https://www.teenvogue.com/story/adoption-gratitude-expectationsAdoption Gratitude: How Expectations Weigh on Adoptees
This reported op-ed argues that adoptees shouldn't have to feel grateful.
By Logan Hoffman-Smith
August 29, 2023
“I never know how to feel around my birthday,” said an anonymous adoptee on Subtle Asian Adoptee Traits, a Facebook group where thousands of transnational Asian adoptees go to share their feelings on adoption. “I celebrated my birthday when I was younger,” the poster continued, “but as I’ve gotten older, I am reminded of loss.”
The flurry of hearts and crying emojis that followed from fellow members speaks to the resonance of this statement. Birthdays are a complex time for adoptees. While celebratory in nature, they can also bring up painful reminders of loss, relinquishment, and questions about one’s adoptive parents. Our experience of birthdays serves as a metaphor for the broad, unspoken expectation that goes with adoption: We should always wear a smile lest we be labeled ungrateful or defective for expressing more complicated feelings about our situation.`
Adoptees are often told that our biological parents put us up for adoption because they were financially or emotionally unable to care for us, and that our adoptive parents, out of generosity, took us in to give us a better life in a country with better resources. This narrative is reinforced by most available adoption literature, which is by or for adoptive parents; it is more difficult to access adoption literature that is written by or for adoptees. The stories we are told frame biological parents and birth countries as nonviable as non-options. Kiera McCabe, a poet and Chinese American adoptee, says this version of events disregards the humanity and potential of biological parents, and that the reality is often more troubled. “I think that it took me a long time to get to that attitude, to not view adoption as just this cut-and-paste family where we’ve made everyone happy,” she tells Teen Vogue. “Especially because adoption does inflict a social death on us, and a legal death on us and of where we’re from, our countries of origin, cultural death. We lose so much."
McCabe adds, "It also inflicts a social and legal death on our birth families, because of the pariah status” they get subjected to in some communities for giving up their kids. White savior fantasies," says McCabe, such as the one spun in the 2011 documentary film Somewhere Between, are “reassurance for white people that they’re doing the right thing by adopting.” The “horror” of adoption and foster care is that “we have these narratives of ‘making a family for you.’ But you can’t make these families without destroying another one.”
Many Chinese American adoptees recall their adoptive parents telling them a story about a “red thread of fate” that connected them to their adoptive parents when they were young. Kimberly Rooney 高小荣, an essayist, fiction author, and Chinese American adoptee who has written about the red thread folktale, explains that this appropriated metaphor obscures complex systems by focusing on individual decisions. As Rooney wrote in The Offing magazine, one of these original folktales was about a young man who tried to escape his red thread of fate by maiming the girl he was connected with and ended up unknowingly marrying her. Says Rooney, the original folktale was presented as “sort of proof of, ‘Oh, even if you tried to resist, you are connected.’ This is appropriated and sanitized and whitewashed by a lot of adoptive parents, who turned it into this tale of how the red thread was actually connecting their adoptive child to them.”
They continue, “In appropriating and changing this narrative, adoptive parents aren't just scrubbing the violence of the original folktale, they're also scrubbing the violence that exists within Chinese American adoption."
Rooney goes on to say that "adoptive parents have a lot of power over adoptees in the access that we have when we're younger to our own cultures and the tools and frameworks we’re given to think about ourselves and what happened to us. Even if adoptive parents don't realize that they're abusing that power, and abusing their ability to filter what is and isn't appropriate from our cultures through the lens of their own whiteness even if they don't realize that that's what they're doing, it still is. And it's unfortunately incredibly impactful on adoptees.”
Those who acknowledge the complexities of adoption are often met with backlash. Kimberly McKee, an adoptee and associate professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, has written about the assumption of obligatory gratefulness, presenting the concept of the “adoptee killjoy.”
“The adoptee killjoy pushes back against demands for gratitude toward adoption by demonstrating adoption's complexities,” McKee tells Teen Vogue. “It's not just about being angry; it's thinking about the systems and institutions that rendered individuals adoptable, as well as drawing attention to the fact that adoption just isn't that positive win-win-win for all people.”
She adds, “I like thinking about the adoptee killjoy because, inherently, by voicing just any opinion, we are killing the joy surrounding fantasies of adoption, and that prevailing fantasy of adoption as rescue and as a humanitarian act.”
Statistics show that adoption doesn't exist independent of imperial politics. International Korean adoptions boomed during and after the economic devastation of the Korean War, with the number of international adoptees increasing from around 6,166 in the 1960s to 66,511 in the '80s, according to the country’s Ministry of Health and Welfare data, cited by The Korea Herald. Comparatively, between 2010-2021, the number of international Korean adoptions was 486. China’s one-child policy brought on by economic anxiety also led to an exponential increase in the number of international Chinese adoptions, mainly the adoption of girls. Rooney argues that the movement of adoptees from China to the United States replicates the violence of forced migration and assimilation brought on by the hand of the United States in global capitalism and imperialism. Anna Ghublikian, an artist and Korean American adoptee, identifies as an adoption abolitionist due to the structures of criminality and poverty that render children adoptable. “Adoption is an industrial complex, designed only in the interests of those who have adopted, but it also puts responsibility on an individual adoptive parent," says Ghublikian. "So they either see their child through or steer their child through this journey of institutional violence without necessarily the tools to do that right, potentially thinking they’re do-gooders.”
However, Ghublikian notes, the onus ought not be put on individual parents, but rather on exploitative global politics overall. “Many adoptive parents, I think, could benefit from a little more self-reflection and a critical lens," they say. "But at the end of the day, I wouldn't blame my parents for wanting me. The question of who adoption resources are for kind of reflects both of those things. The interests of parents, prospective parents, I think, is what drove the industry, so naturally, the resources would be oriented around it.”
A shift toward agency for adoptees has led to more readily available resources, says Ghublikian, like gatherings, support groups, film, and literature. McKee, while conducting research for her new book, Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees From Girlhood to Womanhood, has also noticed a shift in resources for adoptees, by adoptees. Memoirs like Shanon Gibney’s The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be and Jenny Heijun Wills’s Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related: A Memoir have given adoptees new access to community and language. McKee is particularly excited about the forthcoming YA anthology of adoptee short fiction, When We Become Ours. Major films, such as Return to Seoul, that feature adoptee characters in all their nuance have also helped make adoptees feel like they have more agency and are less alone. “We're still seeing a shift in terms of how adopted voices are being listened to and amplified," McKee says. "It's not just that we're seeing more adoptees writing memoirs adoptees have been writing memoirs for decades. That's not new. What is new is the content within them the more nuanced or complex conversations about adoptive communities.”
Social media, McKee points out, has also provided a space for adoptees to connect with one another and share their experiences: “Adoptees on social media have a huge voice, whether it's adoptee Twitter, adoptees on TikTok, adoptees on Instagram, there is a growing community. So even if you may not be having these conversations in real life with your friends, there are other avenues to start exploring identity in ways that may feel more comfortable to you.”
Through reflection and conversation with other adoptees, McCabe has gained more confidence and become more comfortable with herself. The poet wants other adoptees to know that it’s okay to push back on society’s assumptions, and that there are many ways to break out of narratives that seem pre-written for us. Adoptees are often told our adoptive parents relinquished us because they really did love us and wanted a better life for us, but this idea as well as feelings of abandonment can bring about significant attachment anxiety. Says McCabe, "Two things were revolutionary for me: Learning the idea that, for us, we are taught love means leaving. Knowledge of this really helped me adjust how I think, my understanding of how I've been in relationships and also to understand why I've been existentially terrified of dying alone for so long. The other thing," McCabe continues, "is we are entitled to the information around our history. It’s not wrong of us to want to know where we come from, because everyone else has that.”
