261 Lanise Antoine Shelley

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/261

---

Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is actor, director, playwright, and podcaster, Lanise Antoine Shelley. Lanise shares about being adopted from a Haitian orphanage at age four by her single white adoptive mother, and how exploring the impact of adoption over the last three years has challenged her connections with her adoptive family.

Lanise also tells us about when she realized that her removal from Haiti left a huge hole for her entire biological family that was left behind, including her mother and father. I also want to mention that in today's episode, we discuss a suicide attempt. Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Lanise Antoine Shelley. Welcome Lanise.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Thanks for having me, Haley.

Haley Radke: I love talking to a fellow podcaster. It's one of my favorite things, I got to admit, but I'd love it if you would start. Would you mind sharing a little bit of your story with us?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Well, in regards to my podcast, I started my podcast as a panel series in 2020, when the global racial unrest just erupted with George Floyd and a lot of us BIPOC adoptees didn't really have a support system when it came to our families because many of these families are white.

And so I launched a panel series that focused on identity, race, family and these kinds of conversations and how to have these kinds of very complex, challenging conversations with those that are in our inner circle and that just flew, it took off. We, I guess you could say we went viral because we had over 12, 000 views and people were engaging from all over the world.

But I knew that I couldn't sustain it, just corralling and wrangling a bunch of adoptees from around the world for a panel was just a lot. But I knew that I could have one on one conversations, so it evolved naturally to a podcast. That I've called when they were young, amplifying voices of adoptees, and that has been going strong for three years now.

And I've started off with conversations with adoptive parents and adoptees in season 1 and in season 2, going deeper into the mental health of adoptees and in season 3, really pulling apart what it feels like to engage with adoptees, our spouses, our families, and figuring out how we can move in a world that feels more healed and whole and grounded in these relationships.

So each season has a very strong theme, and we'll see what happens next, but that's the podcast in a nutshell.

Haley Radke: And your adoptee experience?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Yes, that little story. I was adopted from Port au Prince, Haiti when I was four. And I was actually one of, one of two little girls who were adopted, and we were the first to be adopted in that orphanage ever. And they had just started exploring what it would be like to have international adoptions happen. They'd been engaging in mission missionaries and for a long while. And so this was what they thought a natural evolution. And I left Haiti when I was four and grew up in Northern California with a single white female mother. And that's basically it.

Haley Radke: So one of your first podcast episodes very early on, you interview your mother and godmother and you talk about that experience with her and she shares her process of adopting. And while I was listening to that I got very activated and it's not my story. It's your story. I'm curious how you heard her share that story then, and what you think about when you think about that conversation today. Because I think that your views on adoption have evolved over the last few years, and you've shared about that in a few different solo episodes on your show. But I'd love to hear about, from your point of view that sort of evolution.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Oh, it's definitely been an evolution because when we recorded that, I thought that I was out of the fog and I thought I understood what that meant because I felt connected to my adoptive mother. I felt connected to my story, and I could recount my story easily without being activated. So I believed that in itself was being out of the fog, but that was not it.

I had no idea that over the next three years, I would have a deeper, more profound understanding of what the miasma of revelatory insights about my adoption would be. And at present, I have a very estranged relationship with my mother, and that's because of the work that I have been doing on anti racism, the work that I have been doing on myself for healing, the wounds that I didn't even know existed.

So many of us adoptees are playing catch up. And that's how I feel, because there were a lot of missteps that I didn't quite notice from my caregivers growing up. Because I thought it was normal. Because I didn't have a voice. Because I wasn't connected with a strong lexicon of emotions to draw from and so I thought it was okay to be treated a certain way and as I started to dig deeper and unpack, I realized that there were a lot of missteps that could have been avoided had my mom been more educated. Had she been just slightly more willing to be curious and ask more questions. As opposed to feel that everything was okay because she quote unquote loved me. And so I'm learning through this work that story of estrangement is actually quite prevalent in the adoption community, right?

When you come out of the fog and realizing that certain things that happened when you were younger were not okay. And coming to grips with that trauma, it's interesting because I had no idea that adoption was traumatic or had the capital T trauma labeled intrinsically inside of it until these past two, three years, because I was told that it was all good.

Everything about adoption was good. It was for the betterment of me. And that's not, that's not so. And as I speak to other adoptees, as I do my own work, I understand the underbelly, the darkness, the sordid history behind adoption. And in wanting those conversations, sometimes people aren't ready to have those conversations.

Sometimes they're not ready for accountability. Sometimes they're not ready to come to grips with the fact that they did not protect you. And I know I'm being vague right now. One of the things that, that I encourage adoptive parents to focus on that I've learned that is imperative, as opposed to focusing on "I'm going to love and save this child," I really want people to pivot from that way of thinking to "are you going to protect and guard this child"? Because love will be inherent in that.

But there is this sense of saviorism that is attached to love, the sense of indebtedness. I'm sure you've heard many adoptees talk about that. But I encourage adoptive parents and my adoptive mother- who did not protect me in a variety of ways and even as an adult, I have identified ways in which she fell short of that guardianship- and understanding that there are these invisible parameters that adoptees have to negotiate and navigate all the time. And I feel strongly that adoptive parents are the ones pulling the strings and understand the parameters and understand the rules more than we do.

And so when we ask the wrong question we get stonewalled. When we try to ask for a certain level of engagement or a certain level of emotional availability, we are again met with defensiveness. And I should probably speak more for myself. But that has been my experience and in listening to other adoptees throughout the years that has been their experience as well.

Haley Radke: I also am estranged from my adoptive parents and I absolutely agree. It's so common in our community. And it's like, the more healing work we do, the more learning we have to do about the atrocities committed in family separation, we're sort of moving forward. And if they are not willing to go there and learn those same lessons, the gap just widens into a chasm. You know, it just it's it seems insurmountable sometimes unless they're willing to start getting in there and doing the work

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I think I'd made some inferences based on some of the things that you had shared in your show, that I thought that may be the case. I don't want to like just go in at your adoptive mother. I'll just say, you know, there's so much of this.

I also grew up in an evangelical church, so there's so much of the colonial mindset when you're talking about missionary work in a foreign country. And wanting to save these orphans and you had a family. You had living parents. And so can you talk a little bit about your experiencing experience going back to Haiti when you were 13?

And when did you come to understand that maybe my family actually didn't realize the implications that adoption would have? Were they hoodwinked in some way? Like, what's the, what's the story there? If you would unpack that.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Well, I grew up Presbyterian.

Haley Radke: Okay. Okay.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Yeah. So I get it in a very conservative Presbyterian household. And you're right. My family was, to some extent, hoodwinked because...in these developing countires their idea, their understanding of adoption is different from ours. And a lot of these families who either relinquish their children -or their children are abducted because that happens to- believe that when they turn 18 that they'll come back. And I did not know that was my mom's expectation until I went back when I was 27.

And I had that face to face that every adoptee dreams of with my mother. And I was just keening, you know, on my knees, like, bawling, like, why? What led you to this, to relinquishing me? Because I have three biological siblings who grew up in Haiti, who grew up with my mother and with my family and in the orphanage. So that's a whole nother ballgame. A whole nother layer of complexity because I didn't realize the depth of my absence until three years ago.

When I was looking at my little sister's Facebook page, and there were all these photos of me, like it was a shrine. And I realized in that moment that I was being mourned. I had never conceived that was a possibility. Why would someone mourn me? Who am I? I can barely receive love as it is. You know?

And to surpass love to the point of grieving for me was something I had never considered. And so, when it comes to realizing the reason behind my adoption, that didn't happen until I was 27, and when it came to me understanding the depth of the impact of my absence, that wasn't until three years ago.

Haley Radke: Did your adoptive mother know you had siblings in the orphanage?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: She did. And my older brother at the time was in the orphanage with me, but she didn't feel equipped to raise a boy. Which I give her props for, because I kind of suck my teeth a little bit when I see a single white person raising a black man because that in this environment, it's very, it's complex. You know, and understanding the gravity of that is essential.

My mom ended up adopting another little girl who was in the orphanage, and she became my sister, and she and I grew up together as sisters in California, and she and I are not close. We have a very contentious relationship, and we always have had, and it came to a head in January.

And hearkening back to what you said about the evolution of my podcast where it starts out very optimistic and somewhat naive, and then it gets real. Towards the very end in some of my solo episodes, I talk about aloneness. And the gravity of that and the idea of belonging. Brene Brown talks about how the antithesis of belonging isn't fitting in.

We, as adoptees are thought to need to fit in. Like, we need to be just like the person next to us. And in order to feel a sense of assimilation, a sense of belonging. But it's essential that fitting in is the opposite of belonging. It is when you contort yourself, when you change yourself essentially, and that's why I don't like the word transracial because trans meaning erase does not resonate with me.

I'm interracially, internationally adopted. There was nothing erased about me. It was, a lot of things have become dormant, that I had to awaken in my adulthood such as my Haitian identity, my culture, my fervor for certain foods and certain music and all of that. Those sort of things. But those existed inside of me.

And for a long time, I believed that my ancestors didn't come with me. Like I was alone, just floating in an abyss by myself. And it's so dire and dark and dreary, right? But that's how I felt, you know, and I feel that a lot of adoptees struggle with aloneness.

There is a positivity to solitude. I'm an introvert. I like solitude, but to feel perpetually alone is something different.

Haley Radke: As an actor, director, playwright, do you feel that your work has been impacted? In the last few years, as you're coming to unravel this adoptee identity, and as you say, coming out of the fog, some new lingo is coming into adoptee consciousness. How has that impacted your creative and professional work?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: I think that the work that I've been doing in my healing has definitely permeated in my artistry. I've written a play called Pretended, a take on Adopted, because for a long time I felt that, that adoption was just pretending. Like we're all just, you know, playing our roles here, right?

Like this is an assignment that was given to me. And every once in a while I'm reminded that we're acting. And we all have costumes and makeup, but this is my life. And so I wrote a play, and I am also curious about writing plays for young audiences, because I think it's imperative for us to start to educate and support young adoptees.

If I had a mentor when I was younger, I think I would have turned out slightly differently, but I didn't have a mentor. I didn't start to have mentors that would affect me in a very positive way until I went into dance. I was an African dancer, and the African dance community just swallowed me up. And that's when I started to love my skin.

And that's when I started to love Black culture and all of those things. When I was just immersed in a very Afrocentric community. And so, other than that, other than writing, it doesn't really show up in my work, but it is a constant kind of elective passion of mine that I do on the side when people ask me, oh, what are you up to?

I actually don't mention my adoption advocacy oddly enough because it just feels like my daily bread. Why would I mention that I wake up in the morning? Like, it just is.

Haley Radke: You're talking about mentoring younger adoptees, and I focus on adults, you know. I talk to adult adoptees, those are the people who I want to support. They're going through search or reunion or they don't want to talk about it, those are my people, those are my people.

And so, I see other adoptees doing some youth mentoring and those kind of things, and that's really exciting to me, too, because I think, oh what if I had that when I was young? And I'm curious about what your thoughts are, I don't know if there's a good answer for this, it's like, if the adoptive parents don't really get it, that they were complicit in some sort of, you know, family separate, whatever the circumstances, there's a part that, you know, I don't know. I'm all for, I am for family preservation. Lanise, that is my 100%.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: So am i. So am I. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay. So that's sort of where I'm coming from with this. So mentoring young adoptees to hopefully, you know, be more secure in their identity, be able to, Yeah. I don't know. Maybe you can fill in some of those gaps for me.

Like, what are some of the things that we would have needed when we were younger? How do you mesh that with like, but also keeping safe in your home where your adoptive parents still have the power and into young adulthood, you know, when some of us may still need some of the supports from them that can feel kind of dangerous.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Oh, absolutely. I know it can get precarious if the wrong person comes through. But I think that having someone that reflects your story is important. I felt that I was the only one and it was because I was. In a town, in a small town in Northern California, my sister and I just had each other, but she had her friends and I had my friends. So we really didn't bond in the way in which my mom thought we would.

And I came to find out that's actually quite true for a lot of adoptees who are adopted with other adoptees. Like the adoptive parent thinks that they're going to become besties and rarely does that happen. And so I think that finding someone that reflects their story, that supports their story, that believes their story and who can be empathetic to their point of view is a game changer.

Because I was silenced as a kid, not in the way of like verbal abuse or emotional abuse because I had a fairly serene childhood. But when things did come up, such as in middle school, I took a bunch of pills and I wanted to kill myself. That was never addressed. The why was never addressed. It was literally brushed under a rug and thought to have been, oh, just an errant teenager acting out.

As opposed to, this is an adoptee who has experienced trauma, who, my mom told me this three years ago, and I had no idea, I guess I had forgotten- there's a lot of my childhood that I blacked out.

We cried for two years when we came from Haiti. And that's huge. I had no idea. My mom now recognizes that was us grieving. But at the time, she didn't recognize it as grieving. Which is so odd to me, as it comes out of my mouth, I'm just like, why didn't she think of that?

But that's, that is the mindset of a lot of adoptive parents, right? They get so excited about this vision for their family. They extract this child from wherever, domestically or internationally, change the child's name. My name at birth was Lunise Antoine. My mom changed my name to Lanise with an A, Anne, A N E, Shelley. In high school, I reclaimed my old last name, Antoine. And that's what I go by, because I'm both. Again, hearkening back to nothing was erased.

It's something that adoptive parents do indirectly, right? They try to just, like, scrub the child's history clean off them to give them a brand new start. And that's not the truth of it. Every single child, whether it be from infancy or four years old, or nine years old, or a teenager coming with rich history.

I didn't even know English. To have somebody who spoke Creole, who could mentor me, who had somebody who could speak French, who could encourage me to keep my native language, would have been instrumental. But because we were plopped into a neighborhood where we were the token, where we were the singular oddity exoticized, we did not want to be ourselves. We wanted to fit in.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that part of your story. I see that connection as life saving to see that, to have someone that's like you. I also identify with a similar experience and it's just like we're in so much pain, but we don't know why like it's this. Yeah hidden thing because we're not talking about Oh, are you thinking about your mother?

Are you thinking about like those conversations were just not had in my experience. I I love the name for your play, Pretended. Like, my God, that's so brilliant. I love it. There, I think when I've talked to other adoptees who are also actors. I've heard a few sort of express this, like, I'm already an expert in acting.

Did you ever feel that way? Or have you looked back and thought, why was I drawn to that? Or, I don't know, do you have any ideas about your theatrical nature?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: That's funny that they say that. I was always artistically, you know, drawn. I had an affinity for dance, for visual art, for movement and expression. That was something. It meant a lot to me from an early age to express myself in that way. And then with acting, when you're doing it well, you're telling the truth. And so when you see something that's moving in a movie or a play, you cannot imagine that was written because it feels so anchored in truth, anchored in a naturalistic delivery.

And so for me, oddly enough, Ppretended feels like adoption is a game where I'm lying. I'm lying the whole time. I'm lying when I tell you I love you. I'm lying when I tell you I care. I do not care. But yet I'm assigned to care. I'm assigned to love you. And when I break down adoption, and it's just like really simple parts. When I was taken from Haiti, from my family, which you mentioned before, a lot of adoptees have families, orphans, bt definition, have lost one or more parent. The majority of adoptees have both.

And at the time of my adoption, I had both. So in this pretending in adoption that I have felt that I have been just playing into for so long, it felt that I was taken from an orphanage in Port au Prince, Haiti. I was stripped of my name. And then I was told you're not going to speak Creole anymore. You're going to love this person. You're going to call this person mom. You're going to call this person grandma and grandpa. You're going to like this food. You're going to like this environment. That's what it is.

And no one asks you if it's okay, how do you feel about it? Do you miss your mom that you remember? Because as a four year old, I was completely materialized. And when you meet any child, even if they're a kid, they have preferences. When little babies have their preferred binky, you know. But I was a four year old. So imagine my preferences, the list of that. So I just feel strongly that when it, in regards to my adoption, that a lot of it was pretending to be something, to be someone that I was not.

And when I started to have those hard conversations with my mom about what was true for me, that's when her and my relationship got sticky.

Haley Radke: In your podcast, you come across, at me, as Big Sister Energy. And so I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm in reunion with my father and three younger siblings.

And so I, in 12 years ago, I, boom, I'm an older sister, so I have these conversations with my younger sisters, especially, and it's like, oh my gosh, I'm a big sister. I gotta, you know, bring the big sister energy. I'm curious about that, if you're willing to talk a little bit about that part of your experience. And have you been able to feel like you're part of your original family, even though I know that's really complex and you're not in a great relationship with your first mother right now either.

I don't know. I don't want to speak for you. I would love to hear your thoughts on that, especially with the big sister energy. I know you said you had an older brother as well, but.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: That's funny that you caught that from my podcast because I like to take people underneath my wing. I like to mentor people, and I think that was to kind of address that I missed that energy as a kid.

My sister did not give that energy to me, and my sister's older than me. And so, I do find brothers and sisters and so many people like the majority of the people that come on to my podcast are now siblings, you know. We call each other sis and all of those things now. But I think it's important. In the beginning, when I first was unified, reunified with my family at the age of 13, I, I found that it was easy to talk to my siblings.

Even though I didn't know Creole and they didn't know English. I just felt that there was an ease because it wasn't as complicated of an emotional history as it was with my mom. And so I had hoped that I would become close to my siblings, my biological siblings, but we haven't. And I don't think that will happen in this lifetime just simply because of the cultural chasm between us.

I tried for a few years to get close to my older brother who has learned English, but again there is that cultural barrier between him and I, and not to mention the fact that he was left behind. Like, I am not going to understand the complexity of his healing process of being left in an orphanage and watching his little sister leave forever.

Like, that is trauma. I don't know if he's addressed that. I don't know if he knows that even exists within him. But I have to give him grace and give him space to process that however he deems fit. And so it, it's unfortunate that I don't have in real life true sibling energy. And that's why I seek it in other people.

Haley Radke: Oh, thanks for sharing that.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: I know it's also dark and dreary.

Haley Radke: But we relate to that. We relate to that. You know, we have a list of losses And there's some things that no matter what we do, we may feel like we can't fill that gap. And so I've, I think, God, I love that you know how you're filling that gap. You know, and you can model that for fellow adoptees who might feel that same loss that you have.

So I think that's empowering. You know, we can't go back in time. We can't get unadopted. We can't. Your mom can't have a change of heart and be like, actually, oh my gosh, what did I do? Like, I gotta bring her back to her family. Like, that didn't happen, you can't undo it. But now, what are we gonna do with it? As adults.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Well, thank you for that, because I do try to alchemize that pain that sorrow right into something that is empowering for others. That is encouraging, inspiring, motivating, because that's all we can do in this lifetime. So, that is what I try to do with the resources I have and the time that is allotted to me.

Haley Radke: Which we don't know what that, how much that is. Let's, how else can we make this morbid and just super dark?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: I know, I know. I'm in real life, like outside of this, even in my podcast, I feel like I'm a little bit more upbeat than I am today, but alas, like listening to my own tale, it's wow, this is, a downer.

Haley Radke: Yeah, you know, sometimes it's just when we're telling the truth that is just what can happen. I love listening to fellow adoptees share their stories. And I've heard so many, and I think no matter what our circumstances, just saying the things out loud can empower other people to have agency over their own stories and decide whether or not they want to share them publicly but yeah, I love that you do that.

For fellow adoptees as well on your podcast and I love that it's we're going to recommend resources now. I should have said that, okay I love that you have left up your process. I remember interviewing another adoptee years and years ago and she's like my first few blog posts are so cringy because they come off as so grateful and adoption is the best and walla and then, you know, she came out of the fog and started to write more and more critically about adoption and I think.

I love that you can follow your progress through your interviews, through the different kinds of conversations you have through the last few seasons. And I think it's really special because I think you're bringing your listeners along on that journey in, I was going to say in real time, but you know what I mean.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Thank you for that.

Haley Radke: Your podcast is called When They Were Young: Amplifying Voices of Adoptees. Can you tell us about why you chose the name when they were young?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Well, I wanted something catchy and I wanted something to reference to adults talking about their past. And so, When They Were Young: Amplifying Voices of Adoptees is the opportunity, the platform for adult adoptees to delve into, dissect and heal what they did not understand when they were young.

And so, that Is the premise that is the goal that is what I seek in each episode is to identify within myself because I am learning, you're right. You do kind of watch in real time, my evolution in the fog, out of the fog, through the fog, all of it. And I think it's essential. I think it's expansive for people because adoptees, again, do not get to witness a lot of that unfolding.

And a lot of those conversations, for fear of the reaction from their adoptive parents, for fear of being, being face to face with their shame that has become so ingrained that they didn't even know existed within them. And so I just wanted to create a platform where we can reclaim our voices, as I reclaimed my voice, reclaimed my name, my identity, and redefined what it is for me to exist as an interracial adoptee.

Haley Radke: I think it's... It's really powerful. I've already said, I think it's so important to have these conversations and elevate the adopted person's voice, which is what I'm doing as well. And I love your solo episodes. I really enjoyed your conversation with Patrick Armstrong in particular, again, fellow podcasters.

So if folks want to start, is there one or two episodes that you would point them to as like a good first touch point for them to get to know you a little better or the show? That's putting you on the spot, I know, because listen, all our episodes are our babies.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: I know. I'm like, what?

Haley Radke: Yeah, pick a favorite, Lanise. Let's go.

Lanise Antoine Shelley: What episode? Okay. I would say start with, any of the most recent five. Because there's such a wide array of adoption stories of resilience, stories of healing. And what I do on the podcast is not just talk about their stories, but I make sure that we frame their triumphs as well. Like a lot of the people, all of the people that come on to the podcast are writing books. They're launching podcasts. They're doing such excellent work in the world. And I want to make sure that we adoptees aren't just our stories. We're so much more, we're doing all of these amazing things. And that's why your podcast is so great too, because you highlight all of the triumphs of adoptees as well.

And that is essential because our stories, yes, there, they are sad. There's some sad elements to them. But we have survived them. We have survived that story. And that needs to be noted as well. So for listeners out there, start with the first five episodes. If you want just a little sip, try the solo episodes.

Those are just one on one, between you and myself. A lot of musings, a lot of books that I've read that have resonated with me that I want to share with the listeners. I'm constantly learning, constantly sharing what I learn and get, I get very excited to, to share what other adoptees are doing. So that's why I'm here.

Haley Radke: Amazing. We're kindred spirits and you didn't even know it. Lanise, what did you want to recommend to us today?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: I would recommend following Tony Nabors, T O N Y N A B O R S, at racial equity insights. He just has some really strong insights on what it means to be anti racist, what it means to be an ally. These are all kind of buzzwords right now floating around in the adoption community. Words that I've used, but he breaks them down in respect of what supremacy has done to adoption, what its doing to adoption, and how we can dismantle a lot of the supremist mindset behind adoption that's keeping it prevalent. That's keeping it boisterous. That's making sure the industry of adoption stays lucrative.

And as we mentioned before, we're about the preservation of families, and that is the cure for adoption is the preservation of families. So understanding the history behind adoption and also a documentary that people should watch is One Child Nation on Amazon Prime. That is amazing. It is about the one child mandate in, I believe, the 1980s or the 1970s in China. And that is what launched the influx of Chinese adoptees and the suburbanites here in America didn't know that the reason why all of these babies were available was because they were being abducted, essentially. So it's understanding the history behind these countries that have adoption as a resource, which many of them do, and understanding your part in keeping adoption alive.

And making sure that supporting adoptees, supporting the preservation of families should be the first and foremost mission.

Haley Radke: Definitely, and I listened to one of the guest spots you just had on Unraveling Adoption where you talk about how to be anti racist within adoptive families. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well which totally goes along with what you're telling us about Tony.

Thank you so much, Lanise. It has been a pleasure talking with you. Where can folks connect with you online and find your show, When They Were Young?

Lanise Antoine Shelley: Thank you so much, Haley. They can find When They Were Young on just about every platform, Spotify, Pandora, iTunes. And if they rate and review, that would be amazing.

But you can also go to my website and engage with me on Instagram at YoungAdoptee or Lantoines. And I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you.

I can't express how valuable I think these conversations are for us to hear when other adoptees are just going through it and we can just know we are not alone. That is one of the main reasons that this show continues to exist is because I just want you to know that you're not alone. I have really loved getting to know so many of the people I've had on the show and it's a real privilege to be able to bring them to you.

And if you're looking for adoptee friendships and community, we have some really great spaces that you can hang together with Fellow adoptees for Patreon supporters, AdopteesOn.com/community, and if you're looking for a support group in your area, you can always go to Adoptees Connect and just Google Adoptees Connect.

There are so many groups around North America, and I know that they're expanding beyond as well. So if you want to get your in person connections I think it's just so valuable. So I'd love to have you join us at one of our upcoming events in October 2023 if you're listening when this episode is released, we have an Ask An Adoptee Therapist Live zoom call with Marta Sierra.

And we also have a book club event with Nicole Chung, and we would love to have you join us so you can find out about both of those at Adopteeson.com/community. There are links to Patreon and all the events we have going on on the website. And I invite you to join us and help support the show to keep going and help having these conversations available in the world.

Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

260 Mike Hoyt

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/260

---

Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Mike Hoyt, remarkable artist and author of the graphic memoir Hanabata Days. We discuss his reunion and subsequent reunification process with his first father. Mike also shares how reunification has impacted his own identity and that of his daughter's.

Before we get started, I want to invite you personally to join our Patreon adoptee community today. Over on AdopteesOn.com slash community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adopted people around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you today. And as always, links to everything we'll be talking about are on the website, AdopteesOn.com Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Mike Hoyt. Welcome Mike.

Mike Hoyt: Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Haley Radke: I would love it if you would start. Would you share some of your story with us?

Mike Hoyt: Absolutely. Mike Hoyt, I use he, him pronouns. I was born in a little small town in southeast Minnesota. And I was, you know, transracially adopted at birth and raised in a white family in sort of the near suburbs, first ring suburbs of Minneapolis.

And I'm married to an adoptive, transracially adopted woman who is Korean adoptee both also raised in Minnesota. And we are raising a family together in the Twin Cities. And in 2017, was able to reunite with my first father, Leonard, and we have been developing a relationship since that point. And so, for me, being 53 years old now, and having reunited with my first father at 47 we're developing this relationship and learning to, to discover who we are as Ohana over the past six years.

And... I'm an artist. I trained as a visual artist, but a lot of my practice has been sort of public art or community based practice. And so I spent roughly 3 years sort of telling this story through the medium of graphic storytelling or graphic novel. And it was a really powerful and challenging undertaking, but it became a project that I could engage during the pandemic and really reflect on this experience over the past several years.

Haley Radke: I saw that you have had this ongoing public art project of drawing people's faces. Can you talk about doing that and what that means to you and meeting new people and just the process of drawing someone's face and like concentrating on what they look like. And then doing that with your father.

Mike Hoyt: Yes, absolutely. You know, I think that early on in my life and in my 20s and 30s, I was a studio based artist and I did a lot of my work in isolation. And I grew increasingly, not by bored or tired with that, but I felt like it was very limiting. I didn't feel like I was connecting to the community in which I live in and the people I live around.

And there's been a lot of studies about access to the arts. And, you know, 1 in 1 in 10 people that visit a large legacy arts institution is a person of color and I live in a community where 70 percent of people are, you know, majority of people in my neighborhood and community are people of color. And so how do we access the arts and engage in either other people's or our own creative expression?

So I felt very interested in using drawing and art as a platform to connect with my neighbors and to do sort of neighboring in a way to build connections. So I developed this platform called One Another, which is a mobile portrait station that I hook up to the back of a bike, the little bike trailer that folds out into a drawing desk.

And I invite neighbors and people to sit with me for half an hour at a time or longer and we draw each other's portraits and have a conversation. And it's a very simple process of using brushes and ink and very limited materials, but I felt like it was it also an invitation to do something that we don't really do today, which is to sit with a stranger to have a very intimate exchange that is also safe and to just be and how often is it that we sit across from someone we don't know and just quietly engage one another or even look deeply at each other's features.

And so It was really, I know I've done hundreds and hundreds of portraits of people in my community, at basketball courts, at picnic areas, at parks, and for me it was also really just a beautiful way to connect to people, hear their stories, and I think also be transported into the lives of my community in ways that I wouldn't necessarily be connected to and be in relationship with. So just trying to expand our human connectedness or the betweenness between people. And then at the end, I normally I'll give the drawing to the person that I've, you know, drawn the portrait of. And if they've drawn me, then oftentimes they, they give it to me as an exchange. And so it's also sort of a, it's a way to think about exchange in a sort of non commercial or capitalist sense, you know. Like we're giving each other this exchange and this gift and we share in this moment and the drawing is a reminder and an archive of that moment together.

Haley Radke: I'm picturing you having, well, first of all, a wall full of drawings of yourself made by other people. Which, as an adoptee, to see how someone else sees us feels particularly impactful. Perhaps you don't have that. But, what was it like to draw your father like that? You said this, intimacy, and you share a little bit about it in your book, but I'm like fixated on that moment.

The permission to see. Stare at a genetic relative's face for that long. It's interesting to me.

Mike Hoyt: Yeah, it was one of the first things we did after our initial greeting as he welcomed me and my family into his home and we sat down and talked and then I politely asked him if I could draw his portrait and we continued to talk story.

But I think part of it was also to just ease the anticipation and the energy in the space and maybe our nerves that I could just be doing this activity while we're talking and he could follow and watch along and, you know, a drawing is not a photograph. It doesn't. It's not a perfect representation of someone.

It is. It's always sort of, it's, you know, it's a move through someone's hand onto a page. So I think there's something about the imperfection of it. That also is interesting. And it is also a moment in time. But it, it became this interesting process where my children who were younger at the time where they were noticing all of the similarities and our features and also the differences.

And they were calling all of that out during the process. And that became a way for us to really look at each other's features. You know, if we had attached ear lobes, or if his fingers were as long and narrow as mine, and just to be able to look deeply at each other's likeness.

Haley Radke: So I think reunion is often highlighted to us as this mountaintop moment.

It's the moment. Okay, you're drawing his portrait. You're meeting at an airport for the first time. And that's the stuff that gets highlighted on the reunion TV shows and things. But I love that word of reunification. And what does that look like? And so you've been in this process for a number of years now.

And how challenging it is and the ups and downs and I wonder if you can share a little bit about that what did you think it was going to be like, did you think of it as like this one time first meeting and then you're like, wait, how do we sort of get into each other's lives and like actually reunify?

Mike Hoyt: That's a great question. I didn't have, I mean, I think maybe in the back of my mind, I was trying to trick myself into not having expectation. Yeah, but the anticipation is so heavy. And it's so layered.

I think having experience and been with my wife and her process of reunification 20 years prior, I had some idea of at least experiencing what she went through with her first mother and. I didn't know if it would go in a similar way, but I very much was interested in just learning who he was and his story and even less about how I came to be.

Or I just wanted to know who this person is as a human. And he was so generous in his interest in connecting. But I also knew that it would require me to do more of the initial work, you know. He's not great with the internet. Doesn't do email or social media. So it's very much old school. We talk on the phone or I'll write him a letter or so in some ways.

Maintaining and having this relationship with him is using the tools and the technology of the past and there's something actually really sweet about that. But I, I think that is one of the interesting mysteries of, I think a lot about our responsibilities or it's a better word for it, but yeah, I guess I, you know, how are we connected to each other and how are we responsible or even implicating each other's features and what does that mean for both him and I, you know, he, his health isn't great and so at some point he may have to move in and live with us and we might take care of him in his later years.

And and this is only a person I've known for 6 years. And to have that conversation with my family with my wife and my kids, what would that mean to them? And thankfully, they're very open and receptive to that idea. But that's also, I didn't imagine before this process that might be something to have to tend to, right?

The caregiving. And we're ready and willing at this point. I don't know if that answered your question.

Haley Radke: Well, I was thinking about how special it is that you had your wife as a resource for you, of what does this look like? What could it look like? And so many of us go in not knowing anything.

And it's kind of overwhelming and scary and like world upending. And another thing I remember from Hanabata days is when you're first getting messages from this, these DNA matches. So, extended family and you're kind of like trying to. figure out the connections and things. And it doesn't happen in like this clean spot where you're ready to sit down and, you know, get on the phone with somebody or whatever.

You're like in a camping trip and, you know, and so again, when we're imagining what reunion looks like in these connections and things, it never comes in at the perfect moment. It comes during life and I don't know. I think there's something important about talking about what it actually looks like for fellow adoptees.

Mike Hoyt: Yeah. I mean, I think that's just it. You know, I had sort of not, I had kind of given up on the process for many years because there just wasn't much information about my first family. You know, they didn't have... there were sort of ghosts on the internet, you know, there was no public record really that I could track.

And obviously with closed records laws here, there was nothing I could surface through the state. But, you know, these connections became like my, I was so thankful that my first cousin, Kim Lynn was so receptive and so excited to know about this, our connection and, you know, that her, that my father was her uncle and that she thought very highly of him.

There was a lot of mystery and familial history and stuff that kind of was entangled up in all of it, but she really wanted to connect us and felt really. She felt accountable to making that happen. And so I'm really thankful that she was so diligent and did a lot of the initial outreach to him. And I, the layers of connection aren't just about, you know, whether it's biological parents or not, but also all of the people that help make that connection.

Right. And. All of a sudden we have this extended ohana that, you know, stretches the mainland and Hawaii and the, so our sort of familial accountabilities have increased significantly. But also the immense desires to connect and learn who our people are and why they've poured so much love and aloha into this process for us. Why they're so willing to help create this bridge.

But it very much, you know, happens like, well, there's a phone call at work or there's a text message that happens while you're driving and life gets put on hold because that's such a significant thing to tend to. And I think for me, you know, waiting 47 years to have, you know, whatever I'm not knowing, but not saying that it's necessarily a resolution, but to have small questions answered for the possibility of that. I'm willing to put a work meeting off. I'm willing to adjust my schedule because I don't want to have regrets either.

Haley Radke: Some of these things come in and it's- Oh, actually, this is my top priority now. This is my identity. This is my, right? This exploration. And for those of us who have children, when we don't know our legacy, when we don't know what's come behind us, it's oh, you discover it and you're like, oh my gosh, I got to know all this so I can pass it down.

There's this more sense of urgency for me. That's what sort of happened.

Mike Hoyt: Yes. And for, you know, my children, unfortunately, my, my wife's first mother passed before they were born, you know, and so and my adoptive mother passed before they were born. So they didn't have the history and the connection to any of these important people.

And so it feels like this, whether it is for them or not, it feels important to me and my wife that they are very much a part of this process as we step through it as much as they're willing and able. And I think that my hope, I guess, is that they'll understand the significance of it, both for me, but also for them.

Haley Radke: You were raised in a white family. Did you know your ethnicity growing up, or when did you discover that?

Mike Hoyt: You know, I was sort of given a vague, I guess... I was told that I was Hawaiian and and, you know. I was actually told that was a lot of things. Okay that, you know, and that's, I have this nickname Hapa 9.

So Hapa is sort of half in Hawaiian or it's used if you're half Asian or Pacific Islander and half what you're a Hapa Haole. And so I was always told that I was nine nationalities growing up. And so I always use this nickname, hopa nine, but I'm actually probably more like hop at 14 when I look at my DNA results. But, you know, I never really fully understood what percentages I was.

And so it's interesting to have online consumer DNA testing sort of confirm my racial and ethnic sort of makeup. And, you know, percentage is even- about half hawaiian, but a quarter Filipino, and about nine or ten other things mixed in, Irish, English, Scottish.

Haley Radke: I'm Scottish, partly. Okay I have seen part of your career unfold and I know that you're an activist and so involved in your community and Indigenous rights and all of those things.

To me, when I'm looking at it, it seems that you have done that for a couple decades prior to reconnecting with Leonard and your Hawaiian heritage. Is, as, am I accurate in observing that?

Mike Hoyt: To a degree. I mean, I always felt like my identity was somewhat mystery. Like I could never fully claim who I was. Because it wasn't really, I didn't have an actual record of my authentic racial makeup is X, Y, and Z. And so I felt like I tried to align myself with movements and people doing work in our community. And I have a lot, our community is a lot of Asian American and some Pacific Islander people.

And so I think there's a large group of activists and organizers. That do a lot of really powerful work. I wouldn't say I was as active as I could have been in my younger years. And I'm not sure if that was because of the sort of ambiguity of my racial identity but I felt like I was always trying to be an ally and is in ways that were authentic.

And if that came up short at times, it's probably because I just felt self conscious about who I was and how I could be an ally and how, I where I fit. But I think it's my understanding of that myself, at least within all of that has grown and change over the years. And maybe I've come to forgive my younger self for not being as vocal or powerful as I could have been, but also have forcing and challenging myself to turn up the volume now.

Haley Radke: I'm picturing you as a father teaching your children these things and how you want to raise them to be what kind of humans in this world and you and your wife, obviously exploring these things as you're leading them.

So I'm curious if you have thoughts on that, passing on your cultural heritage to them. And also while navigating reunion and also while really actually claiming those identities while you're doing all of these things at the same time with them watching you.

Mike Hoyt: Yeah I'm sure they witness it as a big, messy, meandering process that we're engaged in.

And hopefully at some point in their lives, it'll make sense. And hopefully in some time in our lives, it'll make sense, but, you know, we're, I think we're just trying to find our way through. And I was just recently talking with a friend's class, actually a class of undergraduate students about the book.

And I think this sort of, this came up in, in in a small way, just thinking about what the impact is on my kids, but also that the book reflecting on how I wrote it and that sort of tenor and tone of it is a very kāne or male situated perspective and voice. Right?

And, but I think that and I don't know if it comes across actually, I felt like I was very much trying to think about and as we raise our children, think about where, how do, how am I growing to support the development of two powerful young women, you know, female identified children. How do I, how can I be a feminist ally to them in their development, and how do I practice that forward?

So I think the book is also me being in dialogue with that within myself. Whether it comes across or not.

Haley Radke: Some of the most powerful things in the book to me is as you're writing these like soul burying letters to ambiguous loss and, I have a lot of markers, But I'm picturing your children reading it as adults and- I hope my kids are just a little younger than yours.

So we're sort of on the same parenting path. I'm just behind you, and the boys. And I think, what do I want to leave them? What kind of relationship do I want to have with them as adults? How am I really sharing of myself with them? And I thought, wow, if I would have known, you know, these innermost thoughts from a parent, I wonder what that would change for me.

You know? Because you are so deeply personal. In what you're sharing in this book.

Mike Hoyt: It was very challenging. I think. Because my work has shifted so much to public practice into supporting, much larger sort of equity work and community or community development work. I had moved away from any personal work at all.

And so this book is very personal and deeply vulnerable. It was deeply vulnerable to. I had to challenge myself to sit with my own stuff and to sort of sift through it. And I still, I'm still processing what it means today after several years. But I also think, you know, time is so finite, right? And What are the questions that my children will want to ask me before I pass or I would not want them to regret having never asked me.

And maybe there's some freedom at 53 or when I wrote it, between, you know, the past several years that I care less about, like sharing my imperfections and sharing the sort of the messiness of our lives. I want that to be revealed to them so that they know that they can have imperfect lives and that know that their parents made mistakes and that we had, we tried and that beyond intention, we wanted to have good impact and that they can carry themselves forward that way.

Haley Radke: I love that. It's so powerful, you know, and I don't know that, there's this, I don't know, I have this deep fear that my legacy is not going to be that important in some way.

Mike Hoyt: We all have that, don't we? Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah. So, I don't know. What are my sons going to think when they listen to hours and hours of this show when they're adults?

Mike Hoyt: I don't know. They're gonna be like, wow this was important to so many people.

Haley Radke: I'm like, God, my mom sure talked a lot. Wow.

Mike Hoyt: We have to have inquiry though, right? Like that is what you're passing down too.

Haley Radke: The curiosity. This is why I got really obsessed with the portraits you were drawing of people.

At one point, maybe like a year or two into Reunion, our public library was doing this human library thing where there would be an event and you could sign out a human book.. And I was one of the books people could sign out and ask me about adoption. Yeah, it's a really cool idea I know lots of people lots of libraries have projects like that. But that's what I was thinking of it.

I was like, Oh, you're drawing someone you're engaging in and talking with them for, and it reminded me of this book, this human book thing.

Mike Hoyt: I love that idea. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah. It was weird though. It also was weird. I was not very public with my stuff yet. So that felt most exposed I had been to date. I, okay, I have so many things I want to ask you.

I don't want to miss anything.

Mike Hoyt: That's okay.

Haley Radke: So, being married to a fellow adoptee... We sort of hinted that this is, you know, giving you some assistance, hopefully, with your reunion now with your father. What did your wife think about you writing the book and sharing all these things? I'm assuming you had talked about a lot of them as well, but what was that like?

Mike Hoyt: Yeah. You know, it's funny. I think my kids are the most sort of embarrassed by how much it tells their story, but they're like, dad, why did you put me in there? You know, these little like pieces of it. My wife was very supportive and she's always been incredibly supportive of my work as an artist and the time away that I spend doing that because it's not my full time job.

You know, I have a desk job. Have a daytime job. So, yeah. It's always required this sort of really tending to this balance of work life, artist life. Family life, relationship life. And I, she was very comfortable with it, you know, and she was mostly like her biggest concern, is Leonard going to be okay with the story? You know, and how do we, and she coached me and talked to me a lot about like, how do we make sure that Leonard is comfortable with all of this. And which he is, and we, you know, sent many drafts and had long conversations and, but maybe she's also at a place in her life where she's, she'd be better, she'd better tell you than I would, but yeah.

We don't have anything. Secrets are not a thing anymore. You know, we don't want to live with secrets anymore. We spent so much life trying to uncover them or unlock them that they're not healthy for us anymore. And so maybe better to bear more and less. And even if it's a little cringey or sentimental or too vulnerable, she'd rather err on that side.

So I think she was okay with most of it.

Haley Radke: Thinking about what Leonard thinks of the book and the project. You mentioned earlier I didn't know how I came to be, and you know how you came to be now, and a lot of this story is Leonard's story and his extended family, which in turn is yours, but it's this history that so many of us don't ever have the privilege of gathering together either because we don't have access, we are never going to connect with our biological origins for whatever reason, maybe it's impossible or we're too afraid to ask.

And it's, it can be really scary. Can you talk about talking with Leonard about having these conversations and there's a drawing you've got or painting? Paint, draw, what is this?

Mike Hoyt: You know, technically, I think I was never really a painter they're drawings.

Haley Radke: Okay drawings. They're beautiful. I just, I'm like, I feel like I'm being, making a mistake but there's the, there's a panel where you're literally drawing out this timeline, but I was like, oh my gosh, how many of us have done that? I don't think many.

Mike Hoyt: Yeah, I mean, those were just, you know, Leonard is very generous, and I think that he also wanted me to get things right.

And he wanted me to, I think he felt like Mike doesn't know what it was like to grow up in Hawaii, pre tourism, you know. Leonard was born in the 50s, so before it became what Hawaii is today, he wanted to share with me in a very nostalgic way, like this portrait of the family experience growing up on the islands at that time.

And I think because it'll never be that way again, given, you know, the commercialization of the islands and the colonial history, and the fact that more Native Hawaiians live on the mainland than do now on the islands, any longer. So I think he, he wanted me to understand that, but from the narrative of the family's experience and wanted me to connect to that.

And there are, you know, there are parts of his life that we haven't talked about, you know. He went through dark periods and which is why he ended up on the mainland. And I've been very, I've tried to be really respectful of that. So we have these unspoken sort of ways of keeping things compartmentalized until he's ready to talk about those things.

And hopefully I believe that he treats me with the same respect and, you know, a sense of boundaries, but we didn't have, there was no rule book for that. We just sort of tried to figure it out together. But, you know, maybe it's his age, you know, he's in the middle seventies.

And now I think he loves to wax on about what Hawaii was in the fifties and sixties and what a beautiful and magical place it was for him and his family. And because it's so different. I think what it is in some ways for Hawaiians today, but also the lives that they've established on the mainland as well.

Haley Radke: When you asked him about your origins, what was that like? And do you have a sense of that he thought of you because he knew there was a baby out there somewhere? Or did he put it away sort of to the side and not think about it? These are like these are like these deeply painful things a lot of us think about.

Mike Hoyt: I mean, he was very forthright, but also, you know, I don't, he had a very different context than my first mother. Her choices were different than his. He could step away from the situation. He didn't have to, he could either grant or just give up the choice, the choices to my mother to deal with.

And so, you know, in the sort of the world of gender roles and how to make those major decisions and choice points in a situation of birth and adoption. He took a step back from that process. You know, and they were young, obviously. But I don't, I think that, from my understanding, he didn't necessarily see, even if my mother had been pregnant with me or not, that he didn't necessarily see them having a long term future together as a couple.

She was going off to college and onto the mainland, and he was going to be back in Hawaii, and they were on different paths. And, you know, a lot of what I share in the book about my origin story is... It's only through his voice. I mean, actually, some of it is shared from my biological mother. We had been in correspondents, and so she filled in some of the holes as well.

But, you know, there's, so there's a, maybe a sense of there's some truthiness to the account of things, and that maybe the account is a little one sided because it's only being, the detail of it, the story is probably being told more from him. And so when we connected, you know, he knew that he had a child out there in the world, and I'm not sure how much he spent time thinking about. Probably not a lot.

But when we first met, he first talked on the phone he revealed to me that he thought that he had a daughter and he didn't know, you know, the gender of me at the time. And so that's, you know, the level of his connection to that piece of my story and his story. And they both, you know, went on and got busy with life too.

And so. I don't think he was, I think that he was comfortable sharing as much as he knew, but he also understood that it was only his perspective that he could share and that he wasn't obviously as close to the process of carrying me to birth than he could have been.

Haley Radke: In this letter, the Dear Surrender letter, I don't know if I'm going to say this right, you say, what if I had been Hānaid instead of being adopted within the formal Western system?

Can you tell us how to say that? What does that mean? And then what do you think about when you think about that?

Mike Hoyt: Hānaid. So that's sort of the Hawaiian term for sort of informal adoption. And I actually, you know, some folks that I talked to in my family, cousins and relatives, they talk about hānaid family and that just, you know, for centuries people would hānai another family's child and raise them as their own.

And that was sort of more of an indigenous cultural practice. And there's actually really a lot of challenging things that are a result of that. Who can attend Kamehameha schools and get a scholarship, right? Is it about blood quantum or is it about culture and acculturation? But anyway I think a lot about, you know, my, my mother was Filipino and half white and grew up in that family context.

And so, given that the choice, my adoption was hers and within her family. And the expectations that were placed upon her, you know, I went through a domestic adoption process, a very formal process. Had the choice been within Leonard's family, would I have been hānaid. Would I have been raised on the islands by a neighbor down the street, or by a third uncle of his or auntie.

And I think, you know, obviously, we have no idea of knowing what our lives would be like if we took a different path that, you know, it doesn't work that way. But. I do think a lot about just, I just know that I would be a completely different person and I don't necessarily have remorse or grief. I don't grieve that in a way as much as I may be used to. But I know that's one of the multiverse identities that live out there is the, you know, my, my name would have been Akana and not Hoyt or whoever the family down the street who hanaid me, I would have had their last name or surname.

Haley Radke: Okay. Interesting to think about. The exploration of identity is so... I don't know. It consumes more of my time than I'd like to admit, probably. Still. Mike, is there anything that you want to make sure that you say to your fellow adopted people? What's important for us to know? I don't know. Any thoughts?

Mike Hoyt: Oh, you know, there's surround yourself with other adopted people, if possible. You know, I have, we have a very powerful, rich community of friends and I think that's also who is raising our children is this community of friends that we have in the sort of found family or family that we chosen family.

But so many of those friends are adoptees that we don't necessarily have weekly meetings about the politics or academics or academic theories of adoption, or, but we have, we're together. We be together. We are together in space. We hold space for one another. And there's something comforting and supportive, even if it's not about having those conversations all of the time. There's just something about knowing that people exist within your friend community, support community that have lived this experience and walk with you, even if it's to walk with you through some other stuff you're trying to work out. And obviously, it's important to when able to have those conversations about adoption as well.

And I, you know, and I think. How do we practice forgiveness for ourselves? For people entangled in these processes and these policies and the practice of secrecy, there's so much that has been out of our control and so much that we haven't been able to access them. And so it's, it seems like it can be easy to feel like you've never done enough.

Or I should like, all right, I should have a different emotional capacity and I could be better at being a person, a whole person. And how do we care for ourselves and forgive ourselves for where we think we don't have what it takes to sort of live through these unknowns and to deal with longing. And there's, everyone evolves along this path at different times and at different stages in their lives.

And I've learned so much from peers and friends. I've just. And just seeing how they walk in this world. So, I don't know, I just, have grace, take care of your heart. Yeah, that's not really great other than taking care of yourself. There's not a lot there that, that's really specific. I'm sorry.

Haley Radke: No, I think this call to community is important. It's easy for us to find ourselves as the only adopted person. It's not something you usually go up and introduce yourself to people in adulthood as oh, I'm Haley. I'm an adoptee. That's I don't lead with that. But I do think there's so much healing that can come from being connected with fellow adoptees.

Mike Hoyt: Yeah.

Haley Radke: We talked about that a lot here. I really want to recommend your book Hanabata Days. It is a graphic memoir. Well, okay, so I read it and I thought this man is a remarkable human I so enjoyed learning more about you, learning more about Leonard and your family, and it gives just this beautiful layers of what reunification can look like.

And I learned so much about Hawaii, and you unpack all of these topics like colonialization and all of these things that we should know more about if we're ignorant of the topics. And so you address all of these other social issues as well, which is amazing that all the layers are just amazing.

So it's so beautiful too. Oh my goodness. The art. It's just tremendous. I wish people could flip through it with me right now. You can't see because you're listening, but It's so gorgeous.

Mike Hoyt: Thank you I mean the great thing about the graphic memoir is that you can't really spoil it on a podcast because, you know half of it is visual, right?

Haley Radke: Yes. But I think this is one that has more writing than a lot of them with the letters, like in your prologue, the dear daughters, I talked about the dear surrender letter you write to your wife, to Leonard and you kind of let us in behind the wall a lot more than others, I think.

So, anyway.

Mike Hoyt: Thank you.

Haley Radke: One of my favorites. And I want to say thank you to Lynn, who messaged me to tell me about your book because.

Mike Hoyt: Thank you, Lynn.

Haley Radke: Yes. Thank you, Lynn. Is there anything you think we should know about Hanabata Days before you tell us what you want to recommend?

Mike Hoyt: You know, I had grown up being in love and collecting comic books, you know, superhero comic books as a child and I always thought I'd be an illustrator and never went down that path, whether, I don't know, I just got too wrapped up in other things and to return to this late in life and it really was a project about inquiry and, you know, teaching myself this very specific medium. I've, that I've been inspired by other Graphic storytellers Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do, one of the greatest novels of all time, in my opinion, but I just wanted to see if this story would work in this medium and challenge myself to grow.

And so I'm not a writer, but I think that it helps me understand how to, how I fit within storytelling maybe? Or at least how my skill sets and where I might have some facility could help shape the way the story gets told. And so I'm just honored to be here.

You know, I just hope people have a chance to see the book and to have a conversation about it. Or find something moving about, you know, a piece of it, or make some curious, right? Given what's happening in Maui right now and around the world. Be curious about the state and the conditions of native Hawaiians and Kanaka and and what's happening now.

Haley Radke: Yes, I think for fellow adoptees, no matter what our experience, there is something that you will find that is resonant for you in this book. So definitely. Okay. What do you want to recommend to us?

Mike Hoyt: Well, I think one of one of my favorite books by an adoptee is, appear and another dear person on the front network is Sun Yung Shin's, Unbearable Splendor.

And I think I found it so powerful because it's so unlike the type of storytelling that I would approach, you know, my storytelling is very more matter of fact, like this thing happened and then this thing happened. But when I first picked up on Unbearable Splendor, it almost takes you away in a way through its sort of surrealist, allegorical framing.

Of all of these issues of adoption that you forget that you're reading about adoption in a way it's so stirring and so powerful. I think I just hadn't read a book that dealt with these issues that took me on such a journey and maybe left me reflecting for as long as this book did. She's just such a powerful writer.

And I think, you know, Sun Yung will never have to create a graphic novel because it is the way that she works language is so visual. You don't need pictures. The poetry just fills your mind with images. And so I just, I recommend the work of Sun Yung Shin, in particular, Unbearable Splendor, one of my favorites.

Haley Radke: That's a good recommendation. I have a few of the poetry collections of theirs. And I think Unbearable Splendor is one of the first adoptee books that I saw that had some replications of documents in it. And I was like, Oh, I love that. This is the true thing. And let's have it permanent for all to see. And copied and multiplied out. What a treat to talk with you. I will double down on that I think you're a remarkable human and I'm so glad your work exists in this world. Mike, if folks wanna connect with you, where is the best spot for them to do that?

Mike Hoyt: I think through my website, michael-hoyt.com. I'm also on Instagram at it's Hapa9, H A P A 9. Don't do the Facebook as much. Or, I left the X, as it were.

Haley Radke: Oh, I'm almost with you. Almost.

Mike Hoyt: And hopefully, those are great ways to connect with me. And I think I'd, you know, out in the world as much as possible.

Haley Radke: In person. In person events. There you go.

Mike Hoyt: Maybe at a park, drawing your portrait.

Haley Radke: All right. Well, we'll catch up with you somewhere in Minnesota. Okay.

Mike Hoyt: But it's really, I thank you so much for having me on and for sharing the book and doing what you do, you know, it's really such a wonderful resource to be able to listen through all the episodes and to have a deeper understanding of the work of people in my peer group that I haven't had the depth of conversation with them, even about their work around adoption. And so I have such a great respect and a deep and appreciation of people even within my peer group or community group. So what an incredible resource you've built.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much It is my honor to do so.

Oh My goodness, I just feel so lucky some days at the Amazing Humans I get to interview and share with you. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I really have been craving more time with fellow adoptees talking about these things. I know, right? I do it every day and yet I think there's just something so special about being together in community.

However, it looks if you're in an in person support group or on a Zoom call. And in, in our Patreon offering, so Patreon is a crowdfunding platform that I use because this show is literally listener supported. So thank you so much to all of you who already support the podcast in that way. And I want to invite you if you haven't yet joined us on the adoptees on Patreon. We have several live events every month, including a book club gathering with fellow adoptees.

We have our Ask an Adoptee Therapist events where you can ask an adoptee therapist whatever you want, and we are so pleased that we have these cool things. You can join us I, and I don't want you to miss out. So I would love to have you. AdopteesOn.com/community explains all the things you can get when you join Patreon and we'd love to have you.

And in our upcoming month, if you want to see what events are coming, you can go to our website, AdopteesOn.com and click on the live event calendar, which has information about all the upcoming events. And, thanks to Patreon supporters, we also have a scholarship program. And so if there's one that you would like to attend and money is tight, you can apply for a scholarship to an event that interests you.

So I'm so happy to be able to offer that. So you can go to our website to check that out. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

259 Welcome Back!

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/259

---

Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke.

Hello, friend, happy fall. So excited to be back with you, bringing you brand new episodes with fabulous adoptees that you need to know and hear from. I can't wait for the fall lineup we have prepared for you.

So starting next week, we are going to have brand new interviews. I...mmm. So good. I've had really excellent conversations and I'm thrilled to be bringing those to you. Today, I wanted to share a little bit with you about what we've been up to over this summer when you and I haven't been talking, but I have been having live events with my Patreon supporters and we have introduced this new monthly Live zoom event called ask an adoptee therapist.

And I wanted to share some clips with you from some of your favorite therapists who have been on adoptees on many times, and they're asking, answering questions from listeners. So I have compiled a few of our best conversations. Not even, I shouldn't even say that. Just a few of the great questions we've had and talked about with a therapist.

There have been so, so many. It was really hard to pick what to bring you. So we have Lesli Johnson with us, Pam Cordano, Marta Sierra, all expert adoptee therapists and giving their best advice to us. They are not your therapist. And of course, this is just for education and entertainment purposes. But I hope that no matter what they're addressing, we talk about relationships and grief and what our picture perfect reunion might look like or a successful reunion might look like.

I think all of these things were going to be helpful to you. Let's listen in.

Here is a listener's submitted question from our recent September Ask An adoptee Therapist with Pam Cordano. I'm grieving the loss of my adoptive father who passed away very recently. Although my dad and I weren't especially close, the enormity of this loss has surprised me.

Do you have any recommendations for working through the loss of a parent as an adoptee or any resources that you may have found helpful in this situation?

Pam Cordano: Well, I just think that even when a loss can be hard to understand or explain, if you weren't that close to, let's say an adoptive parent or a birth parent for that matter, and then they die and, there's a big reaction, bigger than expected reaction. I think that number one, trust that reaction, that the reaction is you know, it's you happening. It's you know, you're, there's something happening inside of you. I don't really believe in these over reactions here. You know, I think that any reaction is the right reaction.

And I'm just really tired of pathologizing any of this actually, you know, I just feel okay, you know, like we're sad, or this hit is hitting us bigger than we would expect. And then I think that. You know, with all losses, I used to work for hospice also with part of this whole cancer thing. I did that all losses seem to, you know, build on each other.

And so, losses are can be very complicated, whether it's break up deaths of people or adoptive family members or birth family members, even if we don't know them very well and changing forms when our, you know, kids and our kids are home and then they're not home anymore, that I was a wreck when my kids went to college.

I was just, I felt like I was losing them forever. I had no perspective. They had more perspective than I did on that. So the first thing is to trust it, to trust the reaction. And I don't think we get those messages a lot of places. I think that it can be hard for people to understand us on the outside of why we're having such a big reaction or, you know, pet loss too.

And then, you know, I think we need to find people, maybe a therapist, but people that can listen to us and be with us without trying to change us. Without trying to minimize it or put into perspective for us, but just let us not know why we're having this big reaction and just be with us. And that goes again to having somebody with us so that we're not alone as we're processing something hard.

It's healthier than trying to do it all by oneself. And feeling like one has to do it all by oneself.

One thing I learned working for hospice is that regular therapists are not the same as grief therapists. And there's really a big difference between therapy and grief therapy. And with grief therapy, the therapist does a lot of just listening, hearing stories, hearing what's coming up, and asking questions to just kind of fill out whatever a person is feeling in the moment without, without sort of attaching it to the person's sort of whole life, you know, like it's not a symptom, you know, it's a whole experience itself.

Haley Radke: I was also thinking of, when you, I think trusting your own reaction feels so freeing because I was thinking of someone I know when their adoptive parent passed and they were estranged and I was like, is this going to be a big thing for them or not or whatever?

And I think there's some sense of guilt that it wasn't a bigger deal. Are we supposed to fall apart? Is that, you know. It's unfair that we put those things on ourselves.

Pam Cordano: Right. Right. Cause I. I mean, I think that sometimes we just feel blank because the original loss was so, it's so unlanguaged, it's unprocessed, it's we don't, it's just too big and then, next loss has come.

Like I was really close to my grandmother and she died when I was 18. I didn't shed one tear. I just was like a robot and I just don't think that I was ready to let, I don't think I really, it's ever come up. I just haven't, I was more just in keep it together, second function kind of mode and it can feel like a blank instead of.

So I think we go both ways over blanked and over, you know, I don't say over, but big responses. And it's hard to understand when we weren't that close to a certain person.

Haley Radke: Here is a listener submitted question from our August Ask an Adoptee Therapist with the answer coming from Marta Sierra. If as an adoptee you are able to plan an ideal first reunion.

With first family, mother, father, married, full adult siblings, how would you want to set it up? The mother is open about having PTSD from relinquishment. Siblings didn't know about adoptee until after contact with the parents. All have been welcoming though cautious, some more than others. Everyone wants to meet face to face.

Geography is an obstacle that makes planning well in advance necessary. Ooh, set us up. Perfect scenario. What's that? Or help us temper our expectations.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes, I love that. One question. That's, of course, individual, but I'm going to post it. Anyways. What does a successful, I'm going to take the whole word perfect out of it, but what does a successful reunion trip look like?

I think we might all define that a little bit differently. So the clearer we can be about how we want to leave after and how we want to feel like leaving an interaction can actually give us a lot of information about what we're hoping for happens within it.

And I think the most successful experience has to honor everyone involved as best as possible with all of our very different experiences that we're bringing in and very different needs. So conversations before. I mean, I think my like simplest answer is communication, but communicating both what you think you might need. Starting a conversation, whether that's individually with everybody that's going or even in some kind of group chat around, hey, what does everybody need personally when you feel overwhelmed?

When you feel really emotional? What do you want us to know about that? Oh, you know, so that you can start to share a little bit about that and think through that as far as like lodging and where I think all of these have to do with what would make it successful for everybody as a group, but also individuals. Is there cultural pieces in there?

You know, I know with international, transracial adoption reunions, sometimes there's a lot of pressure to stay with your family in their home and so being able to advocate for, I'm actually not ready to do that. I'm going to book an Airbnb and, you know, let's, tell me more about what, you know, what are you sad that I might miss out on if I don't stay with you?

Oh, I really wanted to cook you breakfast. Okay, well, I can come over for breakfast. I can get up early and come do that. So, trying to make space for again, everybody's differing needs and differing wants maybe asking everybody what's the thing you want to do the most or the thing that you're most excited about. Is it eating together?

Is it going to the movies? Is it downtime where you sit on the floor and talk, right? Everyone has different stuff that they're dreaming about going into this. So to know that's kind of like a family vacation, right? What's most important to you? What do you do? You want to leave like definitely having done and so the more you can openly communicate about that before, you're also like building pathways of communication that you can rely on in the situation if things are getting rough.

Haley Radke: What are some things that you personally would build in for safety? Like I love the idea of having your own space you can go to.

When I heard, everybody's coming, I was like, huh, is that how I'd want my first meeting to be? Would be with everybody. Do I only want to meet my parents the first day? And then, you know, like those kind of things. Did you have any thoughts on that?

Marta Isabella Sierra: Yes, exactly. I think, you know, again, right. If you don't want to consent to everybody at once, that's something you have to speak up for.

But if we're talking about like a multiple day experience, there can be time in there for that one on one connecting and maybe for a party in there somewhere where everybody gets to go. Right. But Again, in that pre communicating would be a great time to say, I'd love to have a dinner or a meal, maybe one on one with my two siblings and my parent that are going to be there.

Can we schedule that? I want to be able to connect one on one as well as have these, make some group memories together.

Haley Radke: My big tip is you got to get all the photos you want and don't be awkward about asking for those, because you may want something tangible later to help you remember. I don't know.

For me, that was really important. I literally have one picture with my mother. That's all I'm going to get.

Marta Isabella Sierra: Also just the last thing, you know, do you want somebody with you from outside? Do you want a support person with you and who do you want that to be? I think when you just said that I time traveled back to this morning that I almost had a complete and total meltdown and I'm so glad that my friend was there that morning and could just even non verbally tell me that I needed to calm down.

I was starting to sweat. I was so anxious. My sister was super late. It's not important the story, but it was really helpful to have somebody there that could just look at me and communicate with me. But also that I knew could see that I was overwhelmed and I knew that it mattered to her when I was having this moment.

Not that my family didn't care either, but I just was feeling invisible. I went to that adoptee invisible place of not being important and to have somebody who could just touch my arm gently and be like, everything's going to be okay, was so clutch. I think that could have been a moment of a real explosion if I hadn't had someone there to ground me.

So. Yeah, support people can be a great resource.

Haley Radke: And if I guess if they're not able to like actually come with you, if you know, okay, my friend is on speed dial for emergency.

Marta Isabella Sierra: On call support person is also very valuable.

Haley Radke: We've got several listener submitted questions about relationships from our July Ask an Adoptee Therapist episode with Lesli Johnson.

Any suggestions on how to move forward in a relationship when the non adopted spouse did not, does not recognize or acknowledge the effects of adoption? Sorry for my paper noises. And number two, I am struggling to stay married at this point. I feel like my marriage was built around the person I used to be.

And I know that I'm a different person now, and I don't want to go back to being the old person. He is trying to be understanding and make space for what I'm going through, but I often question if there is real hope. I don't necessarily want to throw it all away, but I also don't want to try to be the person I was before and I feel like that expectation is there. I guess my question is, how do marriages work after coming out of the fog? It's complicated, but what are the key elements to success or failure? Trying harder and good intentions don't feel enough.

Okay, Lesli those are big ones. What are your thoughts?

Lesli A. Johnson: Those are big ones. Yeah. And I hear this a lot. The first piece is your partner willing to. Listen to a podcast, read a book, read an article, right? There was a recent article in the New Yorker that I think is a good one. You know, is the partner willing to read about the adoptee experience? So I'm assuming this person is telling her partner about what's happening, but are they willing to, you know, again, listen to a few of the podcast on Adoptees On. Yeah. Will you read this article? Can we read this article together? Right? Can we listen to a podcast together? Can you know, I think that it's is your partner curious about your internal world and your life experience? And if that isn't something that's happening in a couple, in both ways, right? You know, curiosity and openness and what's happening with you, then the relationship may not work right? We can't force our partners to try to understand us, but we, I think we hope and expect that there would be a willingness to have that curiosity. Someone just wrote in the chat that her partner binged.

Haley Radke: Oh, binged Adoptees On. Had a lot of discussions about the episodes together. Found that really helpful. That's nice. Thank you. I was trying to think of an example that you could, if our partner was now something and we were trying to learn about it, I'm trying to think of an example and I can't even think of one.

Lesli A. Johnson: Right. Thanks. Well, had an early loss, maybe, or had something traumatic happen in childhood and had not ever talked about it and then realized it did have an impact on their sense of trust or safety. I mean, there's, there could be similarities like that.

Haley Radke: I don't know. Do you have recommendations of- this is a huge life decision, deciding if you're going to depart from your partner? What are some things that people should be doing before to make sure they're doing like all the work for themselves to make this make a good decision here?

Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, well, I mean, again, bringing up, will you please listen to this? Will you please read this with me? And if you're bringing some, this is my opinion, but if you're bringing something kind of as, that's not a hard task to ask a partner to listen to an hour long podcast or a two hour long podcast or read an article and begin a conversation, right?

And if the partner is saying no, there may be more than just this person isn't getting it. You know, isn't curious about my, my being adopted. There might be more to that. Therapy. Absolutely. I'm working with an adoption informed therapist and or an IFS therapist and internal family systems therapist can be helpful.

Haley Radke: Okay. Thank you. The last in this relationship set is I'm just beginning to be interested in possibly, maybe starting to date again. I've been feeling closed off and would appreciate tips for how to proceed with caution while remaining open hearted. Is this as hard for adoptees to balance as it is for me?

Thank you.

Lesli A. Johnson: Yeah, I think relationships are often difficult for people whose, you know, earliest attachments was severed. Right. So it creates, and then when I say the earliest attachment to our birth mother, right, the person that was supposed to care for us and be there for us. And when that happens early on in a person's life, the person grows up to develop a sense of mistrust. It's not safe to trust people. And then how does that translate into relationships? Right? Issues around I need someone, but also, you know, needing feels really bad. Right? So we develop these insecure, anxious or avoidant attachment styles.

And so really understanding your attachment style can be really helpful in relationships. I mean, there's a book called Attached that's a good one.

And there's also if you just Google attachment styles, there's lots and lots of information. So it's secure attachment, insecure, avoidant, insecure, anxious and disorganized. And usually adoptees fall into a category of anxious or avoidant. And it doesn't mean that we don't want a relationship or we don't want to be in relationship with other. It just means because of our circumstances, we developed a style based on our relationship with our caregivers.

So, and that we also, because of the beautiful gift of neuroplasticity, we can change our brains in adulthood so that we can have a secure, like it what's called an earned secure attachment and that's through relationships with friends, relationships with therapists and also a tuning to ourselves in that kind of parent- child way, like taking care of our younger parts and we can have that more, a sense of more security and safety in the world.

Haley Radke: Early in 2023, we had Mary Gauthier join us on Adoptees On, and if you're listening when this episode goes on live on September 25th, we are having our Adoptees Only Book Club with Mary discussing her book Saved by a Song. And here is a clip of us discussing her album, The Foundling, and then her subsequent writing of Saved by a Song.

This is from episode 245, and I hope you'll join us for a book club with Mary on Monday.

If you're listening after that date has already passed, the audio recording of our book club will be available in Patreon for supporters of the podcast, so you can also catch it there.

I've read your book. It's so good. Loved Saved by a Song, The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting. And in it, you share, you know, that you toured with The Foundling and you played the songs and as you just said, right, it's it healed something in you to write them, but just. Playing it over and over.

I mean, you're bringing up the most traumatic thing that has happened in an adoptee's life, right? The separation from our genetic connections. And what was it like to, you know, decide to kind of put that away and decide you're not going to perform those songs anymore, but then write your story on paper for, again, the masses to read?

Mary Gauthier: What a great question. This is awesome. This type of questioning is so beautiful and I don't get it very often.

So writing it into songs that I sang for about a year and then I really don't sing anymore was part of my healing. It was naming it, claiming it, owning it, and then doing the best I can to let it go. This happened. It shaped me. I was wounded, but I don't have to spend the rest of my life limping. What I can do is find strength in the telling.

And so I don't need to tell it over and over again. I need to tell it till it makes sense to me and then let it go. And then I was asked to write this book and writing long form around the story was a different experience than writing songs. In the songs some of it was fictionalized.

I didn't feel compelled to have to write exactly what happened. In fact, a song that does that is usually pretty boring. So in songs the fictionalization freed me in some ways to make it a story about all of us, you know? In the book, I got into the particulars of my own story because it was partially a memoir, and that liberated me as well.

So that I could look back over the story of my life and say, Well, if that hadn't happened, this wouldn't have happened, and if this wouldn't have happened, I wouldn't have been given this thing that I really cherish and love. I think that writing it long form really was an addition to the healing of writing the songs around it.

It alchemizes it in a different way. I think if we're drowning, we've gotta find a lot of different kind of life jackets. And for me, they're, both of the art forms, long form and songs were were driven by this thing inside of me that needed to be shown the light. The healing light of truth.

It really strengthened me. It took some of the weight out of the sorrow.

Haley Radke: It is so good to be back. It is so good to think of all the conversations that we have shared over the years on Adoptees On and on the adoptees Patreon events. Like I just feel really thankful for this community that we have built together to amplify adoptee voices and adoptees spaces, and thank you for being a part of that.

Normally I would be back a little sooner with new episodes. So I just want to let you know, we're back. We're flailing, but here and I have had a really interesting September so far. And you know, we don't need to go into all the things, but I'm really glad that things are sort of calming down and we're just ready to go with fall 2023 episodes. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for listening to Adoptee Voices and Adoptee Stories. And if you want to hear more of these things, please consider supporting the show. It is literally how it continues to exist in this world. AdopteesOn.Com slash community. And you can join us at these amazing Ask an Adoptee Therapist events.

Ask your questions anytime, adopteeson. com slash ask, and we'll include them in an audio recording for patrons. So lots of good stuff over there. Join us for a book club, all the things. I love getting to hang out with you guys on zoom and really hearing from you what's going on in your lives. And I've built so many friendships over there. I just feel so grateful. So thank you for being here. Thank you for being a part of the community for helping adoptees on exist. And let's talk again next Friday.

258 Nicole Chung

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/258

---

Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. We are so thrilled to welcome Nicole Chung back to the podcast today. Nicole's new memoir, a Living Remedy, is a heartbreaking pilgrimage where we walk with her through her grief and losing both of her adoptive parents within a few short years of each other.

We talk a lot about grieving today, depression, avoidance, grief, rituals, how our loved ones can show up for us. The joy pets can bring us in the worst of times. As an adoptee, Nicole has been one of the stalwart leaders in our community, and you'll know why when you listen to the compassion and vulnerability she shares in our conversation today.

Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Make sure you stay tuned to the end of the podcast today to hear how you can join our book club with Nicole in October, 2023.

And for details on our upcoming summer break, we wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Nivole Chung. Welcome Nicole.

Nicole Chung: Thank you so much, Haley. It's great to be back.

Haley Radke: I have been reading all the things. You're prolific. You've got an advice column and all of these pieces in magazines and all through the last few years. And even though I felt like I had followed along and knew the story, when I was reading A Living Remedy, I read it in one day in October last year, I was, blessed to have an advanced copy and I just, I was like, oh my gosh, it's so much. So anyway, do you wanna catch us up since the last time you were here in 2018?

Nicole Chung: Sure. And thank you so much for reading. It really means a lot to me. I mean, since the last time I was here, five years. It's actually not that long. Right. But at the world has changed. We've all changed. So living remedy, as but some of your listeners might not, it's a story of grief, it's a story of loss and of losing both my adoptive parents in a two-year span. My father died in early 2018 and my mother in the spring of 2020, in the early weeks of the pandemic.

So the book I had started working on it actually while I was touring, like on the paperback tour for All You Can Ever Know, in 2019. I knew I wanted to write about grief, losing my dad, and specifically how my mother and I were both grappling with how his loss had been sped and his illness before that exacerbated by these pervasive inequalities in American society that we all know about.

And in his case, financial precarity was a factor. Lack of access to healthcare was a factor in his early death. And also there were just various points at which, other parts of the safety net failed him and failed my mother. And it was something she and I were both, as I said, like grappling with, and I knew I just couldn't write the story of this loss, which for me was cataclysmic.

The biggest loss of my life thus far as an adoptee. It brought up so much for me as well. I couldn't write about that without facing these other things, these injustices and inequalities that led to his early death. But at the time, my mother was alive and she wasn't sick, and I didn't know that cancer was coming for her.

I didn't know that a few months after starting the book, she'd receive a terminal diagnosis. And I certainly didn't know that, by the time she started hospice care, because her cancer really was untreatable at that point, we would all be in the midst of the pandemic. Right? So she started hospice care the same month that we were all asked to stay home.

And so my mother and I were separated, like with a country between us, as had long been the case. But in this time, I could not get to her. And so many people. I lost her kind of sight unseen. I mean, we had video calls, we had phone calls and texts but I wasn't able to be there at the end because she died in the spring of 2020.

And at that point, honestly, the book was like the furthest thing from my mind, right? Like I had stopped working on it when she got very sick. I was focused on her care, helping to manage her affairs and parenting two kids. Working full-time through a pandemic. Can't take time off in this country if you're supporting a parent who's sick.

And so I was just kind of juggling a lot. Like many people I think in the sandwich generation, caring for elders or parents and caring for young children will be familiar with but in the midst of a pandemic and I couldn't imagine writing about it and I couldn't imagine leaving it out of the book.

So I picked it up again, I think it was probably six or seven months after my mom died and just kind of started over from the beginning. And as, because you've read it, like my relationship with her is really what provides the foundation for the book. As I rewrote it, I realized that was really at the heart of it.

And so when you read and you experience like my father's illness and loss, we're still getting that in the context, I think, of like my mother and I experiencing that together and mourning him together and then going through it together when she gets sick. So yeah, again, like it's, it's not like it's been a huge span of time since you and I last spoke, or it's not a huge span between the two books, but yeah, everything kind of shifted and my relationships with my parents, my relationship to grief, my relationship to my work and writing all had to change as well.

Haley Radke: I had never thought of memoir being a way to introduce readers to the people that you love. And I heard you talk about that in several different conversations that you've been a part of, different podcast episodes, and I see that so clearly in your book. Is there something that you could tell us about your mother in particular that I don't know, and just an anecdote or so something to get us to meet her through your eyes.

Nicole Chung: Yeah, I mean, to, to the first part, I guess of what you just said, I think it's so important in crafting memoir like nonfiction to make sure that the narrator, the you, the I, I cannot be the only fully realized, like human seeming whole and nuanced character in the book. It's important for me to be there. I'm obviously the guide through it. You're getting everything filtered through the lens of my perspective, and I'm the one deciding what's important for you to know about my life, about everybody in it. But it's so important for the other people, the characters who come into the story to feel real and to be given, I think, the dignity and respect of that and to.

And for readers, trusting your readers enough to give them like the fullest portrait that you can. And so it was very important to me that readers get to know my parents in this case before I lost them, to get to know who they were before they got sick.

I don't think they or any of us should be defined by the worst things that have happened to us, by our losses, by our traumas. These things are obviously enormously important in who we become and in shaping us, but it's not like we all are trauma. And the same is true of them. I didn't see my parents' lives, even though there were tragic things certainly, or things that were enraging, I didn't see them, their story as this, like American tragedy.

I experienced them in our life together as so much more complex than that, and in many cases that many times as a story of love and resistance and resilience. And so those are things I really wanted to capture. And the job as a writer is picking. Since you can't share everything, picking the things that feel most important, the memories, the conversations, and the most obvious thing to share about my mother is just like her deep love.

For me and her faith in me, which I know I was very lucky to have, even when we did not always understand each other. But I also remember things like she had an extremely dry and sometimes sarcastic sense of humor. And she always, her faith in me was such that, I don't know, I just, I truly believe, like she could have somehow justified any choice I made in life and supported it. Which is rare I think, in a parent. And I don't even know that should always be the case. Right. But that's, that was what her love for me meant. I don't know, like I think about just like her overarching goal as a parent was to make me feel like I was enough. And so many of us, I never really felt like I was, but that's what I remember most clearly about her, honestly, is that it was like her lifelong quest to get me to believe that I was enough.

And it just, it took a very long time, I guess, for me to learn that. So that's one thing.

Haley Radke: I love how you portray it comes across very clear to me in the book. And so I think this is true, if I'm gonna say this, that it seemed like your adoptive parents were so good at holding you with like open hands, right?

Like ready to launch you, ready to cheer you on, support you in all the things rather than this other way that parents can sometimes be like holding you so tightly that you feel crushed and stuck. And so to see them model that for you as you left as a teenager off into the world, into the east coast, far away and lived your adulthood so far away from them.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Nicole Chung: Yeah, so part of it I like grew up dreaming about escaping the town where I lived. I was, as I wrote in the first book, I was the only Korean I knew. I was like the only transracial adoptee. I knew if there were others, at least, like we didn't talk about it. I didn't know about it.

I'd experienced a lot of racist bullying. Like it was just, it, I felt from a really young age, like there must be more than this and I can't stay here. And it sounds depressing, but I actually think that helped me like survive until it was time to leave. Not to sound dramatic, but you know, it was really hard for a long time.

There were years in elementary school especially where I remember not a week went by where I didn't experience some form of racist bullying. Whether it was like the ching-chong chants at recess or like being called actual slurs, it was not like a place where I felt safe, that school or that town.

And so I always knew I was gonna leave. And it's true, I didn't have to go as far as I did. But I don't know, like my parents, as I write in A Living Remedy,, they're from Ohio. They were the ones in their family who left, who got out. They didn't go to college. They got married very young and they moved to Alaska and then Washington State and then Oregon where I grew up.

So they were kind of like the pioneers of their family. And I think that's why they didn't raise me- as much as they loved me and I think wanted me close by- I mean, they didn't raise me with that expectation or that weight. And even though we didn't talk about race, and we certainly didn't talk about racism, they knew enough I think, to know that I wasn't going to be able to stay.

I write in the book that I think in many ways, my mother especially, was preparing me to go because she wanted me to have these choices that due to our financial situation when I was growing up, might well have proven impossible. They wanted me to go to college, but they couldn't pay for any of it and we weren't really sure how I would go or if I would go until I left.

So again I think back to that faith and that trust in me coupled with like real questions about what it would be like for me going out into the world whether there would be the resources I needed to do that. But yeah their love for me was never about like ownership or control or living like some life that they expected for me.

They really wanted me to go out and to find my own path and my own happiness. And again, I thought that was just what parents did, but I know now as an adult, sadly, that is not always the case. I just don't think there was a lot in my parents' love for me that was selfish or clinging. I think they would've loved for me to stay at home, but understood that from a young age that I wasn't going to do that.

Haley Radke: Here's a line from your book you say: she did not think about leaning on or drawing strength from me, but of protecting me, lifting me up to her. That was what it meant to be my mother.

Nicole Chung: I mean, it's hard too, right? Because my mother was moving into a situation at that point in the book, due to her terminal diagnosis and everything. Like she, I don't know, like she needed help. And I think one of the things I really wanted to address in this book, this latest book, was that changing relationship that you have with parents, with elders, when you start to move into more of a caregiving role when your positions are kind of reversed.

I think that was so difficult for both my parents, but especially my mother to grasp. And in this country there's such a focus on like personal responsibility, what we owe our elders, what we owe our parents.

For adoptees, I think sometimes wrapped up in that is this like unfair expectation to other people have that you'll be grateful or loyal, right? But we just aren't given the resources or support we need, really, when it comes time to care for each other in a crisis. And like the focus on individual personal responsibility obscures the reality of so many systems that fail us in our time of need. But it was just so difficult. I knew my parents needed more help. And at times I was able to give it, but often I wasn't.

At times they were not able to accept it or let me in. And that was just kind of an ongoing point of tension, I think because as they saw it, their role as my parents, that wasn't part of it. Accepting my help. Accepting my care even when they needed it. And I think that's something so many families have to navigate as people get older.

Haley Radke: Oh, definitely. I mean, I think that's probably a huge part of your story that was really resonating for folks outside of the adoption community because, of course, your book is like way out there. So thanks for coming back to adopteeland to talk about it.

You, speaking of that, you did this interview with Rebecca Carroll, and I'm gonna quote you a line that you shared with her in that you said: what does it mean to be an adoptee when your adopted family is gone? What does that mean?

Nicole Chung: I mean, I'm still figuring that out. I think there was a time right after my mother's death and I was obviously grieving for her. And it was, I was still at home. Covid lockdowns were still ongoing. I had to live stream her funeral from my living room sofa with my family. And my cousin, who is like the only person in my adoptive family I'm still close with, he's my same age, he called me and, at one point he was like, what is it like, like how do you feel?

And I was just like, it feels like being unadopted because not only were my parents gone, they and my grandmother had been like my very last link to that family. I have a large extended family. Because I grew up so far from many of them and we didn't have money to travel, but also just due to choices and estrangements and personalities and conflicts, like I didn't grow up all that close to many of them. And some of the people I did meet later, I think as a transracial adoptee or an adoptee, you can tell who kind of accepts you, who's really okay with it in the family.

And sadly, I think you can sometimes tell who's not. And I guess I can't really say for sure that I know that's the reason. But like my father's family, for example, I don't think ever really accepted me. And so I'm not really close with anyone left except as I mentioned my cousin. And so my parents' deaths really did feel in a way like, that's it.

Like everyone, they're gone. That means I don't have an adoptive family anymore. I am obviously still an adoptee, but, and being an adoptee is, that shaped so much of my life. But the people who are in that defining relationship, that important relationship with me are gone. And for a while it did just feel like I was completely untethered.

I don't identify with the term orphaned exactly, but. I mean, for a little while, I think that's kind of how it felt. I just felt really bereft. And yes, of course a lot of it was just grief for my parents in the way anybody might feel grief for their parents. But as an adoptee, there was this added layer of I don't know, this was my only family and like my only tie.

These were the people, the only people who really believed in that bond in my whole entire extended family. And they're gone. I'm carrying all of these memories alone. Now. There's nobody left in my adoptive family who like remembers my childhood or remembers what my, or who would talk to me about my parents when they were younger.

Like those connections are just, aren't there. So that's just been something I think that's been really hard to sit with and to live with and to adjust to. And of course I'm not alone. I have reader, people who've read my first book will know, like I have a sister I'm very close with that I reunited with my biological sister. And of course I have my husband and my own children, but it's just I'm very conscious of this other family that I grew up in, like no longer being there. And it feels like missing a limb sometimes.

Haley Radke: Do you feel like you inherited the matriarch role, or because Cindy is your older sister, are you like, okay, I guess I'm gonna pass that to her? Or you're too young to have that? Your parents lost, they died so soon, so early. Too early. And I don't know, what did you feel something when I said that word?

Nicole Chung: Oh gosh. I immediately was like, that's not me. And I don't think it's an ageism thing. I mean, I think I would be proud and happy to be a matriarch, but that's not what I feel like yet. Gosh, that's like an interesting question, I suppose like in my immediate family, my mother-in-law, I guess is who I consider like the matriarch of our family. Even though we are not, we're only related by marriage. And I think when I think about my family in terms of my own children, like that's who I think of as like the matriarch.

And I guess my sister and I are so close. I don't think of her as matriarchal yet. But yeah, that's, oh, that's an interesting question. I don't feel like I've inherited that role yet. And maybe that's part of why I feel unmoored. It's just, I definitely have these connections and they're powerful connections and their chosen, loving relationships.

But I dunno, my family tree like that part is gone. Yeah. And my relationship with my birth parents, though I'm in Reunion with my birth family is not really what I, it's not really a substitute, not that I would be looking for it to be a substitute, even if my adoptive parents were alive, but it's not at that level.

And actually my relationship with my birth father has changed a fair bit in recent years. And I think part of that is because of the deaths of my adoptive parents. But I think, I still feel even, it's been like three years since my mom's death, my adoptive mom. And I still feel this sense of, I don't know what's next. I'm still kind of waiting, to figure that out.

Haley Radke: Okay, this is gonna take a big turn. Are you ready?

Nicole Chung: Okay.

Haley Radke: Star Trek. Yay. How excited was I to hear Deanna Troi mentioned in your book. As a faithful Star Trek Next Gen rerun watcher, through my childhood. Which I've gone to try, I've tried to rewatch now, and it's ooh. I don't know. It's tough.

It's a tough rewatch for me. But anyway, so you mentioned Deanna Troi, and there's a little story in the book and I was, I just got kind of fixated on it. Oh my gosh, she was the counselor. She had these like telepathic abilities and empathy and I was like, woo, that's like us.

We grow up having to parachute it into a new family where we have no connection. There're strangers to us. We have to read the room and adjust to where we are and like get really hypervigilant about these other cues that these strangers to us are giving us. I'm curious, as with that piece, I'm picturing her as an adoptee. She's not. But those empathy skills. How is that having that superpower through grieving for you?

Because we're taking on other people's feelings around us. Your children, your husband's trying to support you, your sister is there to support you, but you still are like feeling those things. I don't know, am I reading too much into Deanna and conflating you too? I don't know. You tell me what you think.

Nicole Chung: Oh, I'm always happy to talk about Star Trek or Deanna Troi. I don't necessarily think of myself like as an empath. Maybe it's because some of the people who describe themselves that way to me, I've been like, no, you're not. But I think what you have a point in terms of as adoptees, I don't wanna say we're like shapeshifters, exactly. Nor should we have to be. But I do think there's a lot of reading the room, trying to read cues and trying to sometimes be what other people want. Of course, that's like a universal experience that children have. Like we learn very early on whether we're adopted or not, like you learn what things you say that really upset your parents and what things are okay and safe.

You learn whether it's safe at all to disagree or to make them upset. Like you, you're always picking those things up. In my case, I write in a living remedy about being a very watchful kid and part of that was anxiety, I think. And part of it was being in a place where I knew my presence was often unexpected or unwanted.

I mean, not by my family. My adoptive family, my parents, but like out in the world, in the community where we lived, this very white community. I just didn't really feel safe, as a child from a super young age. And I was always like aware of where I was, who I was with, whether I was drawing attention to myself, wondering what people thought. And so yeah, I mean those qualities, that watchfulness and that wanting to find a place or people with whom I can feel safe, that's persisted for sure.

How it relates to grieving. I mean, I don't know that I had thought about that till you asked the question. I don't know. So many things besides being adopted, went into that. Like being a writer, being observant, like making my living literally observing and remembering and then trying to listen to the story and tell that. Those are things that like I can't exactly trace to adoption. They're just part of me. But yeah, I think just the hardest thing for me to do in grieving my parents was learning to show myself grace and show myself care and like grieve without this self-recrimination and like desire, I guess, to keep myself suffering because that's what I thought it meant to grieve.

That's what like a good, loyal daughter does when her parents die. Learning to grieve without that kind of self punishment, that self-blame, that was really difficult and I'm sure some of that stems from just like the way I grew up feeling very responsible for other people's feelings and other people's comfort. Which is impossible, I guess, to divorce from growing up as a transracial adoptee.

Haley Radke: In the book, when you are sharing some of those first months of grief, both after your father's passing and then after your mother's, you share some deeply private thing, private thoughts that you, that came to mind about not wanting to be on this planet anymore and about your anxieties and things. And I don't necessarily want you to share about that because you lay that bare in the book very well and I felt so appreciative that you were saying, the true thing, so you could really invite us in.

And I'm curious if you have memories during those times of friends or other people in your life who loved you well, like what were the best things that people did to help you through that time?

Nicole Chung: When I think back to the depths of my depression after my father's death, first of all, I didn't really know that's what it was.

I thought, of course I feel horrible. Like my father's dead. This is grief. This must be what really deep grief feels like. It's not exactly the case. In many ways, I wasn't actually letting myself grieve. It was just too painful. And so I was cycling through a lot of anxiety and like guilt and self-blame over what I felt were my failings as his daughter.

Like the things I wasn't able to do to help or save him. Practical things like not having enough money, like to pay for the medical care he needed when he needed it. To like other things that maybe I couldn't really help, like where I lived, where I settled, in part because I had my own children and my own family. I just kind of, I was so wrapped up in like blame and in punishing myself, and I think that's where a lot of the like depression came from.

I don't know, like some of those months are a blur. Like I mentioned in the book. Like I cannot, we moved from one house to another in that the first few months after he died. Our rental term was up. We had to leave. And I don't remember packing or unpacking. I know we did, we live in this house still.

But I just don't remember really any of it. I can tell you about the four or five moves prior to that, but not that one. So things like that are just kind of lost to me. And that's trauma. That's, and that was a reaction to that. But I do remember of course my husband was great.

He's always been our rock. I mean, I don't think it took a loss in the family to make that really clear to me. But he was doing a lot, not just like a lot of the practical things, which he's always done, but like the lion's share of parenting.

And then, when I got to see my sister. I mean, that was very important too. And we didn't see each other for a long time because of the pandemic. But we would talk often. I mentioned my cousin would check on me a lot and no one could really do anything. No one could make my father's loss or my mother's loss any less painful. But, the people who I really trusted and loved who I could be my whole self with, who I could be messy with who I could admit, like my, the dark thoughts I was having too, that was, I mean, helpful, as helpful as anything was.

And then, I'll just say and give a shout out to therapy. I sought therapy a few months after my dad died. I still go. It's been really hugely helpful and I don't know, like I recognized that I needed that and it's why I continue to go. I started going because of grief. And needing help with that.

But of course, like so many other things come up once you start. I am really grateful, like it was a horrible time, but I'm lucky to have had the support and like the access to that support, that I needed.

Haley Radke: I was gonna- I watched you take care of your mom, like obviously not reading about it in the book, all the things you would send to her and the ways you were trying to connect with her because of Covid 19 and not actually being able to go physically to her.

And so I guess I just imagine that your people would do those same things for you. And I get it in that grief blur, like it's hard to remember and bring those things to mind.

Nicole Chung: One thing, I mean, I remember after my mom died is that I mentioned this in the book, but I was so anxious about the phone because for every, for months, like the only calls and texts I got were like, about my mother.

It was like always horrible news. And even when I was reaching out to other people for help and support, it was like through my phone. And in the days after she died, like when the phone would ring, like my heart rate would spike, and I felt like I was gonna panic sometimes. So my husband started carrying it and telling me if I had to talk to somebody, if it was important, because I like, just couldn't have a phone for a few days, few, maybe a couple of weeks after.

So my friends knew this, but they wanted to be with me and they couldn't call and talk to me cuz I wasn't really in a state to have a conversation. So they, a group of them recorded these like video condolences, just like them talking at their phone, cameras telling me they loved me and they were there for me.

And when I was ready they would be there. And they sent them to me and it meant so much because they were trying to be with me in this way that they could. And even though we couldn't be together, they also could not get on a plane and fly to me. And then I, couldn't even talk on the phone in real time.

So they wanted to make sure I knew, even though I couldn't answer the phone, that they were, they loved me and they were thinking of me. So I just remember that being like profoundly important at that time. And it's still it was just awkward freely. That's not the kind of thing you would think to ask a friend for, when you're grieving.

It'd be great if you could record a video just like telling me that you're there and I can just watch it over and over or reach out when I'm ready. I couldn't like think of tasks to give people and I certainly wouldn't have ever thought of that one. It just meant a lot that they took the initiative, they realized it would be helpful and.

They did it. And it meant a lot to me.

Haley Radke: That got me teary. See, I know you have good, you've got good people in your life. I love that. Thank you for sharing it. You mentioned earlier and you share in the book that you had to view your mother's service live streamed. I'm curious if there's, if you're comfortable sharing, this is pretty personal, but if there's anything that you've done since then, any grief rituals or things that you've done to make that more concrete's the word that's coming to mind, but it's not the right one.

But for yourself I'm thinking of the adoptees who maybe don't get to go because of estrangements or finding out their birth parent has died after they've searched, or the things that are out of our control. Just like the pandemic was. Are there things that have been special or important to you or things that you've tried to build in to have this sense for yourself of - closure is not the right word either, but I think you get the gist of what I'm trying to say.

Nicole Chung: Yeah, I mean, I don't think of the book as therapeutic. That's not really what writing, at least for public consumption, is for me. But I will say I do think of the book in many respects as like the legacy of my family and like that story, just knowing that it's preserved imperfectly, but still- that it's a place where people can still meet and learn about my parents and hear their voices.

It's a place that I will always have and my children, will always have to do that. I mean, that is very meaningful and I, I mean, I recognize too it's more than that. It has to mean something to readers. It's not just about me and my feelings, but it is actually kind of comforting that's the case because, I don't have those physical connections to home anymore.

And like when my mother died her, she wanted to leave her house from her manufactured home to her sister. Partly as thanks for caring for her. And my, her sister recently passed away and has left the house to someone else, which is of course like her right. But I don't have any claim or any stake too to what was my parents' house, the place where they lived and died.

There isn't going to be some visit home, where I go through everything and pick out things to keep and sell others and say goodbye to that place. Again, like the book is the structure kind of through which I get to do that.

And I don't know, I think in terms of like rituals, I've done things like send flowers to be placed on my parents' graves, like on their, the anniversaries of their deaths or their birthdays or their wedding anniversary.

I try to think about them of course, and sometimes I've done things like have a meal in their honor. Sometimes I've written letters, which of course, go unsent, kinda just telling them things. And I look at their pictures a lot. And the pictures I actually love most are the ones when I was very young or not in the picture yet.

I like thinking a lot about who they were before I really got to know them as parents. I'm so curious still, as much as I've learned and as much as I've written, like I, I'll always be curious and have questions about who they were as people before I entered their life. So like those things are really meaningful to me, but it's imperfect and sometimes it doesn't feel like enough.

There's still this physical distance. There's very real emotional distance from the rest of my family. There aren't these physical connections. Like I don't really go back to my hometown a lot. I can't go back to my parents' home. So it's hard. I think I'm still learning what missing and grieving and honoring them will look like.

Haley Radke: Are there stories or things that you are- oh, maybe even traditions, I guess, that you are like planning. I am gonna share these with my children in their honor.

Nicole Chung: I don't know that I think about it consciously, but of course like when I think about traditions around like holidays or birthdays or even the way, like I try to talk with my kids or be available emotionally and all of that.

Like so much of that is based on how I was raised. I guess the fact that like the only vacations we ever took as a family were to the Oregon coast, and it's partly because we couldn't actually afford to go anywhere else, but it's also because it was like our favorite place. And it was a really special place to my mom and me especially.

So like I do wanna take my kids out there again. They've been before, but also just like going to the beach or beaches that are closer to us. That's kind of like a special place for my family. I don't know, we got a dog and my mother always loved dogs. Just had a very special connection with them, including her last dog Buster who was like faithfully at her side, like all during her illness and even as she died.

In a way I think about us having a dog that we love, who's a real comfort to the whole family is this extra connection to my mother. Just I dunno, I think it's something she would've understood and been really happy about. So there are some things, but mostly it's like everything in life.

There's a part in the book where I write that like to live is to remember them. And it's true, like everything I do in and with and for my family, but also beyond that is, is part of what it means to love and to miss and to grieve them. And it's what they would've wanted from my life to go on, and for me to find contentment and fulfillment and like meaning and joy and all these things despite these losses.

So I think of my whole life in some sense as like an extension or honoring them, like being what they really wanted for me. And it's kind of lovely actually that I get to do that without the pressures. Some people feel, right. Of feeling they have to live up to something or accomplish something or achieve something, to really honor their family.

I know, like I'm un I'm under no illusions about like my parents' expectations in that regard. They just wanted me to live and be happy and have my own family and, love them. So that's kind of what I'm carrying forward.

Haley Radke: I have the photo of you and your mom up on my screen because I was just double checking the time article. One of the ones that you wrote. It was one you wrote while you were deciding whether or not to visit her and you were expressing that in the article. We can link to that. And so I, I see her face as we're talking and there's a pup in that picture. And I, I noted in the book you're mentioning Sebastian, your cat and your mom's dog Buster. And then your new little friend, Peggy. God, what a....

Nicole Chung: Peggy is not so little anymore.

Haley Radke: No. One more reason to follow on Instagram is Peggy. Yeah. But in your book launch, which I attended virtually, someone made sure to ask what happened to Buster? There's this importance for us of animals and we actually recently did an episode on adoptees and grief around losing our pets.

But I'm wondering, you mentioned your mom's love of animals. How has that been for you, having Peggy in your life and seeing your children really enjoy connecting with Peggy as well?

Nicole Chung: Yeah, I mean, I sometimes joke that I don't think my mental health should be so dependent on the dog or anything else that's mortal. But no she's been like so good for our family. So we, like many people, we got our dog in the, like during the pandemic. She's very much a pandemic pup. We got her about six months after my mother had passed and, you all remember like the fall and winter of 2020, like nobody was doing, maybe you hadn't suffered a deep personal loss, but like no one was thriving.

I didn't know anybody who was like genuinely happy and we were facing down this long pandemic winter where we weren't vaccinated and we still really weren't seeing people and it was grim. Okay. Even if my mother hadn't died, I was just like, I know a dog does not magically fix anything. I know grief is just something you live with.

But at the same time, like honestly, I just felt like we really needed a win. We needed something really good to happen. So that was Peggy and she demanded all our focus in the way dogs often do at the beginning. Especially like just meeting her basic needs and learning how to take care of her. Kinda like having a newborn, but like only for a few weeks.

I don't know. It was just like a new place to put all that energy, right? But she is, she like quickly became the emotional center of the family. My kids, my kids immediately felt happier. Like I could see real joy on their faces for the first time. And more than that, like I could actually feel that, like I could access it.

And I mentioned in the book how, like for months after my mom died, I always felt like if I was viewing someone else's joy or happiness, it was like through a glass. It was something about, it wasn't quite reaching me, like I could see it, but I couldn't feel it. And Peggy crashed through that glass, that wall.

And I really felt like I could feel joy again very deeply. And seeing, experience it with my kids for the first time since her death. So yeah, it's, I don't know, she's the family comfort animal for sure. She got the kids through that like long zoom school year. Like they would take Peggy breaks. Yeah she's still really kind of at the heart of the family in many ways. So we're, we are very like lucky to have her.

Haley Radke: It's nice to have some piece of joy while you are still moving through. I just, I don't know. The more we've talked before, like adoptees are just experts in grief. There's just not this endpoint, but as our life grows around our grief, you know that diagram that everybody shows. There's gotta be Instagram reels about it or something. I know I've seen like all the circles and my therapist too has drawn them out for me.

As our life grows around our grief and incorporates, it's just like somehow coming back to some sense of normalcy and I kind of breathe this sigh of relief when you said it's been three years because preparing to interview you, this grief of your loss of your mother is like raw to me as the reader. And I feel oh, you've had time before. You have to go on this tour and talk about this over and over. Not that it's makes it that much less painful, but it's still yeah. How are you talking about this over and over after I've participated?

Nicole Chung: That's like the hardest question to answer. I, I don't really get nervous like going on the radio anymore, but I had this interview that I felt was kind of a big deal with Steve Inskeep at N P R and the, I was like we're getting through this. It's okay. I feel like I'm not bombing this. And then the very last question he asked was like, how are you doing?

And I came up with something, but I'll just say that is the hardest question to answer. Every possible answer flew out of my head in that moment. I don't know, it's just, it's been- tour's been hard. Like it's a privilege and it's been- parts of it have been really joyful. It's been wonderful to meet readers and to see friends and to talk about the book.

And there's no substitute for that. I really- like more than the reviews, which I'm thankful for, and more than interviews or articles, like getting to actually meet and hear from readers and hear that the book mattered to them and hear why there's no substitute for that as far as I'm concerned as a writer.

So I love that and I'm really aware of what a privilege it is, especially after the pandemic when so many people couldn't do that after publishing books. And at the same time, it's a lot, it's been a lot to hold this grief and to hear, at every event someone will often, many people will share their own stories with me and I, that's been happening since All You Can Ever Know.

And I'm very conscious too of that being an honor, but also being a lot to hold. Right. Yeah, it's been, I think. I think I'm doing okay. And unfortunately I got Covid at the end of my tour and had to cancel some events. So it feels a little unresolved right now. Actually. I was supposed to go to Chicago and Boston and didn't make it there, but I don't know, I've been, I thought it would be even harder than it has been emotionally to go on tour, to relive events, to answer questions like about people I've lost.

And while it's been difficult, I think there's been like a lot of solace and beauty and humor and community and joy in that as well. So I don't know. The book really means so much to me. I think it is the best thing I've written and I'm very like proud of that. So it has meant a lot to get to go out and share it with people.

Haley Radke: I'm absolutely gonna recommend that people pick up A Living Remedy. I read All You Can Ever Know. And we did a book club for that all the way back in 2018 when it came out. And when I first read A Living Remedy, I loved it. I read it very much with these eyes. I came away being like, wow, that was a scathing critique of the American healthcare system.

And oh my gosh, capitalism. And, I came away like angry and I think I already told you, I, I read it in one, literally one sitting on my laptop. So you must know if I'm gonna read it on my laptop with that, our copy then it's the big deal anyway. And then to prepare for today, I listened to the audiobook and I came away with this oh my gosh, it's your soul laid bear.

It's so deeply personal and I found it so interesting that I had these two different experiences reading it and it wasn't- you're not the, you're not the audiobook narrator. And for me that made it a little bit easier cuz hearing it in your voice, I think I would've like really been broken and I felt thankful that you didn't have to read it.

Some piece, I don't know if you have a comment on that or not, but I was like, oh my gosh, if you'd had to read this out loud to us, I don't know if we could have bear, just beared with it.

Nicole Chung: I don't have that much faith in my performance skills. Like I haven't read either of my books, although I will say, like I, I think I'm a decent reader of my own work, but in short form. I enjoy like reading in public speaking. I did like theater a little bit in high school, so like I'm not afraid of it. And I I like to read aloud with my kids even though they're old and they don't need me to read aloud to them anymore. But I enjoy doing the voices. I think I do a good job reading. I don't know that I could have read either of these books, like to my satisfaction.

So I was kind of happy to outsource that and. It is kind of interesting. I, so I love the audiobook of A Living Remedy. I think Jennifer Kim does a beautiful job with it.

Haley Radke: Amazing.

Nicole Chung: She doesn't sound like me, but of all the readers, I just, I listen to different samples and everybody's very talented. But I was really hoping she'd be available because like her sample was my favorite.

I don't know, it is always really strange listening to your words and your life, but not in your voice, but I think you're right. And it hadn't occurred to me till you said it, that having that separation, I guess it might have been like beneficial to me as well. I didn't think I was shying away from having to read it out loud by choosing a different narrator.

But of course, like it would've been a difficult very emotional thing to do my own audiobook. I really do recommend the audiobook. I think it's, I think Jennifer did such a wonderful job with it and it doesn't surprise me that hearing it read aloud, and also just encountering it a second time, months later, you'd have a different experience of it.

I think that's actually kind of, I'll take it as a compliment because I think that's how books can reach us at different stages for different reasons and leave us with different thoughts and impressions. So I know like I always love like revisiting favorite books and I always get something different like every time I do.

So yeah, that, that part does not really surprise me that the experience for you was different.

Haley Radke: I remember going into reading it and already being mad about the situation, right? Because I'm like, oh my God, you didn't get to go to the funeral. I knew the story, like I knew it had as much as you can just know facts.

So that's how I went in and that's what I experienced. That's what I read. And so now I'm just like, oh my gosh, I wanna hug you. I'm just like so yes. It's amazing. I loved All You Can Ever Know. A Living Remedy is just you, as just a much like- . Okay. I feel like I'm gonna say this and it's some, I don't mean it at in any way as an insult to All You Can Ever Know, because it was so good.

This is just so good. Like it's just elevated. You're writing, everything is just amazing. I can, I know why it's all on the best of book lists everywhere.

Nicole Chung: Very good publicist as well.

Haley Radke: No. Shade to your publicist, but also just it's amazing. It's amazing.

Nicole Chung: Thank you. I mean, one of the nicest things, one of the best compliments I think a writer can get is: you've improved. I love that people always think I'll take it the wrong way and I never do. Like I'm truly thrilled. I also think it's true and I also. Some of it's like agent experience, but also just what I had to give to this book emotionally. Like what it demanded of me. The fact that I was five years older and had finally learned to give myself more grace and to be more patient with myself and acknowledge my limitations.

Like all these things, I think just made it a much, I think it's a much better book. And that I love my first book too. It'll always mean a lot to me, but I do feel like A Living Remedy is like a different kind of flex for me as a writer. And it also just pushed and challenged me in ways that no other piece of writing ever has.

So it changed so much in the writing and in the rewriting that, yeah. That is why I think that I'm so proud of it, is just it I've said it before. It's like my whole heart. That's really what it required of me.

Haley Radke: And we are thankful to receive your whole heart. Okay. In 2018, you were here. I. You said to me, one of my wishes is to edit and publish an anthology of adoptee authors.

What do you wanna recommend to us today, Nicole?

Nicole Chung: I had love to recommend an anthology I co-edited of fellow adoptee authors.

Haley Radke: Yes, I know.

Nicole Chung: It's young adult fiction. So every, all short stories, every story is by an adoptee of color featuring like an adopted teen protagonist. And my co-editor is the wonderful Shannon Gibney, who probably your listeners will be familiar with.

Have you talked with Shannon before?

Haley Radke: Yes. She's been on our book. She's the one repeat book club author Until you Okay. You're gonna be the second one. How about that? Yeah.

Nicole Chung: Okay. So this is a high honor. So your listeners will know all about Shannon and her wonderful books. But yeah, this is kind of just a labor of love and we were connected by a mutual friend, Sarah Park Dahlen actually who is a not an adoptee, but a scholar in the field of like children's literature who's really knows so much about like adoptee literature especially.

And Sarah had been like encouraging Shannon and me and probably other people too, to pay attention to the space of children's lit and literature for young people because there's- as diverse as it is, I think as it's gotten so much better than it was when I was a kid. I mean, adoptee stories by adoptees are still so few and far between, and many of the portayals that exist by non adoptees, like, how do I say this? They aren't great.

And so there's definitely a vacuum to fill. And even though Shannon and I both had books coming out this year, and so it was like not the greatest like time for us. We, again, it just felt like a passion project. So we put out a call. A lot of writers we knew and many we didn't sent in stories for consideration and we managed to winnow it down.

So this collection is called When We Become Ours, and it's coming out at the end, toward the end of October of this year. So we're both really excited about it and hope people keep an eye out for it. It just, it's just so special to get to do this and we hope it is the book for a lot of adoptee, but particularly teens, that we didn't have when we were growing up.

And I'm personally hoping every one of our contributors writes their own standalone books. Some of them already have, I should say. But I hope everyone else does because like it's just such a deep, rich well of storytelling and we need so many more stories. Our kids, like young adoptees, need so much more. So we hope this is not an end, but like kind of a beginning and the first of many more like it.

Haley Radke: It is tremendous. I am honored again to have been received a advanced copy and just loved it. We have talked to, you have heard from so many of the authors already have appeared on adoptees on, you're gonna be so excited to read this.

So I'm so glad you're recommending it to us. We will all advance order today when we've heard this. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming back to the show. Thank you so much for your work and I'm so honored that we get to, we had to get to have this conversation. Where can we connect with you online and find A Living Remedy?

Nicole Chung: You can find A Living Remedy wherever books are sold. I especially love if you would like to order from your local or favorite independent bookstore. And yeah. So I mean there's that. And then in terms of finding me, I am, against my better judgment, still on Twitter. So Nicole SJ Chung same handle on Instagram.

I'm on Blue Sky as Nicole Chung giving that one a whirl. So you can find me there for now. And my website is nicolechung.net.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. It's got all your events coming up so folks can still, if you're listening when this comes out, there's still things coming up this year. So we hopeful get a chance to meet you in real life at one of your book talks.

Thanks you so much, Nicole.

Nicole Chung: Thanks Haley.

Haley Radke: I am so excited that Nicole will be joining us for our book club number two with her. We are going to be reading and discussing A Living Remedy in October of 2023. Nicole will join us for a live Zoom discussion and details and dates and all of those things are to come adopteeson.com/book club. Our book club is for Patreon supporters. So those are folks who contribute to the cost of writing Adoptees On. Did you know it is listener supported?

So we would love to have you join us over there, adopteeson.com/book club and we are really thrilled to be able to do this. We also have our book club recording way back when we did All You Can Ever know, and that's available on Patreon as well. I'm really thankful for the generosity of our patrons who make all of this possible.

So I wanna leave you with two things. One, a tear up because we're going on summer break and I didn't realize I would be emotional about it. I still truly love making this show for you. And in order to be sustainable, I take a full summer off to be with my kids and get excited about the fall and recording again.

And I'm listening to myself and I'm like, oh yeah. I'm really glad I still love it because that means we're gonna keep going. So this is our last episode, you will hear until mid-September of 2023. We'll be back with amazing new episodes and, there's well over 250 podcast episodes for you to listen to in the back catalog.

In the meantime, if you want to keep up with me in the summer, we are still doing shows every Monday for you over on Patreon, Adoptees Off Script. And we have this amazing new thing we're doing once a month called Ask an Adoptee Therapist. And the recordings of these are dropped in podcast format into your podcast app for Patreons.

And I'm going to give you a little clip of the one we just released in June. Ask an adoptee therapist with Marta Isabella Sierra, and you can hear that right here.

(Upbeat music)

Haley Radke: Our last question submitted is from Bruce. Bruce asked Janina Fisher, who wrote Healing the Fractured Selves of Trauma Survivors, describes the conclusion of trauma recovery as being, when the nervous system can finally experience the sensation of it's over and no longer has to defend against a threat that the body experiences a still being active. There have been periods of time in my recovery where I thought I had to reach that point only to discover a few triggers down the road that there is a whole nother floor of the house littered with trap doors to explore. For adoptee trauma, is it realistic to think that there is an end to the healing work or even a stage where we can just sharpen the saw?

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: I loathe this moment to be the bearer of really rough news. I just was talking about this actually in my own supervision today. No. If I'm gonna be as simple and honest, no, there is no end. This is lifelong healing. I don't believe that I. What happened to us is recoverable even in one generation because it wasn't one generation of trauma.

This is generations of trauma in our birth family system and the adoptive family system often as well. And so I don't think it's realistic and I think there's ideally some compassion, some self-compassion that can be had in that. If you know that this is lifelong, that doesn't mean daily suffering.

That's not what I'm saying. I think when we pursue healing, especially when we pursue it with the open heart and really commit to ourselves, that there can be long periods of joy and growth and building things. That's always my wish that adoptees can heal enough to build things in their lives to make being here okay.

Even to make it okay. And to make it feel like you wanna wake up tomorrow. That's the work there. There is joy here. There is love here. And ideally we can stay around long enough to have those experiences. But I, I cannot sit here and lie to you that it's not gonna be forever, because there's just so many layers to this healing.

And the more we heal, the deeper that gets, we get to touch into different places.

Haley Radke: I appreciate your honesty and I mean, we're all living just a human experience as well, so I think there's just always going to be things, and I think our community too, right? If you're here, you're a curious person and you're, interested in self exploration and personal growth and all of those things.

So we're already on the path. So as much as you're like, oh, I don't wanna tell you this, it's but we kind of already knew. We kind of knew. Yeah. Yes.

(Upbeat music.)

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh. I love Marta. She just says it like it is. If you wanna join us for our upcoming ask and adoptee therapists, we've got one scheduled in July and August and September every month. So we would love to have you join us. Again, you can go to adopteeson.com/community or slash book club, whatever details you wanna grab to join us. All the events are up on the website and I'm just really proud of all the work and resources we are making for you and for our community. So again, a huge thank you to Nicole for joining us today.

A huge thank you to every guest who has been generous with their stories and talking through their adoptee experiences all year long. And I'm really yeah, I'm sad about my break. I'm happy it'll be kid time, kid summer for me. I'm still in the middle of mommy time. My boys are nine and just about 11 as I'm recording this and so I just don't wanna miss a moment.

I am so thankful for each one of you. Thank you so much for listening, and we will be back in September with brand new episodes for you. Thank you for listening. I'm sending my big love to you.

257 Sarah Myer

Transcript

==========

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/257

---

Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. We are so excited to introduce you to Sarah Meyer, author of the forthcoming graphic memoir, monstrous. Today, Sarah and I talk about their love of comics, anime, and cosplay, and how it led them to explore their own identity as a Korean adoptee and comic artist.

We also talk about anger and violence and how it can be incredibly scary when it's erupting out of ourselves. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, on Sarah Meyer. Welcome Sarah.

Sarah Myer: Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: I am really excited to talk with you today. I'd love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.

Sarah Myer: I was born in 1986 in, according to the papers anyway, Seoul, South Korea, and I was adopted three, or I arrived in the United States three months after I was born, so in August of 1986. And my parents had already adopted my older sister who was also born in South Korea. And she's about, I think we're like 18 months apart in age, so she's not that much older than me.

I grew up in a really rural part of Northern Baltimore County, Maryland, where there wasn't a lot of ethnic and racial diversity. Oh, and on a farm, a 10 acre farm at that, cuz my dad's hobby was farming on the side, but he actually had a government office job in the county seat, Towson. So growing up I was around our beef cows and for a short period of time we had chickens. We had a duck at one point.

Haley Radke: Very rural growing up.

Sarah Myer: For sure. And then I studied sequential art, which is a fancy word for comics which was always like my, my lifelong ambition was to be an artist because of my love of cartoons and animation and anime. And currently I'm working in the comics industry, so I was able to pursue that dream.

Haley Radke: Amazing. You mentioned growing up in Maryland and that it's pretty white there, I'm assuming.

Sarah Myer: Right in the area that I grew up in. Yeah.

Haley Radke: And so your sister was also adopted from South Korea and, but you were not biologically related.

Sarah Myer: That's right.

Haley Radke: So was she the only other Korean that you knew growing up?

Sarah Myer: No, actually we, so we did, we do and did have some friends who were also Korean adoptees. But there, I would say that my experiences and my interpretation of the area differs vastly, I would say, from my sisters as well. While I consider those other adoptees from the area to be friends and good friends, we don't necessarily see eye to eye when it comes to perhaps my more pessimistic and sort of negative view of some of the events from my childhood.

And everybody's experience was a little bit different in regards to that. Yeah.

Haley Radke: So I'm guessing you didn't talk much about adoption growing up.

Sarah Myer: I tried to talk about it a little bit more with my sister than I think she liked. And then occasionally I think I've sort of over the years asked those friends who were also adoptees, hey did you deal with, racism?

And sometimes they would sort of, express that they had similar experiences to mine. But I think that I was often- and this is not their fault by any means, this is just my personal interpretation of it- I often was left feeling a little bit like, oh, I guess I'm overreacting, or I guess I'm like too sensitive about it, or I seem like I'm angry angrier about those experiences than, they are.

And it sort of, I would often feel like- I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, so to speak, and maybe I oughta just drop that with them. So I actually ended up talking a lot more about my personal frustrations when I lived there with my mom and my dad. In many ways, like my mom and my dad were more of like my close social circle when I was a teenager, which is a little bit different, I think, from what many parents are expecting a teenager to be like. I often would, stay home and wanna talk with mom or dad.

Haley Radke: Okay. You are releasing this. Stunning graphic memoir called Monstrous. It's coming out very shortly, and you chronicle multiple racist events that happened to you throughout childhood like that with, 2023 eyes, it's obvious, like not microaggressions, like macro, like full on aggression.

Sarah Myer: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Situations. I don't know. I've talked with lots of transracial adoptees that, did experience that growing up and it sounds like you were sort of trying to talk to it with your peers and they were not really - oh, let's just ignore it or put it to the side. I imagine they were experiencing some of the same things you were.

Sarah Myer: Right? I, yeah. And you can see in throughout the book that, now with the benefit of hindsight, I'm able to sort of express how much emotional and mental health turmoil that really- all those experiences with racism put me through. And I guess if I had to theorize as to why they were a little bit more tight-lipped about it. I think to some degree there may have been some component of like subconscious embarrassment where it's like distancing themselves from me. Cuz it, I was also like, just as a teenager, I was like very nerdy and very like odd maybe compared to like their efforts to maybe sort of blend in a little bit more.

And then also I think that. Whenever there's something really uncomfortable going on where you don't have or feel like you have any control over the world around you, which I'm sure as I felt they likely felt to some degree as well. I think that sometimes people like to try they develop like a coping mechanism of com compartmentalizing. So I feel like some of that may have been like pushed way down. I know it's not my place at all to. Try to psychoanalyze what was going on with them. But I'm just saying I can understand why they maybe were thinking, I'm not ready to, nor will I ever be ready to discuss this with you, Sarah. So I totally understand like why they didn't feel comfortable talking about that as much as I did, or they wouldn't react in such a open way about it in school.

Haley Radke: It's something I learned, I think maybe only a year or two ago. About internalized racism. And so I imagine, yeah, if we're like psychoanalyzing from far away, some of it's that too. Are you comfortable sharing a little bit more about your experience with that and what that was like growing up and how that affected you emotionally?

Because it sounds like you were more aware of those things are willing to actually look at it even at the time?

Sarah Myer: I think so for, in some ways, for me, I think that it on the one hand, it- I guess if I'm gonna be more like pessimistic about it objectively- I do feel to some degree that some of those ins insecurities about my physical appearance, like my facial or features, that, that kind of did sort of, I feel a bit robbed of the average teenager experience. I didn't really feel necessarily like anybody in my school would want to date me. So I was kinda like afraid to even really I think, express any form of adolescent, like teenage, sexuality that other teenagers at the time were expressing.

But I do think being optimistic about it, it did also, force me to confront a lot of internal identity issues that any teenager would be facing or any child, coming of age would be facing maybe a little bit earlier because I had such, I had to deal with those negative emotions, so early and, that could have gone very wrong.

I think for me, because I do see and when I was writing and drawing this book, I could see in hindsight a few parts of my life where I think- it's probably a good thing I was a little bit more nerdy than I was because I easily could have become one of those kids who really like rebels and sort of, gets into substance abuse or something to cope with their emotions.

And I think to some degree, my nerdy side is what helped me stay away from that. But it did make me feel simultaneously- and I've said this to my parents, in hindsight, sometimes I think I was almost like still a five year old when I was 16 and yet I also felt like I was 96 years old. Cuz I was like so freaking like weary sometimes and so cynical because of some of the racist encounters I would have.

I sort of would, I think I subconsciously got used to thinking if I'm walking into a room, I have to be emotionally prepared that people are maybe not going to like me or, not like what they see or something, or say something that's upsetting. So I think I was like really under a lot of stress that made me feel a lot older than I really was.

But also my interest in like cartoons and animation and anime and cosplaying was sort of something that also made me feel like, what's. What's going on with all my peers, they wanna drive but they wanna hang out what? You know what I mean? Like I feel like I still maintain this weird like childlike side and I still do to some degree.

Haley Radke: That's amazing. I have a son that's very artistic and is always drawing and of course, at this time, he's only eight. He can draw better than all of us put together. Right. Because he spent so many hours doing that. And we talk on the show so much about writing is healing and different ways you can use art and creativity to get those feelings out. So it sounds like you were doing that.

Sarah Myer: Oh yeah. I think I think the cosplay was an extension of that. It was like when you draw or when you write you're you're either, expressing your interpretation of how the world, how you see the world, or you might be expressing an idealized version of, Hey, here's how I wish the world around me was, and you might be escaping into that a little better.

Or using that as a vision board, I guess, for like how things could be, how good things could be. And I think cosplay was sort of my way of taking that, like artistic expression and wishes so to speak, for how I wish the world could be out into my reality.

Haley Radke: For the older folks can you just say what cosplay is, just in case people haven't heard of that?

Sarah Myer: So cosplay I guess the general definition would be making or cobbling together a costume that, dressing up and wearing it and dressing up like an anime character that's traditionally what it was, like a Japanese animation character like Sailor Moon or Goku from Dragon Ball Z. But it's now been used as a label just to refer to the act of wearing a costume to look like a fictional character. Now people will say, oh, It's my Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes cosplay. So now it's used, it's kinda used to refer to any act of dressing up as a fictional character from a variety of media sources.

Haley Radke: And so you were doing that as a teenager?

Sarah Myer: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Uhhuh. And were you doing that at. Events like where it would be traditional for cosplay comic-Con, that kind of thing or other.

Sarah Myer: So I kinda I started doing that before I went to my first anime convention, which was in, which was Otakon 1999 technically was my first anime convention that I attended, but I cosplayed to Otakon 2000, which in the book I've sort of amalgamated those two events to make it seem as though Otakon for the book's narrative purposes. I made it seem as though Otakon 2000 was my first anime convention and also the first cosplay at an anime convention.

But, I was always excited about Halloween at school cuz I was thinking, oh, I can wear my Ash Ketchum costume and not get in trouble, in middle school. But like I, I would wear my Shinji Ikari, the main character from Neon Genesis, Evangelian and School Uniform and Ava like, earpieces in high school almost every day. I had five pairs of black slacks, five white shirts, like blue t-shirts. And I had made those little, they look like sort of these high-tech looking white cat ear things that I would wear around school.

So yeah, I cosplayed whenever I could, felt I could get away with it at school.

Haley Radke: That is interesting to me, like now we're looking back. Right. And your book really spans, your whole childhood, through adolescence, young adulthood, sort of as the endpoint of that, the story there. But looking back and looking at, adoptee sorts of issues. It's interesting, right, to observe yourself as Oh, I was dressing up as a character every day.

Sarah Myer: Yeah. Or almost every day, whenever I could sort of get away with that, but yeah. Yeah. I think that was a bit of an emotional shield of some sort. Also I think it was my way of expressing my frustration with the high school that I went to. Where football was definitely valued by the administration more so than our theater department. Or the art department for that matter. So I kinda, at that point in my life, I had thought, you know what people are gonna think I'm really, maybe think I'm weird no matter what I do, or I'm gonna be an outsider in this community no matter what.

Whether I'm wearing an Abercrombie and Fitch shirt or like dressed as Ash Ketchum from Pokemon, may as well just do what I want. And I really, I haven't looked back from that though. I guess I recognize where I could have reigned it in a few times, I think. But I really, in the long term, I'm not at all sorry for having done that.

Haley Radke: And like here I'm gonna say two different things. Love what you love. I love that you knew you love these things from childhood and they've brought you so much joy and now you've moved your way all through to a career in this. And then the other thing is it's safer to be attacked or bullied or made fun of for, because I'm in cosplay versus my deep down identity. Asian person raised by a white family. Nobody looks like me here except my sister, and like it's very complex and as a kid growing up I wasn't.

I know I had lots of issues. I've had suicidal ideation since I was like 12 years old. I had depression. I had all kinds of things I was working through as an adopted person. Confused. Like, why am I here? And like you're processing all those things. And so to give so much grace to our younger selves, like we're just like doing the best we can with what we have in this weird situation. Right.

Sarah Myer: Right. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay. I'm curious if you're willing to talk about some of the things you show in the book.

Sarah Myer: Sure.

Haley Radke: You portray some incidents where somebody is, poking you in some way, usually racist, calling you something or something like that, and you get this like volcanic eruption of anger. And there's like this dark monster that you show sometimes. I, like I said before, my, my son is eight and he loves drawing and I'm lucky that I got an advanced copy.

And so I was able to, I showed him, I'm like, oh my gosh, look at this artist. Look at her drawing. I said, some of the books scary, so I'm just gonna flip through a couple things. And I showed him, in particular, the one where you have this this big moment of revelation. So I think you know the page, it's like, the monster is like huge. And anyway.

Sarah Myer: Right.

Haley Radke: He is oh my gosh. Anyway, you have a fan for life in him too oh, can you talk a little bit about that? About having this anger and I don't think it's something we talk about that much in the way that you share in the book.

Sarah Myer: Honestly, I don't know if it's, scientists are always debating, aren't they, about nature versus nurture.

Are there, I feel like every other week there's some article saying, are we born angry? Are some people prone more to anger than others? And I just, for as long as I can remember, I always had a short sometimes long, very volatile fuse when it does go off.

But I've always had an anger about me. I think that even when I'm happily drawing something, like even nowadays, I sort of think is this like energy that I feel and the drive that I feel when I'm drawing or really hyper focusing on a project, is that technically the anger just being rerouted. You know what I mean?

I've always felt very high energy. I've always felt almost like I, I don't mean to say this in the clinical way, but I've almost always had like a manic energy about me. Ever since I was a kid where I would flip between really gleefully happy and hyperactive to like furious like in a second. But I can flip right back.

So I don't know if I maybe was just, maybe in my DNA or my genetics, there's a little bit of a hot tempered sort of streak in my biological family. I don't know. But yeah, I always, I definitely think that the environment I grew up in didn't help. And I do think though, that my sister the difference between her and I, not being genetically related of course might point to a little bit of possibly a genetic thing, and the anger, like the temperament that I maybe was born with.

Definitely my anger was a lot more on display than hers. And I think I, at one point in the book I addressed how it was a weird, almost like, I don't wanna say miracle, obviously, but you know what I mean. It was almost like a weird, like lucky thing that I think the stereotype, the racial stereotype of the meek and mild Asian is actually what kind of kept me from being considered and labeled by administrative staff members at school more of a problem child, you know what I mean?

So that's a really weird, messed up double-edged sword thing, because I feel like my anger, because they just saw me as like this small, like Asian kid, I feel in some ways, like they look the other way when I would do things that maybe might have gotten other kids suspended or even expelled.

And I'm definitely like, those were some of the hardest pages to draw was like, not even the monster character, not even the quote unquote the flat face character who's a monster. It was actually the pages where I showed just Sarah, just hitting somebody or doing something that brought up a lot of shame in me, just like now as an adult drawing it.

Yeah, and I still, I think. Feel a lot of anger about those past incidents. But I noticed that nowadays, it's few and far between now. But if I do encounter somebody who's being racist or ignorant or saying something that just might set me off, like I definitely now am more a little bit more focused on educating them.

So I'll still like, give them a piece of my mind, but it's nowhere near that kind of explosion that I had when I was a kid.

Haley Radke: I think it's so vulnerable for how you shared those incidents in the book especially. I think it will give people permission to talk more about those things, and I can't imagine like it's oh my gosh, I see where it was coming from my child's self.

And not knowing how to channel this appropriately and safely. And yet I still wanna tell the truth and say I, hit them or whatever the case may be.

Sarah Myer: Right.

Haley Radke: So I hope that you've been able to process some of that and have, it's like a forgiveness for your younger self, right? I don't know. It's so hard.

Sarah Myer: Yeah, I mean I, and there was a temptation in some cases to try and reach out to, some of the individuals upon which these fictionalized versions of the characters were based on the character's name is Calvin. But I'm like, no, that ship sailed a long time ago.

You know what I mean? I'm not. I try not to chase people, quote unquote, anymore. You know what I mean? I try not to look for that validation from people. But yeah, I mean it definitely, it's hard cuz like you were, like you've mentioned a few times, our child self versus who we are today.

It's like we have these two different minds observing things and remembering things and interpreting things. So yeah, my child self would definitely wanna say to, to Calvin, Hey. Just so you know. I still remember that. Just so you know. That really messed me up. That really upset me. But, how do you feel about this Calvin?

But to be honest I don't, I feel like wherever that individual might be I really don't think he would care. Even if he saw this thing plastered in Times Square or something. I don't think he'd care.

Haley Radke: And like just to also give little Sarah a pass too, it like they were doing some stuff where you don't wanna say anyone deserves violence.

Sarah Myer: Right.

Haley Radke: But also bad behavior all around.

Sarah Myer: Yeah. I, and I have to admit, like my adult side, I guess looking back, I tried to think too, what kind of indoctrination occurred in that character, Calvin's home, to make him say in middle school some of those things that he says, which reference World War II and reference comfort women and other atrocities of war in regards to my, Sarah's, ethnicity like and racial background.

What kind of indoctrination was he going through at that time too, where he clearly over, I guess a summer, had been, probably told by some authority figure in his private life, you're not to enjoy Pokemon anymore. You can't enjoy Japanese animation. So he was probably going through something that I can't hope to understand even now.

Haley Radke: Yeah. We're all bringing different things to the table. You, there's this, a quote from the book. You said, my ferocity drove people away. Even the ones I liked.

Sarah Myer: Yeah. Yeah. I think that, first of all, I think my parents were sometimes a little bit a at a loss as to like how to handle my anger. And then I think for sure, like in that instance it was the Power Ranger's friend. I think that she, that friend, like she was in the book. I used an amalgamation of a few childhood, like young, early childhood friends that I had that I think, yeah, they were like really confused by, or baffled by like the anger that I would show even if it wasn't directed at them because, and again, with the benefit of hindsight, that really was, I'm sure, shocking to other little kids.

Especially, and to contextualize it, this was the early nineties back when toys and TV shows for kids were still very gender binary. This is blue and red. It's for boys. This is pink. It's the Barbie car for girls. So I, I do think to some degree there was a confusion of Sarah's acting like one of the boys and eww boys, we don't like that.

But also I think, yeah it was frightening for my classmates to see me just suddenly go off on that one kid in the like recess incident.

Haley Radke: Can you tell us about choosing the title Monstrous.

Sarah Myer: My editors, Robin and Michael and I went through a lot of different titles and it was actually a late, later arrival on Monstrous, and I think, I wanna say it, it wasn't my suggestion. I don't think. I think it was Robin or Michael's, and we liked that idea because monstrous indicates something that's looming, something that's large, but also something that is scary and something that is threatening. And I guess monstrous sort of is meant to describe all of those feelings, like bottled up, you know what I mean?

They're always there, like looming behind you. And if you don't, if you don't face your own, demons, so to speak, your own monsters, if you don't fight your own monsters, you might become the monster itself. Like it might consume you.

I also think that it works for childhood sarah's kind of Freudian fear of being inside a body, like devoured. Like that was always a fear that I had as a kid. Like scenarios like that, if it would show up on TV or in cartoons, would frighten me. And I even still to this day, I don't watch like Pinocchio because of Monstero the Whale like still scares me.

Haley Radke: Oh.

Sarah Myer: And Fantastic Voyage is off the table. I can never watch that movie, but yeah, I think Monstrous just works on like several levels for what kinds of things in my story are monstrous or could become consumed by the monster.

Haley Radke: In later part of the book, this is another quote he says, what he said opened up a wound i'd hidden for years. And some deeply braided anger at my birth. Parents came out that day. Can you talk about how you've looked at your story and thought about your, genetic past now, or your ancestors, your genetic ancestors as an adult in the last, number of years since you've written the book and processed some of the adoption things.

Sarah Myer: Shortly before my editor, Robin, approached me to do this book, I had completed my graduate thesis, my MFA thesis. Which allowed me to research transracial adoptee issues. And it was about how comics and graphic novels as an art form can be used to express or create one's own self-identity through drawing basically self-portrait over and over again through the telling of the story.

For example, Gene Luen Yang's, American Born Chinese, addresses issues with internalized racism and how that character comes to accept all aspects of who he is, the American side and the Chinese side. And during that time that I was researching and writing my thesis paper, I learned a lot of things about transracial adoption in the United States and in regards to records being potentially falsified in some instances for adoptees from overseas. And issues that Korean adoptees in particular have had to come up against in terms of trying to seek out the birth parents.

So I haven't made any contact with my birth parents. I have been able to connect with a biological half sibling, and that's been a really, really fulfilling relationship, but we only know each other through Facebook. We've talked through video chat a few times, and hopefully in 2023 we'll be able to meet. She's out on the West coast.

But I definitely, I still, there's still a lot of mystery surrounding my birth parents because even that discovery of a biological half sibling, between the two of us, we still haven't necessarily been able to identify a biological parent. The shared biological parent between us. That's still like something that is, it feels very far off and very distant to me. But with the advent of the internet and DNA testing and always thinking, huh, I haven't checked on my like DNA family tree thing in a while. This could be the day that I check it and suddenly I see, oh, direct biological match for father or mother.

So it's it's scary how like technology's really helped with that search yet it also makes it very sudden. Sometimes you might not be ready for it. And I really lucked out in regards to my half sibling. She's older than me and she's been super nice and it's been really nice to just like talk, and just get to know each other as friends.

But yeah, I, with the book, I was able to, and I said this to my editors, I really wanted to address how Sarah's, like adolescent Sarah's started to feel angry towards the biological parents, in part, due to how Sarah would see things happening around her. Like the idea of whenever Sarah would see like her classmates being horny teenagers, like Sarah would sort of resent that in a way because- and again, I'm editorializing what teenage Sarah might have been thinking, but perhaps teenage Sarah was looking at it and thinking, oh, irresponsible and hypersexual maybe like my biological parents were.

Whereas when Sarah was younger, when I was younger, I sort of tried to think of it at times, if it ever came up as a fairytale. Like that whole, maybe I'm like a long lost princess or like heir to the throne of some mysterious civilization far away.

And of course, over time that definitely changed. And I don't even, as I show my dad when we're fishing, telling me he had read that they were fishermen, fisher folk, in the papers. But. I don't, I take that with a heavy grain of salt because I believe that he told me what he knew to be true from the papers. But my research since then, circa about 2016, has given me enough anecdotes from other adoptees from South Korea to make me think that could have just been fabricated. They could have just slapped that on there.

And the more Korean adoptees that I meet online, the more I sometimes find myself wondering, am I gonna like just run into somebody who's got the exact same birth name as me, the exact same birth date, the exact same information all the way down the line, and find out that this is some kind of, they cycle through, like I'm being very cynical and very pessimistic, and I'm sorry, this is probably not happy listening.

Haley Radke: But realistic.

Sarah Myer: Yeah. I'm just always, my, my most cynical side is thinking, okay, how many times did they use that birth name? On a forum, did they slap that in there for one, every, one out of every like 100 or one out of every 10,000 and just assume and hope that we would never meet each other cuz it was 1986. It's only a matter of time, I think until I, I either find out definitively, there's no way to trace my biological parents or until suddenly just one day I check that email and they're there. I'm not, I'm still on the fence about how aggressively I wanna pursue that cuz I still think that I would have some anger.

I don't think I would erupt at them or anything, but I definitely, I don't know if I would feel uncomfortable with trying to reconnect with my biological parents if I had definitive proof that it was them.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I know folks are all along the spectrum of their interest in finding info out if they can, and sometimes you just, you can't ever know, and some of us are fortunate to have more info than others and yeah, it's a big spectrum.

Before we do recommended resources, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you wanna make sure you share or anything else you wanna say to adoptees?

First of all, where can we read your thesis and also especially in regards to comics and drawing and all of those things that have helped you, that you wanna maybe wanna share.

Sarah Myer: The thesis should be on Savannah College of Art and Designs, graduate Thesis archives. It's, it would be like a longer link.

Haley Radke: So we can get it. Okay.

Sarah Myer: I believe you can, yeah, I can email you that link.

Haley Radke: Okay. Let's link it. Awesome.

Sarah Myer: And fair warning, it's long. You might have noticed I'm a verbose person and my thesis is kinda long too. So like.

Haley Radke: We have academics on and we talk about their research papers. We're good. We can read anything.

Sarah Myer: And in regards to, I guess, I definitely, and I've mentioned this, I, one of the things that had a profound. Impact on me when I was working on that thesis and also like just broadened my horizons in terms of what comics can do for those issues that I was always holding within myself was Gene Luen Yang's, American Born Chinese. It's a graphic novel from First Second,, and he actually recently, I think it was last year or the year before, signed a contract with Disney+ . So he's gonna, it's getting a live action Disney plus mini series adaptation and I'm really excited to see it cuz not only is that an adaptation of an amazing graphic novel, it's also exciting to see oh, more Asian American faces in mainstream media. So I'm really excited about how much things have changed. I wish I could go back and tell, young Sarah, hey look, it's not gonna be like this forever.

Haley Radke: Yeah. You'll be able to see yourself soon and connect with other people who've had similar experiences. Yeah, and you're making that representation for other adoptees now I'm gonna recommend your book, obviously. Monstrous. It's so good. I, first of all, I just flipped through just to see all the beautiful graphics.

Sarah Myer: Oh, thank you.

Haley Radke: You're. Sarah's a tremendous artist. Like you have no idea. It is stunning. And then reading this story is so deeply personal, and as I said before, you're so vulnerable in it sharing. And I didn't wanna spoil too much because the way you wrap things up is just poignant and insightful for, especially for fellow adoptees. So I know it's gonna speak to a lot of people and have a huge impact.

And the other thing is, this is the only, the second adoptee graphic memoir that I've seen. And perhaps there are more, but it's only the second I've seen out in the world and it is so powerful to have that representation And oh my gosh, I love how your joy and love for enemy and comics and coplay like, it's so cool.

I don't know. I, as I said before, my eight year old is like super into that stuff and I can't relate. Like when you were talking about your examples and stuff, I'm like, Sailor Moon. Okay. I heard of that. I heard of that. I remember I was a nineties kid too, so. So it also helped me inter, it helped introduce me to some things that I was like, okay, I can I can get into that. So anyway, I loved it. It's amazing. I can't wait for people to get their hands on it. How are you feeling about it coming into the world very soon?

Sarah Myer: Terrified. I have to admit, like I, I know that there are gonna be people that I know, from my hometown, who might not like the way I depicted the hometown, but ...

Haley Radke: Should have acted better if they wanted you to write less about them.

Sarah Myer: I've tried to like, make peace with that too, is, but yeah, I'm really excited about it and I hope, I guess that I also hope that it shows just, whether adoptees or not, I hope it shows another side to the East Asian American girl kind of image that's, still lingers. I feel like it's getting, we're getting further and further away from that meek and timid and submissive stereotype. But I definitely, Sarah, as a child and me, who I am now, like definitely doesn't fall into those categories. And I'm sort of hoping that while I, of course don't advocate anybody being as angry as Sarah was, I hope that it might encourage some Asian American girls out there to be a little bit more outspoken when they feel they need to speak up and speak and defend themselves. Verbally, of course.

Haley Radke: Verbally, of course. Yes. Yes. Verbally and just come on, having, I don't know, there's something about having those things depicted. It's okay, I'm not alone. I'm not a bad person. I, like it's, it can be so freeing for someone else who struggled with those, that shame and guilt of past things to be like, okay, I can work through these things and it's not just me. I think it's really validating for folks. So thank you.

And the other thing is you've got a whole list of resources in the back for adoptees, Asian Americans, for bullying help, L G B T Q organizations. And so that's lovely for folks who, read your book and are like looking for supports. Perfect. What do you wanna recommend to us today?

Sarah Myer: We talked about a little bit before this interview, Stephanie Drenka's writings. She's written for a HuffPost and a variety of other news outlets online. She's a Korean adoptee as well, and I've read some of her articles and I appreciate her candid and very passionate writing about various issues that relate to both just Asian America as well as adoptees issues.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Stephanie's amazing and she was on the show, episode 210 and right after we recorded that episode, she left her past career behind and went on to start the Dallas Asian-American Historical Society. She's still publishing Visible Magazine, which is amazing for underrepresented writers and artists to get their work out there.

So yes, I wholeheartedly agree with your recommendation. Sarah, it's been so great talking with you. Thanks for sharing your story with us. Where can we connect with you online and make sure we can figure out how to get your book in our hands?

Sarah Myer: Yes. Thank you for having me, and the best place to find me online is sarahmeyer.net. That's my main website and I'm on Instagram and Twitter at s Meyer m y e r comics. (@smyercomics)

Haley Radke: Perfect. We will link all those things in the show notes. I know you're on LinkedIn too, and we'll link to the published page of your books so people can grab it.

Sarah Myer: First Second Books is the best, is the Publisher of Monstrous and you can order through them and it's also available on Amazon.

Haley Radke: Awesome. So it's Monstrous, a transracial adoption story by, you graphic memoirist, Sarah Meyer. And if you are a nineties kid, you have to go to Sarah's website if not, just to see teenage mutant into turtles because, bonus you. Oh my gosh. You draw them, you're part of a project where you were the colorist for a comic, I think.

Sarah Myer: Yes.

Haley Radke: Oh my gosh. So fun. So fun.

Sarah Myer: It's been a dream come true. For sure.

Haley Radke: I listened to a podcast where you were interviewed about it partial way through the show.

Sarah Myer: Oh yeah. New York Comic-Con.

Haley Radke: Yes. I'm like, oh, if little Sarah could see you now. Dream job. Thank you so much, Sarah. Just a joy to talk with you.

Sarah Myer: Thank you, Haley.

Haley Radke: Behind the production curtain, sarah and I actually recorded this conversation in January and I have been dying to release it. I'm so excited that it's out. Sarah's book will be out right away. Make sure you grab it if you're listening when this airs, or a couple days around where it airs. It is out in 2023 and we're just so excited to add another adoptee authored book into this world.

So please support them and make sure. You make sure you support the adoptee work you wanna see in this world or else we will get less of it. We are winding down towards the adoptees on summer break and so I just wanted to give you another heads up. Next week's episode is going to be our last episode until September, and there are so many episodes you can listen to in the back catalog.

If you don't wanna go without adoptee content for this summer, we're still releasing new adoptees off script podcast episodes for Patreon supporters. We have multiple live events going through the summer. Would love to have you join us. That literally is how the show is. The stay of and keeps existing in this world is through.

Your financial partnership with me, if you had to adoptee on.com/community, you can sign up and join us and make sure you don't miss out on an any of our like really amazing events. We have the adoptees off script parties where you can meet new adoptee friends. We have the adoptees only book clubs and our brand new event, ask an adoptee therapist, which is such a tremendous resource.

I'm so excited about it. So please join us adopteeson.com/community, and I'd love to see you and meet you over there. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.