A Different Book
By Hannah
Adoptee
From Jiangsu, China; Living in Canada
My adoptive mother has been reading books about adoption and asked me for recommendations. I have a reading log, which tracks what books I’ve read, and I have told both my parents that I’ve been reading more books on adoption, adoptees, and China’s One Child Policy. I found myself hesitant to recommend some of the books, mainly the memoirs. I didn’t have an issue recommending books like Outsourced Children by Leslie K. Wang or One Child by Mei Fong, non-fiction research/journalism about China’s One Child Policy and social welfare system. And yet, when it came to adoptee memoirs, I hesitated. I was afraid they’d see how closely I identified with the struggles portrayed, how much I’ve struggled.
Older Sister: Not Necessarily Related by Dr. Jenny Heijun Wills is a memoir about her life in Canada as a South Korean adoptee and her search and reunion with her birth family. She offers a raw look at life after reunion with biological families and navigating the language, cultural and geographical barriers that come with it. It’s written as a series of memories in mostly chronological order as letters to her 언니 (unni/older sister). It’s not quite poetry or epistolary but it reads like it.
I saw this book as a recommendation in an adoptee online community and no book I’ve read about adoption has been as impactful to me as this one. It’s so deeply personal and yet, as another adoptee, I could see myself in it as well. When I bought my own copy (I had originally borrowed it from the library), I immediately offered it to my parents to read. I was nervous but I wanted them to read it and see what had impacted me and resonated with me so greatly.
A few weeks later, I asked them what they thought of it. I found myself disappointed and frustrated that the sentences that spoke so much to me didn’t seem to impact them as much. I don’t remember what my mother said to me about the book, other than she thought it was sad. My father’s takeaway from Older Sister: Not Necessarily Related was about the author’s mental health and that he hoped she got better. I wanted to yell at him “But what about what she said about race and how much of an outsider she felt?” I wanted to say, “What about how she feels as if she cannot be the Korean daughter her birth parents want her to be, and she cannot be the Canadian daughter her adoptive parents raised anymore?”
When the author screamed back at her birth father “Look at what I’ve become,” what did you think? When she said, “How could anyone’s love be that good?,” did it resonate in your bones the way it did for me? When she said that “Korea is imagined as so close when we’re being taken away, infants alone on airplanes, but so far when we want to return,” replace Korea with China, which is so out of reach for me. What did you think?
I am not homesick for China but sometimes I feel homesick for certainties. To be able to say, “this is my birthday,” “this is my birthplace,” “this is my birth name.” The answers to those feel so much farther away than China.
My mother asked me what I thought about the books I’ve read and how they portrayed adoption. Did I think it matched my experience? I couldn’t find the words to answer in a way that left me satisfied. I gave a vague answer about how it changed depending on the adoption status of the author. How could I say that I saw myself in some moments and also felt like a stranger in others? How can I say “this is what it feels like” when sometimes I don’t feel like that at all? How could I explain that it was simultaneously my experience and yet nothing like it? I would need another book to say what I thought.
Perhaps I’m being too harsh, maybe just like I didn’t fully want to share my pain with my parents, they also didn’t want to burden their adopted daughter with what they felt when reading the book. But I also think maybe Older Sister represents a different book for them from the one I read. Where I read about a fellow adoptee, a peer, perhaps in their minds they read about a child, as so many adoptees are still seen as. But it was still disappointing, that what I imagined could have brought us closer together, made me more distant.
“My Canadian family took the brunt of my anger and sadness because, unluckily for them, we all spoke the same language.” – Dr. Jenny Heijun Wills, Older Sister: Not Necessarily Related
For a collection of book recommendations from others in the adoptee community, check out our previous blog post here.
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