Adoption Day 2026
How do you define your own beginning? Maybe when your family decides to add a child to the clan, or your birthday. Maybe the day you came home from the hospital.
One October morning in Hefei China, 6 baby girls are brought into a conference room by their Ayis (Mandarin for aunties and used in place of nannie) and everyone waits for the foreign visitors to arrive. One baby girl is dressed in a faded, yellow footed onesie that is obviously too big for her. She laughs with a grin from ear to ear as her Ayi plays finger wiggling games. The door opens and energy shifts as soon to be mothers and fathers enter. One middle aged, caucasian, shoulder length blond haired woman, scans the room before her until she finds her child. “Isn't it nice to see how happy they are?” She exclaims with aw. This is the scene that plays out the day I am adopted in 1998. The laughing baby is me and the awestruck lady is my mother. Since this day a common story my family loves to tell, is one of our first interactions from the same morning. They gave me a plastic toy key set that was quickly a favorite. The agency was completing paperwork and needed my hand prints. The keys were taken, my hand was inked and pressed on paper. Before anyone realized it I had grabbed back the keys and inked them too, which I proceeded to put in my mouth. To this day the keys still have ink stain marks.
I consider myself to have an educated guess beginning and a known beginning. I differentiate these dates because the first is one I can't remember or be told about first hand. Up until my known beginning I can only assume and make educated guesses of what my life was like. Some adoptees love celebrating their adoption day or got you day, while others find them triggering and would rather it just be another Tuesday. I hear people saying that adoption day is a wonderful thing because a child came home. However, consider if an adoptee sees adoption day as the definite line to when they lost all connection to biological mirroring, cultural belonging and a motherland. They may not want to celebrate this loss. Neither celebrating or disengagement is right or wrong.
To be technical, a thing controlled by a small part of our brain, the medulla oblongata, is not often thought about or delved into deeply without a reason, a given purpose. The nerves system regulates it as an automatic action that all creatures could not live without. However, have you ever stopped to think what else it can mean or represent, a single breath. 28 years later, on my adoption day, I have learned that the breath space between the words Adoption and Day hold more than I could ever explain because it is more than two words. It is as simple as breathing and as complex as the universe.
Adoption is as easy as breathing because it is an 8-letter word with an accompanying definition, per Merrian Webster, “the act of adopting someone or something, such as legally taking a child, accepting a new technology, or beginning to use a new practice.” Adoption is as easy as breathing because it is a fundamental fact of a life thrust upon adoptees, who cannot intervene in the past to stop or alter circumstances that lead to our present lives. While challenging, adoptees can only move forward in building their own safe communities. How adoptees choose to do this varies by the individual and their personal values. However, when you speak to an adoptee and express that adoption is easy, they will likely see it as incredibly dismissive of their experience because to them, adoption is never easy.
Adoption is complex like the universe for a multitude of reasons that I could never comprehensively list. Adoptees can struggle with a sense of identity and belonging. This creates challenges of relying on others because they hold a (misplaced) belief that if already left once, what's to stop abandonment from happening again. The goal is to not make this a self fulfilling prophecy by telling adoptees that leaving first can save them the pain of abandonment.
I personally fight the fear of being a fraud who has not one Asian leg to stand on. I fear the look of disappointment on Asian aunties faces when I fail to speak fluent Mandarin. If I go against cultural Chinese norms that are steeped in thousands of years of history, I feel like I am turning my nose up at what I should have grown up to be. This narrative of self doubt needs to be challenged more often, so, I am trying to remember what I would do if a friend came to me with these same sentiments. I would give them grace and love because they are human and deserve no less. The important thing is, I can give myself grace and love, too.
A final thought that comes to this adoptee's mind today is this; adoption is a lifelong odyssey that is always changing. I only ask one thing from you, dear reader. Please always remember that adoptees are more than just ‘an adoptee’. We are writers, actors, scientists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, world travelers and much, much more. We are people, too.
