THIS LIFE

Nearly a decade ago I went to visit my grandfather in the hospital. My sister, three and a half years younger, was there with my parents when I arrived. A middle-aged nurse came in and began talking to my parents and sister. Given my Asianness, she probably didn’t think I was family at first. I wasn’t offended. But then she started talking to me like someone would talk to a pre-teen.

“Are you still in school?” She said, with a voice I might use to talk to my pets. She even hunched her head down as if I were a dwarf. No offense to the dwarves, but I’m nearly 5’2″ and the rest of my family isn’t much taller.

“Nope,” I said, kind of confused.

“So, you’re not going to go to college?” She asked.

At that point, I realized she thought I was in high school! I told her, “I’m in my mid-twenties.”

She remarked, “My, you look so young!” And then she went on to talk to my younger sister about how sometimes when you get older you start doing things to look younger.

I didn’t think much of it at the time because I wasn’t old enough to care how young or old people thought I was. I was used to my peers being older since I started working at such a young age. And in the creative industry, there aren’t the same dress codes to abide by. People just wear what they want–and I’m glad. I laughed at the idea of someone thinking I looked that young, though.

On the phone to one of my best friends, five years older, she said, “I’d be so offended! She was commenting that you weren’t age appropriate.”

It was the first time I’d really heard that phrase, so it stuck with me. Age appropriate? What the hell is that?

Being Asian, I’m supposedly lucky in that people can’t easily pinpoint my age. I looked older as a teen and then my face got more subtle definition over the years. I have puffiness under my eyes from allergies, but people still guess I’m ten years younger at times–which I find hilarious, but again take no offense. It can even be flattering. The only thing that I do find offensive, though, is that whole thing called age appropriateness.

I’m not talking about wearing diapers and sucking on a pacifier, people. There’s a fetish genre for that and I’m not into it. But, Mary Jane shoes? Yes, please. Mini skirts? So long as I can pull them off, why not? Pigtails? They’re more fun than a pony tail. I wear what I like because I like it, not because I’m trying to look a certain age, and not because I’m in some sort of denial.

Okay, well maybe I am in a little denial, and if I am, it’s that people will ever stop thinking they have a right to make you play the role they see you in. From my point of view, I don’t let people decide what music I should listen to, what politics to believe in, or what food I should be eating. So why on earth would I care to consider what clothes they think I should be wearing, or what activities I can or can’t participate in? Why start now down that slippery slope to conformity, making fun of people who are braver than us, and gossiping about why they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing? I’m an expressive person and I do what I like and think that you should, too.

I read somewhere that these days people are younger for longer for a variety of reasons. I believe it and think that it’s great that we make our curiosities and vibrancy last. The rules of what age you should marry, buy a house, have kids, and in what order, have been proven obnoxious. People who want to believe there’s an exact formula to life that we should all follow aren’t inspired enough. We should not listen to them. For the most part, I try to ignore them.

So, why this post? Well, I guess I’m now considered within that age spectrum where I’m more attuned to people’s ridiculous rules. But just because I’m attuned to them does not mean that I care enough to alter myself to fit into their picture. In fact, I look forward to reaching those ages I never thought I’d make it to, continuing to dress as I please without giving in to the pressure to fit the norm. I should design a T shirt that says, “I feel good so f*ck you.”

And also, it would’ve been my grandfather’s birthday today and thinking of him made me remember the hospital story. Happy birthday, Papa. It’s too bad you’re gone. I have a feeling we would’ve gotten along a lot better today. Maybe I could’ve even borrowed your fedoras and taken things to a whole new level?

I’m still not at the point where I can imagine my first mother, whether she thinks of me on the Korean equivalent of this day, or comprehend that she was ever my mother. It doesn’t help that I’m no closer to understanding how I came to be abandoned, just shy of a year into my passive search. I can’t empathize with her, because I don’t know if it was a tough decision for her to leave her baby. I don’t know if she was killed or pressured into it–if she had anything to do with it at all. But I know I had to grow inside some woman to be born. It’s still odd to know nothing about this person I was a part of, whom I couldn’t survive without at one stage. All I know is that soon after I could exist unattached to her, I became a survivor.

My childhood wasn’t perfect. I don’t know many people whose were. From my perspective, my parents made some mistakes, but I can’t imagine a parent who wouldn’t make several. I was a complicated child in a complicated situation. Very little was known about international transracial adoptees when I was growing up. My parents were told I needed a loving home and they stepped up to the task, unaware of the psychological time-bomb I’d become.

I’d like to think that I’ve done very well, unapologetic to how boastful that sounds. And because I’m finally at a place of peace, I can finally, truthfully, write the following to the woman who raised me: My mother.

Mom, we have hurt one another. We have grown from our trials and tribulations. We’ve ached for what we couldn’t and can’t be for each other, and cried for what we were and hadn’t meant to be. We have challenged each other’s existence in ways that more simplified relationships cannot. And despite every stubborn scowl and annoyance that I’ve had with you (to you and behind your back!), I am thankful to have you and our complex relationship. You’re the only mother that I know. And if ever a time comes when I know of my biological mother, you will always be what I consider my real mother. You had the balls to take me into your home and raise me amongst your own flesh and blood.

I’m sure it’s difficult to try to understand that although I’m part of your family, I will never be just like my brothers and sisters who were born from you. From no fault of your own, I don’t have that natural entitlement or the security that comes with it. But it means a lot to know you appreciate me for my differences and the richness my dynamic adds.

All around me, there are babies being born from anxious parents who can’t wait to know them. The first months of these babies’ lives will be filled with excitement, anticipation, and love. These babies will be held and squeezed, bounced on knees, and passed around to the open arms of so many relatives and friends. I don’t begrudge these babies for what they should have, but it still hurts sometimes to realize what my first six months lacked.

To all the mothers who do whatever it takes to make their families and to keep them safe and close to their hearts, I salute you. I really do.

I’ve been told that I have an extraordinary memory for my past and I probably do. But memory is funny when its past context smashes up against its present context to create a new cap on the wave of a truth.

When I was little, I used to lay in bed imagining a future that would never be. I learned how to lucid dream decades before I knew what that meant, because I wanted to have control over something. I could fly in my dreams if I tried hard enough. I could make myself invisible. I could tele-transport a whole group of people to safety if need be–or just for fun. In real life I was told ‘you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up’ and ‘anything is possible’. I took those things to heart and it placated me for a while.

As I started becoming conscious of my face and the way it looked so different from the rest of my family’s faces, I became secretly obsessed. There was a long countertop between two sinks in our bathroom with a wide mirror on the wall above it. I used to sit there for hours, upclose with my face and all of its differentness.

I knew two Asian girls in my town at the time but pretty much tried to avoid them. I don’t know what that was really about except maybe I didn’t want people to associate me with them and make fun of us together. Maybe if I wasn’t around them, my Asianness was less accentuated and our collective Asianness would be diminished. I didn’t want to be like these two other girls. I wanted to be like my family, I guess. I wanted to feel like somewhere I belonged and everyone else would know it just by looking at me in the same way they’d look at the rest of my family and know they weren’t just friends of the family. I dreaded when an adult would talk to my parents when we were all out together asking ‘are those all yours?’ because of the sheer number of us. It would only be a matter of time before my existence at the table would have to be explained.

So at night, I decided to dream up a world where I could mold myself as if I were clay. There was a secret place on my arm that I could push a certain way that would make me malleable. I could just tap something and imagine its color and that would stick, too. All I had to do was hit that button again to lock in my changes. In my dreams, I could be long and narrow, a blonde or a redhead, with green eyes and a freckly complexion. In my dreams I would still stand out, but now in a way that everyone admired. I was the super ‘them’.

Of course I was insecure. Why wouldn’t I be–a single Asian girl in a sea of white? The only Asians I saw on TV were dorky with rice bowl haircuts, ugly glasses, and funny accents. If they weren’t on Sesame Street, they were made fun of. In the media, tall, tan, blondes with long eyelashes were the thing and I was the furthest from it.

After a few years of this subconscious clay like fantasy, I started to become depressed when I realized that I would never be able to be ‘whatever I wanted’ and not everything was going to be possible. And to make matters worse, I was starting to get a little acne. So I’d sit in that same spot in the mirror scraping my nails from cheek to chin. I’d hold my eyes open with my fingers hoping they would just f*cking stay like that. I’d use every single one of my sisters’ beauty products in the bathroom hoping they would make me start to look like them. But of course it never happened and only made my skin worse. At dinner, my dad would tell me that I wash my face the wrong way and everyone would try to tell me what to do as I sat there feeling so ugly and gross.

Growing up so distanced from a community of people who looked like me made me incredibly vain and terribly disconnected. When I met people, I fixated on their appearance rather than who they were. I’d be thinking ‘if only I had her eyes/hair/waist/skin’ everytime I saw someone new. And if anyone complimented me, I knew for sure it was because they felt bad for me.

As comfortable as I’ve always been to be the me on the inside, I don’t think I was very comfortable with being Asian until the last couple of years–and I’m in my thirties now. I felt uncomfortable around ‘real’ Asians (non-adoptees) after my experience with Lin’s family, afraid they wouldn’t see me as one fo them. Hell, I didn’t even see myself as an authentic Asian–especially after visiting Korea.

The past few years I’ve made more of an effort to get to know more Korean adoptees. I’ve spent time looking at Asian faces without so much prejudice, seeing the person beyond the face. I can finally look at our faces with clean eyes–not with wannabe white American eyes nor not-quite-Korean eyes. I’m able to appreciate all the beautiful, subtle Asian features that make me feel calm about being amongst them. I actually feel ‘amongst’ a people now. Why did it have to take so f*cking long?

Body image is a big enough problem for women in general, let alone those who are unavoidably different from the bulk of their immediate community. Call me an insecure child or say that my family didn’t try hard enough to boost my individuality or self-esteem, and I’ll consider it, but I know that’s not it. Families are supposed to tell us we’re great, and if we’re lucky, they do. But I never bought it. I looked to my peers and picked up on how I was looked at or treated and valued those interpretations over anything said by someone who was supposed to care for me. And my peers looked to celebrities, models, and the media to tell them what beauty was. We were kids. When you’re a kid, that’s just what you do.

I’d like to think kids who grow up in family situations similar to mine have it better today. There’s the internet. There are some movies with cool Asian Americans. There are a few Asian Americans in cool bands. Asians on Western TV are not just figure skaters, news reporters, greasy nerds, kung-fu fighters, or token add-ons anymore. Then again, plastic surgery is so accessible to kids now and there’s tremendous pressure for monolid Asians (like myself) to get their eyes ‘fixed’ before they’re thirteen. Nearly every popular Asian celebrity has had their faces made over to look more ideal.

Of course self-esteem has to come from within, but we’ll always be a product of our environment to some extent. So much seeps into our subconscious and attaches to our cells. Our self-esteem isn’t always the same as our body image, either. It has taken me decades to navigate through physical self-acceptance and to be okay with my own limitations. I still fight it sometimes and of course I never want to just let myself go. I owe it to myself to workout and be healthy. But the media… you can’t tell me they don’t play a big role in our self-image–no matter how smart we are. We don’t live on an island in our minds. We live in this world with a spectrum of people who want to Photoshop us with their products and eyes.

I used to look back at my young self and see her as so imaginative. It made me a little proud. But like an old joke that you hear again as an adult, it’s not quite the same anymore. Sure, I was imaginative, but I was also pathetically sad. I’m lucky that I could afford to worry about my looks rather than where I would sleep or when my next meal would be. I was privileged enough to be vain–that’s not lost on me. Still, I’d like to see a world where kids don’t want to carve their own faces off because they don’t feel it’s okay to be them, looking like themselves and nobody else. The world interacts with us through its face and into our own.

One way or another we are conceived, carried, and born. The process starts during one of those three events and never dies until we do. Whether that’s when our hearts stop, brains die, souls are squashed, when we are buried, cremated, or otherwise physically extinguished–I don’t know. But I do know that life is a process in progress from the very beginning and until the end. It’s not just the best of the times that we’ve had, nor the worst.

Around this time, many years back when I was born, I was being passed around quite a bit. The week following my supposed birthday has always been a nebulous one full of contemplation and wavering emotions. It’s like climbing slowly up the old rickety rollercoaster, knowing the drop is gonna hit any moment. I feel full of so many things, so many amazing things, but I just want to throw my hands in the air and fall quickly with my heart bouncing up inside my head, hoping it will land me somewhere safe. Let go of my mind and just be in my body. I love that feeling. I hate that feeling. I need that feeling, and I know I can rely on it. It’s not quite instability and not quite on the verge of insanity. It’s hard to let go of the edges of the car even though I logically know that if it derails I’m totally screwed anyway.

And that’s just what life is like for me, I guess. It’s a series of sharp turns, lifts, drops, wonder, and recovery. I’m so happy for what I have now that it makes me feel guilty for wanting more–and I do. But that’s just a sign of not being overtaken. I may have been hijacked from time to time, but I’ve reclaimed myself and it’s never felt better. To want is to maintain a healthy spirit that knows it’s okay to continuously strive for better.

Say what you will about technology and the internet, but it’s all balance. The other day my (OMG) fiancé and I FaceTimed on the bed with his mother in Ireland. (It’s a lot nicer than it sounds.) There are so many people I’ve connected with because of technology, and so many kids will have a more open world and opportunities they might not have had otherwise. In this world full of power struggles and war, political maneuvering and ugliness, if you can read this, you are fortunate. If you can complain about how many times Person X posts about their baby/band/car/bike/job/pet/lover/hater/cause/etc., then you are privileged. You may not see it now, but someday you will.

We already take so much for granted–says the girl who’s disappointed we’re still driving cars rather than Jetsonesque spaceships. In my busy life, I can find time to have a quick, meaningful conversation with someone in a place I’ll probably never visit, and they will enrich my life. We can see photos of newborn babies from excited parents and relatives, and contemplate what we might have missed. (There likely wasn’t fanfare when I was born, but might there have been proof of what my biological family looked like around then?) We can have our hearts melted by other people’s words–or links to videos about animals who treat each other better than people. Any curiosity we have, we have cheap and easy access to. And that’s not even including how anyone can fulfill their creative ideas. I used to be embarrassed to plead with my dad to borrow the enormous video camera to record me and my friends doing synchronized dances–which I’m glad were well before YouTube. And then I’d be humiliated when he’d have to watch it transfer onto VHS.

I’m too young to be old and too old to be young, and it’s great. There’s a part of me that I’ve unlocked and she feels a lot like I did when I was a child, before she knew her worst nightmares could happen IRL. And there’s a part of me that’s always been present. She’s an old lady with long hair who paints canvases on her porch, who sings in her music room, who writes out her memoirs and shares them with anyone who cares enough to bother.

All this time I thought I’ve wasted, I can appreciate now. I no longer wait for my life to begin nor worry about when it will end. I’ve made amends with what I’ve needed to, so perhaps I will die, but if I do it’ll be happy because I finally got it. (Note: I don’t want to die.)

All these people, all these opinions, all these creations that we admire and judge from our specks here on Earth–if we’re lucky, they’re what we’ll remember in our final days. We’ll think of the awkward conversations with Person Y, the time we didn’t mean to insult Person Z. We’ll laugh at the memories we made with Persons A-G. We’ll think of the things we created and what drove us to make them. We’ll wish we had more time for it all, but were too busy living out other parts of our lives. The times that we shone will be less than we’d have hoped for, and the times that we flopped will be more. And it will be totally okay.

If I were just a digital representation of myself, each pixel of me would be differently filled. You might hate some of them. You might love some of them. Chances are, you’d laugh at some of them, too. I do. But it’s just me and that part of me is just a speck of who I am, who’s just a speck of our community, which is just a speck of the world, which is just a speck of the universe–and so on. We’re so small yet every speck of ourselves takes turns inflating inside us. It makes us feel more than we are and that helps us feel good about just being a speck of a speck of a speck. I think that’s kind of cool.

Before I went to camp and made friends, I thought there wasn’t much to do during the summers up in Maine. I spent my time reading, exploring, bike riding, being a tom boy, and swimming. We lived on a small island that was reachable from the mainland by a few bridges, but it was much more fun to take the boat down the river to the harbor when Dad was in the mood for it. Mom packed us picnic lunches and if we were lucky, we spotted seals along the way. That was really all I was interested in at the time. Those slick lumps of cuteness were so exciting to see. Sometimes they’d sunbathe in a pack on the rocks and completely make my week.

Our cottage that grew into a house was right on the river–so much so that one side was on stilts. At high tide on a full moon, the water would rise up under the house. We’d turn on the floodlights and my older sisters and I would look for baby squid amongst all the other sea creatures. I believe that’s why I made the decision to not eat seafood at such a young age. To me, sea life was magical. It pained me to see them crawling over one another in tubs at the restaurants in town. At the yearly clam-bake and whenever we ate out, I’d watch people crack open lobsters and clams and I’d cringe in silence, eating french fries and corn.

At low tide, sometimes I’d convince my brother who was two years younger to explore through the mile of mud and seaweed. I had two things on my mind: 1) I liked to find a long stick, plunge it into the earth, and rotate it until it made a cone-like hole. I told my brother it was how they made clay, but of course I completely made that up. 2) I liked to find crabs and make them pets for the day. We filled the kiddie pool with water and dumped them into it. Sometimes we’d let them slip down the little plastic slide, but we’d mostly just watch them move around. We always set them free after awhile. I hadn’t known at the time that it was cruel. I just liked to study them.

There weren’t many kids on our end. They called our little community’s piece of the island Rocky Point, and it was mostly vacation homes. When someone had a kid visiting, we’d adopt them as friends for their short stay. Usually they weren’t exclusive to our age levels. Friends were so hard to come by at that time that we weren’t able to keep anyone to ourselves.

One day, there was a boy around my brother’s age who came around looking for something to do. My brother had an ATV so they rode around on that for awhile. It was a low tide day so I’d collected some crabs into the kiddie pool. When they got bored, they came around the house and saw me observing and playing with them. I don’t know what it was, but I didn’t really like the new kid. Something about him just rubbed me the wrong way, so I went inside for awhile and got something to eat.

I can’t remember how long I’d been inside for, but our kitchen spanned three sides of the house. You could see the pebbled driveway, the garden, and the waterfront–which we called our little beach. The boys were laughing outside, but I just ignored them. And then I heard something hit the side of the house. And then again. And again. I looked out and saw my brother and that boy hucking the crabs against the house, killing them, and laughing hysterically. I went out and saw all the dead crabs thrown on the ground. I felt betrayed and as if I’d betrayed them.

I think my mom went out to yell at them to stop, but it was too late. I was so angry with my brother. I held it against him for a long time. He had no good reason for doing it, of course. He said it was the other boy’s idea and he just joined along without thinking. From then on, I stopped gathering the crabs, of course. And I stopped taking my brother on bike rides to look for tadpoles in swamps. I didn’t trust him anymore. He was just a kid though–maybe six or seven years old. But around that time, our personalities were shifting a lot. He was getting really into science and burned insects using a magnifying glass and the sun. As much as I hated insects, it still annoyed me that he found nothing wrong with it.

To some extent, I can understand why my brother disregarded the crabs as worthy of life. We lived on the coast of Maine a quarter of our lives. People were always eating seafood. You saw them in tanks and even chose the one you wanted. No one valued the lives of sea creatures, unless they were in big aquariums. For some reason, that was different. And of course the bigger ones got more respect.

I was already well on my way to being a vegetarian by then. My dinnertime inquisitions had made me feel guilty about eating red meat. It didn’t help that the juice was the blood. I never liked the taste of it. I’d have stopped eating chicken a lot sooner than I had if it didn’t taste so good and usually didn’t resemble any part of an animal. Being raised in an Irish Italian family, meat was a huge staple in our home. Luckily as I got older, more nutritious chicken-esque alternatives like soy, tempeh, and wheat gluten were being made available. But while I was growing up, I nearly drove my mother mad with what she considered to be my strange emotional food issues. And she’s right. I did have emotional issues with food. I just didn’t like the idea of eating animals. We always had a houseful of cats, dogs, guinea pigs, fish, and whatnot. I didn’t get how we chose which animals to eat and which ones to treat like pets or a part of the family.

It’s been so long since I’ve had to eat around tendons or put my emotional attachment towards animals behind a locked door in my head. There are enough things in life to feel guilty about. I’m glad that for me, food is no longer one of them.

Land of Gazillion Adoptees, the blog that covered my e-KADs, have been running this unofficial Why the Adoption Establishment Annoys Me week. The corrupt adoption industry is something I’ve taken upon myself to look into recently. The topic of adoption alone fuels a lot of intensely heated conversations that I’ve only recently felt brave enough to participate in. And I’m glad people are finally discussing this touchy subject, but we’ve got a lot of work to do.

To me, one of the most irksome fallouts of the adoption industry is how it has painted and sold fairytales to the world. Prospective Adoptive Parents are made to feel like saviors just by taking in this poor child that without them had no chance. Adoptees grow up with the feeling that if they’re not grateful for being saved and everything their new life has afforded them, then they should learn how bad it could’ve been had they not been adopted. And when that adoptee starts to learn that there are more scenarios they could’ve lived–other than becoming a prostitute or uneducated migrant–they’re once again an ungrateful adoptee. Because of these fairytales that continue to be hammered into our heads, we’re made to feel something’s wrong with us if we so much as question them. What’s worse is that people who hardly even know us or our histories are honestly ignorant enough to tell us how lucky we were to have been adopted.

I’ve met in real life and in online communities adoptees who have had preferable experiences. They were housed, fed, educated, and most importantly, loved. More or less, their emotional needs were met and they were allowed to discuss their adoption and their genetic culture. Some had illnesses or defects that their birth family was said to not be able to afford supporting, and their new adoptive family could. But these stories unfortunately are less than equal to the amount of recollections of physical, verbal, and emotional abuse. There are people who were told their whole lives that they should be grateful for being repeatedly hurt and neglected because ‘it could have been worse’. It’s those stories that have opened my eyes to want to know more.

Over the last few years, I’ve heard amazing stories about adoptees learning they were stolen. In most instances, the thieves were family members who acted on what they thought to be the benefit of the mother and entire birth family. If you Google a little, you can learn how awful Korean society has been and still is to unwed mothers and illegitimate children. But the country is absolutely thriving now–as I was shocked to learn when I visited for a month in ’06–so there’s not really the financial need for western families to rescue these children anymore. It’s so easy for Koreans to relinquish their children, wash their hands of the past, and lock the door. It’s in their history now. And adoption agencies have fabricated so many stories and made it difficult for adoptees to trace their own records. Oftentimes if a birth mother is magically tracked down, she needs to meet in privacy because if her new husband and children found out, she’d be disowned.

What annoys me the most is how badly the industry has hurt us adoptees and segmented us into sub-groups. People are outraged at being stripped of their names, their culture, and information that’s rightfully theirs. Those who feel strong enough to fight it are often so emotionally charged that they can’t communicate effectively with those who are still unaware of the crimes that have been done. It has pitted us adoptees against each other for the lack of understanding or wanting to believe there are more perspectives than our own. Sometimes it hurts too much to even consider the other side of things that we completely resist it. And sometimes when we’re ready to take it in, we’re met with such harsh attacks that we slip back into our shells. Those who’ve had it good and hadn’t wanted to question the adoption industry label those emotionally fueled as Angry Adoptees who unfortunately had bad A-families. And those who want to reform things consider those who aren’t pushed to look deeper into the ugliness, ignorant enablers. There are those of us who think it’d be a beautiful full-circle kind of thing to adopt as we’d be able to share our learnings and truly empathize. And then there are those of us who see any prospective adoptive parents as enabling the white man’s corrupt baby market. As much as we strive to not be personal about it, of course we are.

When I have the energy to allow myself to sit with it for long enough, I get frustrated and overwhelmed by what a big mess the adoption establishment has created. There are other important things in my life to focus on, but I do feel guilty for not giving it more. I don’t want to be all consumed by what is only just a part of me, yet so much of who I am. I need time to just be human, plain and simple, working towards my other life goals and happiness. And in the meantime, there are so many suffering each day. There are still mothers being forced to give up their children and lied to about what’s really happening. There are babies who are truly unwanted who will end up in families that will treat them terribly. There are families broken up, never to be reunited again, all for pride or money troubles. And then there are mothers who think giving up their baby is like taking the morning after pill–an easy way out of something that shouldn’t have happened.

The lack of post-adoption services for both adoptive parents and adoptees is just disgusting considering how many of us are affected. Growing up, a social worker should have stayed in contact with us, counseling us as to what was normal and okay to feel. Because many of us felt too guilty to consider the traumatic stress of being abandoned and adopted into a new culture has been, when it happens, it’s a shock to our adoptive families. Every consideration feels like an attack. I spent some time estranged from my family because we simply didn’t know how to communicate with each other about it. Even now, things can be difficult and I often feel on my own with it all because I’m the only one adopted (of seven kids) who needed to adjust. To everyone else, nothing’s changed, and they can’t understand why things matter to me all of a sudden.

Personally, my life has been interesting because of my adoption and as much as I wonder, until I get more of my records, I don’t know how my life could have been. I’m thankful that whatever I’ve experienced and lived through has brought me to where I am now. But to be honest, sometimes I’m still surprised that I’m where I am now–balanced, happy, and able to love. I spent the bulk of my life fantasizing about the perfect, considerate suicide that would least traumatize my family and friends and whoever found me. It has taken everything I’ve had to reach this place of confidence. And still, I know there’s so much more to learn. I only hope I have the fortune to be able to uncover more of my past, and then to absorb and integrate whatever it is without disrupting the things I love about my life.

Some people have respectfully told me they think I’m absolutely nuts to consider my pets’ feelings as if they were human. And I respectfully think that they just don’t get it. I’ve lived with animals most of my life. (That’s not a euphemism.) Sure, they’re not as intelligent or sophisticated as humans, but when you live with them and look them in the eye, you can see there’s something there–that they’re not merely pets.

When I agreed to get a dog a decade ago, I was young and naively in love. I’d have done anything to make my boyfriend happy and the excitement he had over it warmed my heart. My parents had two beautiful chocolate labs from a woman over in Newburyport who had another pregnant dog. We were supposed to get a girl. Her name was going to be Sofie. But a few days after she was born, we were told she didn’t make it and were asked if we wanted a boy. We took some time to grieve and then decided to go up and meet the puppy.

Grieving must make one delusional, because there was absolutely no way we could’ve met this puppy and said, “Nah, I think we’ll pass.” I cradled this shaking little bundle of brown fur with a squished in face and promised him a million things in that moment. Four weeks later we brought him home.

Shaunnessy has since lived some life–none of which I had planned, but it’s the life that unfolded. He rode 1,800 miles in the cab of a truck down to Key West to live the American Dream while I became a novelist and my boyfriend started a boat chartering business. But less than four months later, we were back in a truck much like the first, 1,800 miles north. It was okay for him as he never took to the heat, but he didn’t know he wasn’t getting his old life back.

Over the next few years while I was in Ireland, he lived with my family, the two older labs, and a beagle. He had acres to play by the Merrimack river. And everytime I came to visit, I could tell he was happy and adjusted. I tried to take him down to Somerville when I moved back ‘home’, but he had a seizure and I knew that I was taking him from a great situation into a much lesser one. I brought him back up to where his life would be fuller, and he stayed there for as long as he could.

A year and a half ago, as part of the lingering financial downfall I eluded to before, my parents were moving out of their house to an apartment. Part of that heartache included not being able to take any of the dogs with them, as their situation was such that they couldn’t be choosey. We said good-bye to Mollie and Bailey and their departure struck me harder than I’d expected. Months later I was told that Shaunnessy couldn’t be kept by my sister who had cared for him in the old house, either.

By this time, I had a completely new life. I was at band practice twice a week and my boyfriend was, too. We had adopted two kitties a year and a half prior, and my landlord wasn’t fond of the idea us adding a dog. I don’t know if I was okay with the idea of us adding a dog, either, and I know that my boyfriend wasn’t. To be honest, cats are easy but dogs require more responsibilities. Adding a dog into the mix–and a big one, at that–would completely change our lifestyle.

I talked Leo into taking Shaunners down for a trial weekend, but of course that trial weekend wasn’t enough. Shaunners had been through so much separation anxiety, losing his sisters, and then moving from house to house. He had no sense of security. And it was the summer. He never did too well in extreme heat and we didn’t have the luxuries of central air.

Less than a week into our extended trial, Leo came to me and said, “I don’t think the dog is going to work out. Just look at him. He doesn’t look happy.”

And I don’t know what maternal thing snapped in me, but I heard myself say, “If we (me and the dog) have to find our own place and you take the kitties, that’s fine. We can still date. But I’m not giving him up.” Three days later, Leo and Shaunners were spooning on the bed together.

When I agreed to adopt Shaunners when he was four weeks old, I promised him I’d always provide a good home for him. He looked so scared on that cold winter day. It was early March and the rest of his litter was already spoken for. I never made the connection at that time, nor was I yet aware, that that was around the same time in which I was probably born and feeling the exact same way.

I’m not going to try to tell you how hard it is to find an apartment to rent in the city with two cats and a one hundred pound dog. But with less than a month’s notice (thanks to my old landlord) we were able to find a place that would do. Everyone has adjusted and accepted one another as family, and now that we’ve finally moved to our ideal apartment for the five of us, we all have the space we need to thrive.

Shaunnessy has now lived in the South End, JP, Key West, West Newbury, Essex, Cambridge, and Brighton. He swam in a variety of oceans and lakes, chewed pine cones in the Back Bay and cooled off under palm trees, walked both Newbury Street and Duval Street, sat in pubs, hiked through hills, and met so many animals and people. With any luck, he’ll continue to explore and enjoy life for a few more years. But still, I can’t help but ask myself at times, “Am I giving him all that he needs? Is this as full of a life as he’d like?”

To be honest, the answer is, no, I’m not giving him as full of a life as he’d like. If he could, he’d go on double the walks with both me and Leo, and we’d go on excursions every day. He’d eat quadruple the food that we give him and he’d sleep in our bed right between us every night. If it was completely up to him, we’d never leave the house without him.

The average lab is said to live only 10-12 years. In a couple weeks, Shaunners is going be 11. It’s not lost on me how unfair it is that this is all that he gets. While I’m busy keeping up with my own life (as I rightfully should) poor Shaunners is losing time. I’m so happy that we get to spend the rest of his years together, but already wish I could’ve done more. And I wish I could do more for him now, even knowing I’m doing as much as I can.

We make unspoken promises to others all the time, so many of which we can’t keep. I’m often reminded in adoptee groups how good intentions don’t guarantee the right kind of fulfillment. I didn’t know much about dogs when I agreed to adopt one, or that our little home would be broken. Does that make me a bad dog mom? If the dogs in the park could talk, would they criticize me for spending years away from Shaunners, or for not meeting his every need? There’s a balance to be met. Even sometimes when it is, it leads to resentment.

If I could, I’d explain to Shaunners why his first ‘dad’ one day never came back. I’d apologize for running off to Ireland instead of staying home with him. He’d understand why Mollie and Bailey were sent away. But I don’t think it’d make a difference. He’s kind of a like a simple, medicated human. He just wants to be happy now. I wonder if he knows he’s towards the end of his life? Does he remember when I wasn’t a good parent, coming home at unpredictable hours, treating him more like a ‘pet’ than an animal with a life?

Life is hard. If we’re good, we do the best that we can most of the time. Sometimes that’s enough and sometimes it’s just not. I sure hope that this is.

My dad and I always had what’s probably a very common father daughter relationship. He was never a man of many words and believe it or not, neither was I for more than half of my life. He was like a different species to me, and I to him. We’re still very much strangers to one another. We never hit that level of comfort the way my other siblings have with him. I’m not so sure it has to do with my being adopted or just overall personality differences. And I’m not sure it will, or even needs to, change.

When I was in Nursery School we were asked to make a card about our dads. I think I wrote that he was 10 feet tall, 40 pounds, and my favorite thing about him was that he would buy me gum. In fact, I asked him to buy me gum so often that one time I went into the supermarket with him, he forbade me to ask him for gum. And as the list was being checked and I could sense we were done, the anxiety of leaving the store without gum consumed my four-year-old body. I got creative and started dropping hints. When wandering into the candy aisle looking at things right near the gum didn’t work, I said, “This store really makes me feel like chewing.” He thought it was so funny that I was able to chew freshly bought gum all the way home.

My dad was also right behind me on my little red tricycle the first time he took the training wheels off. He bought me the movie Annie, in which I watched over and over imagining another life I might have had. He marveled at my determination in school, the way I wrote stories and drew, and made little songs on the piano. Everything I did he shook his head at with genuine awe and it felt good to have that sense of importance.

As my goofy personality started developing, I took great pleasure in playing practical jokes on him. Always worn from a long day of work, he’d pass out on the recliner downstairs before dinner. It was always my job to wake him up–which I hated because it was an impossible task. One night, on my third or fourth visit down to wake him, I said, “Next time I’m coming down to pour a glass of water over your head.” Sure enough, I went back down with a glass of water and poured it into an empty glass directly over his head. It worked.

If he asked me to get his briefcase, I’d get it and perch myself on it until I caught his attention. “What are you doing?” He’d whine, rolling his eyes. “I’m waiting for you to tell me to get off your case,” I’d say. And he’d begrudgingly smirk a little at the ridiculousness of it all.

But as much as I liked to put things on his head while he was sleeping, or make fun of his heavy Revere accent, more than anything, I dreaded being stuck alone with him for too long. The silence curled up all around me and made my skin itchy. Picking me up from camp or gymnastics, or when I’d have to accompany him to the dump up in Maine, I’d nearly lose my mind in the exsanguinating discomfort. Somehow I just couldn’t do it. It was easy to be the fun-loving clown in short bursts, or to give him quick daily updates before he became inundated with the rest of the kids. And that’s how I preferred it.

The little I think I know about my dad is still up for debate, but I suppose I always felt bad for him. His father died when he was a teenager and left the family business to him. He did well for himself for awhile, but his options were limited and his childhood somewhat robbed. His mother was an alcoholic waitress at the IHOP and also a shopaholic. Worse yet (for my mom) she lived in an apartment they converted for her in our house. Her obsessive compulsive behaviors made him a bit OCD, too. She died in the house when I was still in elementary school. And his only sister, of which he employed, ended up embezzling from us when I was in high school, rendering us in really bad shape. My family will probably never recover from it financially, and I’m sure he’ll never recover from it emotionally.

I called my dad today to wish him a happy seventy-something birthday and to see if he got the present I sent him. My social skills have improved so I was able to keep the conversation going past when I suspected he was going to say, “Alright then,” three or four times over. And as I hung up the phone, I remembered I bought some gum at Whole Foods the other day. It’s not the cracked up good stuff I used to get as a kid, but it worked.

And I think about my dad today and our awkward meanderings. I quickly rush to forgive him by conjuring up memories of how I pitched him to buy me my Korg M1 and how much it meant to me when he took me to pick it out. I remember the countless hours matching his socks–that were all so alike yet different–in the dimly lit room. I laugh at the plastic slimy cookie that I left on the floor to rile him up when he saw it. It was all in good fun. But as much as I pad the front of my head with all that, there’s that one time that’ll never be spoken of between us that I’m trying to crowd out. It’s the time I overheard him refer to me as ‘the Korean little shit’.

I must’ve been about seven or eight, tops. I was sitting in the living room as I liked to after dinner, looking out the bay window at the stars in the sky. There was a big etched vase with decorative feathers sweeping out of it and I liked to lose myself as my eyes traced the swirls of its surface. Dad had come home late from work and was upset with the state of the place. Nobody had done their chores–except for me, the Korean little shit.

I forgave him for his words as soon as I heard them, too, or at least I wanted to. My oldest sister rushed in assuring me he didn’t mean it, but I knew that he did. He was angry and overworked. And no matter what I did right, I would always be Korean. The ‘little shit’ part didn’t bother me so much, I don’t think.

My dad never came to apologize to me himself. I don’t think he was emotionally capable of doing such things–and here I am, decades later, still excusing him for it. I carried on as if nothing happened for days and then years, and it’s still never spoken of. I’d be surprised if he remembers that night, but of course, I can never forget no matter how much I try.

I’m still not angry at my father because I know his limitations and accept him for what he can’t be, despite what I need. And I hope he forgives me and accepts my limitations for all I can’t be and all that I am. We’re all people, kind of walking through life in the dark half the time. And that’s just how it is.

I wouldn’t be human or truthful if I were to say that I’ve never been jealous. My early years were consumed with jealousy over my neighbor’s blue eyes and blonde hair, the girl at school who was long and thin like a string bean, my best friend who was able to love herself for her quirks because her quirks were acceptably beautiful. I hated my jealousy, but there it was every time I encountered someone who just ‘had it better’ somehow.

Being so different from those around me created an expedited emotional experience in some ways. I was hyper-conscious of things that a lot of girls didn’t encounter until high school. At the time, I felt so worn by the intensity of it all. But on the upside, I went through it all much quicker. I learned at a really young age that I didn’t have to strive to be the most beautiful, the thinnest, the tallest, or the latest cover girl of YM, because none of those things were realistic. I spent a lot of time focusing on writing music on my Korg M1, short stories and poems, and, well… learning to dance like a Fly Girl, but let’s not get into that part right now. It’s not that I ever thought that those things would take me somewhere, but doing them made me feel good to be me.

After a night of hell that came out of nowhere and forever changed my life, I kind of stopped doing what used to make me feel good and just waited for life to either end or begin. Nothing made sense to me anymore. Everything therapeutic that I wrote was cliché, but in hindsight, it was no more cliché than the stuff I wrote before.

As time went on, I saw younger girls doing things that I wanted to be doing. Child stars didn’t make me jealous, but they made me feel sad for the child in me who never got to fully indulge any of her dreams. I became an extremist, thinking there was no point in starting anything over now because I was already too far behind.

Of course I know now that I was very much missing the point–that whole cliché yet true saying about it being the journey, blah blah blah. But what I even knew as a child–that doing something because of how it makes you feel–was lost. Or maybe it was just an excuse to keep me sitting on my ass feeling sorry for myself because trying meant being a sort of vulnerable that I wasn’t strong enough to be yet.

Seclusion is the worst thing to do to oneself. You get trapped in your own head validating your own perspective. I wanted to live this intense life or live no life at all, so I fueled it with drugs and other people who thought living like rockstars was better than being happy. If I was to come out of seclusion, it was to be with other self-proclaimed outcasts with so much potential and nothing to show for it. When you’re down, it feels good to be around others who you think are pretty cool but are nowhere closer to happiness than you are.

I fell back into playing music on a whim when I was staying with my family while waiting for my passport to let me back into Ireland for another 6 months. My friend Eugene gave my brother a guitar he bought in Key West but couldn’t bring back to Ireland for some reason. I got my brother Jeff to show me a few chords and I think suffering through the pain of a boat back acoustic with thick strings was another pivotal event in my life. From then on, I began doing rather than wishing I had long ago or worrying about not being good enough.

These days, it’s really hard for me to get jealous of anyone for anything. Of course it can be frustrating when you work hard for something and don’t get the results someone else does. And yes, some may have things naturally easier than others, but who says that’s the coveted thing to have? The bottom line is, if there’s something I’d like to do, I might as well just do it rather than feel insecure because I’m not and someone else is.

Funnily enough, this all comes from a very strange place. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past week about how badly people want to put other people down. Specifically: women want to put other women down. Lana Del Ray sucks because she’s beautiful and gave a subpar performance on TV. Madonna sucks because she’s fit and she’s old. This one’s hips are too big and that one’s chest is too small. None of these things are really relevant to who they are and what they’re doing and you’re not. It’s bad enough that men feel it’s okay to judge us for these things, but we tell them it’s okay when we do it ourselves.

I could be wrong, but see it all coming back to primal jealousy. Women just don’t like to see other women who look better than they do being applauded. Women don’t like to see other women who can do something better than they can being admired, unless they say they admire them first. Not all women are like this, of course, but for many, it’s so much easier to verbally take someone down a peg than it is to step up their own game. And guess what? It’s not really a competition. Women play such a big part in holding back women as a whole. And, why do we do this to ourselves and each other?

In a perfect world, everyone would be celebrated for their own strengths. But something happens when someone’s celebrated for something in which we’re lacking but want. What is that something? And, how can we fix it? The only answer I can come up with is by instead working on the things that we want to be better at.

Of course it’ll never be a perfect world. And I’m sure if someone catches my boyfriend’s eye, I’ll feel a spike of jealousy again, too. I’m not claiming to be some holy über woman, but it’s good to recognize and change bad habits. In the end, it’s all about how good you feel being you, and how highly you value those things that make you who you are. And if your boyfriend or friend or employer or whomever doesn’t value what you bring, you’re not in the right place.

I wrote a post in another blog about women to stop hating ourselves, and I think it’s relevant to this. Perhaps the reason why so many women are self-conscious is because they’re afraid people are judging them as harshly as they themselves judge?

In the Fifth Grade, a Taiwanese family moved into town. One of the girls was in my class. She had a brother two years younger, a cousin a year younger than him, and another cousin in between herself and her brother. I was fascinated by them, being real live Asians. They spoke English fairly well but were obviously fluent in Chinese. They carried cute little pencil cases, lunch boxes, and backpacks that I instinctively fell in love with. The designs of their things were so much more colorful and fun than the ordinary supplies I got at CVS or Wayside Bazaar. I was happy to find a sparkly purple notebook, but theirs had sweeping designs in vibrant colors.

Lin, the girl in my class, became fascinated with me, too. I looked more like her than the other kids, but dressed and spoke more like everyone else. Our mutual fascination with each other’s lives and cultures made us inseparable. Around her, I felt more Asian, and around me, she felt more American. We made Ramen noodles together after school every day. She (kind of) taught me how to use chopsticks and the Chinese number system. I taught her about cool American music and how to dress like a punk.

When I went over to Lin’s two bedroom apartment, I saw that her aunt and her mother shared a bedroom and the three girls shared a double bed. Her brother might have slept on the couch. I told my mother that I thought they were poor, so whenever she found something she thought I’d like, she bought one for Lin as well. We were getting into the whole dressing alike thing, inspired by my Sweet Valley Twin books–where the blonde twins sometimes tried to confuse everybody. It was as close as I’d get.

When Middle School started, our world was opened up to so many new personalities. I became captivated with that ‘girl from the wrong side of the tracks’ who later humiliated me. Before doing that, though, she became enamored by us. With her badass street clothes, high, fluffy hair, tight jeans and blue eyeliner, she was pretty much my idol from the first time I saw her pop her gum in home room. And because Lin and I were faux twins–with our new China Doll matching haircuts, no less–a friend of mine was quickly a friend of hers. Only in Middle School, Lin was cuter with her authentic broken English. I remember consciously trying a Chinese accent on for a while, too, just to see if people fawned over me as well. And they did. We were like the miniature Asian Double Mint Twins… or something.

D started following us everywhere, and of course my family was skeptical of her on sight–for all the reasons why I thought she was great. She wasn’t embarrassed being a raucous pre-teen in front of them while the rest of us were more secretive. She smoked cigarettes, wore too much cheap perfume, and wore her slutty clothes out the front door while the rest of us changed in the school bathroom. And for all of the reasons my family disapproved, Lin’s mother and aunt surprisingly approved.

As it was, they saw D as the All American Girl. She was the genuine article, while I was an Asian with an American family who was recently beginning to look a lot more like their Chinese daughter/niece. I admit–it was kind of confusing to tell what I was, but I was working on it. My polite demeanor was too Asian for them. They began to prefer D’s crass, self-confidence, blue eyes, and everything else that made her more American than me.

For whatever reasons she may have had at home or elsewhere, D was a very volatile girl. She sought drama and thrived on controlling situations. She briefly decided to drive a wedge in between myself and Lin, concocting vicious lies about me. And just like that, my faux Asian twin sister was out of my life. I was emptied out–as if broken up with. A week later, D confessed she was wrong about Lin and explained that Lin was the one spreading lies about me. It was all a nightmare at the time, but luckily in hindsight, just a matter of two or three weeks. But in those short weeks, D’s games knocked the wind out of both Lin and myself. Our friendship was tested and sadly we’d lost.

Once D moved on to new people to toy with, I tried to reconcile with Lin. We both apologized for what had happened and were ready to start our friendship back up, although cautiously. I was set to go over to her apartment after school one day when she stopped me in the hall looking sad.

She said, “I can’t be friends with you anymore,” keeping her eyes on the books that she clutched onto in front of herself.

“Why?” I asked, figuring it was because she wasn’t over what happened with D.

She said, “My mother says I need to hang out with more American friends,” and without waiting for my response, started walking down the hall to her class.

Wasn’t I American? Didn’t I even win the Flag last year in school for my essay on being an American? Isn’t my family American?

America was all that I ever knew. It was, at times, overstated that I was an American because of my being adopted. Sure, I knew there was some place on the other side of the world where I was born, but that might as well have just been a book about someone else’s life that I heard of but hadn’t bothered reading.

It was at that moment, standing in the hallway alone, age eleven or twelve, that I realized that I really didn’t fit in anywhere. It was hard enough being a pre-teen going through puberty, but this was that on crack. For the first time, I’d learned that the Asians saw me as American–yet not quite American, and the Americans saw me as Asian–yet not quite Asian. I didn’t realize what an impact that hint of an understanding would have on me from then on.

Lin gave me a gift by being my best friend–my impossible twin sister–for a year and a half. And she also gave me a gift when she walked away. It just so happened it wasn’t anything I’d asked for or wanted.