Why You Must Not Treat Adopted Children as Different
I had the same basic needs as my non-adopted siblings
When I was a young child one day I looked at our beautiful shiny silver kettle and was surprised to see an Asian face looking back at me.
“Mum, there’s a Chinese girl in our kettle” I told my mother.
“Don’t be daft,” she responded, “that’s you.”
This was news to me. It didn’t matter to me what race I or anyone else was. We are all human and the idea that people of different races are different was new to me that day I saw my reflection in the kettle.
My mother told me when I was five years old that I was adopted. I had been placed into an orphanage in Malaya, as a baby, because my birth parents were poor and had enough mouths already to feed. The first five years of my life in Australia with my English-Australian family were largely stress free. But when Mum tried to explain to me that kids at primary school wouldn’t believe that I was a sister of an adoptive sister because I was Asian and my sister wasn’t, it confused the heck out of me.
“Being Asian” and “difficult different,” was not a construct that a healthy and nurtured five-year old wondered about. The first glimmers of shame appeared in my psyche. The stress-free life truly changed…
