Transracial Adoptees According to the Media: Grappling, Struggling, and Hopelessly Confused

I wrote a post on this before, but with the surge in anti-Asian violence and the Atlanta spa shootings of six Asian women, there's been a wave of new interest in the alluring story of the Asian people raised by white people.

I find this absolutely insulting.

Why? Imagine a tiger escaped from a zoo and killed a family of humans. Then the news media goes to interview Tiger King and asks, "You do know that tigers kill humans. So how can you live with tigers?" In this case, a white person killed Asian people, ergo, we must interview the strange and most mysterious anomaly that is Asian transracial adoption. (Transracial adoption means that the adoptee is not of the same race as the adopted parents. It doesn't mean we're changing our race.)

As a resident of a suburb of Philadelphia, I can say confidently that there are plenty of adoptees, Chinese and otherwise, who very strongly identify as Asian American. Just because our parents don't look like us doesn't mean we are confused about who we are. I don't look in the mirror and see a white girl. I see me.

There's been a long-standing tradition in the news media to portray adoptees are grappling and struggling on such sophisticated ideas on race because apparently, we are so busy struggling in the vortex of our lifelong racial identity crisis that we cannot have intelligent ideas.

There's an expectation in society that I should be in racial limbo my entire life. One of the themes of "Somewhere Between" (a documentary made in 2011 about Chinese adoptees in America and does labor under the misbelief that we were all abandoned) was literally that we don't belong anywhere. We're stuck somewhere between. I loathe that this idea gets hammered again and again and again. We get it, our parents look different from us--but that doesn't take away our identities as full human beings. Nor does it mean that all adoptees are a monolith that can simply be described as "grappling."

I found NPR's latest article on Asian adoptees raised by white people to be one of the most insulting examples of this phenomenon to date. The article is entitled "'Am I Asian Enough?' Adoptees Struggle To Make Sense Of Spike In Anti-Asian Violence" 

In the title, the two main themes are put front and center:

1) When Asian people get murdered by a racist gunman, apparently instead of having intelligent, fully formed ideas about this spike in Anti-Asian Violence, they are "struggled to make sense" of the world around them. 

2) The truncated quote of "Am I Asian Enough?" within the context of wondering if their voices are valued in national discourse gets reduced to the age-old monolithic narrative of racial confusion. As adoptees were mostly adopted as infants and child, we can easily be perpetually infantilized by the media. 

 Look, if you are an adoptee who is truly struggling, then that's okay! You're thinking about who are you introspectively and working through it. But it is so insulting for the media to take the tragedy of Asian women getting shot and immediately make a beeline for the Asian adoptee aisle, pushing their grubby little fingers into the "don't belong," "struggling," and "grappling" narrative.

There are adoptees who are questioning, grappling, and struggling with identity. But there are non-adoptees who also are struggling with those same questions and adoptees who aren't struggling at all. The media gets to pick who they interview, whose voices they highlight, and which narrative to spin. I'm sick of this "adoptees are helpless forever-wanderers of this godforsaken racial maze" treatment. I am a Chinese American woman. I am a Chinese adoptee. My parents are white. I have intelligent ideas about race. I'm not grappling. I'm not struggling. I'm not in racial limbo. I feel accepted and a part of the Asian American community and identity. And I don't have anything to prove to anyone. So will the news media please stop pushing this monolithic experience?

P.S. After meeting up with a friend of mine after many years, who also happens to be adopted form China, we were able to share our experiences with other people trying to pigeon-hole us into what identities THEY thought we should be. I think she said it best when she said, "It's not we who are grappling to figure out what race we are, it's everyone else grappling with us and where to put us!" I told her to slap that on a t-shirt and I'd buy it.