Dr. Arnold Rosen’s Group Therapy for Chinese Adoptees
Transcript: March 1, 2008
*Emphasis has been added in an attempt to accurately show the moods and affect of participants.
DR. ROSEN: I’m glad you young ladies agreed to see me in a group setting. Of course we’ve been meeting individually—some of us for years and some, like Haley, for just a few sessions. Let me go around the room and introduce everyone. Jessica, you’re the oldest at seventeen. Tiffany and Ariel are next at sixteen. And Haley and Heidi will be turning thirteen this year. Who would like to start?
JESSICA: I don’t know why I have to share stuff with a couple of crappy-ass tweens.
TIFFANY: Me either.
DR. ROSEN: Putting the age differences aside, the five of you have many things in common. You all live nearby—in Pasadena, Arcadia, and San Marino—
JESSICA: Great, so we’ll get to run into each other on the street—
DR. ROSEN: You all have similar educations. You’ve gone to Crestview Prep or Chandler, Westridge or Poly.
JESSICA: I’m intimidated already.
DR. ROSEN: You’re all Chinese—
JESSICA: Duh.
DR. ROSEN: And you were all adopted from China.
JESSICA: I still don’t see why they have to be here.
DR. ROSEN: They?
JESSICA: The little girls.
DR. ROSEN: They’re a bit younger than you, but they won’t be afraid to speak up.
JESSICA: You mean, they won’t be afraid to speak up around me. You must have invited them to learn from my bad example. Hey, what are your names again?
HALEY: Haley.
HEIDI: Heidi.
JESSICA: Let me give you my advice and then you can go home to your mommies. Don’t give a random blow job at a house party just because some guy asks for one. Don’t drink your dad’s best scotch if he’s the kind of person who’ll notice a drop missing in the bottle. Actually, don’t drink scotch, period. Don’t bother to self-medicate. You’re seeing Dr. Rosen. He gives way better meds.
DR. ROSEN: Thank you for your input, Jessica. I can see you’re angry—
JESSICA: You always say that.
DR. ROSEN: Can you think of another reason why Haley and Heidi are here?
JESSICA: Nope.
HALEY: Maybe you older girls can learn from us too.
DR. ROSEN: What do you mean, Haley?
HALEY: My mom and dad sent me to you because I was having problems with my friends. I’ve had other problems too. Things I don’t like to talk about. Maybe Jessica, Tiffany, and Ariel will hear what Heidi and I have to say and . . . I don’t know. Maybe our lives are like gigantic jigsaw puzzles. You find the right piece and suddenly the whole picture has meaning.
JESSICA: Whoa! Isn’t she the smart one?
HALEY: I bet every person in this room has had to deal with that label.
TIFFANY: I have.
HEIDI: Me too.
JESSICA: I hate labels. I hate the word labels.
ARIEL: Just because we’re Chinese doesn’t mean we’re smart.
JESSICA: Yeah, but the expectation is there. The high school girls know what I’m talking about. God, all the hours I’ve spent going to Kumon, and now I have an SAT tutor. This year I doubled down on extra AP classes. The school called my mom to say they were worried about me. “If she takes all APs then how will she have time for extracurriculars? How will she make friends and become a whole person?” Of course my mom and dad got all worried, but it’s a little late for that, don’t you think? After their pushing . . .
TIFFANY: What’d you say to them?
JESSICA: What could I say? “Working hard makes me happy, Mom. Do I get into trouble, Dad?” And they bought it, because we’ve been in this pattern since Day One. Now it’s going to be all work until I get into college. Debate, tennis, making blankets for the homeless, and all that crap. I’m sticking with my cello lessons too. I’m busy promoting the Asian stereotype!
HALEY: But are your parents Chinese?
DR. ROSEN: Interestingly, you were all adopted by white families.
HEIDI: I’m a super student—
JESSICA: Brag about it, why don’t you?
HEIDI: There’s a big difference between bragging and the truth. I’m great at math and all the sciences. I have to play an instrument—
TIFFANY: So do I. What do you play?
HEIDI: Piano. My parents want me to be like Lang Lang.
JESSICA: For me, it’s cello and Yo-Yo Ma.
ARIEL: Violin. Sarah Chang, you know, and she’s not even Chinese! She’s Korean! But I have to keep up with my violin because it’ll look good on my college application. Like every other Asian kid in the country doesn’t also get straight A’s and play an instrument too? I don’t know. Maybe I should stop with all the academic stuff, focus entirely on the violin, and go to Juilliard instead of Stanford, Harvard, or Yale. Man, what a burn that would be!
DR. ROSEN: What about you, Haley?
HALEY: I started violin lessons when I was six. My mom and dad also said I could be like Sarah Chang. My dad inherited a ranch near Aspen—
JESSICA: Great! A brainiac and rich too—
DR. ROSEN: Jessica, please let Haley finish. Go ahead, Haley.
HALEY: Last summer we were in Aspen, like usual. They have a big music festival up there. We’re in the tent listening to Sarah Chang. My mom has this thing where she’ll lean down and whisper, “That could be you one day.” She does it all the time, and it’s always really bugged me. But that day, as I listened to Sarah play Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor, I realized that was never going to be me. Not ever. I haven’t picked up my violin since.
ARIEL: And they let you?
HALEY: They didn’t “let me.” I just stopped.
ARIEL: Weren’t you scared? I mean, what if—
HALEY: They send me back?
JESSICA: I’d send you back.
Tiffany: C’mon, Jess. Who hasn’t felt that? When I was little, Mother and Father thought they were helping me by telling me how lucky I was to have been adopted. “Your parents wanted you to have a better life in America.”
ARIEL: I heard that one too.
JESSICA: We all did, but please, that can’t be the real reason for all our birth parents.
HALEY: Lucky. People say I’m lucky to have been adopted. People tell my parents they’re lucky they got me. But am I lucky to have lost my birth parents and my birth culture? Yes, I’m fortunate to have been adopted by nice people, but was that luck?
JESSICA: Damn! You are smart!
TIFFANY: Mother and Father are lawyers. They always gave me way too much information.
DR. ROSEN: Like what, Tiffany?
TIFFANY: You know, because we’ve talked about it before.
DR. ROSEN: But maybe you can share it with the others.
TIFFANY: Stuff like I needed to know from a superyoung age about China’s history of euthanasia—
HEIDI: They kill all the girls there.
JESSICA: I thought it was only me who got that talk.
ARIEL: My mom used to say I had a morbid curiosity about euthanasia. Come on! I used to cry myself to sleep just thinking about it. Well, sleep . . . I guess I don’t mean that literally—
JESSICA: For the longest time I thought my parents were saying youth in Asia.
HALEY: I heard it that way too! Last year, in fifth grade, I got in trouble when I wrote something about it in my spelling homework. My teacher called my mom, who nearly had a cow. I said, “Youth in Asia or euthanasia, what difference does it make? Getting thrown in a river, left in the open to be eaten by wild animals, or dumped over a cliff? In the end you’re still D-E-A-D.”
JESSICA: I don’t get it, Doc. Why haven’t her parents sent her back?
HALEY: That’s not funny.
DR. ROSEN: Maybe we can let Tiffany finish her thought.
TIFFANY: Mother and Father also told me that my birth parents had to give me away because
of the One Child policy. People there want a boy instead of a girl for their one child. So there’s that. But sometimes a woman gets pregnant more than once. Maybe that happened to my birth mom. If the authorities had found out, they would have fined her up to six times her family’s annual income! I’ve heard that! And then forced her to have an abortion. They even force women to have late-term abortions. My parents are big into right-to-life stuff, so they say I never would have been born, as in “Just think about it, Tiffany. If your parents had been caught, the Chinese authorities would never have let you come to term.” As you can imagine, I couldn’t sleep much either. Still don’t . . .
HEIDI: The One Child thing scares me.
DR. ROSEN: How so?
HEIDI: It makes me feel precious but in a weird way. I mean, I wasn’t precious enough for my birth parents to keep, but sometimes I feel like I’m too precious to my mom and dad. I’m their one child.
ARIEL: Heidi’s got that right. Every year for as long as I can remember, my parents have hired a professional photographer to come and take pictures of me. Their excuse is they want a pretty image to use for our Christmas card.
HEIDI: Same here.
HALEY: At my house too.
TIFFANY: Probably all of our houses.
JESSICA: Yeah, so?
DR. ROSEN: A lot of families send out Christmas cards featuring their kids. What makes yours different?
HEIDI: They take pictures in my room—at my computer or painting.
ARIEL: We do ours in the library, and I’m reading a book or something. Once I was playing violin.
HALEY: Ours are usually outside. I’m always the only thing in the photo—no Mom, no Dad, no Whiskers, not even much of the house or garden.
JESSICA: Get it yet, Doc? These are pictures of us as treasured and adored daughters. The object and focus of all attention and love. The object, okay? It makes me want to barf. Hey, everyone, did he tell you about my bulimia? Anyone else have that? Or anorexia? I hate to say it, Tiffany, but you’re a bit cadavery—
TIFFANY: I am not!
ARIEL: The thing that really used to make me go ick was the way my mom would brush my hair, straighten my collar, pull on my hem, and—
JESSICA: Like they’re never not touching me—
ARIEL: I’d spend the afternoon smiling this way, smiling that way, looking into the distance, gazing downward. Pose, pose, pose. On the one hand, our birth parents in China couldn’t get rid of us fast enough. On the other hand, we’re the biggest gift to our adoptive parents. Sometimes I try to imagine what their lives would have been like if they hadn’t gotten me. It’s so weird, don’t you think? In China, we were considered worthless. I mean, really worthless. Here we’re superprecious, like Heidi said. But you could also say our moms and dads got cheated by getting the runts—the throwaways, anyway—of the litter.
JESSICA: At least we weren’t thrown in a well or whatever.
DR. ROSEN: Could we talk a little more about parents?
JESSICA: It’s your group. We have to do what you tell us to do whether we want to or not.
DR. ROSEN: I wouldn’t phrase it that way. I want each of you to benefit from our sessions.
JESSICA: Don’t forget, Doc, my parents are physicians. I know what’s what. You’re going to use us for—
DR. ROSEN: Jessica, maybe we can talk about your need to constantly challenge me another time, but this session is for everyone. Can we get back to my question? Ariel, would you like to tell us a little about your mom and dad?
ARIEL: My mom makes me batshit crazy. Sorry. Can I say that in here? Yes? Good. I love her, but she’s such a mom. She wears things that are totally embarrassing.
TIFFANY: Mothers can’t help it. That’s just the way they are.
ARIEL: That’s very understanding of you, Tiffany, but have you heard your mom talking on the phone to her friends about you? The other night she called me a hormonal monster. Even when she says nice things—I love you and that kind of stuff—a part of me still feels like she’s lying. One time I totally lost it. I yelled at her, “I wish I was in China with my real mom!” She got so mad, she yelled right back at me. “Yeah? Well go ahead! Try to find her! See if she’ll take you back!” Later she came to my room, crying like you wouldn’t believe, and apologized. Soooo many times. I’m like, okay, Mom! God!
DR. ROSEN: Lots of young people say things like that. I wish you weren’t my mom or I wish I had a different dad. Maybe even your mom said something like that to her mom or dad when she was younger.
ARIEL: Maybe. So?
Dr. Rosen: What do you think she was feeling when she came to apologize?
ARIEL: I felt real bad—
DR. ROSEN: I hear that, but what do you think she was feeling?
TIFFANY: Maybe she was upset because she’d said something so inappropriate to you. Inappropriate. I get that word a lot from my parents.
JESSICA: She should have felt guilty for acting like the worst mom ever.
ARIEL: Yeah, maybe. But maybe she was right in what she said. I mean, could I ever find my birth mother? No. So who else do I have but my mom and dad?
HALEY: My mom and dad always say that the parents here and the baby girls they adopt have happy endings and “the holes in all their hearts are filled with love.” But what happens to the birth parents? I think about that when I can’t sleep. Were my birth parents left with holes in their hearts or did they just forget about me?
ARIEL: I wonder what it would be like to be a biological child. Or white. When I was younger I couldn’t grasp the idea that a pregnant woman would keep her baby. If I ever have a baby, I hope she’ll look like me, even if I marry someone white or whatever.
HALEY: People will come to the hospital and say, “Oh, she looks just like you.”
ARIEL: No one has ever told me I looked like someone in my family before. When I become a mom, I’ll never have to answer questions from strangers about where I got her, if she belongs to me, or—
HALEY: If she’s from Mongolia.
ARIEL: And she’ll never have to answer questions about who her real parents are.
JESSICA: Oh, my God. I hate that! I mean, screw them. What’s real anyway? Isn’t it just what we’re stuck with?
TIFFANY: I’ll be a great mom. For sure my baby will look like me. She won’t be in rags and have ants all over her face, like when my parents got me. She’ll be my only blood relative that I know, and I’ll love her forever and ever.
DR. ROSEN: Don’t you think your mom and dad will love you forever and ever?
TIFFANY: Of course they will. But I don’t know if I can explain this. I love them and they love me, but it’s like Ariel said. It bothers me that I don’t look even a little bit like them. They both have blond hair! Everyone in their families has blond hair. We spend a lot of time visiting relatives—and there are a ton of them—in Indiana. Once, at Thanksgiving dinner, when I was, like, six, I asked, “Why am I the only one here with a tan?” Uncle Jack answered, “You’re our little yellow one.”
JESSICA: You’ve got to be kidding! Jesus Christ! That seriously sucks.
HALEY: You must have been really hurt. It would have hurt me.
TIFFANY: But you haven’t heard the worst part. That label—yeah, another label—stuck. Now the Indiana relatives call me Our Little Yellow One. Mother and Father have asked them about a billion times to knock it off. Forget it. They think it’s cute. But the thing is, I’m not just tan in Indiana. All my parents’ friends are white. Nearly everyone in our church is white. I hate it. I stick out like a sore thumb. It’s really hard because it makes me feel like I’m not a part of them.
ARIEL: I’d love to go to China to find my birth mother.
JESSICA: Don’t bother. There are like a bazillion people over there.
DR. ROSEN: Ariel, you said you wanted to find your mother. What about your father?
ARIEL: Yeah, I’ve always wondered about both my birth parents. Who are they? Where did they meet? Do I have a brother or sist
er? Grandparents? Aunts, uncles, cousins? Why did my mother give me away? Does she think about me? Has she ever looked for me?
DR. ROSEN: I notice that you shifted again to just your birth mother. Why do you think that is?
JESSICA: I’ll answer that one. It’s not hard, Doc. We grew inside our mothers, and they threw us away.
ARIEL: If I went to China, I’d want to look for my mother, even though I know it’s hopeless. That upsets me a lot.
JESSICA: You’re alone in the world like the rest of us.
HEIDI: But now we have each other!
JESSICA: Have each other? I don’t even know you! You and the other one—the brainiac—are starting seventh grade in the fall. Am I right? Those are the suckiest years ever.
TIFFANY: Yeah, mean girls.
ARIEL: It’s still really bad for me, and I’m in tenth grade. We have a ton of Asian kids at my school. Who’s studying in the library instead of hanging with friends during lunch? Who’s getting the best grades? Who’s skipping parties and other social activities to do an extracurricular? Who’s going to get into the best university? We aren’t competing against all the kids to get into college. We’re only competing against the other Asian kids, because we have to check that particular box on our college apps.
TIFFANY: At least our last names aren’t Chinese. A girl in my school—Chinese, born here, with immigrant parents—asked if she could change her last name to Smith or something like that so she would stand out. I thought that was pretty funny. San Marino High is mostly Asian now. I’m Asian, but I’m in the minority, because the nonadopted Asian kids don’t consider me one of them because I grew up with white people. To them, I’m basically white. Those kids are really judgmental.
JESSICA: And what about the white kids? They think I earn my grades easily because of my race. They don’t know how hard I work.