I don't know what to even title this post....

Recently I was participating in group messaging conversation with adoptees from other asian countries. Though most of us in the group are Korean-American adoptees, some are Chinese adoptees living in European countries and in America as well. Something that came up in conversation was how majority of us hadn't really ever eaten our heritage foods until we were older. And then I had an epiphany....


For majority of us who are adopted, we aren't adopted into families that raise us based on our heritage. For example, my family, I love them to death, I wasn't raised by Korean standards in any way. Our favorite restaurant was a chinese restaurant and we still go to the place to eat food. There was a korean language school that my mom enrolled me in, however I didn't stay there past a year. I didn't want anything to do with it because it made me different.

As adoptees we already have it in our mind that we are different from the others around us.So when we're younger we don't really want to stand out more....maybe it's part of our mindset that to fit in better, we can't cater and learn more about our heritage because we don't want to be more "different." What if that's why so many of us Korean-American adoptees say we're "white-washed" because we didn't grow up learning about Korea, eating korean food, or learning the language. Once we began our lives in America, majority of us followed the way our adoptive families lived. We ate mcdonald's, we ordered pizza on the regular, we grew up on mac-and-cheese, and hotdogs. Our lives and eating habits were all but what it would have been had we been raised in Korea.

I don't know if my epiphany is something others have experienced as well, but to me it makes sense. When we grow up we don't want to be any more different than the way we already are, and it isn't until we're older when we become more self-aware and having our self-discovery that we realized that we're missing a part of ourselves. I can say that for the first 18 almost 19 years of my life, I didn't want to really have anything in common with Korea or korean things, but once I began to have an interest and began learning more about Korea, I realized I had ignored such a big part of my life for such a long time and for the first time in a long time, I felt at peace. I didn't feel like I had to fight myself to be someone I wasn't; which was such a big battle for me for so many years.