USA Representative
Marijane is a Taiwanese adoptee residing in Southern California, USA. She is a licensed clinical social worker and counsellor, board-certified music therapist, adoption presenter, writer and blogger. Her background is in the field of child welfare ranging from foster care, adoption, mental health and trauma-informed care. She is interested in the topics of intercountry adoption, race, culture, identity, complex developmental trauma, attachment theory, and neuromusicology.
Marijane is a Trust-Based Relational Intervention trainer and enjoys using her background in the creative arts therapies to address issues of adoption trauma, grief and loss and identity. She has a passion for training foster and adoptive parents in healing trauma, as well as facilitating support groups for adopted children and teens.
In 2010, Marijane began writing her blog after discovering her original adoption contract, which was hidden in her adoptive parent’s home for years. She learned that her birth parents were Chinese, not Vietnamese and Japanese as her adoptive parents brought her up to believe. This new information about her identity caused confusion and sparked curiosity, leading her to search for her birth family to find answers.
In 2012, Marijane returned to Taiwan after nearly three years of searching to reunite with her first family. The reunion with her family prompted her to write a memoir, and in 2017, Marijane’s first book, Beyond Two Worlds: A Taiwanese-American Adoptee’s Memoir & Search for Identity, was published. Marijane remains in contact with family members in Taiwan and hopes to write more books on adoption in the future.
Marijane was one of nine other intercountry adoptees who recenty attended a Symposium on Intercountry Adoption hosted by the U.S. Department of State in Washington D.C. She is working alongside this group to increase relations with the Department of State and other governing offices in the hopes of strengthening intercountry adoption practice and policy for the future.