Anita Rao
It was the first week of my first semester in college. The South Asian Student Association on campus was hosting a meetup event in the backyard of my dorm. But was the invitation for me? I'm biracial but can pass as white, and I was having some serious reservations about going. My upbringing was extremely Indian. My dad led the Hindu Sunday school in my hometown. We only ate Indian food. Indian culture is my culture. But I knew folks wouldn't guess that just by looking at me. My decision felt like an isolating one at the time. But so many of us have to contend with a complicated ways our race, ethnicity and culture contribute to a layered identity. Similarly, the feeling of fitting in everywhere and nowhere at the same time is familiar to a lot of transracial adoptees. Learning more about the experiences of these adoptees has helped me on my own journey to better understand what it feels like to belong in different kinds of spaces. This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao.
Another transformative moment from my college years: meeting someone who shared a lot of my complicated feelings. Her name is Shruti . She lived down the hall from me, and we bonded over taking Hindi 101. She shared how — like me — she didn't always feel at home in Indian spaces but for a very different reason.
Shruti Shah
I was adopted into a family where my mom is white, and my dad is Indian.
Anita Rao
Racially, she identifies as South Asian. Both of her biological parents were born and raised in India, but she was adopted by her biological father's brother and grew up in a mixed race family in Memphis, Tennessee. Culturally, she often felt similar to me. I know that being biracial and being a transracial adoptee are not the same thing. But my friendship and conversations with Shruti over the years have shown me how things go better for everyone when families, both biological and adopted, start addressing uncomfortable conversations around race and cultural politics head on. Shruti and I have worked through big identity questions together at various points in our lives. I asked her if we could share a conversation we had recently that got me thinking. So we hung out — this time with microphones recording.
Shruti Shah
Yeah, so my adoption story is a little bit funky. But I was actually adopted within my family, so I was my dad's brother and my dad's brother's wife's daughter and adopted when I was 11 months old from them. I was born in India and came to the United States with my grandmother — I guess she was the thread throughout this process. And [I] was adopted into a family where my mom is white, and my dad is Indian and grew up in the deep South in Memphis, Tennessee, which is obviously a very different environment than growing up in Mumbai. And so definitely, I think, as a kid [I] was brought up with a very strong, actually, Jewish identity. [I] went to Hebrew school and Sunday school and also really did not, I think, have a strong Indian identity. And I think some of that might have been my mom's influence. And some of that was also I think being raised in the South and going to, I went to an all-girls school that also had a heavy dose of religion mixed in. It was an all-girls Episcopal school. But it would say it was a complicated upbringing.
Anita Rao
Did you identify as an adoptee? Was that a formative part of your identity growing up?
Shruti Shah
Yes, I would say that it was. I think the first memory I have of identifying as an adoptee is when I was a little kid sitting with my little sister, who is my parents' natural child. And I think we were arguing about who came out of mommy's tummy first. I think I said something like: Oh, I'm better because I came out of mommy's tummy first. And I think my dad said: Actually, you didn't. Then [he] explained to me that I was adopted. And, you know, I think I took that to mean: Okay, well, you know, I'm better because I have two moms.
Anita Rao
Hey, that's good!
Shruti Shah
Yeah, I spun it positively. But um, but yeah, I mean, I, I don't remember a time. I don't have a conscious memory of not being adopted.
Anita Rao
Shruti’s experience of being adopted by a family member isn't the most common kind of adoption experience in the US. But being adopted across racial lines is super common. Transracial adoptions are almost half of all adoptions today. And in the last five decades, this kind of adoption has been on the rise, especially white parents adopting children of color. There are resources available for multiracial families, but they tend to focus on the experience of the parents, not the adopted child. The same thing is true in media. Shruti told me that it wasn't until recently that she heard a story focused on transracial adoption from the kids perspective. It was on NPR, of course. We decided it was time for more of that. So we invited some other adoptees into the conversation.
Andrew Lee
So I grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, in a small, predominantly white town outside of Philadelphia. My mom is white. And my dad was also a Korean adoptee. So he was a mixed-race Korean person adopted when he was seven after the Korean War by his adoptive grandparents who were also white.
Anita Rao
Andrew Lee is a Korean adoptee who's been thinking and writing a lot about his experience. He hopes that will contribute to the support system for other transracial adoptees.
Andrew Lee
My dad was adopted when he was seven years old. So I think he had the mentality that a number of first generation immigrant parents have — that they remember the situation where they came from and are really grateful to be in the United States and are perhaps willing to look at some of the challenges that come as being worth the price of admission. My experience was a little different, because as soon as I was a person, I was already a transracially adopted person in the United States. The town where I grew up in didn't have a lot of Asian people. So I think there's always, of course, you know, stereotypes about what Asian people are like. Us being exclusively from from China or Japan. And then a complicating factor, of course, is not really feeling Asian. I think it's something that a lot of Asian transracial adoptees experience. That we feel like we aren't Asian enough.
So something that I think about is how most kids of color, get some sort of framework from their parents on how to think about being a person of color in the United States. Those aren't always the best frameworks for folks. It can be: Just be grateful to be here and keep your head down and don't complain. But there is a narrative that people get, regardless, from their parents who are often racialized in the same way about how to sort of make sense of navigating a mostly white society. And I think something that's really interesting is that a lot of transracial adoptees don't get that.
Anita Rao
Yeah.
Andrew Lee
Even learning from my dad, when he was growing up, he was raised in a culturally white environment. So even though both of us are adoptees of color, the ideas that have been sort of passed down in our family are cultural narratives that don't actually fit people who look like us and move through the world in the way that we do.
Anita Rao
That's interesting. So while you might kind of go physically into spaces where, where there are kind of celebrations of Korean culture, like at your church or around Korean food, you might not have the internal kind of experiences that make you feel connected to that, even though. you know, from an outsider, it may look like: Oh, you're Korean, and you're in this space where people are celebrating Korean culture.
Andrew Lee
Exactly. My mom is Pennsylvania Dutch. I really like German food. I eat a lot of sauerkraut. Looking at me, you, you wouldn't think any of those things. So getting connected to Asian culture, getting comfortable in like Asian-American spaces is something I've consciously worked on, especially as an adult, because for a long period in my life, I felt very apprehensive about going in those spaces, because I felt like I wasn't Asian enough to participate.
Anita Rao
I love how Andrew talks about embracing the complexity of it all. From what it means to be Asian enough to finding joy in his love affair with sauerkraut. If it's not evident already, Andrew is a deep critical thinker and has no shortage of insight and how his personal story fits into the bigger geopolitical history of Korean adoptees in the US.
Andrew Lee
My dad was adopted into a white family after the Korean War, where the US was one of the major combatants despite being on the other side of the world. And in the wake of the war, there were so many mixed-race orphans, like my dad, who were the product of survival sex or sexual assault between Korean women and US or UN soldiers. Now the Korean War was a devastating war, there were huge civilian casualties that were atrocities. Much of the peninsula was entirely deforested by the use of napalm by American forces. So in the aftermath of the war, there was a huge domestic PR campaign in the United States telling American families that adopting these war orphans was their patriotic duty. And this was really a way for the US to claim the moral high ground after what was a really catastrophic conflict for all sides involved, but most especially people on the Korean peninsula, including the mothers of these orphans like my father. So that was my dad's generation. That was how Korean adoption started. It was almost exclusively mixed-race war orphans. I'm fully ethnically Korean. I was adopted in the early 1990s. And what we've seen is that adoption from Korea didn't stop with my father's generation. It In fact accelerated.
Anita Rao
How we got to where we are today in Asian international adoption is a case study in how US intervention abroad creates seismic shifts that show up in everything from immigration patterns and economic relationships to the makeup of our families and communities. Geopolitics shapes transracial adoption. But Andrew says how we see these adoptions here in the U.S. lacks a whole lot of nuance.
Andrew Lee
I think there's an implicit narrative for a lot of transracial adoptions, that our birth countries and our birth families were too irresponsible or too poor to take care of us. So the United States and our adoptive families are put in the position of being benevolent, charitable humanitarians. I think critiquing this doesn't mean to say that I wish that I weren't adopted — that I would rather be in an orphanage in South Korea right now. It doesn't mean any of those things. But what that narrative does, is it puts transracial adoptees and internationally adopted people in the position of being eternally indebted. Eternally indebted to the country we're told is our home. Eternally indebted perhaps to the families that were a part of.
Anita Rao
Adoption across international lines, like what Shruti and Andrew's dad experienced became more common in the late 20th century for all the reasons we talked about. But also because domestic transracial adoption had gotten controversial. And for good reason. Domestic adoption policy in the US, like almost everything else, has been shaped by systemic racism. The 1958 Indian Adoption Project historically broke up indigenous families and placed close to 400 Native children with white families. A rise in the transracial adoption of orphaned African American children led to the National Association of Black Social Workers calling transracial adoption a form of race and cultural genocide in 1972. Non-white kids are still overrepresented in the foster care system today for a whole host of reasons. If and when they get adopted by a family of a different race, I hope they come across Rebekah Hutson’s blog.
Rebekah Hutson
For me, it's very frustrating to see the focus in adoption just overall it's always towards the adoptive parent. And the adoptee and even the birth family kind of get left in the dust. But for me, it's really important for the adoptees to kind of be put at the forefront because number one, we are the only person in the entire situation that have absolutely no choice. We have no rights. We have no choice. Nobody's coming to us and asking us: Hey, are you okay with being taken from this family and placed in this family with these random people?" We don't get that decision, right.
Anita Rao
Rebekah is a writer, activist and consultant who was adopted at birth from Texas and raised in Washington state about an hour outside of Seattle. She grew up in a small, mostly white community. Her blog, "Only Black Girl" is full of hot takes about the adoption industry and her own adoption story.
Rebekah Hutson
And when I was growing up, I was quite literally the only Black person in the community. So, yeah. And my family, we have two other people in my immediate family that are adopted. And then in my larger, extended family, there's about 14 of us. So adoption is really normal in my family. So questions about adoption were addressed well, like I remember having a conversation, because it didn't take me very long to realize I was the only Black person in the family. I remember going to my parents and asking why I was the only one that looks different. And they explained to me the whole adoption process. They explained to me the situation with my birth mother, and they explained to me I was adopted, and it was very open and welcoming. And the conversation was always there if I wanted to have it. But when it came to conversations about race in particular, that kind of got shut down. And I think it was mostly because they didn't know how to handle those questions. But I remember experiencing racism at a very young age, like, I would say, five or six, and I didn't know how to handle those things. So I wouldn't ask my parents about it. And it was a lot of just kind of brushing it under the table, just kind of like: Oh, don't worry about it. Oh, it's from a different time. Then it was confusing to me. Because it was things that would continue to happen. It was experiences I was always having. But every time I would talk to my family about it, it would kind of be dismissed. So it was like: Am I going crazy?
Anita Rao
Yeah.
Rebekah Hutson
It was like invalidating of your experience, so I didn't really know how to handle what was going on.
Anita Rao
Well, it's interesting, too, because you talk a lot you, your blog and your YouTube channel are named after what you just said: Only Black GIrl. The experience of being the only Black woman in a lot of spaces. And so I mean, did you feel like even though you didn't have a lot of other folks, or you really had no one around you that was representing Black culture or Black experiences. How did you kind of begin to get in touch with your blackness? Did you identify as Black as a young kid? Or did that happen for you later?
Rebekah Hutson
It didn't happen till later. Like it wasn't even a thing that was on my mind. Like it didn't even cross my mind that race was something I needed to identify with. I just always knew that I was the one that was being treated differently. When I walked outside my family, like when we went to church, or school events, or you know, anything like that. There was, I was different. And everybody could see I was different. So it really wasn't until college, honestly, that I started to be around other people of color. And obviously had my experiences validated, like the first time I ever had my experiences as a Black person validated when I went to community college. And they on campus had like a diversity center. And that was the first time that I felt like: People are like allowing me to tell my story and listen to me and not invalidate. And I was like: Oh, I'm not going crazy. Like I'm not the only person that deals with these kind of experiences.
Anita Rao
Like Rebekah said, there was an unspoken ease that set in when she found herself spending more time among her people. Being in community with those who share your racial or cultural identity can be comfortable and healing in ways that's hard to explain. For a lot of us, family is that community when we're kids. Our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins are our first teachers. Showing us the ropes and helping us navigate new situations. But when your parents can't do that, where do you turn? It's hard. After Sruthi sat down to talk with me about her experience. We were curious to hear more about how her parents were thinking about all of this. She sat down recently with her father Uttam and her mother Joyce.
Shruti Shah
You guys are arguably experts in raising an adopted kid. So can you tell me a little bit more about, you know, what advice you would give to somebody who is adopting a child of a different race or culture? And also, what do you wish you had known then that you know now?
Joyce
I think the issues of dealing with adoption and race need to be dealt with early on and not ignored or glossed over. We certainly did talk to you, Shruti quite a bit about adoption and what that meant and, you know, did our best to be reassuring about questions you had. However, I don't think we dealt with the issues of race enough. And given that I was white, and you were from India, and clearly we looked different. Kids — probably in class without our knowing about it — may have questioned that. And also may have, the environment that we were in was very much — the school you went to was kind of a white environment. It was academically a very good school, but not a very good school from the point of view of diversity. Which I think would have been helpful. But you became very resilient Shruti. And you are a very resilient and strong person. And I don't know if that contributed, but you are pretty great.
Shruti Shah
Thanks, mom. Dad, was there something you wanted to add?
Uttam
Yeah, no, the only thing is, in our case, and this may not apply to other situations, but my parents, being here, spending a lot of time and all that, if we had exposed to you more of the Indian culture and maybe languages, you know, Gujarati or Hindi, a little bit more and taught you more about that, you would have had exposure to both. And then you would have had the chance to choose. I would think that exposing those children to their birth culture, birth, birth, religion, whatever, and even visiting those countries. Not just when they're two years old, but you know, when they start questioning: Why was I adopted or something. Tell them the whole story. And let them see what they want to do with it.
Shruti Shah
Yeah. It's complex. It's a complex thing.
Uttam
Yes.
Joyce
Yes. It's a great responsibility. And it is complex. But we're so thrilled to have had this experience with you.
Shruti Shah
Thanks, parents.
Joyce
Thanks, daughter.
Anita Rao
I love it. I love it. And I love the Embodied ripple effect. That's not a term I've ever used before now, but it feels right. The idea that asking people to sit down with me and talk through questions about their identities, bodies and health can open up more space for more conversation and deeper connections with themselves and their own parents. And it's not just Shruti's parents who are putting in the work. Rebekah said that she's noticed more and more public conversation about race in the transracial adoption space.
Rebekah Hutson
From what I've seen, it seems like it's starting to get a little bit better, that we're able to have a conversation with people like myself who are talking openly about their experiences. And I think there's starting to become a little bit more of an understanding that it's not enough to just adopt, right. And we call that white saviorism — this idea that like, I'm going to go take this brown child, and we're going to save it. And I'm going to be the ultimate white ally, because I adopted this brown kid, and my job is done, right? Wipe my hands of racism. I did what I needed to do. And that's just not the case at all. Like you can still be extremely racist and adopt children of color. Like, slave owners had children with their slaves. Like, that doesn't mean anything.
So I would say, I think the conversation is shifting, but we're not there yet. Like, even close to it. For me, the biggest thing is not even necessarily individual parents. The biggest issue to me is the industry. There is not really any standard curriculum or support or anything for transracial adoption. Like when I asked my mom, if they even like gave her any resources or anything she said all that gave her was like a piece of paper that said, basically like: Will you love your child, regardless of color, gender or anything like that. And you just had to say yes. And that was it. And then it was like: Okay, here's this Black child for you and have fun. And that's just not enough resources. And for me, the biggest thing I think, is a lot of white people have white privilege, right? So they don't have to think about race. And so when they're confronted with these questions from us about race, they will not understand. It's not something that they've ever had to confront, so they don't know how to deal with it either. So I think we need to go all the way back to the industry providing those resources and teaching classes and making sure that parents have the support and the resources that they need to answer those questions because they don't know how to do that either.
Anita Rao
It all comes back to the fact that we've got to do the work, all of us. Making sense of the many ways we build community in this country means understanding where capitalism and white supremacy, peek behind the curtain of everyone's family photo.
Andrew Lee
I think adoption is a really confusing experience. I think we don't have a lot of frameworks to make sense of it for ourselves. And we're left with what other people give us. I think one of the big insights of feminist movements in the latter half of the 20th century was saying: Just because it's a family, just because it's love, just because it's care, doesn't mean that it isn't power. And doesn't mean that it isn't politics. And I think that's the way I look at adoption, Like me being in the United States is a political thing. My dad being in the United States is a political thing. Every adoption of a child of color by a white family is happening in the context of white supremacy and American capitalism. And I think, you know, in a weird way, having that perspective, I think allows me to have a more nuanced understanding of my own experience.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. My thanks to Kaia Findlay, Amanda Magnus and Charlie Shelton-Ormond for producing this episode. Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer and Lindsay Foster-Thomas is WUNC's director of content. Our theme music is by Quilla.
Thanks also to Weaver Street Market, a worker and consumer owned cooperative selling organic and local food at four triangle locations in North Carolina. Now featuring online shopping with next day pickup: weaverstreetmarket.coop. I'm Anita Rao on an exploration of our brains, our bodies and taking on the taboo with you.