Image description: [Photo shows Rachael dressed in black attire, one of the Women’s Center interns, smiling in front of one of the UMBC buildings.]

Content Note: This post is written by Rachael Joslow, a third-year student at UMBC. I am a transracial adoptee adopted from Vietnam who grew up in Georgia for most of my childhood and adolescent life. I hope to highlight my experience growing up as an adopted child discussing my personal feelings on adoption and the ambiguous loss that I experience. I would like you, as the reader, to acknowledge and learn the realities of adoption through my experiences.

In my previous blog, I discussed my personal experience with being adopted and included some other stories of adoptees (My Personal Experience with Being Adopted). Within that blog, I addressed common questions those would ask of me if I mentioned that I was adopted. These questions being: “What was it like being told that you were adopted?” or “Is it hard being adopted?” My focus from my last blog was to give awareness on the topic while being vulnerable about my own experiences and those of other adoptees who have shared their stories online.

I wanted to recap some aspects from my last blog, because many have come forward to ask me more about what it is like being adopted and how those experiences have shaped me. As it is touched on from my previous blog, many positive adoption experiences from adoptive parents overlook the negative and traumatizing experiences of many adoptees, specifically transracial adoptees. Some adoptees learn that their adoptive parents carry a savior complex over their adoptive children, especially for transracial adoptee cases where they are from foreign countries and the parents are a different nationality/ethnicity. Unfortunately, it does come up in adoption very often, especially when adoptive parents believe they are “saving us” from the situation that we’re in. And to be clear, it’s not that adoptees are not grateful—it is valid for us to feel uncomfortable being paraded as trophies for adoptive parents to receive a gold star on their “good deeds” list.

A quote from an article titled “What We Lost” resonated with me about the frustration adoptees feel towards society telling us that we should be grateful for everything and not express our sadness or negative feelings towards being adopted.

“Society’s narrative of adoption tells adoptees, in no uncertain terms, that if we were given to a loving home, we shouldn’t feel this pain, this chasm, this rip, this tear. We were saved, after all. We’re so much better off. We’re the lucky ones. Our parents must be such wonderful people. We must feel so grateful. How lucky. How special. We were meant to be together. Everything worked out just the way it was supposed to in the end.”

This quote calls out people who don’t take adoptees’ feelings into consideration when we, adoptees, talk about our feelings on adoption. People tell us constantly how we should feel instead of giving us a moment to speak about our lived experiences. There is no time for us to pause or talk about it as a whole. In addition, these experiences contribute to this sense of loss that I’ve been bearing over the years that is specific to adoptees. It is constantly brought up in different ways how I’m adopted and I have no connection to my birth parents. Because this is an extremely vulnerable topic for me to discuss, I’ve had to take extensive time to write this blog in order to give myself space to take breaks until I felt ready to come back to it. However you feel about adoption, a common experience that many adoptees share would be the sense of loss from identity, as well as the relationships we have missed out on.

Ambiguous Loss Felt in the Adoptee Experience

Ambiguous loss is a type of grief that lacks closure and information regarding the loss of a loved one or the loss of a connection with a loved one. Ambiguous loss is common in cases when we have no contact with somebody even though we know where the person could be or what has happened to them. Examples include divorce, estrangement, immigration, a loved one who is incarcerated, and of course, adoption.

Thinking about my birth parents feels weird. I visited Vietnam back when I was eleven years old and struggled with finding my connections back to my culture, the country I was born in. From my perspective, I’ve experienced a lot of ambiguous loss ever since I was able to understand that I was adopted, as early as five or six years old. There are no names on my original birth certificate on who my biological parents are. I don’t know the language nor have I experienced Vietnamese culture growing up. I considered myself white-washed for a long time because I did not have what others might consider key Asian experiences. It felt like I did not deserve to call myself Vietnamese because even though I was considered Vietnamese in appearance, I do not have those interpersonal connections to my ethnicity. I’m Asian but I’m also not Asian. 

What I mean by that statement is that I lack the cultural background that a Vietnamese-American/Vietnamese person might experience normally. It was made apparent to me growing up through middle school and high school that I was different from other Asian peers. I don’t know a lot of cultural foods and I did not grow up with the same household items. Even out in public, it is made apparent by strangers where people don’t realize that I’m standing next to my mom. It’s a weird paradox to be seen as Asian in some settings and not Asian in others. There’s also an internal loss where I feel left out from being Asian.

From the same article, ”What We Lost,” this next quote resonates with me on what ambiguous loss feels like and expressing heavy feelings towards what it’s like to not have a relationship with one’s birth mother as an adoptee.

“Adoption loss is an ambiguous loss. While it changes shape over time, it is often life-long. It is without end. I have lost my entire family and yet, there are no bodies to bury, no socially acceptable ritual or process meant for me to understand this loss and how to live with it. My mother went on living, became someone else’s mother, while I lived my young life with only the presence of her absence and the fracturing unknown. Maybe she’s alive; maybe she’s dead. Maybe she loves me; maybe she has forgotten me. Maybe anything.”

It’s difficult to put it into words. I have no idea where my biological parents are, if they are still in Vietnam or even alive. I’m constantly mourning over the loss of everything in those relationships that I never had with my birth parents. However, it’s not like I’m sad–it feels empty. I have spent most of my life pondering whether or not I cross their minds. These feelings of mine are real and okay for me to feel. On this note, I can still be grateful to my mom and love my mom while appreciating her for everything. While she has given me so many opportunities throughout my life, she also does not hold it above my head that I should be grateful because she adopted me.

It feels nice to put these feelings into words and share them, because not many people are aware of what adoptees go through in their lives. This is my experience with adoption and ambiguous loss and I hope that I’ve left you as the reader with some things to think about. And as always, please make space where you can and listen to adoptees’ feelings and voices when they share their experiences. 

The article I attached is where I got the two quotes from. It is a heavy read as it talks about the writer’s personal experience with being adopted and meeting her birth mother. It is important to be in a clear headspace before reading this story:

What We Lost: Undoing the Fairy Tale Narrative of Adoption

Articles that talk more on white saviorism:

A Savior No One Needs: Unpacking and Overcoming the White Savior Complex

What Is White Savior Complex–And Why Is It Harmful?

The following post was written by Ojuswani Phogat, a third-year student at UMBC. 

Positionality Statement: The letter below is a message from me to my immigrant parents. It is reflective of only their experiences and mine but is being shared with you all with an understanding that the immigrant experience can be a wild, scary, intense, fulfilling, and beautiful one. And that someone, somewhere, may relate to this story on more than just the surface. 

To My Immigrant Parents

Dear Mumma and Papa, 

It is rare for me to think of the lives you led before I was born. To think of you as children, young adults, or parents of a singular daughter, instead of two. I cannot fathom a world where I do not exist, despite the remnants of your past lives that hide in the crevices of our home. The ones you pull out of dusted boxes underneath your bed and from the back of cabinet corners to show to me from time to time. The pictures of you both wearing school uniforms, eyes shining, and faces plastered with bright smiles showing off two missing front teeth. The sindhoor¹ your mother gave to you the day of your wedding, tucked away into a patterned cloth nestled inside of our household mandir. The ceramic chai cups, lovely little things, adorned with arrangements of blue flowers your cousins gave to you on your 24th birthday. I do not consider these mementos of your life's most cherished moments until I do. Until I see them with my eyes, smell them in all their aged glory, feel the weathered edges of the containers that store them, and sip chai from them, and it dawns on me that there is a whole part of your story that I do not know the intricacies of. And yet it defines my very existence. 

I can't imagine the courage it would take to leave behind...a culture, a language, a home. 

To say farewell (or at the very least see you in a while)... 

To the very khets² of green that sustained your childhood, where you gulped down sugar cane juice and stole neighborhood fruit off of tall, lusciously beautiful trees as your grandmother called for you to return home. 

To the patches of dirt where you gathered with your friends to play cricket and kabaddi³, laughing and bonding for hours.

To leave behind everything you have ever known. 

To leave behind a community enriched with thousand-year-old traditions rooted in a fundamental understanding of what it means to be Brown and thrive in a place with people who look just like you. 

The experience of leaving home must be undefinable. It seems, in a word: scary. In a few words: completely, utterly terrifying. An experience that I am almost certain you would never allow of me. And yet, here I am, existing in a land completely new to the both of us. One we navigate with excitement and curiosity but mostly caution for a hesitancy of the unknown.

In reflecting on my time in this place, I think of the hill just a few feet behind our old house, my own khet² of radiant grass and luscious trees on which you took my sister and I to fly kites at the age of 4. The same one that I glared at through my bedroom window with my eyes stinging with tears as I spent my freshman year of college cooped inside a house that was wholly consuming my sanity. I think of the gravel-covered playground in our community that we went to each year on the last day of summer, spending hours swinging and playing games. The same park I watched with a feeling of despair as I sat in our green minivan packed to the brim with clothes, appliances, and toys. As we drove away from friends, family, and the community you created for us towards our new house in New Jersey, where a second such community would never be built. 

In leaving your home, you have rendered me without a concrete one. I exist in this place but have not found the ability to claim it as my own. It is not mine, despite my residing within it. How can one belong to a place when their physicality, spirituality, and culture remain under speculation, only being accepted in bits and pieces when it suits the visions of the white man? 

It is here in this environment that I exist within two distinct worlds. I am an American, born and raised, but what marks my presence in this place is my othered identity. It is the Desi part of me, the one defining my brownness, that I am legible through. It is here where I exist in limbo between the cultural and social markers of my two communities. It is in this middle ground is where I am accepted by neither community. 

You would think then that in reconnecting with your home, I would be accepted as one of the pack. I would be revered as one of the community, a missing piece of the puzzle that renders it complete. However, the gap between you and me and, by extension, me and them is one that cannot be closed by sheer will. It is not solely a gap of distance; it is one of the mind: of experience, of speech, of perspective by which physicality is completely transcended. Such a gap, while marked physically by the Atlantic Ocean, is one that I am ridiculed for despite the role I did not play in its creation. My removal from my location and also the location of my ancestors is what renders me without a base. It leaves me without a place I can cherish and savor with my whole being. 

It is understandable that your instinct is to protect those who you have created. That in lieu of favoring our exploration of this place, you have prioritized the notion of safety. A notion you then fed to us: it is not you we don't trust; it's others. This phrase, a manifestation of the fear you have undertaken to live within your reality. The fear that you have for your own safety and mine. And while that itself does not excuse the excessive control you have chosen to operationalize within our relationship, there can be an acknowledgment of the fact that you are more like me than I have ever thought before. That you are human, and your instinct to protect kept me alive in a way you found my instinct to build community and thrive in a place I considered my home never could.   

1: vermillion-colored cosmetic powder made out of saffron and red sandalwood. Is worn in a long stroke on the top of the forehead and into the hair part by married South Asian women 

2: plot of land typically with crops (a field or farm) 

3: South Asian sport

The following post was written by Ojuswani Phogat, a third-year student at UMBC. 

Positionality Statement: The letter below is a message from me to my immigrant parents. It is reflective of only their experiences and mine but is being shared with you all with an understanding that the immigrant experience can be a wild, scary, intense, fulfilling, and beautiful one. And that someone, somewhere, may relate to this story on more than just the surface. 

To My Immigrant Parents

Dear Mumma and Papa, 

It is rare for me to think of the lives you led before I was born. To think of you as children, young adults, or parents of a singular daughter, instead of two. I cannot fathom a world where I do not exist, despite the remnants of your past lives that hide in the crevices of our home. The ones you pull out of dusted boxes underneath your bed and from the back of cabinet corners to show to me from time to time. The pictures of you both wearing school uniforms, eyes shining, and faces plastered with bright smiles showing off two missing front teeth. The sindhoor¹ your mother gave to you the day of your wedding, tucked away into a patterned cloth nestled inside of our household mandir. The ceramic chai cups, lovely little things, adorned with arrangements of blue flowers your cousins gave to you on your 24th birthday. I do not consider these mementos of your life’s most cherished moments until I do. Until I see them with my eyes, smell them in all their aged glory, feel the weathered edges of the containers that store them, and sip chai from them, and it dawns on me that there is a whole part of your story that I do not know the intricacies of. And yet it defines my very existence. 

I can’t imagine the courage it would take to leave behind … a culture, a language, a home. 

To say farewell (or at the very least see you in a while)… 

To the very khets² of green that sustained your childhood, where you gulped down sugar cane juice and stole neighborhood fruit off of tall, lusciously beautiful trees as your grandmother called for you to return home. 

To the patches of dirt where you gathered with your friends to play cricket and kabaddi³, laughing and bonding for hours.

To leave behind everything you have ever known. 

To leave behind a community enriched with thousand-year-old traditions rooted in a fundamental understanding of what it means to be Brown and thrive in a place with people who look just like you. 

The experience of leaving home must be undefinable. It seems, in a word: scary. In a few words: completely, utterly terrifying. An experience that I am almost certain you would never allow of me. And yet, here I am, existing in a land completely new to the both of us. One we navigate with excitement and curiosity but mostly caution for a hesitancy of the unknown.

In reflecting on my time in this place, I think of the hill just a few feet behind our old house, my own khet² of radiant grass and luscious trees on which you took my sister and I to fly kites at the age of 4. The same one that I glared at through my bedroom window with my eyes stinging with tears as I spent my freshman year of college cooped inside a house that was wholly consuming my sanity. I think of the gravel-covered playground in our community that we went to each year on the last day of summer, spending hours swinging and playing games. The same park I watched with a feeling of despair as I sat in our green minivan packed to the brim with clothes, appliances, and toys. As we drove away from friends, family, and the community you created for us towards our new house in New Jersey, where a second such community would never be built. 

In leaving your home, you have rendered me without a concrete one. I exist in this place but have not found the ability to claim it as my own. It is not mine, despite my residing within it. How can one belong to a place when their physicality, spirituality, and culture remain under speculation, only being accepted in bits and pieces when it suits the visions of the white man? 

It is here in this environment that I exist within two distinct worlds. I am an American, born and raised, but what marks my presence in this place is my othered identity. It is the Desi part of me, the one defining my brownness, that I am legible through. It is here where I exist in limbo between the cultural and social markers of my two communities. It is in this middle ground is where I am accepted by neither community. 

You would think then that in reconnecting with your home, I would be accepted as one of the pack. I would be revered as one of the community, a missing piece of the puzzle that renders it complete. However, the gap between you and me and, by extension, me and them is one that cannot be closed by sheer will. It is not solely a gap of distance; it is one of the mind: of experience, of speech, of perspective by which physicality is completely transcended. Such a gap, while marked physically by the Atlantic Ocean, is one that I am ridiculed for despite the role I did not play in its creation. My removal from my location and also the location of my ancestors is what renders me without a base. It leaves me without a place I can cherish and savor with my whole being. 

It is understandable that your instinct is to protect those who you have created. That in lieu of favoring our exploration of this place, you have prioritized the notion of safety. A notion you then fed to us: it is not you we don’t trust; it’s others. This phrase, a manifestation of the fear you have undertaken to live within your reality. The fear that you have for your own safety and mine. And while that itself does not excuse the excessive control you have chosen to operationalize within our relationship, there can be an acknowledgment of the fact that you are more like me than I have ever thought before. That you are human, and your instinct to protect kept me alive in a way you found my instinct to build community and thrive in a place I considered my home never could.   

1: vermillion-colored cosmetic powder made out of saffron and red sandalwood. Is worn in a long stroke on the top of the forehead and into the hair part by married South Asian women 

2: plot of land typically with crops (a field or farm) 

3: South Asian sport

The Women's Center lounge and office will be closed THIS Wednesday, Dec 7th for Administrative Purposes. 

Have a great last week of classes, UMBC!