What do you think of when you hear the word “adopted” or when you discover someone is adopted? Take it from someone who is adopted, questions will circulate about the circumstance until the truth is revealed. To me, I never viewed being adopted as a bad thing. In fact, it saved my life. Honestly, I don’t think I would still be alive had I not been, and that scares me — what my life could have been. But it’s something I’ll never know, and I feel very lucky that I was given another chance to live. I believe that’s what my birth mother wanted to give me: a second chance to live.
Growing up in the South was hard. Even though people claim racism ceased to exist years ago, it still does. Kids my own age asked me questions about why I looked different from the rest of my family. Some of them included, “Did your real parents not love you?” and, “How much can you see out of your eyes?” At first, I didn’t know how to respond. How does one respond to those questions at the age of 12?
The only place I felt like I belonged was at home with my family. My parents never treated me any differently from my three brothers and my sister, and according to my mother, my siblings “worshiped the ground I walked on.”
A few months ago, my second brother told me, “I never thought of you as being different from us. I just thought of you as my sister.”
After feeling like an outcast until I was 17, at the beginning of my junior year, I decided to leave home. Going to a boarding school in the North was the best decision I ever made because I finally got a taste of what it was like to not be perceived as an alien. I was a foreigner in my hometown, but in Connecticut, I felt like I actually fit in somewhere. Well, apart from my family.
While I was there, I met a boy and a girl who were adopted from Russia and the United States consecutively, and it was a relief to know I wasn’t the only one. Even now, when I meet those who are also adopted, I feel as if I have a connection, a bond with them.
Of course I have those moments where I wonder who my birth parents are, what they look like if I have siblings, what I would be doing if I still were in China, but those questions will never be answered. I used to be dissatisfied with that realization, but now I have come to accept the reality that I will never know.
Now when I tell people I’m adopted, I don’t receive weird looks or odd questions. Instead, I’m warmly met with the words, “That’s cool!”
I used to feel so alone, and there were times I wished I looked like everyone else.
But being different is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s what makes you special.
