grief is not linear | InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV)

March 9, 2023March 3, 2023

Adoptee Grief and Zen Meditation

In Indianapolis, I recently started practicing Zen meditation with a sangha in the lineage of Mahayana Buddhism from the Kwan Um school of Zen, started by Zen Master Seung Sahn. I started my studies with sitting with a community of practitioners at the Indianapolis Zen Center. Practices consist of sitting and walking meditation, listening to Zen dharma readings and participating in light-hearted dharma discussions in the waiting room.

What has been a game changer in meditation practice has been meditating with my eyes open. I decided to try and have been struck by its functions and usefulness. I’m fully alert rather than traversing in various sleeping, subtle stages of meditation that I usually find inner peace with. I’m awake in the mindfulness I gain with my eyes closed, and what advances my meditations, is that I develop a mindfulness in my waking life instantly rather than closing my eyes, doing all this work in the dark, and later integrating it with the world.

What’s come up since my recent move in this new city is the living grief that I’m immersed in when I close my eyes. I feel it as a ferocious, all-consuming ocean in my mediations. And from it, there is a heaviness in my mind. And I look through that heaviness like fog or dirt on a window. But it does clear, which I’ve achieved in split seconds of temporary clarity. And then I feel exact vividness in the present moment, and I have no mind at all. I’m just awake in the room I’m sitting in.

During a Zen retreat I had yesterday, I was able to have an Interview with a teacher. I brought up my grief in mediation and my experience when it clears.

“Where does it go?” The teacher asked.

“It disappears,” I said.

“Then you have a choice,” he said, smiling.

I described the grief and the heaviness, the way it can pull at me and makes me sleepy, and how the feelings of sadness and this heaviness can obscure my clarity, seeking Zen advisement on meditating with these difficult sensations revolving almost like a circle. I described that I have a strong attachment to it, that I might have been making it even bigger by focusing on it in my mediations throughout the years, unknowingly concentrating my mind in it and feeding it, but now see how it lingers in me with eyes open, and I can only imagine how it could also influence my waking life unconsciously. So, I was troubled because all of this is like taking on my lifelong karma as an adoptee, which the teacher knows a little about thankfully.

“Learn from it,” he said, “And when I experienced it, I would thank it. I thanked it for the lesson.” He described his own life experiences in grief, mentioned a book titled, How to Be Friends With Your Demons, and said it did go away for him.

I felt a sudden burst of hope in this conversation.

“So I can try appreciating its presence and continue with practicing,” I confirm to him.

“You have to feel it,” the teacher said to me towards the end of my Zen interview. “You have to own it.” I stared at him, now understanding that there is a way to practice Zen even with grief. And that there is a way to own it and to not let it have control over my life.

In my new apartment in Indianapolis, I’m seeing the grief in my life as it is today and the heaviness that it creates, with eyes open, and I’m journaling about what it teaches me. I’m asking critical questions in myself from what I observe even though it’s hard. Instead of focusing entirely on my grief, I’m giving space to thank it and appreciate its presence in my life and waking world, and all that it teaches me. From my experience with grief, it’s a wounded, intoxicating companion to me especially with the death of my Filipino American brother last year. But I also realized that I am not abandoning my grief by appreciating it and connecting it back to the love inside me.

Read Desiree’s previous blog: Moving on in a new city

Resources

Trauma in adoption resources

Your grief is your gift

February 7, 2023February 7, 2023

Your Grief is Your Gift

by Kamina Hall, a black, transracial, late discovery adoptee in the USA

It was never about you, my dear sweet child,
Your soul has always had a purpose, though you have feared it defiled.
She relinquished you, the grief is valid and oh-so-real,
But this is not forever, this isn’t your forever, feelings are there for us to feel.

Thus, grieve, dear soul, my sibling in love and light,
Let the sadness and pain wash over you, but don’t wallow too long in wrongs and rights.
Treat your emotions as visitors, welcome them with open arms and attend to them kindly,
Then, bid them farewell, thank them for coming, and never submit to them blindly.

Look at your pain, hurt, sorrow, rage, and fear,
Ask them what lessons they have for you, but refuse to allow them to interfere.
Your soul chose this path, this very journey, for a purpose,
So look to your feelings with curiosity, not identity, as they only exist to alert us.

Everything you are yearning for resides inside you at this very second,
You are not incomplete or faulty; so stand strong and refuse to feel threatened.
The family, the mother, the love unspoken,
Nothing and no one holds love for you like you becoming, with arms wide open.

So grieve beautiful soul; grieve what was lost,
Remember that you chose this path, though it comes with the most precious cost.
You chose this most difficult of paths to share your love, your light, and soul,
You are here to shine your light for the reckoning and to take part in making us whole.

You can follow Kamina at her Youtube channel – Kamina the Koach

November 30, 2022December 1, 2022

Grief in Adoption

by Cosette Eisenhauer adopted from China to the USA, Co-Founder of Navigating Adoption

Grief is a weird concept. I expect myself to grieve people that I know, family and friends that have passed. Those times it makes sense to grieve the loss of a loved one. I know them and I’ve loved them. I am able to grieve a person that I’ve met, a person who impacted my life for one reason or another. People also grieve when there are tragic events, a lot of times this come with knowing their names and faces.

Grieving my biological parents and the life I might have had in China is a weird type of grief. Grieving people that I’ve never met and a life I never had is a confusing type of grief. There is no person to look at, there is no name that goes with the grief. Then there is the grief and numbness when it comes to grieving the information I don’t know. Grief overall as an intercountry adoptee is a weird concept, it’s a weird word.

There has always been a void in my heart for my biological family. A dream of mine was to have my biological family at my wedding and as the day gets closer, it’s become more real understanding I probably won’t have that dream come true. The grief has been so real, it’s been overtaking. Sometimes the grief I have comes and I don’t even realise it’s grief until I’m struggling at the time. It’s the same concept of grieving someone that I know personally yet, there is no name, no face for this person(s). I never knew their voice or their lifestyle. It is grieving someone I’ve never met.

I’ve learned it’s okay to grieve, I am a human. Every single person has lost someone they know and they’ve gone through the grief process. People grieve in different ways. I don’t compare the way I grieve with the way someone else grieves. There is no timeline on when I should stop grieving. I might think I’m done, and then it starts up again.

You can follow Cosette at:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_c.eisenhauer_/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cosette-e-76a352185/ Navigating Adoption Website: https://www.navigatingadoption.org/home

March 3, 2022February 21, 2022

Kris shares about Adoptee Anger

This is a series on Adoptee Anger from lived experience, to help people understand what is beneath the surface and why adoptees can sometimes seem angry.

by Kris Rao, adopted from India to the USA, recently discovered their adoption as a Late Discovery adoptee.

In 2019 at the age of 34, I learned that I was adopted. Since then, I have become insanely familiar with the grief cycle. In a non-linear fashion, I have been relentlessly experiencing all the emotions associated with grief. Of all the emotions, anger, however, has become the one constant emotion when I think about adoption.

In the case of my experience, as a late discovery adoptee, I am angry for being lied to for 34 years. I feel deceived. Conned. Duped. Whatever words I can think of to describe it, ultimately for 34 years I was manipulated into believing I was someone that I’m not. Manipulated into believing strangers where my biological and genetic kin. The identity I was given never seemed to fit with the person I knew myself to be, and I was gaslit into feeling like the crazy one for my thoughts.

The thing about anger though, is that it is perceived as a negative emotion. All my life growing up, I have been taught to control it. To not let it get the best of me. Even now, as I write to share my experience and express my opinions on adoption today, there are those that tell me to not be so angry. That anger is not a good thing.

For quite a while after discovering the truth, I struggled with the anger. In a group for late discovery adoptees, I once posed a question about anger. More than 90% said that they still are angry, or struggle with anger. The most helpful responses were the ones that said it was okay to be angry. One adoptee even responded to something I wrote and said that it was a “righteous anger”. And they were right. My anger is righteous and justified for my experience. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to feel it.

As Faith G. Harper wrote in her book Unfuck Your Anger: Using Science to Understand Frustration, Rage, and Forgiveness:

“If feeling anger is OK, you can be angry and still be OK.”

Looking back, I think I struggled with anger because I confused my thoughts about anger with how we manage and act upon it. There is nothing wrong with the emotion itself. Anger is a normal reaction to any negative situation, and it’s how we deal with it that determines a positive or negative reaction. And that’s the key thing, “Anger is a response to a deeper emotion. It’s a secondary emotion, meaning it’s reactive. Not just to situations we encounter but to other emotions.”

Negative emotions are okay as long as we express them in a healthy manner.

I was always frustrated growing up with how I was raised. Frustrated that I couldn’t understand why I always felt different. That frustration turned into anger soon after discovering I was adopted. I’m angry about being lied to. I’m angry about all the abuse I experienced and for being gaslit into believing that it was for my own good. And I grieve because of it. It’s a lot of negativity to deal with all at once. When I learned I was adopted, I was hurt. There was sorrow from what felt like a huge act of betrayal. That hurt would also become anger. The more I tried not to feel all these “negative emotions”, the more “negative” I felt I was becoming.

Mark Manson wrote the following about negative emotions in his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck:

“The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

“This is a total mind-fuck. So I’ll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again: Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”

It’s been a lot of work, but I’m learning to reframe myself and how I view my anger. I am learning to simply accept what it is, and use that to process my grief, my trauma. Accepting the negative experiences of my adoption. Allowing myself to feel my anger, and not be it.

I came across this quote a while ago, and it stuck with me regarding my grief.
“No one notices your sadness until it turns into anger, and then you’re the bad person.”

I don’t know its origins, but it feels accurate. If anything, I want people to know that my anger is not about who I am as an adoptee. It’s not even about who I am as a late discovery adoptee. It’s about what I feel as an adoptee.

More importantly, I see my anger as a tool, because it not only has allowed me to establish and keep necessary boundaries to protect myself, but it is what drives me to write for change, share my experience, and restore all that was taken away from me. I’ve learned to use my anger to advocate for change, for sharing my experience and my unapologetic truth. I share the realities of adoption by writing just exactly what I feel and how I’m dealing with it.

My anger is about calling for accountability from those that don’t want to be held accountable. It’s about reclamation.

In an essay about anger, Brian Wong wrote the following:
“While anger might not be the most practically useful emotion to have in all cases, its epistemic and motivational productivity makes it the ideal candidate in steering victims towards making appropriate claims to compensation or reparation. It is the anger towards losing what matters that enables victims to pinpoint the most important components of their restorative process – of course, we might not think that restoration is intrinsically most valuable, but this critique misses the point. Anger can play a crucial role in recovering lost goods.”

Quite simply, that’s what anger is. What it can be.

Healing from my past traumas for me isn’t about letting go of my pain, or my anger. It’s how I manage it and how I utilize that anger. It’s about using my anger for a positive experience.

Anger as a reaction to a negative experience can provide us with the energy for change. It can be used to help keep ourselves safe and give us the courage to take back what we’ve lost. And that’s a good thing!

For more from Kris, follow at:
Kris-404:RootsNotFound
Twitter @adoptedindian
Instagram @indianlatediscoveryadoptee

December 17, 2021November 24, 2021

Does My Perspective Matter?

by Dan R Moen, adopted from the Philippines to the USA. This is the 2nd of a 3 part artwork piece by Dan that explores being adopted.

One of the key things that has been an eye-opener for me is understanding what’s appropriate to say to somebody who’s grieving or going through pain.

We have failed to understand each other and to utilize tools to cultivate real empathy — not sympathy. Unfortunately, because of this, difficult conversations can cause alienating, victimizing, or gaslighting the individual. We oftentimes want to give advice or external perspectives, but oftentimes it’s unwarranted when the person is going through pain in the moment. This is in large part because we have been taught that giving advice equates to helping. Humans have a natural instinct to want to fix; the idea that anything that doesn’t fit the standard needs to be repaired and repaired quickly.

All it does is alienate the person and make them question if they have a right to feel human emotions. Without consciously doing it, this can easily come off as egotistical and one can project their own ways of dealing with life expecting the person grieving to meet that same standard — even with the best intentions at heart.

The key to really helping somebody going through grieving or troubles is to really listen and validate, validate, validate. This being said, that does not necessarily mean agreeing with the person, but it is humanizing the person and allowing them to have a place to cry, feel, and go through the emotions necessary for growth.

Be mindful of what you say to individuals when they look overwhelmed, dealing with anxiety, or going through a loss. I must remind myself this all the time. I slip up too. What you say to them can deeply impact them either positively, or unfortunately, negatively. Do not make it about yourself, and above all else…. DON’T tell them how to feel. Sometimes, remaining silent, but being an active listener, helps the other person tremendously, and phrases such as “thank you for sharing. I’m sorry you’re going through this. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help” will help them and give them a sense that they can go to you for support.

These are reasons why we as adoptees have, on a much larger scale, so many mental health problems going on that unfortunately get undiagnosed, untreated, and invalidated. When we see crimes happening there is something more deeper going on that we don’t see. Crimes in society from stealing to murder, are symptoms of deeper and more complex needs by humanity.

Keep in mind more scars are invisible than they are visible, this means you do not know what the person is going through. There could be much more from their history and lived experience that you may never experience. What we are witnessing when someone is grieving may be rooted in something much deeper and more historical in their own lived experience. So why would we compare our lives to each other? Life is not a race to the bottom, nor a race to the top. We must be able to be like glassware. Wine glasses hold what they can hold, shot glasses hold what they can hold, and punch bowls can hold what they can hold. One cannot pour the same amount of liquid from a punch bowl in to a shot glass; it will overflow. However, people are not static, they can handle the amount of stress that a shot glass can hold, and slowly move up to a punchbowl, and then back down again.

I recently had a conversation with a wonderful friend of mine who is Indigenous, about the Native American community and how they view about giving advice:

Elders do not give advice or perspective in every situation they get an opportunity. Instead, they understand that a young person will have a different lived experience than an elder and in order to get advice, one must give each other bundles of tobacco. Tobacco is sacred in many Native Americans traditions and cultures as it is a medicine used for prayers, communication, and messages to the Spirit World. Elders will give tobacco bundles to the youth if they need advice and young people will give tobacco to elders if they need advice. This is seen as an offering gift. I absolutely admire that, and I wish people would practice this concept way more: even in therapy there are codes of conduct about giving unwarranted advice. When the phrase, “What do you think? What would you do? Do you have advice?” Is uttered, that’s the invitation. If you ask, “May I offer perspective, advice?” and they don’t want it. Don’t give it. Let the grieving person BE HUMAN.

For Dan’s 1st artwork in this series, see Grieving for the Child of the Past.
For more on Dan visit his website.

December 13, 2021November 24, 2021

Grieving for the Child of the Past

In November 2021, I was asked by the Australian Department of Social Services, to source artwork by intercountry adoptees that would fit with their artwork brief for a literature review they funded reviewing the research available on Adoption and Suicide.

ICAV approached various adoptee artists known for their work by ICAV and requested if they wished to submit any pieces. Dan, a Filipino adoptee in the USA, had only weeks before just joined the ICAV network and I had seen his artwork as part of getting to know him. His artwork blew me away with its depth and intensity. So I’ve asked him to share it with you all here. Artwork is such a powerful medium to portray the adoptee lived experience! I hope you enjoy the next 3 blogs whereby we share you Dan’s incredible talent, his artwork and the meaning behind each piece. He presents to you his 3 part series, all related to being a Filipino intercountry adoptee.

by Dan R Moen, adopted from the Philippines to the USA.

This represents both my present and my past simultaneously going through emotional turmoil. The child is suggested to be naked in representation of being completely vulnerable. With both arms surrounding the adult form of themselves, the child desires nothing more than to be loved, protected, and to not feel orphaned—a real sense of belonging.

The adult, however, represents my current adult self. The old world/Victorian/Edwardian clothing represents a connection to history; the love for studying and learning from our ancestors and a passion for those who came before, and yet, completely ignoring the child in the present. The red vest represents love but is covered and not revealed by the partially closed frock coat. He is looking away from the child suggesting that there’s a disconnect. He is looking in towards the darkness knowing that the world isn’t all shiny and glorious. He too is also grieving but not fully connecting to the child. One arm is wrapped around the child suggesting there is some small connection to his past self, but the other hand is completely in the pocket suggesting that there’s a sense of standoffishness, including cognitive dissonance—needing to grow up and to move on. He is displaying the inner turmoil of accepting the idea of “that’s just life” – while simultaneously, not granting himself permission to fully mourn with the past child.

Surrounding them, there are different colors suggesting fire of meanings. The dark greens represent the forests that I visited throughout 2020 and all the secret spots that I like to go to for healing. Many of these locations were off the nature trails, and for one to visit them, they would have to trek deep into the woods to find these locations.

The red represents the blood of those who have died at the hands of bad policies, politics, racism, ignorance, and to Covid-19. As does the white, which represents the countless spirits and souls who have passed onto the next world.

The yellow represents the fire with chaos and change. There are hints of gold metallic paint suggesting the idea that there is healing within the chaos, but it depends on individuals’ perspectives. This is represented physically by the viewer as the angle that you’re looking at the painting determines the visibility of the metallic paint. So, when multiple people look at the painting at the same time, some will see the metallic paint while some will not see it, that’s the point.

Many of us, as adults, sometimes forget that the raw emotions we feel, are human, just human. No logic is needed in the moment of grief. Many of our fears, woes, and deep inner turmoil come from our past, and sometimes, we mourn our childhood – as we haven’t given ourselves permission to fully grieve and feel these raw emotions. We must give ourselves that permission; any advice from others or opinions from others will not be fulfilled if we don’t allow ourselves to feel first and validate how feel internally.

You matter too. You are #1 in life; from birth to the next world – learn to live with yourself, not by yourself.

Coming next, Dan’s 2nd art work piece Does My Perspective Matter? in his 3 part series.

To find out more about Dan and and his work, check out his website.

December 1, 2021November 22, 2021

Relinquishment, Adoption and Grief

by Bina Mirjam de Boer adopted from India to the Netherlands, shared for November Adoption Awareness Month at Bina Coaching.

At the moment when adoptees experience that they have lost part of themselves due to relinquishment and / or adoption, they suddenly come into a grieving process. A kind of mourning that they themselves, but also their surroundings, often cannot comprehend or contain.

A special event such as a pregnancy, the birth of a (grand) child or a wedding can suddenly lose its colour or shine. A demise, loss of work, or a move can suddenly become the most dramatic and prevailing event of an adoptee’s life.

The previous loss that hitherto sat dormant in the unconscious is triggered. Suddenly the unconscious wakes up in the conscious and throws back the adopted one into the previous loss trauma with the corresponding behavioural change. The emotions that come with this seem to absorb everything, structures and controls disappear and chaos prevails.

Often adoptees who previously considered themselves “fortunately adopted” suddenly feel the emptiness and try to fill it up by looking for their self, their identity and / or their mother. But the emptiness, sadness and fear does not dissolve during this quest or in reunification. There often remains the history, the secrets, the guilt and the shame between both.

Because of the fact that this form of loss and mourning is not recognised in our society, adopted people do not have the option (e.g. leave period) to mourn, give meaning to their loss or experience a farewell ritual like a funeral of their adoptive parents. And often they have no memories of their first parents with whom they can comfort themselves. Because of this, it will often remain a never ending story and the wound will remain open.

A mother and child separation causes lifelong loss, which we carry in our body until the end of our life and is also transferred to the next generations.

That’s why it’s important to raise awareness for the loss and trauma during relinquishment and adoption and the impact of missing our descendants data. Adoptees should experience as much entitlement to support in their grieving process as those not adopted.

For more from Bina, read her other ICAV blogs:
Imagine losing your parents twice!
Forget your past

August 28, 2021August 16, 2021

I’m like a Deer Caught in the Headlights

by Krem0076, an Korean intercountry adoptee raised in the USA.

I am an adoptee from a closed international adoption. I have paperwork but for many of us, our paperwork is often fraught with mistakes, lies and discrepancies. That is a challenge – is my information accurate? My birth name? My birthdate? My origin story if I even have one? Are any of the names in my paperwork real or accurate?

I have names for both my b-mom and b-dad and I decided in 2017 to try searching for my b-mom on Facebook. Here’s another challenge – because I am adopted from Korea and wasn’t raised reading or speaking my language, I had to figure out how to translate the English version of my b-mom’s name into Hangul and hope it was accurate. Thankfully I have a fellow Korean adoptee friend who could do that for me. I searched and found a woman who has physical features that are so similar to mine, it was like looking into a future mirror at myself around 50 years old.

The next challenge was – do I message her? And if I do, what the heck do I say? “Hi, you don’t really know me, but I may be your daughter whom you relinquished back in 1987. Did you relinquish a baby girl then? I promise I’m not crazy or going to cause trouble.” Yeah, I don’t see that going over well. Do I friend request her? How do I approach her without spooking her? What if she’s married and has other children? What if I’m a secret? What if she denies me?

This was back in 2017 when I first found my potential b-mom, and after weeks of agonising and being petrified but simultaneously excited, I sent her a message and a friend request. I waited days which turned into weeks, that turned into months and eventually, years. Nothing. I went from being excited and hopeful to being nervous and unsure. Eventually it turned into bitterness, frustration, rejection and loss all over again. In the end, I numbed myself to it and pushed it into the back of my brain and tried to forget.

Fast forward to March of 2021. I had recently fully come out of the adoption fog, started reconnecting with my Korean culture, language, foods and traditions and making more Korean adoptee friends. I decided to look her up again and see if there was anything new. From what I’ve gleamed as an outside observer, she looks to be married and has 2 adult daughters. It also looks like she runs a berry farm. I decided to message her again, this time in Hangul hoping she’d respond to that better. I’ve also updated my profile name to include my birth name in Hangul, hoping she’d see it. She never read the message and I don’t have the option to friend request her again.

I know I can go through other channels to find and contact my b-mom, but I am a mess. What if they can’t find her? What if they do and she rejects me? What if this woman is her and she rejects me? What if she’s passed away? That’s another challenge – the debilitating and paralysing onslaught of emotions that stop me from moving either way. I’m like a deer caught in the headlights.

For adoptive parents reading this, I encourage you to foster open adoptions if you can – not for your needs and wants, but for the future needs and wants of you adopted children. They will grow up knowing their origins, their medical history, their b-mom or parents. They will have a better sense of their identity. They will be able to ask questions and have them answered. There will still be trauma. There will still be tough days and emotions. But they will have a stronger foundation than I will never have. I’m 34 and drowning somedays. I struggle with being adopted and right now, quite frankly, I hate it.

August 12, 2021August 12, 2021

Shape Shifting

by Marie, a daughter lost via adoption from her Chinese father who shared his story last week: The Sin of Love

I put the truth on a pedestal, but I also see how she’s a shape shifter, whose form changes depending on who holds her and their state of mind. In the few months since I found my father, I believe he’s understood my need for the truth and tried to offer it to me. But that truth keeps changing as my arrival in his life has been equal parts joyful and traumatic.

Confronted with me, the lost daughter he’s longed for, he’s also reliving the past. A past he’s suppressed because it was too painful, alone with memories in a society which erases birth parents and their grief, as if it is something they had agency to prevent. He had no wise mentor and no safety through which to process his pain and loss, not only of me but of his first love. I believe the woman he loved died to him when she signed the adoption papers. While acknowledging she probably had no choice, he couldn’t reconcile that woman with the one he loved eternally. So although he had clues as to where she was, he never looked for her because his love must surely be gone — the Agnes he loved couldn’t have given away their child; in doing so she compelled him into signing the adoption papers too. He tucked away that grief and entered a life in which loss unconsciously drove his decisions.

Years later he sleepwalked into a marriage. Another pregnancy would garner his commitment to his wife and to another child he couldn’t lose this time. But Agnes was a silent guest in his marriage and family – she would never leave, and neither would I.

Since I’ve returned, the truth evolves and shifts. Agnes has been unconsciously a perpetrator, a woman who gave up her flesh and blood and simultaneously a victim of a bigoted and controlling mother who altered the destiny of all three of us. As the months since our reunion have gone by, my father has been tormented by the past: guilt, anger, confusion and loss have plagued him with what he calls “sudden floating rubbish”. Neither of us can ask Agnes what happened from her perspective because she died in October 2016. 4 years before I found her obituary and 5 before I found my father and confirmed it was her. In her absence we both thrash about with what we know, attempting to piece together the puzzle which for me has even more missing pieces which are gradually leaking out of the memories my father accesses in flashbacks and increasing empathy for my mother. He stares, as I do at the one photo we have of her, posted on her obituary. She is young and smiling and though her features individually aren’t mine, somehow her face echoes mine. I saw myself in her, knowing who she was as soon as I saw the picture.

As he moves through the memories now with an altered lens of compassion, and perhaps conscious of how I would view my mother and how he wants me to feel about her, my father has revealed memories which again shift reality and truth. As my birthday approaches the revelations seem to be increasing. In his recollections, now she’s happy and smiling on the day I was born. They named me together and all seems fine when he leaves her that day. But a week later he’s called to sign adoption papers and compelled by a judge to do so when he refuses. He would never make sense of the decision and never talk to Agnes again to unpack what happened. His anger and confusion would hold her at a distance more successfully than her absence, until I arrived sending photos of myself in which she is ever present. In the last week he has seemed to need to share new puzzle pieces, as he puts it back together himself. He now believes he has wronged her.

In his own grief he couldn’t comprehend what a traumatic loss she endured. Yesterday he revealed another piece of the puzzle. When he finally searched for Agnes, he too found her obituary so he sought out her brother, his friend, to find out how she died. What he was told led him to believe she took her own life. This news has shifted reality again for me. While not knowing anything of her life, I can only assume losing me was a devastating event which forever impacted her state of mind and her family life.

I can’t help correlating the month of her death with its anniversary of my adoption. I suspect each year my August birthday would summon a silent grief and perhaps linger through to autumn when two months later, I went home with another family and within a few months unknown to my parents, to another country. I don’t know if she knew when I left the mother and baby home. It’s not clear to me if I was with her for those first two months of life or living in its adjacent orphanage under the care of nuns. Unrelenting in their views of what was best, the nuns lied to my father when he travelled the seven hours from Taiping to take me home, where his mother awaited, wanting to welcome me to their family.

What the Church told anyone is under question and with Agnes gone, perhaps only her siblings might know. It’s possible she shared something with her second daughter or husband. As I think of my maternal sister, I now wonder if my existence would unlock a mystery for her too. If she never knew about me, perhaps her loss also involved a traumatic secret lost in death and added to her grief. I remain stuck with what next in my search – for now just happy to be part of my paternal family and all the absorbing realities of getting to know the family and culture I lived without for almost 49 years.

June 22, 2021June 2, 2021

Implications of China’s One Child Policy Expansion

by Hannah, adopted from China to Canada.

Guizhou province—”Humans have only one earth, we must control population growth!” (Adam Century)

Born in China

I was born in China. That’s it, end of origin story. That’s all I know. I was probably born in Jiangsu Province, but even that’s not certain. The earliest known record of my existence is a medical examination when I was estimated to be 20 days old. Many of my friends know where they were born, what hospital, what day, some even know the time down to the second as well as how long it took. I know none of that. They know who was present at the time they were born, what family members they met first. I know none of that. My legal birth date is estimated from when I was found, I have no original birth registration. My name was given to me by orphanage officials. I don’t know what my name was or if my biological parents had even bothered to give me a name. The record of where I was found and when have been lost or forgotten. My (adoptive) mother wrote in a scrapbook which county they were told I was found in. There are no records of it, I have no abandonment certificate like some Chinese adoptees do and I have no recorded finding ad. For many intents and purposes, my life began when I was adopted by a white Canadian couple when I was under a year old. I am one of thousands of Chinese children adopted by foreigners after China opened its doors to intercountry adoption in 1991.

Like most Chinese adoptees, I was adopted under the shadow of the One Child Policy, first introduced in 1979. The One Child Policy (the unofficial name for the birth restriction policy) dictated that couples were only allowed to have one child. There were exceptions for rural families and ethnic minorities, but the policy was implemented and unequally enforced across the country, with varying levels of violence. The cultural preference for sons is well-publicized and is believed to be the reason behind why the majority of Chinese adoptions under the One Child Policy were girls. It is widely known and accepted among the Chinese adoptee community, the majority of us who were born female, that we were relinquished (or stolen) because of our sex at birth.

China’s changing birth restrictions

On May 31, 2021, I checked the news and saw a CBC article that said China had eased its birth restrictions and would now allow couples to have up to three children, instead of the previous two, which was implemented in 2016. I remember reading a similar news article in 2015 when it was announced that China was relaxing the One Child Policy for the first time in decades to allow for two children per couple. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, I was happy that the restrictions were loosened and sad that they were still policing reproductive rights. And yet, this morning when seeing the news, I felt much more strongly. Perhaps it is because during the pandemic, I made an effort to connect to the adoptee community, through joining online Facebook groups, run by adoptees for adoptees. I started trying to (re)learn Mandarin, which I had long since forgotten, despite being put in Mandarin lessons when I was little. Maybe it’s because of the spotlight put on anti-Black and anti-Asian racism due to the multiple high-profile police killings of Black people, the surge in Asian hate crimes due to the racist rhetoric about the origin of the pandemic, that’s forced me to more closely examine my own racial and cultural identity as a Canadian, transracial, Chinese, intercountry adoptee. But perhaps most of all, it’s because I have two sisters, also adopted from China, something that wasn’t allowed in China for most families until now.

Mixed Emotions

For many reasons, reading the news article on China’s new relaxed policy, gave me many more mixed feelings. Again, the happiness at a relaxed policy and the sadness and disappointment at the continued policing of women’s bodies and reproductive rights. But this time, it came with another feeling: anger. I am angry. It feels like a slap to the face for all Chinese adoptees and their biological families who were (forcefully) separated under the One Child Policy. It feels like it was for nothing, even more than before. What was the point of my biological parents relinquishing me (if that’s what happened) if they were just going to change the policy later? What was the point in creating the policy when the birth rate was already falling, as it does when women are given greater access to education, careers and contraceptives, and now they want to increase the birth rate again? What was the point of stripping me of my name, my birthday, my culture, when the driving force behind my abandonment has been (semi-)reversed? If Chinese couples are now allowed to have three children (the same number as my sisters and I), then what was the point of the policy which drove thousands of children, mostly girls, to be abandoned, aborted and trafficked?

Now the policy has been changed and so what? I’m still a Chinese adoptee, living thousands of kilometres from my birth country, with no easy way to connect to any living blood relatives, unless I want to attempt a search. I’m still a Chinese adoptee who doesn’t know my birth name, birthday or birthplace. South Korean adoptees fought for and successfully lobbied the South Korean government for recognition and (limited) reparations. They have been given a way to recover their South Korean citizenship and are now eligible to apply for the F-4 (Korean Heritage) Visa. During the pandemic, the South Korean government sent free face masks for Korean adoptees. China does not acknowledge dual citizenship, nor does it provide adoptees with a special visa that would allow them an easier way return to their birth country. China does not acknowledge intercountry adoptees or how the thousands of children who were adopted internationally were direct consequences of the One Child Policy. The policy has been loosened and now Chinese couples can have up to three children, like my family in Canada. The policy that likely drove my adoption has been loosened and yet nothing has changed for me, and the Chinese government moves on.

What If’s

I don’t like thinking of the what-ifs and what-could-be’s. I don’t like imagining what my life could have been if I was never relinquished (or stolen), if I was never adopted, if I was adopted by a Chinese couple instead etc. But this recent announcement has forced me to think about the what-ifs. Specifically, “What if my birth family had been able to keep me because they weren’t restricted by the One Child Policy?” I’m happy and satisfied with my current life. Despite the occasional hiccups, racist micro-aggressions and identity struggles, I wouldn’t change anything. That doesn’t mean I can’t and won’t mourn the life that was taken from me due to the One Child Policy. I mourn that I don’t know what my biological parents named me (if they did). I mourn that I don’t know the date, time and location where I was born. I mourn that I don’t know, and may never know, if I look like any of my biological relatives. I mourn that I will likely never know the full story behind my adoption. I mourn that as a Canadian, I will never feel fully comfortable in China and that as a Chinese adoptee, I will never be seen as fully Canadian. And I’m angry that for the Chinese government, they can change the One Child Policy and move on, while I and thousands of others will bear the consequences for the rest of our lives.