Musings on Identity

This to me is real: When people look at him, they will see Asian. This is part of who he is. So rather than ignoring or denying this, help him to embrace it. Don’t put him in the schizophrenic position of feeling like a white person trapped in an Asian body.

So: Nurture his Korean-ness. Learn about Korea. Make connections with the local K-A community. Make connections with other K-adoptive families. For mutual support, shared experience. Having adopted him, we must also to some extent adopt his birth country, which in fact I am eager to do.

Yet this is also true: that he is and will be culturally American. What about his desire and need to fit in here? Is it better to emphasize difference or similarity? Can you do both? How? For starters, you actively acknowledge difference as a positive thing to prevent its being considered a negative or shameful thing. At the same time you continue to nourish a sense of essential similarity that is more than skin deep. He is not either/or; he is both/and.

My own father, as a boy, was ashamed of his Italian-ness to the point that he denied it, a fact that later made him doubly ashamed. The pressure to conform was too great, and he had no resources against it—not in his community and not in his family, who could not understand how he felt. He was alone. Would it not have been healthier for him to have grown up proud of his Italian-ness?

What of this: when D feels uncomfortable being singled out? He didn’t fit in the Korean school with Korean kids who spoke no English: this was his sense, not ours. He is not Korean, he is Korean-American. He is an American of Korean descent. Sometimes (often, especially while growing up) he may just want to be an American.

I don’t want him to grow up feeling alone, isolated, confused. There are steps we can take to prevent that. Difference can be a source of strength as well as weakness.

Last night I read the report from The Gathering, a first conference of adoptees, held in DC in 1999. I was encouraged by the tone, which was mostly positive. These adoptees certainly had issues, had pain. But the overall tone was not one of anger. This was a contrast to some of what I’ve seen on the Internet, and in reviews of books like Outside Looking In. (I haven’t read this book yet; I need to work up to it.)

Is it possible that some of these more strident voices have embraced victimhood as their identity? And that they have been encouraged to do so by well-meaning activists? Yes. Is it also possible that I want to deny or minimize their pain because it hurts me too much to think of that pain being D’s, of that pain becoming the central fact of his life?