TEEN’S EYE VIEW: Growing Up Adopted Podcast
Biraja, a 19-year-old college sophomore, was adopted from Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India when she was four months old and brought home to a college town in New England. This is her story, as told to Deborah Solomon Reid, who also adopted her daughter from India.
I learned I was adopted when I was two or three, so it seemed normal to me. When my sister, who is African-American, was adopted a few years later from Kentucky, that seemed normal, too. I thought we’d just go pick up a new kid and it would all be good. But when she came, I started wondering about my own origins.
When I was around 7, I began asking about my birth mother. I thought she’d given me up because she hated me. I’d start crying and my mom would reassure me that my birth mother was probably very young and unable to care for me. We’d make up happy stories about her, like maybe she was a classical dancer. I’m still jealous of my sister because she has a picture of her birth mother and knows more about her than I’ll probably ever know about mine.
But I do know about my birth culture. My mom used picture books and maps and Bollywood movies to teach me about India. There was only one other Indian girl my age at my school, and people were always mixing us up even though we didn’t look at all alike.
When I was 14 we traveled to India to see my birthplace. In Kolkata I was surrounded by people who looked like me for the first time in my life. And we actually found my birth mother’s name in the orphanage records. There were many beggars and families living in poverty but I was too young to connect what I saw with what my life might have been like if I hadn’t been adopted. I just took it all in.
When I got home I felt confused about whether I was more Indian or American. Two Indian friends and I started an India Club at our high school to share our culture with the wider community. But people still mistook us for one another. At an assembly on Martin Luther King’s birthday they were all saying it’s great how far we’ve come— as if there was no more discrimination and everything was fine. But they were white; they weren’t being mistaken for someone else just because of their skin color.
Janet 05/07/08
My husband and I adopted a daughter from China, who is now in the eighth grade. I guess what we did was considered “trendy” at the time – because there are lots of families around here with adopted children from other countries. It has certainly made our life much more interesting and diverse, and I think our daughter feels very much a part of this heterogeneous community.
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