I Am Not a Bridge
from: relativechoices.blogs.nytimes.com
November 19, 2007, 9:53 pm
The town where I grew up was small and less than an hour’s drive from Dallas. Miles of farming land surrounded this small pocket of humanity. The population consisted of mostly white residents with a minority of African- and Latino-American residents and me. It was the 1970s — the Age of Aquarius, disco and human rights awareness — but the population was still split into black and white. The war in Vietnam had come to an end and America was still counting its losses. It was in this setting that I grew up loved and protected.
My mother was born into a farming family that had lived in Texas for generations. She and my dad divorced shortly after I’d arrived. She worked as a secretary to support my two older brothers and me. We spent weekends and vacations with my dad when possible. I always missed him when he went away but couldn’t understand why he went away.
Despite the difficult times, I had a large, closely-knit extended family that never let me doubt their love for me. I love them, too.
* * *
I was raised as a white American but only I and my parents saw me that way. Or at least, we tried to. There were constant reminders all around us. One of my dad’s favorite stories is the time he took me to Mexico with my brothers and step-mother but forgot to take my adoption papers. He often jokes about how the border guards didn’t want to let me back into the United States. They thought he was taking me illegally from Mexico.
The reminders also came in the form of racism as I was teased for being a “Viet Cong” or being called “pan face” and “rice patty” by my peers in school. Since race and racism were not discussed in our house, I was not able to recognize it much less deal with it. I was taught not to see it. It was usually dismissed as simple name calling or bad manners.
For the first ten years of my life, I existed as the only Asian in town. Another family adopted a Vietnamese boy, but we never really interacted. He was around 12 at the time and still remembered Vietnam. I had learned about Vietnam through war movies and documentaries. Vietnam outside the context of war remained an enigma.
Other than the other Vietnamese adoptee, I didn’t interact with another Vietnamese person until I entered college. My encounter with a representative from a Vietnamese student organization was brief, painful and can be summed up by:
“Are you Vietnamese?”
“Yes.”
“Do you speak Vietnamese?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
My sense of identity has become fluid as I drift between aspects of my multi-ethnic background: Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, American, Asian and white. Realistically, I don’t fully belong to one or the other.
As mentioned in the adoptee-authored anthology, “Outsiders Within,” many of us discovered, as we tried to explore and/or re-integrate into our birth ethnicities, that it’s more complex than just face and race, culture and language. We were lacking shared experiences and a history of personal interaction important to closing the gaps. Adoptees are often referred to as “bridges.” Personally, I think its use is misleading, dehumanizing and unfairly imposes a role upon adoptees. The word itself implies a kind of passivity or helplessness I find insulting. My background would make me a poor bridge as I can never quite reach from one side or the other.
Having been completely removed from Vietnam as an infant, attempting to find ”my roots” there would only serve to remind me that I am a tourist. My roots are in America now. It is the only home I’ve ever known. What lies in Vietnam is a severed bloodline that I’m struggling to reconnect with while knowing it will never be fully restored. Learning Vietnamese might bring me a little closer, but I would still speak it with a foreign tongue. Familiarizing myself with and observing Vietnamese holidays and other traditions feels somehow hollow, because I don’t have memories of previous celebrations with family. I lack the sense of them being handed down from a previous generation.
* * *
I will always be Viet Kieu, but unlike most Vietnamese Americans of my generation, I lack the shared sense of migration, integration into American society and communal cohesion. My history as an adoptee is only a part of the Vietnamese American community’s up until my adoption, after which it’s relegated to the virtual pages of “The History of Adoption in America.” Living with white parents threw my “assimilation” into hyper-drive and afforded me certain privileges, along with my isolation that only widened the distance between myself and the Vietnamese American community. The gap between us became not only a matter of physical distance but mental and spiritual as well.
There is some sanctuary in calling myself American because it’s broad enough for me to fit. On the days when I grow sick of thinking about “identity,” I’m tempted to use the seemingly all-inclusive label exclusively. The problem is that the generality of it rubs against the old wound left from the previous erasure of my Vietnamese heritage. It conflicts with my need to reconnect, re-establish and reclaim as much of my Vietnamese identity as possible.
Race is yet another matter to consider. Since I was essentially raised as if I were white, it has been a struggle to recalibrate my perspective to that of a woman of color. There are days when I’m still not sure from which perspective I’m viewing the world. Being raised by my white family afforded me certain privileges I might not have had otherwise. No one questioned why I lived on the white side of my still segregated town.
Though it didn’t completely shield me from racism, it afforded me much more protection than many of my contemporaries of color. Or perhaps it didn’t. Since I wasn’t taught to recognize racism, maybe I just didn’t notice. Regardless, I lacked the sense of camaraderie that my peers of color seemed to enjoy. Being seen as privileged cast me into the role of “the other.” As a result, it was difficult to relate and bond with other Asians that I would meet later in life. And still, I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t and never would be “white.” Again, I was the other.
It’s not that I’m saying transethnically-adopted children are doomed to a life of disconnect. Some children may or may not have similar feelings and experiences. For those who do, both may vary in degrees and range. Likewise, I would never suggest that adoptive parents are helpless. I think there are a lot of things they can do to prepare their children for and even prevent negative experiences similar to my own.
I’m not an expert by any means, but I do rely on my own experiences. I think exposing adoptees to their birth culture is a given. It can offer them a sense of continuation rather than that of having been conjured out of thin air. Just as importantly, having access to and being made to feel a part of communities with similar ethnicities can go a long way. This would require parents to live in or close by and actively engage members of those communities. In my opinion, it does little good for transethnically-adopted children to spend rationed amounts of time in culture camps or among peers with similar ethnicities. To some adoptees, it can feel like being given a warm blanket only to have it yanked away again as they return to their isolated environments.
Because of my own experience, I think transethnically-adopted children may have more success connecting with their communities here in the United States. I connect more successfully with second- and even third-generation Vietnamese Americans rather than those from my own. Vietnam is the country of my birth, but like many of those second- and- third generation Vietnamese Americans, my identity is deeply embedded in American soil. I find commonalities with them in everything from questions of identity to a love of both American and Asian pop culture.
Discussions on race and racism can help children to recognize when they are being discriminated against in order to not fall victims to it. This would require parents to learn to see through the eyes of a person of color — what may become the eyes of their children. The adoptive parents I most admire are those who educate themselves on the subject of racism and become actively involved in its prevention. If my parents had done this, it would have shown that they not only cared about me, but the community of which I’d come to feel a part of — if I’d felt a part of it. Becoming actively involved can also illustrate positive ways with which to deal with racial discrimination and prejudice.
Perhaps the role of the adoptive parent could be viewed, not so much as a bridge, but as a builder of bridges, connecting their children to themselves and their ethnicities. As parents, the ability to find and develop the tools is in their hands, not in the hands of their children. Of course, there is no one solution or guarantee that it would achieve the desired outcome. I don’t think it should be a matter of end result, but of preparing a child to deal with the challenges they face as they come into their own.