Two-Minute Memoir: When Love Is a Foreign Concept

As told to Carlin Flora by Ming Canaday

I'm from Hunan province in China. I was around three when my father took me out for a day of fun, including a trip to a playground. I couldn't walk, so he always carried me. (Later, I was diagnosed with polio and scoliosis.) As the sun was setting, he put me down on the side of the road and said he was going to get me a snack. He never came back. I spent at least one night on the street, because I remember crawling around looking for shelter after it started to rain. When I woke up, I was sleeping in a box in front of a grocery store.

A day or two later, a black car picked me up and drove me to the orphanage. It was a welfare institution for both children and elderly folks. During the eight or nine years I spent there, I never really left the complex. Some of the other kids went to the nearby school, but it didn't have facilities to accommodate me, so I couldn't go. I didn't have a wheelchair then. I had to scoot around using my arms.

We were definitely cared for; we had food to eat and clothes to wear. But there was harsh corporal punishment when we misbehaved. I didn't have a fantasy of being adopted, but I do remember thinking, Am I going to be here the rest of my life, doing these same boring chores each day? After visiting the orphanage once, the director of an adoption agency in Oregon wrote about me in his newsletter. The people who would become my parents read it and each had a strong feeling that they wanted to adopt me. I was not a cute little baby. I was 11! Twelve is the oldest age at which a child can be adopted in China; I was just under the cutoff.

I didn't know what America was. I didn't know how to read or write. The caregivers wanted me to learn how to write my name before my new mother came. They said "If you can't write your name, your parents will be ashamed."

My adoptive parents were shocked when they came for me; they didn't fully know about my condition. They knew I couldn't walk, but not that I had scoliosis. My spine was almost in the shape of a C. The doctors at Shriners Hospital in Portland said if I didn't have surgery soon, I would die by age 20 or so. My parents were nervous about the operation, but I was happy to have my back straightened.

I landed with the best parents ever. They're teachers who live on 23 acres of land in the Oregon countryside. My two older brothers were 16 and 18 when I was adopted. My parents were very stable, and the family was happy. But it took me years to love them. The first few months, I was afraid they would send me back; at the same time I wanted them to send me back because I felt so lonely and depressed and foreign. Not a single person spoke Chinese to me when I arrived in the U.S.

The local school decided to go ahead and put me in the fifth grade. My elder brother taught me what money was, and my middle brother taught me how to tell time. My mom would help me with writing, and my dad with science. My parents emphasized education; we had no chores whatsoever. My mom would bring me something to eat while I did my homework, and she would say, "You're such a hard worker." I came from an environment where nobody cared about anything I did to one where everything I did was considered very important.

For years I constantly tested them. I had jealousy issues and always seemed to be in tears. My elder brother left for Brown University a year after I arrived, but I was constantly comparing the attention my middle brother got from my dad to what I was getting. I was a bottomless pit of resentment. Whenever my dad took my brother to do something in town, I would ask why I couldn't go. It was hard for my middle brother—exhausting and annoying. I was aware that I was distancing myself from him, but at the same time I wanted his love.

At the orphanage, the caregivers always had a favorite, and it was usually me. I would get snacks and special privileges. It wasn't something I did consciously, but I was using my method of survival from the orphanage (being perceptive and helpful) in my new home, even though it was no longer relevant. I was in survival mode, despite having helicopter parents. I fixated my jealous feelings on my dad, I think, because it was my biological father, not my biological mother, who abandoned me.

My mom was always very kind and comforting, but I didn't like her initially because I associated her with the female caregivers from the orphanage. She would say "Good morning!" And I would reply, "Bad morning." A certain situation would make me like her, but then I would quickly revert to not liking her. I think the flip-flopping was related to how, in the orphanage, we kids would fight a lot and divide ourselves into groups.

By my junior year of high school, I'd started to care about my mom's feelings more, worrying and feeling terrible if she was mad. It wasn't as if I suddenly loved or cared for her. It happened gradually. I started out not caring at all, and then I totally cared. I definitely love my parents and brothers now. When I went away to college in Eugene, I was so homesick.

I often think about how absurd the series of events was that led to my being adopted. I keep in touch with a friend who aged out of the orphanage and was moved straight into the senior center with the elderly. That would have been me.

Yet I used to be annoyed when people said, "Your parents are so great!" I mean, of course they are, but people would always tell me: "You're so lucky to be in this family! You're so lucky they took you in." This seemed insensitive because it made me feel as if I were nothing and had nothing to give, and my parents had everything to give.

I still catch myself misinterpreting kindness and nurturing acts from my family and friends as signs that I'm helpless or, even worse, worthless. I'm not sure I'll ever completely trust anyone. I have to be careful about distancing myself out of fear, because if I'm always trying to protect myself, I will lead a dull life rather than a meaningful one.