On Looking: An Asian Adoptee’s Search for Her Racial Identity

Looking Back

“Shut up, you’re white.”

This was the sentence that set off my racial identity crisis. At that moment, in my middle school orchestra room, I felt faced with a challenge so complicated and treacherous that it paralyzed me. I marked it as the moment when I realized I had no choice but to operate within the confines of Asianness set out by the world before me. I thought this was what it meant to find your place in the world.

I used to describe my relationship to my racial identity in my childhood as “colorblind,” but now, I find that “dissociative” is a better term. To be racially colorblind denotes that one does not acknowledge their racial differences, and that was certainly not my childhood experience. For as long as I can remember, I was always aware that I was Chinese. 

My parents did their best to celebrate my heritage in the ways they knew how. We went to cultural events for Chinese adoptees, hung up decorations around Lunar New Year, and celebrated my Gotcha Day every year. Most of all, they always affirmed that they loved me because of our differences, not in spite of them. But even though they did their best, it wasn’t enough. While they acknowledged the physical reality of our racial differences, they lacked the capacity to have candid conversations about the emotional reality of them. In part, that’s why I only recognized our differences in the physical and literal sense. I had no basis for their social or emotional meaning. Not yet, at least.

In the spring of third grade, for whatever reason, the trend of pulling the skin around your eyes spread like wildfire in my school: pulling up for “Chinese eyes,” down for “Japanese eyes,” and together for “Mongol.” I remember standing in line as we waited to head out to recess, to the library, or to the gym, and watching all the white kids do it to each other. They giggled at how silly they looked. I never thought it was funny when I watched them do it.

The first person to try it on me was one of my best friends, Martina. I gave her a stilted, puzzled laugh as a response, and then I immediately got up to go to the bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror and slowly pulled my eyes up, down, and pushed toward the center, as if to see if what everyone was saying was true. After pulling my eyes each of the three ways, I traced my eyes’ natural shape with my finger: round, almond-shaped, and large. It was plain as day to me that I didn’t have the “Chinese” eyes that everyone was making. So, then, why were they all doing it?

Even then, I could feel that the Asian eyes trend didn’t come from a totally innocent place, even though the other kids nor I knew its racist history. So when I left the bathroom, I told my friend that she should stop doing it.

She furrowed her brow at me. “But what’s wrong with it?”

After a second of processing what I’d observed in front of the bathroom mirror, I said meekly, “Because it’s wrong to make fun of people for being different.” 

With that statement, I removed myself from the target of the Asian eyes trend. It was probably easier for my brain to say it was wrong to make fun of people than allow myself to realize the truth of what I was experiencing: that people were making fun of me. It was easier to feel like I was outside of the other than realize that I was the other. 

W.E.B. DuBois coined the term “double consciousness” in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” He defined it as the struggle of, in his original context, Black Americans, as they balanced viewing themselves from their internal lens and the marginalizing external lens of their white American counterparts. Since DuBois first introduced the term, “double consciousness” has been extended to many marginalized groups. Looking at my relationship to my Asian racial identity from this lens, that moment I was told “Shut up, you’re white” wasn’t the crisis I used to think it was. It was, instead, the moment when my lack of racial consciousness suddenly transformed into two — the “double” which DuBois referred to. I could no longer be the de facto blank slate that I preferred to be. That sentence shoved the disparity between how I saw myself and how the world saw me to the forefront of my mind. There was no going back.

Looking In

The summer before we left for college, my best friend Sylvia invited me over for dumpling night. At this point, I knew folding dumplings was a staple of the Asian experience. “Fresh Off the Boat” and “Crazy Rich Asians” had taught me well. My first few (okay, 50) dumplings were rough at best. I couldn’t figure out the right balance of wetting the edge of the wrappers and not having my fingers stick everywhere, so most of my dumplings ended up with dried edges and somehow rectangular shapes. I was embarrassed at first, feeling like a klutz for not being capable of pressing the two edges of dough together.

Sylvia, her mom, and I quietly worked for an hour or so, engaged in the meditative folding process around the dinner table. I would sometimes feel isolated coming to my Asian friends’ homes because it made me hyperaware of the things I was not and that I could never have. No matter how welcoming or kind their parents were to me, I wondered if they could see how different I was. I wondered if they spoke to me differently because they knew I was raised like an “American” kid, not an Asian American one.

But this time, around the table, no one was making me feel like I was a part of something I never could be. I was allowed to just exist, a pair of hands pressing and crimping edges of dough together, slowly filling up large platters in the center of a table. I was a part of an unspoken togetherness. Despite my dumplings being in severe need of improvement compared to Sylvia’s and her mom’s, I felt no different. In that moment, their silence gave me a gift: the feeling of being emphatically enough. Asian enough. It helped me start realizing that maybe there were other moments when I could be enough, too.

But what did enough even mean? What did that look like? It’s different for every Asian adoptee. For me, it started with voluntarily putting myself into Asian spaces, even when I was afraid of how empty they might make me feel.

Looking Out

I headed off to Smith College in the fall of 2021 off the heels of COVID-19. At the club fair, my new friend Beatrice and I stumbled upon a club we were both interested in: Pan-Asians in Action, or PAIA for short. PAIA was explicitly open to all Asian students and had a large emphasis on activism in curricula and our community near and far. The club presidents told us they would be hosting a discussion to hold space for Asian students on campus to share the hardships they faced during the pandemic. 

“If you go, I’ll go,” Beatrice told me. 

“Deal,” I replied. Beatrice identified as half-Asian and had told me a bit about her insecurity around being white-passing and not feeling like she belonged in Asian spaces. I could relate.

The discussion was held in a tiny, stuffy classroom in the back of an old academic building. There were too many of us to sit in the seats, so we all sat on the floor in a large circle. The air was heavy and warm, knotting our group closer. The discussion started out loosely guided with a question or two just to get people comfortable, but soon, the stories flowed naturally. One by one, different people in the group shared their experiences. One person was from Atlanta and was worried about her family’s Chinese restaurant. People were worried about catching COVID from their food. Neighbors even posted signs on the restaurant door telling them to shut down and leave the neighborhood. Another person recalled getting berated in the grocery store by a white woman as she bought toilet paper with her mother.

I didn’t share anything during the discussion. That day was a time to listen. My Asian American identity would not just be informed by my own experiences but also by the experiences of all of my Asian American peers. I knew that part of my journey to feel at home as an Asian American was internalizing the experiences of being Asian American outside of my own as a transracial adoptee.

I kept on going to PAIA meetings after this discussion throughout my first semester, and I began to feel at home speaking the cultural, experiential language of my Asian American peers. Maybe I couldn’t speak their mother tongues, but I could laugh along when they reminisced about the hell that was weekend Chinese school. When they half-heartedly complained about their moms’ obsessions with discount designer fashion at TJ Maxx, I began to understand their mix of exasperation and admiration. On one hand, my friends didn’t want another comment about how they could dress nicer. But, on the other hand, they looked up to their moms — these women who, despite all of the challenges they had faced, somehow came out with their heads held high and outfits on point.

As I have begun to consider life post-college, I’ve realized even more how much looking outside of myself adds meaning to my internal Asian identity. This comes not only in the form of reaching out to my Asian American peers, but also in the form of mentoring younger ones.

This past summer, I had an internship at a large asset management firm in Boston. To no one’s surprise, the firm was predominantly white. One Monday morning in late July, I was in the lobby having just grabbed a coffee from the cafeteria, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and looked down to see a short Asian girl staring back at me.

Oh, a high school intern. 

I’d overheard they were starting that week. I was a bit annoyed at first, since I preferred my mornings to start with some alone time to catch up on emails, say hello to my intern friends, and settle in. But any annoyance quickly dissipated once she started talking.

Her eyes darted back and forth as the words tumbled out of her mouth. “Um, excuse me, but I was wondering if you know where I’m supposed to go? They said to be here at 9:15, but it is 9:15 and no one is here and I don’t want to be late, but I think maybe I am and …”

I chuckled and looked her in the eyes. “Hey, I got you! Don’t worry. We’ll figure out where to go. I’ve got all the time in the world.” 

Her eyes widened. “Really? Are you sure?”

I nodded firmly. “Yes. Absolutely.” It felt like I was looking back at myself from a couple years ago. And of all the people she could’ve tapped in the lobby, she was somehow drawn to me too. 

After talking to the front desk workers, I brought the high school intern, whose name I learned was Rachel, up to my office floor. We sat at one of the booths together and chatted for a while. I learned she was a senior at a public high school nearby. Like me and my friends in high school, she was heavily involved in her school’s orchestra. She was also balancing a sport, robotics club, and applying to college. I kept reminding her to have fun! I knew I wished I had.

The following week, just like one of my mentors at the company (who, not coincidentally, was also an Asian woman) had previously done for me, I took Rachel out for lunch and tea. I shared with her my internship journey, some of my adventures in Boston, and my whole college search process. Most of all, I emphasized how much the wonderful friends and connections, like mine and hers, that I had made at the company had really made my experience.

Afterwards, I showed her my favorite snack spot on the seventh floor. I told her how I had been kicked out of that very spot seven weeks earlier by a white woman who complained I was “taking up too much space.” Yet, I watched as my two white friends went up after me with no comment from the woman.

“I can’t believe people are still like that here!” she exclaimed.

I shrugged. “Yeah, it’s kind of crazy. But just never forget: These are our snacks, too.” 

I hoped Rachel knew I wasn’t just talking about the snacks, though. The snacks were ours, but so was our right to take up space in the office, at this company, and in the corporate world. We belonged here, even if it didn’t always feel like we could.

Throughout the last couple weeks of my internship, I kept myself available to Rachel, answering random questions about intern life and giving a lot of advice about college. When we saw each other at the End-of-Internship Party, her face broke into a smile as she ran over, then excitedly telling me about a big group project she had just presented.

“Thanks for being here for me,” she said as we were leaving the office.

My heart swelled in my chest. “Of course! The only way we get through is with each other.”

I had always been someone who liked building mentee relationships. But this was the first time my identity specifically as an Asian person informed the creation of one. It was by no means the defining part of our relationship, nor what we talked about the majority of the time, but it formed a special foundation for it that I knew I wouldn’t find anywhere else.

That summer, I learned that there were going to be times where my otherness would be used to leave me out. But there were also going to be so many times where I could use my otherness to bring people in.

Looking Forward

In the beginning, I used to think racial identity was about letting things happen to me. What did the world think of the things I did? How did that inform how I felt? But I have realized that racial identity formation is not a passive process. I have autonomy. I am an active participant in becoming the person I am, in finding the community that I want to have, and in reaching out to others to bring them forward with me.

In previous versions of this essay, I would always conclude with a neat, pleasant ending about feeling satisfied with my racial identity, even though I felt the opposite. Part of me did this because writing “I still don’t know what’s going on” didn’t seem like it’d earn a good grade, and I wasn’t ready to take the risk of admitting that uncertainty either. Now, I can confidently say that I still don’t know what’s going on. But I am more confident in my pursuit of it.

I know that the process of understanding my racial identity will never be simple and never be easy. But I also know that it can be joyful and daunting. At times it seems small, but it is no less cathartic. It is borne out of the sum of my experiences, of growing up and growing out, of finding community, and of being lucky enough for the community to find me.

The concept of racial identity is wide. It is scary. It is uncertain. In some ways, it’s everything I am afraid of. But it holds so much of what I love, too. I will never stop looking for it. 

All photos courtesy of Laura Edwards