“I am tired of looking different. Even when people aren’t making fun of me, they are always asking me to tell them all about myself and how I got here.” - “Sometimes I lie awake at night and cry because I miss my birth mother… the funny thing about that is I don’t even remember her.” - “I love my parents and I have the best family. Sometimes I just don’t know how to tell them that it does matter that I don’t look like them.” - “You know, I am not sure what it means to me to be Chinese… what I do know is that I don’t like Chinese food, and I would much rather play basketball than take language classes right now.”

International adoptees have unique and complex issues to wrestle with. For some the struggle is intense; still others only rarely think about being adopted or wonder about their birth parents or birth country. In response to these struggles, adoptees often are described by both themselves and others as spending their lives at a crossroads where they have to decide for themselves, “Am I Chinese or American?” while having experiences along the way that serve to convince them that they do not, for whatever reason, fully belong in either their birth culture or their adoptive culture.

Recent research has pointed to the adoptee struggle with the dichotomous nature of their choices for identity and has proposed a new way of thinking about this conundrum. When posed the question “Where do I belong,” the answer for international adoptees has long been “nowhere” or “I don’t know.” The adoptee might think, “I do not fully belong in either location, neither here nor there.” The new model of adoptee identity suggests, rather, that there is a “space” in between one’s adoptive country and one’s birth country. This space encompasses the answer, “You are neither and both at the same time. You are an international adoptee, and that holds a cultural status that is unique and distinct.” This is a space where diversity is the norm and no two families are alike in their makeup. What brings these people together and causes them to have a culture of their own is their status as international adoptees. [1] The concept of international adoptees having a cultural space that is unique only to themselves is where a group like CCAI’s Xpress Yourself finds its power to support the identity development of its participants. The idea is that when an adoptee finds other members of this unique culture, they find belonging in the “space in between.”

Xpress Yourself is an effort to create and offer adoptees access to their unique culture and develop their unique identity. They find themselves in a place where their story is not so different, their looks are not so different, and they do not feel automatically singled out. They learn that their experiences with the struggles of international adoption are normal rather than the exception. They realize they do not always have to tell their story because it is shared by everyone around them. They have felt what it is like to look different from their parents, they know what it feels like to experience racism in all its different forms, and then, together, they know what it is like to feel at home in your own skin.

Not only is Xpress Yourself built on the idea of creating and facilitating adoptee connection, it is also built on the idea that all of this can be a lot of FUN! The best way for kids to connect with others and learn about themselves is to play. These groups are full of time together playing games, creating art projects, using drama, eating food, sharing giggles, telling stories, and most of all building friendships. Projects are designed to be fun and creative ways to explore the participants’ feelings about being adopted, share those feelings with others who really “get it,” and learn to be comfortable being oneself. Kids learn that they can choose to be both Chinese and American. They can choose not to learn the language from their country of origin and still value its culture as a part of who they are.

In addition, kids often begin to see being an International Adoptee as a privilege. They can decide, like every one else, which parts of their history are important to their identity – they just happen to have more to choose from. In this way, they have a uniqueness that makes them privileged. Not only that, they learn their choices always stand open and their identity is not static in nature. An adoptee may not have any interest in returning to their country of origin when they are a child, and that, too, is okay. They may also develop an interest in a trip back when they are in their teens, twenties, fifties, or even seventies, or they may not ever choose to go back. They learn that they can choose to be proud of who and what they are, an international adoptee. What is recognized and facilitated is that adoptees are all individuals and who deserve to be loved and encouraged to form an identity that truly belongs to them, as well as to see that they stand in a place of privilege, not poverty, amongst many others who, in all of their diversity, are just like them.

Some might argue that adoptees are damaged because of loss and that by helping them connect with their birth culture as much as possible we are overcoming that. Others might argue that we should minimize their adoptive status and raise them as any other “American” child. Both of these are, in my view, extreme positions. We should encourage adoptees to learn about their birth culture, but not force them or believe that connecting to that culture will overcome the loss associated with adoption. Nor should we fail to recognize the challenges and uniqueness that comes with being internationally adopted and suggest they are “just American.”

It is true that adoptees do have a number of unique struggles, but they also have a number of unique opportunities. Every individual must go through the process of developing an identity and sense of self that belongs to them alone. As a child becomes an adult, they look at the world around them, at their parents and grandparents, at their community and friends, at their experiences both positive and negative, and they decide which of those things to take on as a part of themselves and which to leave behind. This is the nature of identity development. Adoptees hold a place of privilege in this respect because they have so much more to choose from, and Xpress Yourself groups are designed to help kids live from this place of strength, community, and connection. When they finish their six weeks of group, the all-too-familiar comments mentioned above are joined by sentiments like these:

“I can be myself here.” - “This has really helped me feel less alone.” - “I don’t feel so crazy anymore for feeling mixed up sometimes.” - “I know I can love my parents and still love my biological mom and that’s ok.” - “I understand myself a lot better now and that makes it a lot easier to try to explain to my parents how I am feeling. I want them to know, you know.” - “Being different isn’t really all that bad. I am proud of being me!”

(Please note that the italicized portions of this article do not contain direct quotes from Xpress Yourself participants due to the nature of confidentiality maintained within the groups. They are, however, representative of the sentiments expressed by adoptees throughout the group process.)

[1] The idea of Adoptee Culture originated from a study by Robert L. Ballard entitled, Identity Formation in Vietnamese Adoptees of Operation Babylift: An Exploratory Study in Intercultural Communication (2006), which was presented at the 2006 Western States Communication Association conference in Palm Springs, California.