Next month I’m scheduled to give my third “lecture” on what it means to be a transracial adoptee
I’ve been good I’ve finished drafting my piece even though there are three-four weeks to go before I have to deliver my “lecture”. But it’s gotten me to thinking…
When I was a kid the social mirrors I had to reflect back to me, my identity, my likeness were non existent. Because people like me, as far as the media were concerned didn’t exist. What was beamed back to me was a grotesque and crude facsimile of what society then (and in some respects today) think that an East Asian should be.
The outsider, the heavily accented foreigner, light on mental capacity, huddled over woks, or ushering in customers into a restaurant. Non of this meant anything to me. I was neither heavily accented (well not with an East Asian accent), my adoptive parents were not in the catering business and when I was a child for a while I considered myself the same as everyone else I was British, so I thought.
I’m an adult now and fifty odd years had passed by. I call this country my home. It’s the country that I was brought up in. It’s the country that I was educated in, I know it’s culture, it’s language and I live here. Yet even in the 21st century in spite of all of the “diversity” and multicultural labels why do I still feel like an outsider?
4gottenadoptee 