There is a popular (albeit misguided) belief that BIPOC kids adopted into white families live white-approximate lives and grow up with white privilege. This belief asserts that adoption is beautiful and is one of the purest kinds of love, a love that has the power to transcend racial boundaries, replacing a lost family with one newly gained. But this simplistic vision of adoption is propaganda in service to the multibillion-dollar adoption industry and its paying customers: white, adoptive parents with access to power and privilege. However, our proximity to white privilege also correlates to our proximity to white violence. Packs of white boys riding their bikes through my neighborhood, shouting anti-Asian slurs as they passed my house. The white woman down the street who perceived me as polluting the neighborhood. Veterans who compulsively told me about their Korean War experiences when I was just a little girl. Racist nicknames and comments about eating dogs. The erasure and isolation. Fetishism and hyper-sexualization. The rape. To acknowledge one’s adoption trauma is devastating on its own. Doing so …

Around age 10, I got a bad sunburn on my face. My adoptive mother didn’t really take sunscreen seriously. She, a white woman, was always trying to tan. A cancer survivor, she liked tempting fate. She admired my skin tone, particularly in the summer months when her skin reddened and mine caramelized. The tanner I became, the more she admired (envied?) my body. “Look at the color of your skin!” she would exclaim, taking a step back to gaze at my bare arms and legs while I played at the pool or the beach, her voice a mix of incredulity and admiration. “You tan so nicely; your skin is the perfect color.”  I did not know then about fetishes and colorism; I just felt proud of my tan skin. While I never asked, I imagine my adoptive mother’s preoccupation with my skin tone was driven by her hyper-awareness of our biological differences, for these biological differences poked at her insecurity that I was not “really” her daughter. My adoptive mother once admitted that, early in …