How do adoptees navigate milestones like weddings?
Over the weekend, I traveled to North Carolina to see a friend get married. I met this friend, who I’ll call Mia, in high school, when our families were on a homeland tour to Korea organized by our adoption agency. The trip was an angsty awakening for me — my Sarah McLaughlin and Elliott Smith CDs were playing in constant rotation. I was withdrawn and awkward but Mia was the cool kid, chain smoking skinny Korean cigarettes and holding hands with Mark, her homeland tour boyfriend. The Koreans fawned over our white parents while the children were mostly left alone, occasionally rounded up for photo ops at temples. At night we snuck out of the hotels to go bowling and buy alcohol. I observed Mia with a kind of wonder. Here was a badass Korean girl I could look up to. Finally.
Years later, when Mia and I were both in college in New York, we traveled to the Gathering conference in Seoul. Every night we went out drinking, coming back to the orphanage guesthouse in the early morning. We listened to the babies down the hall cry out as we fell asleep. The next day, we would visit our favorite ramyun ajummah, who had the spiciest broth on the street, sweating out the debris left from night before.
But it wasn’t all drinking and flirting with boys. While in Korea, we visited Eastern’s home for unwed mothers, attached to the building where we were staying. We interviewed the birth mothers. One had given birth just a few days prior, her belly was noticeably deflated. Mia, a photographer, snapped portraits of pregnant mothers to leave in the adoption files. One day, a child will come looking for their file and see tucked within it, a photo of their birth mother. Our project served as a catalyst for my wanting to be a journalist.
Back to Mia’s wedding. The best man made a wobbly, sentimental speech. The bride’s father took the mic and talked about Mia beginning with, “Our journey with Mia began 34 years ago when we picked her up at the airport…” Then, Mia spoke: “I want to thank my parents for adopting me,” she said.
I was married 5 months before. As an adoptee, I struggled with the idea of having a wedding, knowing that my friends were mostly Asian while my family was all white. I was scared of the dichotomy this would create, self-conscious of the way that my two worlds would be forced together. Indeed the wedding, with my white family and my Asian friends swinging from the karaoke stage at the after-party was surreal. The crowd at the bar in Savannah might have been perplexed by the sight of a Korean woman in a wedding dress belting out “We are Family” with a group of white women. But, for better or worse, it’s who I am.
Mia’s wedding was the first adoptee wedding, other than my own, that I have attended. While she didn’t have many Asian friends, her white family reflected my own.
Why did I cringe when her dad talked about picking her up from the airport? When Mia expressed gratitude to her parents for adopting her? Maybe because it all sounded too … uncomplicated. It distills the adoptee experience down to one emotion: gratitude. If I had spoken about my adoption at my wedding it would take an entire novel and more than a few drinks to do it justice. Instead, you could see my adoption plastered everywhere — over the people I loved who were in attendance.
I suppose the weekend highlighted the differences between Mia and I, how we might have veered into separate directions. Could it be that I’m the badass now?
