Just holding on? Call 1-800-273-8255.

In the past few weeks, our community of adoptees lost two souls … one a 14-year-old Korean girl, the other a deported 40-something Korean man.

Each one suffered the loneliness associated with our lives as part of a diaspora we never chose.

Adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide. We have also learned to mask our true emotions; it is our way of survival.

So many aspects of our lives bring us to moments where we feel no self worth. The family tree, the comments about how relatives take one trait from another relative, the racists taunts that further separate us from our adoptive families … all these experiences build the wall between us and our adoptive communities.

And in some cases, we are rejected and sent from the only country we know (The United States) to our birth place … because our American guardians (our adoptive parents) have never bothered to legitimize us as citizens. Such was the case of Philip Clay.

His death has hit me so hard. Just a month ago, I returned from a three-week trip to my home country. The return ravaged me. Just stepping off the plane and back into the Midwest reminded me that I was a stranger here … and unwanted.

In Seoul, I felt joy and sorrow, but the sorrow was bearable. A community of adoptee friends and the tastes and smells of my infanthood comforted me. Korea allowed me to express my feelings and roam as just another Korean.

In the United States, I felt sorrow and hopelessness.

In the US, I feel owned by my agency. I am reminded that my wishes are not mine to hold. My desires to be a full person with a history go unnoticed. I am not considered the person with human rights that the United Nations Convention declared, but the transaction that must abide by the State of Oregon’s laws. I am not an individual, but the “child” of two deceased, adoptive parents. I am nobody.

As I sank deeper into myself, my small family could not understand. I was draining the life out of us all. So … I sat alone. I didn’t want to leave home. Work, a joy I once had, began to drain me further. And I snapped at those I loved. Like a wounded animal, I hid and hissed at those who came near.

Depression keeps us in shackles. It shuts us in seclusion as we smile and pretend. We laugh in public, yet cower in the quiet of our rooms. We make others happy and then sleep little as our mind races to find some sliver of self worth. Then you hear that another adoptee has died at her own hand. You wonder how that would feel to not hurt anymore. You wonder if your soul would truly live beyond the pain of this world.

Some wonder how you can disregard the good in your life and contemplate such selfish thoughts, but know that once you dig a hole, the light no longer streams in. You want the pain to stop. You want peace.

I finally got to a point where I could no longer hold my sorrow and wear a mask. One friend noticed and arranged time for us to just talk (or rather, he was gracious to just listen). I began to understand that the hole was mine but that I could scale it!

Our community is full of people who understand. I only wish we were better at connecting. Social media sites and conferences have helped, but there is still more work to be done. We need one another. But asking for that help is difficult.

Our struggles and our narratives as adoptees are valuable. The mental health profession needs more professionals with skills that meet the needs of adoptees and not just the needs of adoptive parents. There are many adoptees doing the work as therapists, but it should not be solely their responsibility. The profession as a whole can learn from them. We need them before we lose any more from our community.

If you feel despair, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.

Also, feel free to write me here. I promise to write back.

Somebody Else’s Past: Growing up in the Shadow of Adoption

Dear readers, below you will find the words of one I call “the second generation of adoptees.” These words are poignant as they may be echoed by my children one day. Read and respect them, because adoption is more than just birth parents, adoptive parents and adoptees. Our lives and adoptee experiences reverberate to those we now call family … our children.

By CS Brown

It makes me a little uneasy to write about the experience of being the child of an adult adoptee.  I feel like I’m stepping into a war zone. There seem to be two camps — adoptees and adoptive parents — and both seem fierce and unforgiving. Whose side am I on?

Mostly my mom’s. She was born in a government hospital in Bombay, India, into a culture and time where poverty and female infanticide went hand-in-hand. Instead of being poisoned or starved, she was taken to a Catholic orphanage, where she lived for two years until she was adopted by a Portuguese Catholic Indian from Goa, which was at the time a Portuguese colony but is now an Indian state.

In the 1930s, under the Indian and Portuguese laws of the time, the legal rights of the Indian adoptee were neither specified nor protected. Foreign adoptions were infrequent; unwanted children were most often adopted by upper and upper-middle class Indians as servants. As she grew, Mom was raised not as a daughter, but as a housekeeper, farm laborer, and nursemaid; an older female servant physically and emotionally abused her.

She bore the paralyzing cultural stigma of being adopted, or poskem. Regarded as socially inferior, most poskem existed on the margins of society. Many remained unmarried, continuing to serve their adoptive families. At the death of her parents, the poskem received no inheritance, but would continue in service to her parents’ biological children. If they wed, it was usually to another poskem. 

It’s a lot of backstory, but I needed to explain that my mother’s ongoing emotional pain at her abandonment and adoption is complicated by cultural, social and other issues, and I write this with a (mostly) complete understanding of them.

Through some miracle of God, lucky twist of fate, wormhole in the Universe, or whatever else you choose to believe, she and my North Carolina-born father were in the same strange place at the same time, looking for something different than what they had always known. They found it, got married, and came to the States together in 1964.

I can’t remember ever not knowing that Mom was adopted and understanding that it was a source of enormous pain. Her sorrow, anxiety and controlling nature dominated my childhood. When she talked about her biological parents, it was always the mother, never the father. “I still don’t understand how she could just give away her baby,” she says. “How could she do that? What kind of person could do that?”

I’ve always felt kind of sorry for my Indian ajji — I’m sure she had a horrible, horrible life before and after my mother was born — and I always make excuses for her. Maybe she lived in a slum and already had too many children, I speculated. Or her husband made her give away the girl-baby, or she was young and unmarried and her parents made her take the child to the nuns.  “Mom, you hear these stories on the news all the time,” I say. “It doesn’t mean she was a bad person.”

Usually she answers my theories with tears, or as she’s gotten older, silence. As she approaches her 80^th birthday, I’ve learned to keep my big mouth shut when she wonders out loud about her mother. At this point, the best response is “I’m sorry, Mom,” and a big hug.

She has a single snapshot of herself as a child, taken when she was ten years old at her first Communion. Her birth certificate is a piece of cut-in-half letterhead from St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Byculla, Bombay, with a few typed lines indicating the days of her birth and baptism. She cried when she showed it to me. She was ashamed of its paucity, especially when compared to the elaborate footprinted and notarized birth certificates of her American-born children. “It’s nothing but a few lines, but I needed to have it,” she said.

She once told me that even though she had a full and happy life, she felt there something missing —  a little hole deep inside that she would never be able to fill. This was too much for the teenage me. Why was she always so sad? Why did I have to spend so much time comforting her?

Why wasn’t she grateful?

She had us, after all. Daddy would have done anything for her. His mother treated her like a daughter. She had two boys and two girls, exactly what she told Daddy she wanted when they got married. We weren’t rich, but we had a three-bedroom house in a decent neighborhood, a big yard, two cars, a phone, and two TVs. It was a lot better than living in a Byculla slum, pissing in an open ditch, fetching water from public taps, and working as the servant of a wealthy Brahmin.

Wasn’t that enough?

What disturbed my 13-year-old self the most was that if Mom hadn’t been abandoned and adopted, she wouldn’t have eventually met Daddy. I wouldn’t be here. She hated the fate that allowed me to be alive?! Even though it was awful, it led her to Daddy and to us.

Weren’t we enough?

Like most teenagers do, I took it personally. Trying to work through it at a young age, I decided there must be “bad” adoptions and “good” ones, and reckoned that my mom’s psychic pain was the result of her “bad adoption.” Adoptees with “good adoptions” were lucky, and probably grateful and happy. A nice and tidy explanation that helped lessen my teenage cognitive dissonance.

Beyond that, it was too difficult to understand or deal with, especially since I was also busy juggling race-related issues. At that time, a chocolate-brown, sari-wearing Indian woman, a white American man, and their four little biracial kids didn’t exactly fade into the woodwork of a small Southern town. I spent most of my time and energy dodging rednecks on the school bus, avoiding racists in the hallways, trying to fit in with anybody who didn’t call me a half-breed, and studying hard enough to be able to get away from the walnut-minded people in our stupid little town.

I only became curious about Mom’s background in my late twenties, after I left the South. Away from my mother, the overtly hostile stares and behind-the-back glances at our freaky mestiço family, and the rest of the South’s creepy racial baggage, I traded in my anger and frustration for sympathy. I began to grow closer to her.

Life happened — career, money, marriage, sickness, suffering, death — the ten thousand joys and sorrows of growing older. In between, I imagined the lives of ajji and ajjo. I dreamed of dozens of aunties and uncles and cousins, and had the staggering realization that I will never know them, ever. I was born in an abundance of inherited sadness, sings Ryan Adams. You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past, says Bruce Springsteen. I wanted to know: What sadness? What sins? Whose past?

I realized that my emotional needs and longings were so similar to my mother’s. Her sense of loss had become mine, although hers was much deeper and more painful. With a sense of shared experience, my feelings towards her then evolved from sympathy (feeling sorry for her) to empathy (being able to put myself in her shoes). It was a turning point in my understanding.

How could she not be controlling, anxious, and depressed? Much research has been done on the psychological issues of the adoptee. The neglect and loneliness experienced by children institutionalized in orphanages is well documented, as are the feelings of shock, trauma, rejection and loss experienced by many adopted children. Research has shown that fetuses respond and adapt to stimulus in the womb, including elevated stress hormones. Scientists think that the fetus permanently conditions itself to deal with elevated stress hormones, putting it at a higher risk for stress-related conditions as an adult.

Wouldn’t carrying an unwanted pregnancy to full-term, knowing that you’re going to give up the child at birth, be a pretty major source of stress? That would make adoptees biologically more susceptible to anxiety, depression, and other emotional issues from birth. I’m not a scientist, but through the lens of mental illness, it seems kind of obvious.

Adoption itself can be a blessing — but abandonment is a curse. Being adopted is never going to erase the trauma of being abandoned, whether or not the adoptive relationship is “good.” So to my teenage self: yes, adoption saved Mom from life in a Bombay tenement. It brought together two people that loved each other, and many beautiful people exist because of it. But, dear teenage me, adoption by definition is preceded by an abandonment that can have a devastating impact on the adoptee.

I would hope this would be Adoption 101 for prospective adoptive parents, and that they have a reserve of intelligence, compassion and common sense to draw from as their children grow, ask questions, deal with race problems, seek answers about their background, experience emotional issues and setbacks, and perhaps eventually search for their birth parents. But sadly, the online anger of adoptive parents directed at supposedly “ungrateful” adoptees tells me that this is not the case. (In the reaction of many white adoptive parents to their non-white children’s feelings of loss and curiosity about their background, I detect more than a whiff of that toxic-but-so-familiar combination of white privilege and white man’s burden — but I digress.)

And so since the adoption industry, and I use that word fairly pointedly, can’t even seem to properly instruct adoptive parents on how to deal with their child’s potential emotional problems, it has certainly not gone the extra mile to develop guidelines for adult adoptees and their children. We need empathy, understanding, love and maturity to figure out for ourselves how to navigate these rocky shoals.

What stopped me from adopting.

In my third year of undergraduate studies, I read the most heartbreaking story.

Four Korean sisters, ages 6 to 13, made a suicide pact to relieve the burden they believed their parents shouldered as a low income family of seven on $350 a month. This became my view of my birth country and my driving force as an adoptee and a young woman.

In those days, I had finally fallen in love with a young man from Appleton, Wisconsin. I was making plans. In them, I wanted to have a biological child and adopt a young girl from Korea. I wanted to save a young girl from that feeling of uselessness.

This Wisconsin love of my life crumbled as I found he was promised to another back home. My trust was broken, and I vowed that I would stay single and possibly adopt on my own.

Life throws punches, and we roll with them. My parents fell in love, moved to Japan and tried to start a family. But tragedy struck. My mother delivered a stillborn infant son in January 1968. My parents sunk into sadness. They wanted to be parents. After realizing they could not be biological parents, they ventured into the land of Harry Holt. (Here’s where I come in. I know you knew that!)

On their application, they submitted this photograph of themselves. Don’t they look proud and excited? (Holt will not allow me to have the hard copy of this photograph, even though they have an electronic copy of it with my file. It belongs with me, my sister and our children, but never mind.)

Five years after they adopted me, my parents were able to have a biological child. From her hospital room each night of her one-month bedrest stay, my mother cried as she watched me, a purple-coated dot, in the parking lot. Then … my sister arrived. She was cute and cuddly. I wanted to name her Penelope, but my mother decided against it.

My mother would dedicate her life to her girls. She stayed home, volunteered at school, nurtured us to adulthood and with my father, she would console me when the Appleton man left. I told her I wanted to be a single mother with a job. I wanted my life to play out differently from hers. I wanted to seem strong and independent.

Years later, I would meet the man. We married, and my parents asked about grandchildren. My husband agreed with my initial plans, a few years as a couple and later, parents to a biological child and an adopted one. We lived in Rwanda one year after the 1994 genocide and witnessed so many children displaced by war but happy in their home country. My adoption plan was beginning to crumble.

As I turned 30, my GYN asked if I planned to have children. “Yes, of course!” was my reply. She went on to explain that sometimes women might take years to get pregnant, and that I should discuss this with my husband. This reminded me of the pain my mother felt with numerous miscarriages and the still born son. She shed tears every January for that little boy.

Within two years, I was pregnant. The moment my son’s bony hand touched mine through my stretched skin, I was in awe, and the thoughts of any others fell away.

When the moment came for me to finally meet my first biological relative, he was placed on my chest, and I exclaimed, “He has my square-mouth cry!”

We were a happy threesome, and as that joy set in, my mother passed away. I felt lost. I felt I had hurt her as my sister and I found a letter my mother kept. In it, I had written that I wished I had never been adopted. I felt the pain I had inflicted on her in my teen years. But my sister quietly said, “You know, she was so honored that you decided to stay home and be a mother.”

After all those years of pushing back against my mother, years of ridiculing her life’s decisions, I realized that motherhood was my job. I relished it and was proud to be “Mom.”

I would feel my mother’s pain again a couple of years later as I miscarried my second pregnancy. I felt lost again. I felt a failure and decided I was happy with being a mother to one. My husband revisited our earlier plans of adoption, but at the time, we were three on the salary of one, and adoption just wasn’t financially possible.

We would eventually welcome our daughter into our family. I must admit that I beam when my children say they are like me. I waited so long for a chance to compare myself to another human being who shared my DNA. I also share their sadness when they realize that they don’t share biological similarities to my side of the family.

Now that my parents are gone, I wrap myself up in the comfort of my little family. We still do not have the financial means to adopt, but I am content. My initial well-meaning, youth-driven intentions of saving another little Korean girl like me have disintegrated with each adoptee narrative.

Even if I could adopt a Korean girl, I couldn’t add to the pain of a single mother in Korea feeling hopeless to the point of believing her child would have it “better” in a place where material wealth trumps family.

Instead, my focus turns to learning from the past … my past, looking to the future for my children and the future of other adoptees and their children as we navigate the confusion and complexity of adoption.

The Spectrum of Somewhere Between

Looking for an adoption film? Look no further.



While some may read my blog and believe that I am lost, or found, or searching, I direct them to an adoptee in this film, Jenna Cook. She says it so eloquently:

“All of us, this whole adoption community, we have this commonality about us, this unity. But at the same time, we each are at our own place, in our own journey. It’s a journey of our past, and we each have our own road and our own paths set out for us.”

This film, by far, is the one adoptive parents, children and families should see. The director, Linda Goldstein Knowlton, has found four teens that have four different stories. Each is happy in her adoptive family, and each searches for identity. Knowlton, an adoptive parent, has brought this film to fruition for her young daughter, Ruby.

Someday, when her daughter becomes that insecure teen, she will take comfort in the testaments of these four young women, Fang Jenni Lee, Jenna Cook, Ann Boccuti and Haley Butler. I longed for this sense of belonging as I write here.

In the last six months, I have awakened. My adoption sensitivities are keener. I am thankful and rejoice in being a part of this large community of adoptees.

Knowlton continues to post videos that reinforce the feelings I have had for many years, yet suppressed in my loneliness. I see hope in the future for other young adoptees, and Lili Johnson, one of the first Chinese adoptees, gives me hope when she says,

“As an adoptee, I have no ambition to seek resolution. I am not looking to make sense of myself. I’m not looking to have a right answer or a wrong answer. … I’m not looking for like diagrams or any like pictures of what being adopted is, what it means, what people should do, what’s the right way, what’s the wrong way because there isn’t one.”

Hear the call that asks you to think of adoptees with varying degrees of feelings and experiences. Think of us as your neighbors, your friends, your classmates, or simply the person you pass on the street. Just like you, we have our families, our stories, our varied backgrounds. Rather than separate us as different or odd, celebrate us as interesting.

Johnson also says it so very well:

“I get confused thinking about, you know, is being different good? Should we emphasize difference? … Or should we say ‘You’re American just like everyone else.’”

You can see Lili’s full interview here:

Lili at NYU from Linda Knowlton on Vimeo.