Trigger warning: This article discusses racism, emotional and physical abuse, and suicide attempts.
I recently posted this seemingly simple question in the ICAV Facebook group: What does belonging look and feel like?
What struck me was not the variety of answers. It was how many adoptees could not answer at all.
“I don’t know.”
“I really don’t know.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Genuinely wouldn’t know.”
William Gage, a first generation intercountry adoptee from Germany succinctly wrote:
“I know what it looks like. I imagine we all do. But I don’t know what it feels like. Never have, never will.”
Another adoptee shared words they had written as a child:
“Forever lost,
Always longing,
Just to find
A place belonging.”
For people who have always experienced a secure place within their families, cultures and countries, belonging may feel so ordinary that it is rarely questioned. It is simply assumed but for many intercountry adoptees, belonging is not something we take for granted. It is something we spend our lives trying to understand, locate or create.
Knowing from childhood that I did not belong
My earliest childhood memories include an awareness that I was different. I was transracially adopted into a white family. They had pale skin, mousy or curly hair, freckles, taller bodies and features that reflected one another. I was shorter, with straight black hair, a small nose and distinctly Asian features. I stood out like a sore thumb.
Family photographs constantly reinforced the message: I do not fit here. I was always the only person of a different ethnicity.
My differences were not simply visible. They were used against me. I was teased about my nose and told I had “monkey lips”. The people who were supposed to teach me that I was safe and lovable instead drew attention to the parts of me that marked me as racially different. Perhaps belonging would have felt like the opposite of this. It might have meant seeing myself reflected in those around me. Not being mocked for my features. Being protected rather than humiliated. Being accepted not despite my differences, but with them fully recognised and respected. Instead, I grew up knowing I had been placed within a family while never feeling naturally part of it.
Trying to earn my place
As a child, belonging meant working hard, pleasing my family and proving that I was worth the effort it had supposedly taken to “save” or “rescue” me. I believed I had to earn love and acceptance. My adoptive father sometimes told me, “We adopted you. You owe us.”
How can a child feel that they belong when their very presence in the family is treated as a debt? My place was always conditional. I felt I had to prove that I was good enough to remain. So I became the perfect child. I never got into trouble at school. I was the model student. In Years 11 and 12, I was elected vice-prefect and spiritual leader at my Christian school. Academic achievement became one of the only ways I knew to demonstrate that I had value.
At home, I was also expected to work extraordinarily hard. I did physically demanding farm labour that would traditionally have been reserved for a boy. A farm worker once challenged my adoptive father, asking why I was worked so hard when the other children in the family were not expected to do the same. He was sacked for questioning my father in front of me. The message was unmistakable: I was not entitled to equal treatment, protection or rest. I had to work harder than everyone else to justify my place.
I was never going to be white enough. I could never be grateful enough. I could never work hard enough to feel secure. I wanted to become invisible. Now, in a bitterly ironic way, I have. I have legally removed myself from that family. It is almost as though I was never there.
Adoption pretends that belonging can be created through law
I spent most of my life, until my mid-forties, trying to belong within my adoptive family. Eventually, I had to face the truth that I would never belong there naturally. Adoption presented us publicly as a family. It gave me their surname, their citizenship, their religion and a legal relationship to them. But none of those things created the internal experience of belonging. Adoption can manufacture legal relationships. It cannot guarantee love, safety, understanding or connection.
My adoptive father made this clear throughout my life. At his sixtieth birthday, he spoke warmly about his biological children and what a blessing each of them had been. When it came to me, he struggled to offer a compliment. Instead, he made a remark to my husband about what hard work I was to look after. It hurt deeply. Even as an adult, I remained the difficult foreign addition rather than a daughter he treasured.
This is one of the great psychological contradictions adoptees are expected to live with. Strangers describe adoption to us as if it must have been the most wonderful thing imaginable.
“What amazing people your parents must be.”
“You were so lucky.”
“You were chosen.”
I could have been rich if I had received a dollar every time somebody said these things to me. Yet inside that family, adoption made me feel like a second-class citizen—someone expected to be grateful for an existence in which I was not treated as equal, secure or fully wanted.
Isolation is not belonging
I did not feel that I belonged at school, at church or within my local community either. At school, I was the only non-white student. There was nobody who looked like me and nobody who understood how I experienced the world. I was surrounded by people but remained profoundly alone.
Perhaps I should have asked adoptees a different question:
What does isolation look and feel like?
I suspect adoptees would find that easy to answer.
Many adoptees know isolation intimately. We know what it is to be visibly different within our own families. We know what it is to have our racial and cultural experiences dismissed because our families consider us “one of them”. We know what it is to be told we belong while our bodies, experiences and relationships tell us otherwise.
The one place I never question
The only place in the world where I feel that I belong completely is with my two children. It is permanent. It does not need to be negotiated, earned or proven. I am their mother. I carried and birthed them. They look like me. I see myself reflected in their gestures, personalities, ways of thinking and tiny physical expressions.
For the first time in my life, I have a natural place in the world where nobody questions whether we belong together. My nineteen-year-old son gives me enormous hugs every day. In those moments, I can breathe. My body relaxes. I feel safe, connected and deeply rooted. Every cell in my body seems to align with him. There is trust, peace and certainty. I am accepted and loved for who I am.
I never take those hugs for granted because they remind me of what I missed throughout my adoptive childhood: the daily bodily experience of safety, attachment and unquestioned belonging. My children have shown me that belonging is not merely an idea. It is visceral. The body knows when it is safe. The body also knows when it is not.
Acceptance is not the same as belonging
I believe acceptance and belonging are different. My adoptive family may have accepted my legal presence. At times, it felt more like they put up with me. But being accommodated within a household is not the same as feeling deeply connected to the people in it.
My adoptive father once explained to me, “I just couldn’t intuitively understand you like I could my own blood children.”
To him, I was foreign. My differences frustrated him, and he often took that frustration out on me.
Belonging with my children is entirely different. It is not based upon a court order, certificate, surname or legal construction. It is not about ownership. It is a deep resonance within me – a connection that exists beyond anything administratively or socially manufactured.
This does not mean biological relationships are automatically loving or safe. Nor does it mean adoptees cannot experience profound belonging in non-biological relationships. It means that adoption law should not be confused with the emotional reality of belonging.
A child (now adult) can be legally declared part of a family and still spend a lifetime feeling like an outsider within it.
Returning to Vietnam
I have never experienced reunion with my biological family, but returning to Vietnam helped me recover parts of myself that had remained invisible. On a bodily level, Vietnam resonates with me. From my first return, I felt a deep connection to the place. I know I am Vietnamese, and I am deeply curious about Vietnamese people and ways of life.
There is recognition—but it is complicated. Vietnamese people can see that I am connected to them, while also knowing I did not grow up as one of them. It is a distant form of belonging: you are one of us, but you are not.
Returning helped me recognise parts of myself my adoptive father had never understood. I notice it in the smallest behaviours. At a fruit shop, I pick up each piece of fruit, turn it over and inspect it carefully. Growing up, my adoptive father criticised me for being so particular. Yet when I shop in predominantly Asian areas, I see people around me doing the same thing. There, my gestures are mirrored rather than mocked. These small recognitions matter. They reveal how deeply culture can live within us, even when we have been separated from the people who might have reflected and understood it.
But rediscovering our origins also reveals further layers of loss. Language is one of the most painful examples. I cannot speak an Asian language. The tones and sounds I hear around me can feel alien and incredibly difficult to reproduce. For many intercountry adoptees, this creates shame when we are among people from our birth cultures. Our faces suggest that we should understand, yet we cannot speak the language that should have been our birthright. We do not naturally belong anymore, but we know that we should have. The distance between us and our lost mother tongue can feel like a psychological barrier we may never fully overcome.
Finding community, but still carrying vulnerability
ICAV is one of the rare places where I experience connection and belonging. It has brought me into relationships with people who understand aspects of my life without requiring lengthy explanations. There is enormous relief in being around other adoptees whose experiences reflect our shared displacement, racism, grief and search for identity. Yet belonging there is not always simple either.
Adoptee spaces can contain triggers, conflict and hurt. Other adoptees have attacked me, criticised my work and actively tried to pull me down. It can be difficult to lead an adoptee community while feeling that few people see the vulnerable person behind the strength I hold. I am equal parts strength and vulnerability.
Part of my continuing journey has been learning to develop an internal sense that I belong with myself – one that cannot be destroyed by the approval, rejection or reactions of others.
Perhaps that is one of the hardest forms of belonging for adoptees to develop.
Rejected by families and countries
Adoption cost me almost everything. It cost me knowledge of who I was born to, why I was separated from them and the circumstances that shaped my earliest life. I was left with almost nothing connected to my core identity. These losses were created under the language of love, rescue and good intentions. Yet those promises were not delivered. I was abused by the same people who were presented as having rescued me. I was not protected or nurtured.
Adoption intensified the feeling that I did not truly belong anywhere. I became a chameleon, constantly adapting to whichever family or environment I was expected to fit into. I learned to be what others wanted rather than discovering who I actually was. I was a quiet and compliant child. Today, I am a strong, outspoken and confident woman. Becoming her required years of reclaiming the self I had been taught to suppress.
Adoption came close to destroying me physically and spiritually. I attempted suicide many times because the pain of existing this way felt unbearable. To be adopted was to understand how profoundly alone a person could feel.
Even Vietnam, my country of birth, has made no meaningful effort to help me reclaim my original identity despite my formal requests. This demonstrates how fragile the idea of national belonging can be for intercountry adoptees. We may be relinquished or removed from one family, sent away by one country, raised in another, and expected to feel grateful for whatever citizenship or legal recognition we are granted.
Some intercountry adoptees are not even protected by citizenship in their adoptive countries. In the United States, adoptees who were never naturalised have been deported following criminal convictions, often after lives shaped by abusive or neglectful adoptive placements. They can be abandoned twice: first by the country that sent them away and later by the country that was supposed to receive them permanently. Where are they expected to belong?
Belonging cannot be promised by good intentions
The adoptee responses to my question reveal an enormous discrepancy between how adoption is understood by many adoptive parents and how it is experienced by adoptees.
Adoptive parents may experience adoption as the creation of their family. The adoptee may experience it as the destruction of one world and compulsory entry into another. Parents may believe their love, commitment and good intentions are enough but they may fail to recognise the racial, cultural, familial and national losses their child is carrying. Sometimes they cannot hear us because they are deeply invested in believing their decision to adopt was right. Acknowledging the harm experienced by adoptees may feel like a challenge to their identities as loving parents but listening to adoptees is not an accusation that every adoptive parent is intentionally harmful. It is an invitation to confront the limits of love.
Love does not restore a lost language. It does not provide missing records, undo racism or automatically produce cultural identity, family resemblance or bodily safety. It does not guarantee equality within an adoptive family. It cannot erase the reality that the child first had to lose almost everything before becoming available for adoption.
The fact that so many adoptees cannot describe what belonging feels like should shake the adoption community to its core.
Adoption claims to give children a permanent family and a place to belong yet many of us grow up knowing that our belonging is conditional, constructed and uncertain. We are given names, passports, families and nationalities, while still feeling that we belong nowhere.
Perhaps one of the most profound consequences of intercountry adoption is not simply separation from our families, cultures and countries – it is being separated from the certainty that we ever had a natural place in the world and then spending the rest of our lives trying to build one.
Resources
Finding home = sense of belonging
The feeling of not belonging anywhere
Growing up between worlds as a transracial adoptee and third culture kid
Identity, belonging, and bridging the gap between the cultures