You + Me = Loss

You + Me = Loss

Today, February 11, 2021 is Chinese New Year. It’s also my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. (On a side-note, how in the world have I been married for twenty-five years? Most days I feel as if I am only twenty-five years old!) As I sit back and think about the meaning of this day and about my little family, I feel a mix of bittersweet emotions rumbling a bit in my chest.

You see, I am adopted. My adoptive father is Chinese. He too was adopted. He was adopted from an orphanage in Hong-Kong. When he signed his name to my birth certificate and adoption papers, and my last name became Chang, a new family was born but a piece of my birth heritage and culture were lost. Out of love, a family was created but the family my parents created also meant loss and trauma for me. At family gatherings, when I looked around, most of the faces that I saw were Asian. I felt like a fish out of water. I loved my family, but there were many moments that I felt as if I didn’t fit in.

Twenty-five years ago, my husband and I said our vows in front of family and friends. The wedding was held in a historic Presbyterian church in Galveston, Texas on a Sunday evening. It was also during the middle of Mardi Gras and so as we left the church that evening, I could see purple and green sparkling parade floats passing by a few streets over. As I surveyed all of our loved ones standing on either side of us, wishing us well as we started our new life together, I saw fewer Asian faces and more caucasian ones. I felt loved but I also still had small feelings of not belonging to this new family that I was marrying into, even though they looked more like me.

Some days I felt lost, adrift in a sea of questions and confusion. I didn’t understand why I had these feelings of sadness, or that I didn’t measure up to what my family expected of me. I felt these feelings with my own family and with my husband’s family. Some days, the heaviness of feeling as if I didn’t belong weighed so much that I felt covered in a fog of depression. As the years of our marriage ticked by, the feelings dissipated a little, but they were never too far out of reach.

Twelve years into our marriage we adopted a ten-month-old baby girl from China. During the incredibly difficult wait for our referral, I faced deep sorrow as I started to peel apart the layers of my own adoption. During this time I reunited with my birth father and my two half-sisters. Being with them was exhilarating but also very painful. Here was this ‘perfect’ family enjoying each other and the lifetime of memories they had made together. I felt as if I missed out on that life. I was envious. I thought back of my own family and the wonderful memories I had made with them and yet a blanket of sadness lightly covered those memories.

One evening as I was sitting through a class that was required for our adoption, I had a sudden realization on why I always felt as if I was walking around with a hole in my heart. Loss…the loss of my birth father punctured a hole in my heart that could never be filled by my adopted family or the family that I had built with my husband. Nothing could erase, cover-up, or hide the hurt or pain that I felt from not having a father/daughter relationship with my biological father. I understood now why I didn’t feel like I fit into the mold of either of my families. I never had dealt with or processed my loss. For thirty-five years, I carried unprocessed, unresolved grief with me everywhere I went and into every relationship (friendship and marriage) I had.

Over the last thirteen years that I have had my daughter in my life, I have often wondered if she feels like she is lost, or if she feels as if she doesn’t quite belong, or she is walking around with feelings she doesn’t quite understand. I wonder what grief feels like for her? We talk about her adoption and what she has lost. We talk about what I lost, and what her grandfather has lost. She knows her story. We celebrate her culture…our somewhat shared culture. We love her native country and my father’s native homeland. We discuss loss and grief and that it will always be okay to talk to us about her feelings of loss. All three of us have suffered great losses in the midst of the creation of our beautiful families. The three of us carry the scars of losing our sense of belonging, of losing the certainty of what our familial history is, and losing our birth culture. My daughter has lost so much more though. She lost her birth family, her birth culture, and her birth country. And while she has been grafted into a half Asian family, and we celebrate all things Chinese, it will never replace the real thing.

You + Me = Loss of culture. She needed a home. I wanted a child to love and one that I knew would fit into my mostly Asian family. We were incredibly blessed to be able to have the opportunity to bring this sweet Chinese girl into our lives and into our family. Because of my own journey of adoption and loss, I hope I can do her justice as she tries to figure out who she is and how her own losses will fit into her story. I have found meaning in my story and I hope one day she will find meaning in hers.

Today, we wore red to celebrate the new year. We ate wonderful Chinese food that her province is known for. We bought the new year trinkets and gave her and her best friend red envelopes stuffed with money. We shared stories about our wedding that was held twenty-five years ago today. Her story and our story are woven so beautifully together. We are trying so hard to allow her to experience her heritage while we are building our own family heritage.

Adoption is both beauty and pain. It is both love and loss. It is both rewarding and excruciatingly difficult. It is, as the Chinese say, it is both Yin and Yang.

#Adoption #China #loss