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March 08, 2017 - Image 14

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The Michigan Daily

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Wednesday, March 8, 2017 // The Statement
7B

Personal Statement:

A Second Chance to Write my Story

A

s I put my bag of pretzels down
on the counter with the rest of my
mom’s groceries, I see the cashier
do a double-take. Catching me

staring, she attempts to quickly hide her knee-
jerk reaction to the realization that the woman
she is ringing up is my mom, but not before I
can see the surprise and confusion in her face.
It was as though she needed a moment to pro-
cess that I, the Asian girl with the dark-brown
hair, am somehow related to the tall, curly-
haired blonde woman. The blue-eyed, light-
skinned woman was responsible for funding
my unhealthy obsession with pretzels.

At first, I was annoyed — another cashier

mistook me for the daughter of the Asian lady
behind us in the checkout line. But unlike a
younger version of myself — who would have
let out a loud sigh, rolled my eyes or furrowed
my brow — I quietly let the cashier ring us up,
pack our groceries and place them into our car.
I didn’t let show how much it got to me. I even
smiled and said, “You too” when she told us to
have a good day. After all, how could she have
known?

Growing up, when this used to happen, I

would become immediately and visibly upset
because I would feel as though a part of my
identity was taken from me. I would feel oth-
ered, as though I was being singled out as the
strange adopted girl in the family. But how
could they have known?

This is what I’ve begun to say to myself every

time something like this happens. Every time
I’m mistaken for the daughter of the Asian
woman behind me in the supermarket, or in my
own home when guests who’ve never met me
think I’m hired catering staff — because who
would’ve thought that I was the daughter of a
white Italian dude from Pennsylvania? Every
time I venture to the suburbs of Reading, Penn.,
no one knew I was my cousin’s cousin, or my
aunt’s niece, I would smile and force that awk-
ward introduction. Every time someone doesn’t
believe that I’m Jewish, I patiently explain that
I was adopted and my mom is Jewish. How

could they have known?

But as a child, I wasn’t capable of thinking

this through in this way, which undermined
any attempt at reconciling my Chinese heritage
with my identity as a little girl adopted into a
white Jewish and Catholic family. According
to the parent support groups my mom attended
and the literature she read, parents of adopt-
ed children should do their best to connect
their children to their native culture. She was
encouraged to celebrate the Chinese holidays
and enroll me in classes in the language of my
home country. And she did just that.

Chinese New Year’s became a big to-do and

I was swiftly enrolled in Mandarin classes. For
several years, I attended these classes every
Saturday. At the end of each year, we had a big
show where we performed all the songs we’d
learned. Truthfully, I hated every minute of it.
So one year, I gave my mom the death-stare of
all death-stares right in the middle of one of the
performances, and that was that for the classes.
After years of wondering why I was so quick
to reject the Mandarin lessons, I realized it
was because they highlighted the differences
between my family and me. Because I was
enrolled in Mandarin classes, I felt separated
from my family. The only native culture I had
ever known was that of my adoptive family, so
why was I learning a language that no one else
in my family was?

I would look around our Shabbat dinner

table or the annual Passover Seder at my aunt
and uncle’s house, and I would see my family,
celebrating our Jewish lineage. So why was I
any different? There was no one in my family
who spoke Chinese or even celebrated Chinese
New Year until I entered their lives. I’d grown
up around Hannukah parties and Bar Mitz-
vahs,’ so why was I expected to take on an iden-
tity that felt entirely foreign to me? As a young
adult reflecting on my childhood, I know my
parents only had my best interests at heart, but
I couldn’t see it then.

For much of my childhood, I would sit on my

bed night after night, crying to my mom, asking

her why my bio-
logical
family

didn’t want me,
why they didn’t
care
about

me. My mom
would sit there,
patiently trying
to explain that
it was for the
best. My family,
whoever
they

are,
wanted

to give me the
chance at a bet-
ter life. Even

though I didn’t believe my mom, and I couldn’t
understand her at the time, it was true.

In a crisis of overpopulation, China imple-

mented a one-child policy, and if you were found
to have had more than one child, you would be
forced to pay fees that were often many times
greater than Chinese families’ average house-
hold incomes, or face harsh consequences. My
birth mother, my mom explained to me, left me
in front of a police station — one of the safest
locations for me to lay snuggled in a blanket to
be taken to an orphanage. (My birth mother, my
mom always told me, took a big risk by going to
a police station and leaving me there in broad
daylight.)

Even so, up until about high school, I carried

a feeling with me that my birth family didn’t
want me. When I was old enough to use Google,
I started looking up China’s one-child policy.
Many of the articles I found talked about how
many families in China who had a boy and a
girl kept the boy and gave the girl up for adop-
tion. Often, families believed that the boy was
better equipped to help in the fields and around
the home. This only made me more upset, more
anxious and more frustrated that my family
had probably chosen an older brother over me. I
was the unwanted daughter.

Starting at a young age, I began to chan-

nel this frustration and anxiety into storytell-
ing. I wrote stories about princesses and girls
obsessed with horses, and my favorite topic:
mysteries. But when I crafted my own story,
that took a different tone. I wrote my story as
one of an outsider. I had the power to write my
own story, and for nearly two decades of my life,
I used it to cast doubts about my self-worth. I
chose to paint adoption as a stigmatizing iden-
tity, as something that made me different, odd
and weird.

And for so many years, I had let artificial

markers — confused cashiers, inquisitive looks,

family photos — undermine my confidence. As
a young kid, insecure about my looks and try-
ing desperately to fitting in, my physical dif-
ferences from my parents made me feel even
worse about myself. Growing up, I shared my
classroom tables, spotlights on stage and snacks
at school with kids who all looked like their par-
ents, siblings and grandparents. They all knew
the hospital they were born in and the time of
their birth down to the second. And as kid, I
thought that because I lacked all these things,
and because my genes made me appear differ-
ent from my parents, others perceived me as the
weird adopted girl, dropped into a community
she wouldn’t otherwise be a part of. A commu-
nity she doesn’t belong in.

And now, I have decided to give myself a

chance to rewrite my story. My adoption is
part of my identity, and it doesn’t mean I’m an
awkward outsider, it doesn’t mean I’m any less
lovable, any less capable of being everything
I want to be. As I have grown older and more
introspective, I have realized that what makes
a family isn’t its physical attributes. Biological
relations don’t mean much without an emotion-
al connection. People who know me and know
I was adopted never treated me differently. My
family loves me just the same as they would a
biological child. It was I who stigmatized my
identity for all those years. The feeling that my
adoption made me the odd one out came solely
from within myself. I have the power to define
what my adoption means.

A week ago, I was shopping with my mom in

a shoe store when a sales clerk came up to me
and asked me if I needed any help, unaware I
was browsing with my mom, who was already
being helped. And while incidents such as these
will always frustrate me, they will no longer
make me think I am any less a part of my family.

by Anna Polumbo-Levy, Editorial Page Editor

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ANNA POLUMBO-LEVY

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