“I wish you guys had brown skin.”
As you told me this, we cuddled on the living room couch, the teak couch with the green-and-white-striped cushions. You were probably three or four years old. It pleased me that you didn’t wish to be white, that you claimed your brownness and wanted to share it.
“Me too,” I told you. “Brown skin is beautiful.”
What I meant to say, what I should have said, was that I understood your growing awareness of the differences in skin color among us, your family, and between you and your friends at preschool and church. And I understood your growing awareness that this matters to people, somehow. The double takes. The assumptions. The questions. How much did you overhear of my conversations at the preschool playgroup? The lady who asked if my husband was Asian?
It’s not like I hadn’t noticed it. You wandered away from us when we went to Best Buy for a new camera. The salesclerk steered you toward a family that had left the store, an Indian family bedecked in saris. Your skin color matched theirs, sure. While an understandable mistake, it left me angry and uneasy. The family didn’t even know you were on their tail—I found you in the vestibule between the two sliding glass doors, grabbed your hand before you fully left the store and followed them to their car.
I probably should have, could have responded differently, too, when you had a crush on a brown-skinned girl in kindergarten.
“Can a brown-skinned person marry another person with brown skin?” you asked. I said yes, you could marry whomever you wanted, no matter their skin color.
It didn’t occur to me that you were trying to understand how families come together since you’re brown and we’re white. An odd puzzle for you to solve.
Remember that kindergarten exercise? A worksheet with different shapes, the question: Which of these is not like the others? Society trains us to find the aberration, the unusual. And all those matching games, people with eyeglasses, hats, and mustaches being paired with their identical eyeglassed, hatted, and mustached playing cards. We win when we spy differences. And when we make a match.
You’ve lived the differences that my eyes overlook. In every family photo, every Christmas card, every family gathering from weddings to funerals to trips to Finland, your brown skin stands out. You see it. Others see it.
It would be easy for me to tell you that I don’t see it. To me, you are my son. When I look at you, I see and feel love. I don’t see color. But is that my white privilege speaking? I’m only starting to see how society treats you differently, how you’re judged, treated like the odd man out.
I could tell you I’ve been the only white person in a sea of Asians, mistaken for another Caucasian, one that stiffed her rickshaw driver.
“There she is!” the Chinese official pointed at me. But I had paid my rickshaw driver. It took a while to sort this out and find the White woman who owed her driver some money. Turns out she was eating at the restaurant next door to my hotel.
I could tell you that at a family dinner at the home of my Black boyfriend, I felt like a light bulb, brightly lit, blinding. It’s not the same, I know. The few times I felt “other,” I could go home where I felt a sense of belonging simply because everyone matched my skin color.
How often do you feel “other”? Do you feel you belong at home, here?
We tried to normalize your experience by attending gatherings within the adoption community. We spent time with families that looked like ours: Caucasian parents with brown-skinned children. Our local adoption group, “Thais That Bind,” disbanded when most families moved to other areas. We attended a Kids’ Adoption Network Conference. The opening remarks brought tears to my eyes, especially when the facilitator asked anyone in the room who was adopted to stand up. And look at you! And all the other kids like you! Who didn’t look at all like their parents! On our drive home, you asked if we could attend the conference every year. But by the following year, you shrugged when I brought it up.
We flew to Bangkok for a gathering of Thai adoptees from around the world. I thought you might feel a sense of inclusion, but you seemed overwhelmed. To be fair, in many you’re you were seeing your homeland for the first time, beyond the boundaries of the orphanage. The heat and noise overpowered all of us. You presented the gift from the United States to the Princess of Thailand, all decked out in chino pants, shirt, and tie; rode an elephant through the humid jungle; and experienced once again the bright sights, pungent smells, and clamoring sounds of your ancestral land.
When we returned home and updated our refrigerator list of travel destinations, you told me to add Thailand again.
“Oh,” I said, “you want to go back?”
“Yeah,” you replied, “but not with you guys.”
I wish someone had told me how life would be different for you. In third grade, Mr. Kidder kept emailing me to say you were disruptive in morning circle. You kept denying it. Could he not manage the class, or could you not sit still? I didn’t know.
Six years later, you almost flunked ninth-grade algebra and Spanish. After psychoeducational testing, we learned that you had ADHD. In ninth grade! After you’d already lived through years of hating school. Not just disliking it, being bored. But hating it.
As I read more about ADHD diagnoses and their prevalence, I learned that teachers often refer white kids who act out in class for testing and discipline brown kids. Mr. Klein followed the norm. When I shared my new-found wisdom with a Black colleague, he didn’t roll his eyes or laugh at me. He already knew this and so much more. I was only at the tip of the iceberg.
In addition to not liking school, you didn’t like therapy, even though the ADHD testing also revealed clinical depression. I moved you from one therapist to another, wanting you to be seen by someone with experience in adoption. But she was white, and the former counselor had brown skin, so maybe I should have, could have, just let it be. You told me that the white counselor shared the concept of being an “Oreo”—when you know you’re brown on the outside but, because of how you were raised, feel white on the inside.
We hit the jackpot when we took you to an Asian psychiatrist for your ADHD and depression meds. She knew that Asian kids responded better to Zoloft. And for you, it proved true. An immediate change. The depression lifted. But it didn’t change your circumstances or the color of your skin.
Remember your uneasiness at Allie and Nick’s wedding celebration? I saw it so clearly, your discomfort among a sea of white faces. When I asked about it, you said, “I feel like everyone’s staring at me, thinking, ‘What’s that guy doing here?’”
I wished I could’ve found a way to fix it. If only I knew how.
So often during your school years, I felt rejected when you said “no” to spending time with Dad and me, especially after your brother Ryan left for college. You didn’t want us to take homecoming pics of you and your friends, so I got photos from other parents. You didn’t want to go out for dinner together, although takeout was okay. You didn’t want to go with us to visit Ryan at college, even though I was uncomfortable about leaving you home alone.
I asked you why. Why did you always answer “no”? Did you reject our invitations because we don’t look like a family? You said, “No, I just don’t want to go and do those things.”
But I wonder. Which came first? The feeling “other” or the not “wanting” to? Are they inextricably linked, outings with us tied with a subconscious need to guard against others’ eyes?
Does that explain your obsession with hats? You switched from beanies to baseball caps, and now wear cowboy hats. Does this allow you to hide, even for a moment, the color of your hair, your skin, your eyes?
I enjoyed our dinner table chats the summer you worked at Dad’s junk removal business. You had funny stories about removing heavy items—such as atlas balls! Used by weightlifters! —from clients’ homes. As if you could lift a 100-pound concrete sphere, you said. And you’d share the comments you’d hear about Dad as the boss.
“They really like you, Dad,” you reported. “Kevin says you’re the best boss he’s ever had.”
It didn’t seem that anyone questioned your role—your brownness against Dad’s whiteness. But everyone kept mistaking you and the other Asian man, who also wore eyeglasses. “I’m not Harrison,” you’d have to explain, time and again. You didn’t hold it against anyone, said you understood. After all, everyone dressed the same, in uniform: royal blue polo shirts and caps. You and Harrison both had black hair and eyeglasses. How could anyone tell you apart?
I’m sorry I’m white and you’re brown, Jesada. I’m sorry I never acknowledged the difficulties you would face, difficulties we unwittingly set you up for.
A few weeks ago, you shared about going into your local Jimmy John’s and chatting with the guy who works there. He asked where you were from, and I expected you’d say, “Northern Virginia” or “Reston.” But you said “Thailand.”
When I’m asked where I’m from, it’s a geographic question; when you’re asked, it’s an ethnic identity question. You knew what he was asking. I didn’t.
It was fun seeing you last month when we came to Richmond for your birthday, going skeet shooting together. By and large, we were lousy shots, but we had fun.
When we went to pay for the gun rentals, the ammo, and the targets, the lady asked, “Is this separate or together?”
A sign of your age, I guess. When you were younger, when you were shorter than me, when I was holding your hand, no one would ask a question like that. They could look past our differences and know that I was your mom. But now that you’re an adult, no one automatically puts us together, two adults of two different colors.
Since you turned twenty-one this year, you and Ryan hit the college bars that evening. Only a few days later did I hear about your night out.
“I liked your friends, Jess,” Ryan said during our family group call. You both explained the double-take they did when told that big, tall, white, blue-eyed blonde Ryan was the older brother to you, slim, medium height, brown-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed Jess.
“Really? You’re brothers?”
A few of your friends were quicker to get it: “Okay, which of you is adopted?”
Our phone conversation that night also turned to family planning—Ryan shared his recent discussion with his girlfriend about getting married and having kids.
I wanted to ask you but didn’t. It’s too early for you, I know. You’re still in college, after all. Five years younger than Ryan.
But I’ll ask you now: Do you want kids? Do you want to create a family that looks like you? Will you then feel a sense of belonging? Will you feel at home?
***
Our friends at Corporeal Writing are reinventing the writing workshop one body at a time.
Check out their current online labs, and tell them we sent you!
***
