"When I was growing up, I had one Asian friend. I can imagine my parents thinking about friendship analytically at first; I was adopted from Korea when I was 2 and a half and the adjustment was difficult. I worked with speech and physical therapists, unable to form English sounds and beaten down by disease and neglect. I nearly died from hepatitis. As I grew up, I stayed with this friend after school until my parents finished teaching. His house was a place where I could eat rice that stuck together, not what my Korean wife now would call “flying rice.” I’m not sure whether people realize that adopted kids think of themselves as the race of their parents—I must have been in elementary school before I realized I looked different from them. I felt both different and eerily similar to my Taiwanese friend, T., and his traditional—so it seemed to me—mother and father."
No comments:
Post a Comment