and for all the conversations that won’t happen.

In addition to the loss of Helen as a person, there is the secondary loss of what she represented to me as a little sister and the title and the role that comes with that. Helen was the thread of continuity in my life. When China felt distant and unknowable as a child, Helen was my one tangible piece of China from that time that had come with me to the United States. She was living proof that we had an existence before our American one. With her death, I have lost a knower of my history and a piece of myself.

It is my job now to be the keeper of our stories and memories. I so wish that we could have one more day together and one more hug goodbye, but I know that Helen will continue to be with me. In the tiniest of ways, I will think of Helen when my cheek freckles pop out more boldly in the summer, when I douse my eggs with her special concoction of 4 different types of chili crisp, and when I take sunny walks around the lake. I’ll remember her when I see calamari on a restaurant menu, when I glance back at our photos of past times, and when I eat cheesecake, which was the last food we shared together. In large ways too, Helen will be guiding me when I advocate politically for principles of social justice, both here and abroad. She will be with me in my adoption research that she also read and found ways to contribute to. When I look at my fiance’s smiling face, I will remember that she gave him her sisterly stamp of approval the last time I saw her. Living the majority of our lives in separate states, we didn’t always see each other, but I could always feel her love supporting me in my endeavors. And I will continue to hold that in my heart.

Thank you, Helen, for being one of my very first loves, for teaching me patience, for demonstrating bravery during big battles, and for letting me be your sister.

My role in the article is to provide professional insights on the developmental needs of adoptees and advice to adoptive parents. I am not discussing my personal adoption; I am discussing my work. Consider if my work was mycology or marine biology. Would a journalist ask for a photo of me with my parents? I think the answer is probably not. And if this request would be consistently odd in every other field, it probably is out of place when discussing adoption professionally, as well. While I love my parents and love sharing family photos of us, they are irrelevant to an interview that relays my professional opinions.

In her paper, “Do you know your real parents” and other adoption microagressions,” Dr. Amanda Baden describes the infantilization of adoptees as a microfiction. This is evident by people referring to adoptees as “adopted children” throughout their lives. I can think of many articles that interview adult adoptees but ask for or highlight images of them as young children for the cover photo to the story. Adoptees are infantilized by adoption agencies and in adoption research when adoption professionals only consider outcomes for adoptees through age 18, as if adoption ends when formal childhood ends. I shared instances where professors perpetuated the infantilization of adoptees in my autoethnography. And I think of the ask from this journalist as another form of infantilizing adult adoptees, because it does not recognize me as a professional individual outside of my adoptive family unit.

Adult adoptees have been conducting research, challenging adoptee representation in the arts, and advocating for changes to adoption practices for multiple decades now. I am in awe of scholars and activists who have been doing this work longer than me, and I am thrilled that I get to contribute to this dynamic effort for change. But in order for our words to carry the weight they deserve, adult adoptees must be seen as the competent adults we are.

I started Red Thread Broken after a traumatic class in college awakened me to the injustices involved in adoption. Without a social network of local adoptees, I turned to this blog as a way to continue writing and processing what I was learning about adoption while I was home for the summer. I thought that I might interact with some people on the blogosphere, but I did not expect Red Thread Broken to reach a worldwide audience or for the initials RTB to become an integral part of my identity.

Within my first five months of writing Red Thread Broken, Daniel Drennon asked me to contribute to Transracial Eyes and Kevin Vollmers asked me to write for Gazillion Voices magazine. Nearly a year later, Amanda Woolston invited me to join the Lost Daughters, a collective of adult adopted women writers. Throughout the past decade, numerous speaking, writing, and community building opportunities have opened up to me through connections made on this blog. Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Mei Fong, interviewed me for her book, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, and named a chapter after Red Thread Broken. A representative from Penguin Random House hired me to do a competency reading of a forthcoming book with adoptee characters. Jeff Yang and Phil Yu (Angry Asian Man) asked me to be a guest on their podcast, They Call Us Bruce.

Most importantly, I’ve heard from younger adoptees who stated that my blog saved their lives by knowing there was at least one other person out there who understood what they might be going through. I’ve also heard from adoptive parents who told me that my blog helped them acknowledge adoption loss or be more open to conversations around race and adoption in their homes. Red Thread Broken has been so life-giving to me, and if it has truly been life-saving to others, there is no higher compliment.

While my adoption remains the single most impactful event that has shaped my life, writing Red Thread Broken has been the most life altering thing I have done within my own power. Recently, I was moving some of my childhood personal belongings from my parents’ house, and I discovered a high school yearbook from my senior year in which one of my classmates wrote, “Grace – I hope you get LOUD in college! You have a lot of things to say that deserve to be heard.” When I think about everything that has happened through my blog, it is simply because I had a passion and shared my voice. I guess you could say I got loud.

The somewhat timid 19-year-old girl who started this blog repeatedly wished for a crystal ball to be able to see into the future and know what I would be doing, how things would turn out, and if I would figure it all out. That younger version of me wouldn’t believe it if she knew I was working on a research project with JaeRan Kim of Harlow’s Monkey, enrolled in my dream PhD program, engaged to be married, and still writing on this blog a decade later.

As I prepare to enter the classroom again (hello 19th grade), I am now confident in myself as a full person on my own, not a mini JaeRan Kim or Kimberly McKee, but Grace Newton. I am embracing who I am now and who I will become throughout this part of my academic training. I know there will be unforeseen challenges and that I will feel inadequate at times, but I hope that during those moments of imposter syndrome, I can remember my 19-year-old self and how proud she would be of how far I’ve come in the past decade. Let’s see what the next decade brings.

My own love life is a subject that I have not broached before on this blog, partially because I was still trying to maintain a relative sense of anonymity for a long time and partially because I was 19 years old when I first began writing on this platform. Publicly sharing my early romantic fumblings was the antithesis of the expertise I was trying to convey when discussing complex adoption issues. However, I am now willing to share my journey to love, not because I view myself as an expert, but in the hopes that my own meandering story may calm some nervous minds.

On online adoption forums, I routinely see posts where adolescent and young adult adoptees ask questions about dating and love and rejection, and they remind me of similar concerns that I had during my foray into the dating world. I laugh when I think about an incident in which three adoptee friends presented their final projects in a college class titled, “The Psychology of Adoption,” only to discover that each had researched and written about young adult adoptees’ attachment in romantic relationships. The professor, amused, assured them that it was a very developmentally appropriate topic.

While I was not in this class, my 19-year-old self shared the same thoughts. Perhaps the fear became implanted in me because of the hyper-concern for attachment in child adoptees, but I remember lying in my dorm room bed, wondering how I was supposed to trust that a romantic partner would stay in my life when the very first people in my life, who were supposed to stay, didn’t. 

The truth is, for a long time I chose people who I didn’t need to stay. My first intense crush and boyfriend of two weeks (after months of courting) in high school was someone funny and smart and who had a particular fondness for literally white foods including: mayonnaise, alfredo sauce, white bread, and vanilla ice cream only. Despite my strong attraction to him, I knew that I wanted a larger world than he did and that eventually our starry-eyed puppy love would end.

In college, there was a young man who fashioned himself to be a political rabble-rouser of sorts but who my friends not-so-secretly donned the nickname, “the Lusty Lebanese,” because he messaged me at some point every semester without fail to “see his room.” My sophomore year, I dated a sweet and slightly cynical boy who was still reeling from deciphering if his first relationship had been true love or just lust after all. One day, he planned to meet me at a bus stop, and he came running to the shelter just as I looked out the window from inside the bus that had already begun rolling down the street. This quite visually mirrored our emotional inability to get our timing right. During my study abroad semester, there was a tall, blonde in China who viewed the world as a giant skateboard park, and when I came back to campus, I began seeing someone with a somewhat sordid past whose busy schedule did not align with my busy schedule, barely allowing us to see each other.

Eventually, I decided I was tired of the immaturity of college-aged boys and four-month-long flings. I had seen some of my friends fall in love by this point, and I wanted to experience love, too. During the winter break of my senior year, I turned to dating apps for the first time and met an array of interesting characters but developed the strongest feelings for a shy and somewhat socially awkward software developer from Alabama who was living in my hometown. While meeting online is quite typical these days, what was unusual about our story was the nearly page long letter-like messages we sent to each other for months before actually meeting. I enjoyed his humor, story sharing, and curiosity about life. Our digital letters, somewhat reminiscent of love in a past era, were a very sweet way to get to know someone. But given our political differences (he lost my father’s approval the moment he shared that Scalia was his favorite Supreme Court justice), I always knew that he was a stepping stone on my journey and not my forever person. Looking back, I think it is significant that the first person I chose to fall in love with was someone I knew I would leave, indicating that perhaps I was not truly ready for the love I thought I was.

When I moved back home after college, a romance was finally able to develop beyond written words. The first summer together was a honeymoon dream filled with long daytrips out of town, thoughtful gifts, and so much excitement around finally being able to spend substantive time together. After the first several months though, memories of doubt, insecurity, and cruelty began to overshadow the blissfulness of summertime. As I learned more information about his life, I became increasingly suspicious of the high number of Asian women in this white man’s orb, including his officemate/best friend, multiple previous ex-girlfriends, and even his dentist. Though I had certainly encountered men in college who had Asian fetishes, I felt stuck in a different way this time because I had come to this realization after a great deal of feelings were already involved. With trust lacking on both sides, the relationship turned into predictable cycles of breakups followed by periods of him pleading to get back together and empty promises of change. The next spring, I remember making a tally in my planner for every day that I cried during the first hundred days of the year. Despite knowing that I had no future with this person, I found it incredibly hard to leave because of the good memories created at the beginning of our time together. While I had previously feared getting abandoned by a romantic partner due to my own early childhood abandonment, in reality I think I felt guilty about what might be perceived as me abandoning the relationship and the good, vulnerable child still left in him.

When I eventually ended the relationship for the final time (to the great relief of my family and many friends) over two years after it began, I spent nearly a full year finding myself again, enjoying time with friends, and figuring out the next steps of my educational future. After I applied to several Master of Social Work programs, I decided to try dating again. I wasn’t looking for something serious, just someone nice to spend some time with before I left for school. And that is precisely when I entered my next serious relationship.

Our first date was at a local coffee shop right after Christmas, and we bonded over international travels, growing up in Wisconsin, and figuring out our twenties. He was supportive of my decision making process in choosing a graduate school, and I appreciated that he didn’t try to sway me in any particular direction. When my lease at the house I was renting ended, I moved in with him after five months of dating as a test to see if it was worth attempting to do long distance when I went to Washington University in Saint Louis for school that fall. It was the first time both of us lived with a significant other, the first time I lived with a dog, and the first time we both could envision a future with someone. My friends teased me if I thought he was “the one,” and for a while, I did. It felt so nice and freeing to love someone uninhibitedly after my last relationship, in which there were always walls up, somewhat guarding my heart.

After I left for graduate school, he dutifully visited me in Saint Louis one weekend per month. I describe the majority of our relationship as being either intensely apart, when I was at school, or intensely together, when we were quarantined during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic. Around our first anniversary, little cracks in the relationship began to run deeper and fights over trivial suggestions or comments became more frequent. When somatic symptoms of stress began ailing my body, it was difficult to identify if the source of the stress was due to the intensity of grad school, conflict in my relationship, constantly seeing elevated rates of violent racism toward Asian Americans on the news, or living during a global pandemic. As my home life became more tense and unpredictable, I was eager to get back to my roommate and coursework in Saint Louis. From afar, I tried to mold us into something we weren’t. I became frustrated that he wasn’t working as diligently to grow to his full potential, and he became increasingly angry that I was pulling away and couldn’t accept him as he was. Trying to give the relationship my best effort, I moved back after my graduation. As the world began to repair itself after the worst of the pandemic was over, the world inside of our small, yellow house fell apart.

The therapist I had lined up to be our couples counselor became my individual counselor as I reflected on my dating journey up until this point – what worked, what hadn’t worked, patterns in the people I chose to date, and what I wanted next. Now approaching my late twenties, I began thinking about dating partners very differently than I had when I was still in my exploratory phase. After much exhaustion with the weeding out and questioning period of trying to figure out if someone had an Asian fetish, I stuck with my strict rule of not dating anyone who had immediately dated an Asian woman before me. Whether just or unjust, I knew that I didn’t want to live with any doubt. I also decided to prioritize dating East Asian men, in particular Chinese American men. As I began envisioning a family life, having a collective family identity as Chinese Americans became increasingly appealing to me. Moreover, I began to think about my inability to pass on Chinese culture in an organic way to my future children. I wanted to be with someone who would be able to help me share the traditions, holidays, language, and cultural legacies that have been lost in me through my overseas adoption. I was convinced that I might have to move to a larger city if I truly wanted to find someone compatible, given the extremely small Asian population in my city. However, I didn’t have to move. My sweetheart, a self-described doctor with a business degree and a punny sense of humor, had been walking around the same streets and convening at the same bars and restaurants as me after all.

We began talking the week before Thanksgiving and finally met up for drinks one night in early December. As we sipped and snacked, we shared silly childhood stories, political musings from the Trump days, and aspirations for the future. Our early dates included grabbing jianbing from a little café, walking around the local zoo, ice skating, and watching the opening ceremony of the Beijing winter Olympics with Chinese takeout. Before our fourth date I practiced saying the sentence, “There are a lot of things I like about you, and I’m enjoying getting to know you,” in the mirror on repeat, and when I finally mustered up the courage to say this, he responded with, “Likewise, likewise.”

The first time I grazed my fingers through his dark hair, I remember the feeling of shock ripple through me as I internally remarked that the texture of his hair was the exact same as mine. I laughed when I noticed similar placement in facial moles; we both have little black dots on our chin, right cheek, under our nose, and nestled in our eyebrow. As going on dates turned into dating, and dating turned into being in a relationship, every month with him seemed to undo years of internalized racism that had accumulated inside of my body and I didn’t even know was there. There is something about loving these features on someone I care for so deeply that makes it easier to love the same features on myself – especially the ones I was told were different or ugly and were not reflected back to me as I was growing up. I have known my whole life what it feels like to come home to people who love me but don’t look like me, and it is so comforting to finally come home to someone who looks like me, craves Chinese food like me, and with whom I can throw random Mandarin words in a sentence without having to slow down to explain them. This is my first time in a relationship where I have not had be an educator of a culture I feel incompetent in; rather, my fiancé and I both share with each other our understanding of certain Chinese customs and learn about ourselves and our culture and history through these conversations.

Anecdotally, I have many transracial adoptee friends of my generation who have chosen partners of their same race or ethnicity. I also know several older adoptee mentors who were initially married to an early hometown love and have since remarried spouses who share a common racial identity. When given the choice, if adult adoptees are routinely seeking a shared racial and cultural connection in their home lives, what does that say about what is lost through transracial and transnational adoption? 

When the time came for me to meet my partner’s parents, I was nervous because I was not raised within a traditional Chinese family. Though I studied some Mandarin and have been to China a few times, I worried that they would not perceive me as being “Chinese enough” for their son; however, this fear vanished after our first visit. His parents speak to me in English (and sometimes Mandarin), make special vegetarian Chinese dishes for me, and ask about my health in text conversations. When leaving their house on our fourth visit, his dad quietly uttered the words, “okay, love you,” to me mid-hug, and it felt like they had truly welcomed me into their family.

In the autoethnography that I published last year in the journal, Child Abuse & Neglect, I touched on the significance of having relational proxies as a potential social work intervention to promote acceptance through relationships that mirror the ones that people cannot have in reality; little did I know that this concept would become pertinent in my own life just a few months later. As someone who has lost my Chinese family, it has been profoundly healing to gain a Chinese family through my fiancé. Though I will continue to seek answers, I know that I may never know the identities of my first parents, the recipes that have been passed down through our family for generations, or the stories and traditions that are unique to my relatives. It feels like I have been searching for what’s missing my whole life. But when my fiancé’s mother guides us through a recipe shortcut for mapo tofu or makes me a cup of tea with leaves from her hometown, it feels like less is missing. Though the puzzle pieces aren’t exact matches, more of the picture is filled.

My partner’s own complex Chinese American identity makes it easier for us to have truly empathetic conversations about Chineseness, identity, and belonging. I’ve realized that his parents, too, raised a child of a different culture from them. As immigrants from China, they had to navigate raising a child who was born and raised in the U.S. with Western ideals and values, while he had to negotiate what elements of his Chinese upbringing to hold onto and which pieces to reject. Conversely, my white parents of predominantly Polish and Welsh ancestries, who were raising a daughter born in China, had to actively search for ways to engage with Chinese culture, and I had to turn to external sources when I wanted to connect with that part of myself. My fiancé and I are both Chinese, we are both American, and we have both had to wrestle with what being Chinese American means to us individually, as a couple, and as a collective social identity.

I still marvel sometimes when I think about all of the people in the world, all of the places that he and I have lived in our adult lives, and that our lives intersected, with such wonderful timing, when they did. When I think of my fiancé, I think of smiling dogs, a comforting bowl of congee, a 70 degree partly cloudy day, two spritzes of his favorite cologne, his hand intertwined with mine, and a warmth that can pierce through the Midwestern winter. His love of travel and adventure matches mine, while his desire for relaxation reminds me of the need for calmness sometimes, too. His own long and driven path to becoming a doctor helps him better understand and support my ongoing educational journey. His closeness to his family and lifelong friends speak to his caring, funny, and thoughtful nature. I can’t imagine someone better suited to me, and I am so excited for the life we are building together.

From the moment of his proposal and our engagement, life has continued onward for us as if someone pressed the fast forward button. We have both signed on with new positions – him at his first job out of training and me at my top choice PhD program. We are in the process of purchasing our first home together, are preparing for a cross-state move, and are in the beginning stages of planning our wedding. These are the special moments and successes that I so desperately wish that I could share with my first parents. No matter how much internal work I do around my early childhood losses, there is such pain in knowing that the more life milestones I reach now, the more life milestones I lose the ability to share with them. I long to know what hopes and aspirations my Chinese family dreamed of for my future and what they would think of my new fiancé. What I do know is that I am blessed beyond measure for a life that is greater than what my younger self could have imagined and for a life partner who understands the melancholiness amidst the great joy we are experiencing.