Otherness and family
A friend posted this picture of me on Facebook. It was taken at her wedding about a year ago. I cannot remember the exact moment, and I certainly had no idea anyone was memorializing it, but there I am, seemingly having a grand old time. It got me thinking about how I move through life. I am often hyper-aware of people watching me, and how I might look to them. But sometimes I let my guard down, and if a photographer happens to be on hand this is the kind of picture that might result.
As a woman, I try to keep my wits about me, particularly walking through the city, and especially walking through my neighborhood. It’s not that I assume the worst will happen, but I am keenly aware that it could. My husband doesn’t fully understand how greatly my gender affects how one moves through life. Being small and Asian only heightens my sense of otherness.
Being an adoptee also contributes to feelings of otherness. I think I sometimes have a tough time understanding and bonding over family because my experience is different than “normal” people. I acknowledge that family is built on more than blood. I believe that we adopt our friends and make them cherished parts of our larger families out of love. I appreciate that adoption can be a wonderful testament to the power and strength of human compassion and a nurturing instinct. But I cannot ignore that not knowing where I come from nags at me. Maybe if I ever have kids of my own the pride and fierce defense of blood will make sense. While I recognize the need to connect and the importance of the family structure and legacy and a common story, the whole concept of connecting with what are essentially random strangers because of the tenuous tie of marriage seems bizarre.
I one wrote in a college essay that I am the whitest Asian I know. I still sometimes have a miniature crisis of identity when I envision myself a certain way and see a discordant reality in the mirror. Moving through life thinking like a white person but looking 100% Korean has its pluses and minuses. I can pretend I don’t speak English, or I can speak perfect English and catch people off guard who are stewing in their biases. But I am an outsider in the Korean community because I don’t speak the language. And my genes do not resemble those of the many branches of the family tree my parents are currently tracing with such ardor. I wonder if I will someday feel connected to family simply because, regardless of whether by marriage, birth or choice, they are family.
Hmmm. I didn’t know that your parents are tracing their family tree, which is an activity that I find kind of bizarre, given how my family is.
I think my family’s knowledge of its past only extends two generations prior. I don’t know much about my great-grandparents, though my mother’s generation knew them (and in fact her great-grandparents). When I asked my grandparents when our family came to Taiwan, they scratched their heads, said they weren’t sure, but certainly it was before 1900.
Blood is a little bizarre. My particular family (in different ways) thinks of blood and stranger-commitment very strongly. I was taught never to give up on someone who was related to me. And at least on my mother’s side, marriage is treated exactly as blood is. My uncles by marriage are treated basically like family – by everyone. Just typing out “uncles by marriage” feels really weird.
I can’t say that I’ve had the same kinds of questions about my origin or identity — well, now, anyway. But I do have questions about where or how I fit. Sometimes they catch up to me when I read something like this post — but I like it when I outrun them. When I do, I imagine I look like you in that picture, which is an absolutely beautiful one.
They got into the genealogy stuff a while ago, and it’s a nifty little hobby that they can bond over. Some of the things they’ve found are pretty neat. Records from boat trips across the Atlantic. Census records. Old names. TB outbreaks. New branches they didn’t know were there. I’m merely peripherally interested at this point perhaps because of my relative youth, and probably also because of the blood/adoption thing. Though I recently learned the difference between 1st cousin, 1st cousin once removed, and 2nd cousin, so that’s a bonus. Having just finished season 2 of Dexter in which he does a lot of searching about who he is, I’m even more curious about how knowing “where I come from” will make me feel and how it might affect my sense of identity. A trip to Korea is probably in the cards at some point, but I’m still not ready yet.
Interesting about your family’s history, or rather the lack of knowledge about it. There seem to be roughly three camps: the DAR/clan/legacy people; the love-the-people-you’re-with-I-determine-who-I-am-not-my-relatives people; and oppressed/displaced/forcibly separated people like Jews, slaves, and refugees. I guess we all need family of some sort, whether we define it as bonds of blood and marriage or simply those we embrace because of influence or proximity. It’s just so confusing sometimes.
You are a treasure to our family precisely because when you let yourself go, your joy and laughter fill our hearts.
I’ve been talking to my mother about family stories, trying to get started on picture albums, which may or may not happen. I’m using a set of ’set grandmother questions’ from a book to spark our talks. One questions was ‘what did you want to be when you grew up?” Now, I’ve always assumed I come from a long line of dedicated teachers. Turns out, my mother wanted to be a private secretary, working for a rich man or company that would allow her to travel and wear neat clothes. She ended up a teacher quite by accident. The year after she graduated from high school, her sister who was teaching at a small country school (15 students, all ages) got married and then quickly got pregnant. (This is IOWA after all. Fertility capital of the country) So my mother went to the court house and took the state teacher’s exam. She passed! So she took her sister’s place as the teacher with NO TRAINING and not really any interest in the work!
The point being that I used her life as sort of a template for mine–teaching would be an honorable profession in my family. I chose that when research physics became impossible because I couldn’t do the math. And that template was all in MY HEAD, not my mother’s! so I could have chosen to be an author, or editor, or social worker!
You don’t have those templates from family history. That’s both a blessing and a curse. I once talked to a family therapist at a conference. I told him about how we had raised our kids with people of color and other nationalities from all over the world. He said it was the most post-modern family he’d ever heard about and that our kids would be both confused on the one hand about family dynamics and ‘child’s position in family’ and more open to the new world of immigration, integration, and loose relational networks than most children.
Kathleen Norris (Yes, I’m still reading HER) says that being in relationship is a commitment and choice that shapes us into being human.
Hugs from a woman who is delighted to be able to call you a relative by marriage! Julia
What a neat story about your mother. Funny how we interpret and assume things about our parents. You can still do those other things. And now you have a good back story!
I like Norris’s idea. That makes sense that the personal relationships we nurture make us human. Evidenced by even the smallest interaction with a sales clerk that you smile at, a homeless person you look in the eye, or probably any interview with a non-psychopathic criminal. If you shake someone’s hand, they are more human. If you acknowledge someone, they are more human. All amplified exponentially when you get to know someone well, live with them, call them friend or family. But we shield ourselves from seeing, and we hide from being seen because it’s scary, but it probably makes us all a little less human. Here it’s practically taboo to look someone in the eye on the sidewalk or train. Perhaps less so in the south or mid-west, where hospitality is so famous. I remember talking with someone who relocated after Katrina, and she said people in NoVA were so different. They kept to themselves, they didn’t hang out on the front stoop. They never said hello or smiled or waved. Not very neighborly, but safe.