So Lucky

So Lucky

Internalized racism, identity dissociation, greener grass

*Content warning: non-graphic mentions of abuse and use of racial slurs*

“Talk to your Uncle Hank!” High-strung and demanding as always. My mother anxiously thrust the landline into my eight year old hands.

Hank, the Fleming matriarch two time zones away in Texas, drawled on about the admirable Irish Fleming ancestors who came to the promised land of Rome, New York, a gray and strip-mall riddled outskirt of Syracuse.

The inevitable was happening: I was asking about family history and my mom had no idea what to do, so she punted the problem to her older brother, the eldest of nine. I was on the phone talking to a man I’d only met once to learn about my heritage.

“You’re American! You just tell them that your grandparents were Irish and that you’re American!” Hank emphasized. “Vietnam” wasn’t said during the entire conversation.

*********

Often, when people learn that I was adopted they respond within the expected, but socially peculiar, range of questions.

“Do you want to meet your birth parents?”

“Do you like being adopted?”

“Are you close to your adoptive mother?”

“Do you want to visit Vietnam?”

With age and insight, by my teen years I realized that these questions made me angry, and my responses were usually just a side-eyed “no”. I hated those questions. I hated being adopted. I hated Vietnam.

For most of middle school, classmates greeted me by pulling at the corners of their eyes, laughing while say screamed, “ching chong!”

“You were adopted! Your parents didn’t love you!”

“Go back to China!”

And when they called me chink, I didn’t even know what it was.

Being Vietnamese was why I was so unhappy. It was why I was bullied, escalating to the point of girls threatening to push me down the stairs. I was pissed at my classmates for isolating me, at my biological family for giving me up, and at my mom for everything. I would transfer schools in ninth grade, and I decided this time would be different.

The only Asians I knew were from movies: Sixteen Candles, A Christmas Story, Mean Girls. Asians were social weirdos. They were mathletes and anti-social because they were too busy studying or working at their parents’ restaurants.

It was survival of the fittest, and I evolved to survive. I was a Hollister-wearing multi-sport athlete. My math grades tanked, and I was privately happy about it. Seniors invited me to their parties and I always had a boyfriend. By 2010s teen standards, I was cool.

“I forget you’re Asian!”

“You’re not a real Asian.”

Relief.

Most of the time, I forgot too. I tried to forget. Thank God these people understood me. I felt seen for who I was, and safe in my existence. I hadn't been called a slur for months! I flew under the chink radar by being Molly Fleming, the little Irish girl who happened to look Vietnamese.

*********

It was sticky-hot at 11 PM when I wheeled my over-sized luggage out of the double doors at the Ho Chi Minh City airport. A sea of waving, crying, yelling Vietnamese are ahead of me, welcoming their loved ones who are returning home. I rolled my suitcases through the massive crowd, my husband following the leader. I brushed shoulders and clipped the ankles of other travelers but they didn’t notice, too busy being wrapped in tearful hugs by their families.

Instead, I was greeted by the driver I hired to bring us to the hotel that would be home for the next week and a half. There was a complete language barrier, despite my best attempts to learn some Vietnamese phrases. Turns out, I had butchering pronunciations. Who was going to correct me?

I’m a real conundrum.

In America, I’m asked semi-regularly, “where are you really from?” The questions make me one of three things:

1. Confused: it took me until college to realize what people meant, that they weren’t asking out of curiosity, but out of commodity and caucacity. I didn’t understand why “New York” wasn’t a satisfactory answer.

2. Mad: anger bubbled inside me. Great, now I have to tell them that I was adopted and fight back tears while I do it. I couldn’t talk about having been adopted without crying. And sometimes, the asker cried while saying things like, “it’s so amazing that you and your mom found each other. You are both so lucky.” So lucky.

3. Anxious: sometimes it would be other Asian folks asking. It’s why I hated getting my nails done– the well-meaning nail techs have a hard time understanding why I can’t understand them. They were the only Vietnamese people I knew.

I don’t know why I went to Vietnam. One look at my American-food fed body, the sweat dripping down my face in the tropical heat, it was clear I wasn’t really Vietnamese. Even before I opened my English mouth, they knew I wasn’t from Vietnam. I didn’t bother to learn the Vietnamese word for “adopted”. I wouldn’t be able to pronounce it correctly anyway. (Later, I learned that adoption isn’t a practice in Vietnamese culture. It was brought there by the French, and there isn't a word to capture what it is.)

During those several days I made Vietnamese friends, ate wildly flavorful food on the street, and stayed in funky western hotels with the other tourists. In 2018, after that first trip, I decided I would visit every year. But it was becoming increasingly clear that I was not Irish, accepting that my internal and external selves did not align. But was I Vietnamese? To the Vietnamese, I am American. To the Americans, I'm Chinese.

*********

I didn’t care if I met my biological family. Except on the occasional night, trying to fall asleep, and crying out, guttural sobs to any higher power that would hear me to please help me find them.

Searching began casually. A DNA test here and there, telling myself it was because I wanted health information. I started sharing my abandonment story in social media groups run by fellow adoptees looking for their families. And during one trip to Vietnam, going so far as to circulate fliers in the countryside town my orphanage is in.

After a couple years of here-and-there searching, there was a break in the case. A friend of a friend sent me a video that a 50 year old woman posted. She shared details that matched my story point to point, down to the details I withheld. Even before the DNA test confirmed, I knew it was her. With my whole chest I was sure.

I found my family, and spoke with them via translators for the first time over a video call. My mother wept while telling the story of how she was incredibly poor and in an abusive marriage with my father in 1994. She struggled financially, mentally, and physically, and left me in the care of my paternal grandparents while she went to find work in the city and to get well.

While she was away, my grandmother left me outside of orphanage gates to be found in the early morning by an employee. My mother, two hours away, had no idea. Eventually, word reached her and she learned about my grandmother’s choice. She returned to the orphanage to reclaim what was hers.

But my mother was too late.

I was parentless for less than one month. But in only a matter of weeks, I became a ward of the state and then reserved for a single American woman, looking for a daughter. When my mother arrived at the orphanage and I was gone, she was told that I was already in America.

She had no idea that I was just a building over, and that she was being lied to. She didn’t know about the industry of adoption or how much American families would pay orphanages for Asian babies.

I wouldn’t leave for America until two months after my mother came looking. I was wanted, but now by two families on opposite sides of the world. And Vietnam had financial incentive to make sure I was signed, sealed, and delivered to New York.

My mother's story turned me upside-down.

*********

I’ve been with my Vietnamese family twice now, when we were reunited in 2025 and a month ago when I visited for the Lunar New Year. We ate, drank, sang karaoke, and watched fireworks light up the streets.

Aunties, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and siblings have relationally embraced me. We cannot speak to each other without a translator, but the love is palpable. I’ve bonded with my half-siblings and have my first father, my step-father. When I’m in Vietnam I see my family nearly every day for a coffee or meal. Every time someone asks me about my time with them, in ernest, I tell them it’s been the best-case scenario. How did I get so lucky?

I couldn’t be happier.

And reader, I wish that was true.