Who I’m Becoming

by M.B.R.

November 10, 2020

“Where are you from?”…
Despite being a rather simple and straightforward question, it still causes me to hesitate for a second and mentally analyze what the most honest yet appropriate response would be. My automatic response is proudly “Louisville, Kentucky”, the city of horses, rabid sports fans, and the setting for my life as far back as I can remember. However, I know that some people, myself included for that matter, are implying the place I was born, the explanation for the person staring back at them. To answer that, we’d have to draw an arrow to the other side of the world, to Fuling Chongqing, China.

In the midst of third world poverty compounded by overpopulation, orphans were very common in bigger cities in a country that legalized the One-Child policy for planned population growth. I was one of those. I was too young to have any memories of then, but I’m told we were in tiny cribs head to toe and next to each other, living off the bottles and meager portions of rice they had to divide amongst all of the babies there. This bleak and impoverished setting provided the opening for my life; and yet, it was just a step into a completely new world and story.

My journey begins with an older couple thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean who were unable to have children. After much deliberation, prayer, and extra motivation due to age and overcoming health tribulations, the process was in the works to adopt a little girl from China. After months of paperwork, social work visits, passports, vaccines, and so many other technical legalities I don’t fully understand, they were standing in an orphanage, holding a child that they could call theirs. This would chart a course for a whole new direction of my life, but I can never fully leave those origins behind.

Ever since being brought back to the United States at ten months old, an American citizen the moment the plane touched down, I have lived in the same house in the same city for my sixteen plus years of life. Therefore, I always have considered myself very firmly an all-American girl, complete with the “too-urban-to-be-country” Louisville accent that is very loosely classified as southern.

On the other hand, every part of my physical being from my hair, eyes, complexion, and very DNA is rooted in a completely different place and culture. It’s the dichotomy of being physically one hundred percent Chinese but my daily life and experiences being one hundred percent American, so I’m not completely one or the other and don’t feel rightrepresenting one at the sake of the other. As a result, coming to terms with both of these parts of myself is something that has taken much time and is still in progress. .

One of the great blessings of living in the United States in the 21st century is the more widespread acceptance of people of all kinds of ethnicities, backgrounds, and appearances, but I’m not going to pretend that it’s perfect. One of the fundamental longings of humans that God has placed in us and is amplified in this broken world is a need to be accepted and to feel like we belong. We, in our brokenness, will often take anything that makes us different from those around us, whether that be the amount of melanin produced, affecting our skin color, IQ points, class, career choice, or literally anything that makes us individuals, and use that as a means to try to make us feel like we intrinsically fit better within the world than those who lack those certain characteristics. In other words, it’s like a golden retriever saying it’s more of a dog than a Maltese because it’s bigger and has fur instead of hair; that would be quite ridiculous wouldn’t it. They are both different with very distinct appearances, quirks, and needs but are just as fundamentally dogs as each other. Humans get tripped up on that though, and sometimes it’s ourselves that trip us up the most. That has definitely been my biggest personal struggle.

I’ve never been teased or ridiculed or faced a form of racism for not looking like the people around in me. In fact, younger children tend not to notice, and my peers throughout my pre-teen and teen years think it’s an interesting fact but are so used to being around me that it’s almost forgotten. I’ve been in completely opposite environments when it comes to diversity and ethnicity, from my public elementary school where I had a unique mix of Hispanic, African American, Asian, and white classmates and friends to the small private Christian school I currently attend where the overwhelming majority is white middle to upper-middle class kids. I can honestly say I have appreciated and enjoyed both of those experiences for their differing perspectives, challenges, and opportunities. As I look at my experiences, the problems I’ve faced with my identity have never come as a result of outside torment, but rather as a result of my own insecurity and need to feel like I have a place.

Throughout my life and especially in my elementary years, I have always been what you would call socially awkward. Never quite understanding and relating to kids my age, I didn’t have many friends. Instead I preferred to dig in the dirt, read, and talk to my teachers about their lesson plans. I didn’t know it then, but that resulted in me being quite lonely and feeling like I didn’t fit in my life, like a square block trying to go into a circle hole. Those feelings have lingered into my present.

When I became old enough to really grasp and understand that people look different and that I didn’t come into my family in the conventional way, that planted another seed of something that disconnected me from the people around me. It didn’t grow into insecurity until my teenage years. My sister was also adopted from China as were my only close friends, so it was almost a little bubble. However, I noticed the feelings of not quite belonging in little everyday moments that tend to stick with adopted kids.

For instance, hearing about how my mom was a spitting image of my grandma and my cousins comparing themselves to old pictures of their parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and I just sort of sat awkwardly, knowing that I wasn’t physically connected to my loved ones in the way they were to each other.

This was never said to me by anyone, but I seemed to do what humans so often do and pinned my sense of not clicking with the people around me onto what’s often easiest: what you can see.

I was so desperate to be “normal” that I came to resent anything that made me an individual, which included my black hair, eyes so dark it’s hard to see my pupils, and olive complexion in a world overflowing with family members on both sides and my current best friends with hazel eyes and blonde hair turned to brown by time. It’s almost easier to think that because I look different, I’m not accepted… rather than letting someone get close enough to know me, the way I think, love, and view the world, and then rejecting me all the same. It isn’t even at its root other people’s opinions of me, it is me in my heart not knowing who I am or what I’m meant to be.

I can’t say I’ve got it all figured out now, but I have made some progress. Fundamentally, having a deep-rooted knowledge of my identity first and foremost as a child of God because of the blood of Jesus Christ in my place and His resurrection giving me a new life, I’ve been able to let all the other aspects of my worldly identity sort of fall into place.

I’m one of a special group of people God has chosen to give the testimony of being adopted, given a new name, and new life twice, first by my earthly mother and father and secondly by my Heavenly Father. He saw me in the womb of the mother I don’t know and softened my heart to the point where I surrendered it to Him that morning in my bedroom nine years ago.

Now sitting on my couch typing this amidst much racial tension and division in our nation, I can’t say the pull will ever go completely away.

To this day, I will still stare awkwardly at the mall food court ladies offering samples for the Chinese restaurants as they speak to me in Mandarin before hesitantly pointing out that I only speak English. On other days, I’ll confidently make a well-timed “Made in China” joke to my white friends, and they pause for a second before I burst out laughing from the unique position I’m in.

On a deeper side, as I get older and come closer to the point where I start considering relationships and such, I’ve recently been processing that chances are I will marry someone who looks different then me and I from them, and if we were to have children, they would receive none of the features of the people I’ve been raised and loved by my whole life.

But isn’t that a beautiful thing though, and a very small representation of the future where people of every nation, tribe, and tongue are united together at throne to worship the King of Kings forevermore.

When considering all the chapters of my story already written, the ones in progress, and the ones yet to be penned, I’ve ultimately determined that, while important and key to explaining part of who I am, “where I’m from” isn’t as critical as “where I’m going” and “Who I’m Becoming”. While the answers to those aren’t yet clear, I trust the God whose plan for my life has been evident from the start will continue to guide my paths.