Nicole Chung was born to Korean parents, extremely premature, and adopted by a white couple in Oregon. Her adoption was never kept a secret — instead, it was presented to her all her life as the amazing miracle that came out of the terrible tragedy of her parents giving her up. You can see how that would affect a person.
“To be a hero, I thought, you had to be beautiful and adored. To be beautiful and adored, you had to be white. That there were millions of Asian girls like me out there in the world, starring in their own dramas large and small, had not yet occurred to me, as I had neither lived nor seen it.”
In addition to that, Chung was being raised in an extremely sheltered, very white community. She was usually the only Asian person in the room, and she had no one around that looked like her. Not even just a lack of representation on tv and in movies, which remains an issue for so many people of color, but also in every day life. No one looked like her, no one knew about her culture. And although her parents obviously loved her and wanted the best for her, they did nothing to acknowledge that she had her own identity.
“I doubted it had ever occurred to my adoptive parents that I might want to learn anything about Korea. Had they ever suggested a language class, I’m sure I would have complained—it was bad enough that I couldn’t change the way I looked; did I really have to emphasize my differences by learning a language no one else I knew could speak?”
As an adult, Chung decides to find her biological family. Here, if this were a movie, she would go on a tough journey that would ultimately end in a happily ever after for all involved. Instead, once she managed to find her family members (not an easy task), she found a lot of pain and secrets.
It’s an amazing story, with no easy answers. Adoption is an amazing thing — the opportunity for a family to have a child they’ve always wanted, and a child to be cared for in a way that may otherwise not have been possible. But it’s important not to gloss over the difficulties, as well. As Chung says, “Today, when I’m asked, I often say that I no longer consider adoption—individual adoptions, or adoption as a practice—in terms of right or wrong. I urge people to go into it with their eyes open, recognizing how complex it truly is; I encourage adopted people to tell their stories, our stories, and let no one else define these experiences for us.”