He took my hand and led me through a small wooded area that opened up to a beautiful beach. To the left, lush green flora climbed up the sides of volcanoes in the distance. And to the right, rugged lava rocks intermixed with yellow sand and gentle waves, as they rhythmically came to shore. In what seemed like a scene from a romance novel, he knelt on one knee and asked me to marry him while the sun set over the Hawaiian beach behind us. As he rose from his kneeling position, an uncharacteristically large tidal wave crashed onto the patch of lava rock we were standing on, as if Mother Nature herself was overflowing with joy for us. A few moments later, a fellow beachgoer, who we can only assume observed the proposal, approached us with two pink shells, giving us our first gift as an engaged couple.

My own love life is a subject that I have not broached before on this blog, partially because I was still trying to maintain a relative sense of anonymity for a long time and partially because I was 19 years old when I first began writing on this platform. Publicly sharing my early romantic fumblings was the antithesis of the expertise I was trying to convey when discussing complex adoption issues. However, I am now willing to share my journey to love, not because I view myself as an expert, but in the hopes that my own meandering story may calm some nervous minds.

On online adoption forums, I routinely see posts where adolescent and young adult adoptees ask questions about dating and love and rejection, and they remind me of similar concerns that I had during my foray into the dating world. I laugh when I think about an incident in which three adoptee friends presented their final projects in a college class titled, “The Psychology of Adoption,” only to discover that each had researched and written about young adult adoptees’ attachment in romantic relationships. The professor, amused, assured them that it was a very developmentally appropriate topic.

While I was not in this class, my 19-year-old self shared the same thoughts. Perhaps the fear became implanted in me because of the hyper-concern for attachment in child adoptees, but I remember lying in my dorm room bed, wondering how I was supposed to trust that a romantic partner would stay in my life when the very first people in my life, who were supposed to stay, didn’t. 

The truth is, for a long time I chose people who I didn’t need to stay. My first intense crush and boyfriend of two weeks (after months of courting) in high school was someone funny and smart and who had a particular fondness for literally white foods including: mayonnaise, alfredo sauce, white bread, and vanilla ice cream only. Despite my strong attraction to him, I knew that I wanted a larger world than he did and that eventually our starry-eyed puppy love would end.

In college, there was a young man who fashioned himself to be a political rabble-rouser of sorts but who my friends not-so-secretly donned the nickname, “the Lusty Lebanese,” because he messaged me at some point every semester without fail to “see his room.” My sophomore year, I dated a sweet and slightly cynical boy who was still reeling from deciphering if his first relationship had been true love or just lust after all. One day, he planned to meet me at a bus stop, and he came running to the shelter just as I looked out the window from inside the bus that had already begun rolling down the street. This quite visually mirrored our emotional inability to get our timing right. During my study abroad semester, there was a tall, blonde in China who viewed the world as a giant skateboard park, and when I came back to campus, I began seeing someone with a somewhat sordid past whose busy schedule did not align with my busy schedule, barely allowing us to see each other.

Eventually, I decided I was tired of the immaturity of college-aged boys and four-month-long flings. I had seen some of my friends fall in love by this point, and I wanted to experience love, too. During the winter break of my senior year, I turned to dating apps for the first time and met an array of interesting characters but developed the strongest feelings for a shy and somewhat socially awkward software developer from Alabama who was living in my hometown. While meeting online is quite typical these days, what was unusual about our story was the nearly page long letter-like messages we sent to each other for months before actually meeting. I enjoyed his humor, story sharing, and curiosity about life. Our digital letters, somewhat reminiscent of love in a past era, were a very sweet way to get to know someone. But given our political differences (he lost my father’s approval the moment he shared that Scalia was his favorite Supreme Court justice), I always knew that he was a stepping stone on my journey and not my forever person. Looking back, I think it is significant that the first person I chose to fall in love with was someone I knew I would leave, indicating that perhaps I was not truly ready for the love I thought I was.

When I moved back home after college, a romance was finally able to develop beyond written words. The first summer together was a honeymoon dream filled with long daytrips out of town, thoughtful gifts, and so much excitement around finally being able to spend substantive time together. After the first several months though, memories of doubt, insecurity, and cruelty began to overshadow the blissfulness of summertime. As I learned more information about his life, I became increasingly suspicious of the high number of Asian women in this white man’s orb, including his officemate/best friend, multiple previous ex-girlfriends, and even his dentist. Though I had certainly encountered men in college who had Asian fetishes, I felt stuck in a different way this time because I had come to this realization after a great deal of feelings were already involved. With trust lacking on both sides, the relationship turned into predictable cycles of breakups followed by periods of him pleading to get back together and empty promises of change. The next spring, I remember making a tally in my planner for every day that I cried during the first hundred days of the year. Despite knowing that I had no future with this person, I found it incredibly hard to leave because of the good memories created at the beginning of our time together. While I had previously feared getting abandoned by a romantic partner due to my own early childhood abandonment, in reality I think I felt guilty about what might be perceived as me abandoning the relationship and the good, vulnerable child still left in him.

When I eventually ended the relationship for the final time (to the great relief of my family and many friends) over two years after it began, I spent nearly a full year finding myself again, enjoying time with friends, and figuring out the next steps of my educational future. After I applied to several Master of Social Work programs, I decided to try dating again. I wasn’t looking for something serious, just someone nice to spend some time with before I left for school. And that is precisely when I entered my next serious relationship.

Our first date was at a local coffee shop right after Christmas, and we bonded over international travels, growing up in Wisconsin, and figuring out our twenties. He was supportive of my decision making process in choosing a graduate school, and I appreciated that he didn’t try to sway me in any particular direction. When my lease at the house I was renting ended, I moved in with him after five months of dating as a test to see if it was worth attempting to do long distance when I went to Washington University in Saint Louis for school that fall. It was the first time both of us lived with a significant other, the first time I lived with a dog, and the first time we both could envision a future with someone. My friends teased me if I thought he was “the one,” and for a while, I did. It felt so nice and freeing to love someone uninhibitedly after my last relationship, in which there were always walls up, somewhat guarding my heart.

After I left for graduate school, he dutifully visited me in Saint Louis one weekend per month. I describe the majority of our relationship as being either intensely apart, when I was at school, or intensely together, when we were quarantined during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic. Around our first anniversary, little cracks in the relationship began to run deeper and fights over trivial suggestions or comments became more frequent. When somatic symptoms of stress began ailing my body, it was difficult to identify if the source of the stress was due to the intensity of grad school, conflict in my relationship, constantly seeing elevated rates of violent racism toward Asian Americans on the news, or living during a global pandemic. As my home life became more tense and unpredictable, I was eager to get back to my roommate and coursework in Saint Louis. From afar, I tried to mold us into something we weren’t. I became frustrated that he wasn’t working as diligently to grow to his full potential, and he became increasingly angry that I was pulling away and couldn’t accept him as he was. Trying to give the relationship my best effort, I moved back after my graduation. As the world began to repair itself after the worst of the pandemic was over, the world inside of our small, yellow house fell apart.

The therapist I had lined up to be our couples counselor became my individual counselor as I reflected on my dating journey up until this point – what worked, what hadn’t worked, patterns in the people I chose to date, and what I wanted next. Now approaching my late twenties, I began thinking about dating partners very differently than I had when I was still in my exploratory phase. After much exhaustion with the weeding out and questioning period of trying to figure out if someone had an Asian fetish, I stuck with my strict rule of not dating anyone who had immediately dated an Asian woman before me. Whether just or unjust, I knew that I didn’t want to live with any doubt. I also decided to prioritize dating East Asian men, in particular Chinese American men. As I began envisioning a family life, having a collective family identity as Chinese Americans became increasingly appealing to me. Moreover, I began to think about my inability to pass on Chinese culture in an organic way to my future children. I wanted to be with someone who would be able to help me share the traditions, holidays, language, and cultural legacies that have been lost in me through my overseas adoption. I was convinced that I might have to move to a larger city if I truly wanted to find someone compatible, given the extremely small Asian population in my city. However, I didn’t have to move. My sweetheart, a self-described doctor with a business degree and a punny sense of humor, had been walking around the same streets and convening at the same bars and restaurants as me after all.

We began talking the week before Thanksgiving and finally met up for drinks one night in early December. As we sipped and snacked, we shared silly childhood stories, political musings from the Trump days, and aspirations for the future. Our early dates included grabbing jianbing from a little café, walking around the local zoo, ice skating, and watching the opening ceremony of the Beijing winter Olympics with Chinese takeout. Before our fourth date I practiced saying the sentence, “There are a lot of things I like about you, and I’m enjoying getting to know you,” in the mirror on repeat, and when I finally mustered up the courage to say this, he responded with, “Likewise, likewise.”

The first time I grazed my fingers through his dark hair, I remember the feeling of shock ripple through me as I internally remarked that the texture of his hair was the exact same as mine. I laughed when I noticed similar placement in facial moles; we both have little black dots on our chin, right cheek, under our nose, and nestled in our eyebrow. As going on dates turned into dating, and dating turned into being in a relationship, every month with him seemed to undo years of internalized racism that had accumulated inside of my body and I didn’t even know was there. There is something about loving these features on someone I care for so deeply that makes it easier to love the same features on myself – especially the ones I was told were different or ugly and were not reflected back to me as I was growing up. I have known my whole life what it feels like to come home to people who love me but don’t look like me, and it is so comforting to finally come home to someone who looks like me, craves Chinese food like me, and with whom I can throw random Mandarin words in a sentence without having to slow down to explain them. This is my first time in a relationship where I have not had be an educator of a culture I feel incompetent in; rather, my fiancé and I both share with each other our understanding of certain Chinese customs and learn about ourselves and our culture and history through these conversations.

Anecdotally, I have many transracial adoptee friends of my generation who have chosen partners of their same race or ethnicity. I also know several older adoptee mentors who were initially married to an early hometown love and have since remarried spouses who share a common racial identity. When given the choice, if adult adoptees are routinely seeking a shared racial and cultural connection in their home lives, what does that say about what is lost through transracial and transnational adoption? 

When the time came for me to meet my partner’s parents, I was nervous because I was not raised within a traditional Chinese family. Though I studied some Mandarin and have been to China a few times, I worried that they would not perceive me as being “Chinese enough” for their son; however, this fear vanished after our first visit. His parents speak to me in English (and sometimes Mandarin), make special vegetarian Chinese dishes for me, and ask about my health in text conversations. When leaving their house on our fourth visit, his dad quietly uttered the words, “okay, love you,” to me mid-hug, and it felt like they had truly welcomed me into their family.

In the autoethnography that I published last year in the journal, Child Abuse & Neglect, I touched on the significance of having relational proxies as a potential social work intervention to promote acceptance through relationships that mirror the ones that people cannot have in reality; little did I know that this concept would become pertinent in my own life just a few months later. As someone who has lost my Chinese family, it has been profoundly healing to gain a Chinese family through my fiancé. Though I will continue to seek answers, I know that I may never know the identities of my first parents, the recipes that have been passed down through our family for generations, or the stories and traditions that are unique to my relatives. It feels like I have been searching for what’s missing my whole life. But when my fiancé’s mother guides us through a recipe shortcut for mapo tofu or makes me a cup of tea with leaves from her hometown, it feels like less is missing. Though the puzzle pieces aren’t exact matches, more of the picture is filled.

My partner’s own complex Chinese American identity makes it easier for us to have truly empathetic conversations about Chineseness, identity, and belonging. I’ve realized that his parents, too, raised a child of a different culture from them. As immigrants from China, they had to navigate raising a child who was born and raised in the U.S. with Western ideals and values, while he had to negotiate what elements of his Chinese upbringing to hold onto and which pieces to reject. Conversely, my white parents of predominantly Polish and Welsh ancestries, who were raising a daughter born in China, had to actively search for ways to engage with Chinese culture, and I had to turn to external sources when I wanted to connect with that part of myself. My fiancé and I are both Chinese, we are both American, and we have both had to wrestle with what being Chinese American means to us individually, as a couple, and as a collective social identity.

I still marvel sometimes when I think about all of the people in the world, all of the places that he and I have lived in our adult lives, and that our lives intersected, with such wonderful timing, when they did. When I think of my fiancé, I think of smiling dogs, a comforting bowl of congee, a 70 degree partly cloudy day, two spritzes of his favorite cologne, his hand intertwined with mine, and a warmth that can pierce through the Midwestern winter. His love of travel and adventure matches mine, while his desire for relaxation reminds me of the need for calmness sometimes, too. His own long and driven path to becoming a doctor helps him better understand and support my ongoing educational journey. His closeness to his family and lifelong friends speak to his caring, funny, and thoughtful nature. I can’t imagine someone better suited to me, and I am so excited for the life we are building together.

From the moment of his proposal and our engagement, life has continued onward for us as if someone pressed the fast forward button. We have both signed on with new positions – him at his first job out of training and me at my top choice PhD program. We are in the process of purchasing our first home together, are preparing for a cross-state move, and are in the beginning stages of planning our wedding. These are the special moments and successes that I so desperately wish that I could share with my first parents. No matter how much internal work I do around my early childhood losses, there is such pain in knowing that the more life milestones I reach now, the more life milestones I lose the ability to share with them. I long to know what hopes and aspirations my Chinese family dreamed of for my future and what they would think of my new fiancé. What I do know is that I am blessed beyond measure for a life that is greater than what my younger self could have imagined and for a life partner who understands the melancholiness amidst the great joy we are experiencing.