I don’t remember China. I don’t remember my birth parents. I haven’t known anything except my adoptive family and Canada. But I resist telling this story, tracing these origins. I don’t want to tell you because I’m tired of the same old questions, and I won’t tell you those either.
I recently learned that November is Adoption Awareness Month, or Transracial Adoptee Month. I didn’t know that this month existed. I didn’t think that anyone cared. I explained people’s interest away as a rude and nosy sort of curiosity about what it feels like to not know your biological family, as if this meant that I didn’t feel confident in who I am or will be. Even though I don’t believe that I am merely a product of biological reproduction, I have been subject to many different narratives, and I don’t always know which one will be the main one.
My siblings, all biologically related to my parents and each other, each get a single birth story. I get many. My story is rehearsed. It’s well known. Every word has been intimately and naively deconstructed and reconstructed into infinite permutations. At night, I search narrativity for a sign that I am thought of. That I am a product of love and that, even if I’m not, it’s okay to believe that I am. Feeling and experience are the only breadcrumbs that I have leading me to the truth. And the truth is that I tell myself these stories, but I am not yet sure if I am ready to be part of them.
I have many identities to claim. With the increasing destigmatization of mental health issues, neurodivergence, and queerness, I have learned that I am an Autistic, asexual, agender person who is learning how to manage obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety, and panic disorder. And now, I am starting the process of understanding my positionality as a transnational- transracial Chinese adoptee, alone while belonging to a group of isolated individuals who exist triangulated between opposites. I hope to keep growing and that, in accepting who I am, I will continue to learn and grow into someone I am proud of being.
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