Former Orphan

I don’t remember the most pivotal moment in my life. That’s because my life got turned upside down the day my 5 month old self was adopted from China. Legend has it that on the day I was born, my biological parents took a look at my genitals, didn’t see a penis, and decidedly placed me in a basket and left me on the doorsteps of a local police station. Now that’s a happy birthday. I was presumably orphaned due to China’s one child policy that mandated parents keep only one child. In China’s patriarchal culture, boys are favored over girls, and girls get abandoned. Talk about putting the man in mandate.

After being FedEx-ed over to America, I was raised by two white parents. Having grown up in the predominately white south, I experienced life where I didn’t look like most people, including my own parents. This led to some interesting encounters with people who didn’t realize I was adopted. There’s the people that thought I was a lost little girl since no Asian parents were in sight, the elementary school teacher who thought I was being kidnapped when I was just being picked up from school by my white mom, and the neighbor who thought my parents were housing an exchange student. Oh and there’s also the many people who think that I, a young 20 year old Asian woman, am the exotic, mail ordered bride to my 60 year old white father. These uncomfortable situations have dotted my life ever since I can remember.

With my ascent into adulthood, I digest these experiences through the only way I know how – by looking at my experiences of my post-orphan life through the lens of comedy. For me, comedy is the Activia that transforms those moments of pain where I don’t feel like I belong with my parents and makes it digestible. If it wasn’t for comedy, how else would I cope with my aunt trying to set me up on a date with my own cousin? I have to laugh at the ignorance of my aunt rather than be made to feel uncomfortable existing in my own family. I have to laugh at the man who thought I was my dad’s “hot, young date.” I have to laugh at the possibility that dating an Asian might be committing incest. After all, laughter is cheaper than therapy.

Laughing at people’s notions of my identity has become apart of my identity. Since I can’t control my genetics, race, upbringing, or how I appear to others, I control how I perceive people’s perceptions of me. Like a game of Guess Who, strangers try to identify who I must be: She’s Mexican. She’s Cherokee. She’s Korean. She’s good at math. She speaks Chinese. She loves Mulan. She’s adopted? Oh, well then she’s a Twinkie – yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

I am here to say I am more nuanced than a Twinkie. I am more than your assumption of my skin tone. My identity is exactly that. It’s mine. Not something anyone else can project on me. I’m not my dad’s mail ordered bride. I’m not a Sandra Oh look alike. I’m not a chopstick wielding mathematician. I’m not the stereotype you want me to be. I’m just a former orphan laughing at who you think I am.

Adopted Student Association

Rejected Club Names

Sooner Adopted, Sooner Bred. That’s what I originally wanted to name what would become the Adopted Student Association. The University’s takedown of my punny name due to trademark concerns happened sooner than later. After this incident, it was obvious the University is strongly anti-pun. But as a fighter, I journeyed on a quest to incorporate an OU pun into the club name, generating pun after pun. The outcome was too many to count: 17. Many of the resulting names have a dark sense of humor that only adopted people who attended the University of Oklahoma for six years should make. Many incorporated OU’s brand or campus life references. All have one thing in common: they’re all too radically punny for OU.

• Former OUrphans
• Adoption: The Pride of Oklahoma
• I OU 2 Parents
• Boren then Adopted
• Texas Sucks & So Does Being an Unwanted Baby
• There’s Only One of Your Family Members Still Alive
• Live On Until the Next Set of Parents Comes Around
• Crimson Students with Cream Parents
• OU “We Might Actually Be” Cousins
• National Merit Orphans
• Oil ‘n Orphans
• Alpha Sigma Adopted
• Spoon Hold-her Then Abandon Her
• Cat-lett Us Have White Parents
• Sooners Helping Orphans
• Registered Student Orphan
• Sooner’s Secondhand Children 

Club Origins

A new club’s first meeting was a dream come true for the two OU students who started it together. The first meeting of the Adopted Student Association took place at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3. About 15 people met in a small conference room to talk about what the association was created to do and share some personal stories about adoption.

Emily Sharp, an OU Mechanical Engineering and Film and Media Studies Senior, is Co-President of the Adopted Student Association. She said she was adopted from China at 5 months old. “Our vision really is just to make a community for adopted students here,” Sharp said. “And we mean adopted in its broadest sense, so if you were raised by other family members or people that were in the foster care system — we want to … create a community for people from those backgrounds to come together and talk about their experiences.” When Sharp was born in 1995, the one-child law was still in effect, so many boys with disabilities and girls were put up for adoption during that time. “What I’ve been told is I was put up for adoption from the day I was born. I was put in a basket and placed on the steps of the police station,” Sharp said. Sharp was kept in an orphanage for five months and then adopted by her parents in July of 1995. She said one reason her parents specifically wanted to adopt from China is because they wanted a girl.

Valerie Smith, Sharp’s Co-President and Management Sophomore, was adopted locally from Oklahoma City. Smith’s adopted parents had known her birth mother while she was pregnant and had taken care of her throughout the pregnancy. “I knew my birth mom did what she did because she couldn’t give me a good environment to grow up in,”

Smith said. Sharp hadn’t met very many OU students who were also adopted, she said, and even fewer who were interracially adopted. That’s when she met Smith. She said the two made a lot of jokes about being adopted, which sparked the creation of their own association. Sharp said, “Well, if there’s a Lettuce Club here at OU, why can’t there be an Adopted Student Association?” What started as a joke turned into a reality last spring, when the girls gathered three officers, an adviser and 10 dedicated members.

The adviser for the group is Robert Con Davis-Undiano, an OU professor and the executive director of the World Literature Today program. Smith and Davis-Undiano met through the President’s Distinguished Faculty Mentoring Program at OU when Smith was in one of his sections. “I was really happy to do it,” Davis-Undiano said about his role in the club. “I think coming to college is really exciting for everyone, and a little traumatic, too… To have an extra layer of complexity — maybe wanting to know your family of origin, maybe wanting more contact or less — gets really complicated.”

Reety Erwin, Public Relations Sophomore and Public Relations Chair of the club, said she joined because of her friendship with Smith. “I’ve known Valerie for a very long time,” Erwin said. “I think it’s something that’s really important on her heart, and it automatically becomes so on mine.” Erwin said she is one of several officers who were not adopted but joined because they believe it’s an important club. “While we might not have the similar experience (of being adopted), we just help in any way we can,” Erwin said.

Both Smith and Sharp were adopted by white families, and said they have had trouble connecting with their different cultures. “I consider myself a Latina woman but also acknowledge that I have privileges that other people in that group don’t have,” Smith said. “So I try to stay in my lane while also embracing my culture.” Since Sharp is ethnically Chinese but culturally American, she said she feels like people have certain expectations of her that she doesn’t meet. “Because I’m Chinese, people have the expectation that I know how to use chopsticks, or I know how to speak mandarin, and I love pandas and Mulan,” Sharp said.

Sharp and Smith both said that people typically didn’t associate them with their parents because of the difference in ethnicity. “It’s like always feeling like an imposter wherever you go,” Smith said. Smith said one of the club’s big goals is to educate the OU community about adoption and try to debunk some of the myths that people may believe. She wants the group to open up discussions about adoption issues around the world. “The idea of having this support group where people can relate to each other about these things is a chance to open doors that need to be open for everyone, and over time it could become a large group,” Davis-Undiano said. “It’s really good to have other people to talk to about it.”