这是我真正的家人 Zhe shi wo zhen zheng de jia ren
I was born in Beihai, China, in March 2003, and was adopted by Mary and John Gerzema in April 2004. When I was around ten years old, my parents and I did 23andMe. Before then, I had simply thought of myself as a small Chinese girl who was adopted by white parents and raised in an American Midwestern culture. Growing up I learned the term “banana,” yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I am an Asian person who acts and talks like I am white. I am and have always been very close to my parents, but talking about adoption has not always been as easy as it is for me now. This term is much more swallowable for me now that I have realized and accepted how true this is. While I learned Mandarin for eight years, I am still not fluent and never felt a true affiliation to the language. A few years ago, I took an Ancestry test and found that I am not only Chinese, but actually mostly made up of Vietnamese, and Dai (an ethnic group in China’s Yunnan Province) ancestry.
While Christmas is my favorite holiday and the concept of Santa Clause and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer is the greatest thing since sliced bread, I still wonder what it would be like to grow up with the traditions and culture of my birth family. Would I be more inclined to believe in something spiritual, or understand and value the importance and significance of taking care of family? I grew up with the independence of an American, being baptized at one and going to church every Sunday with my family. I attended CCD every Wednesday in Middle School and quit one class before my confirmation in 8th grade because I was not sure of my faith.
As I have grown up, thinking about what I believe in, what I want as a person, and who I am as an adoptee has matured significantly. I have been more easily able to spot the differences in me and people from different cultures in Asia. I think I was as shy as I was until around twelve or fifteen years old because I was hyper aware of how different I felt, even if my friends and peers thought I fit in just the same as everyone else.
It can feel like a huge burden to look different but act the same as the people you grew up around. I did not seek out my identity as an adoptee as much or at all when I was younger because I think I wanted to prove to myself I could be my own person apart from my being adopted. But as I have grown up, I have learned that recognizing all of the ways that adoption has affected me is helpful for understanding myself better than I ever could.
My parents, Mary, and John Gerzema, wait for Nina to set up a family portrait in their living room.
This is when I was first brought back to America. I got this turtle in China and hung on to it any chance I got.
Old pajamas from the orphanage lay with toys that my parents brought with them for me when they were picking me up.
My parents flip through an old photo album. These pictures were taken by my dad when him and mom were walking around villages near my birthplace in Beihai, Guangxi, China. They wanted to capture what my hometown looked like when I was first born.
For adoptees, seeing photos from the place you were born allows for an adoptee’s fantasy or imagination of what their family would look like if they weren’t adopted. Imagining a life that was taken from you can be very difficult for some adoptees.
Transracial adoption, when adoptive parents are of a different race than the child(ren) they adopt, can make the adoptee view their parents as white saviors, or the parents themselves might view themselves as white saviors. For transracial adoptees, there is often a sense of gratefulness for being adopted into an American family.
My adoption group sits together on the day we become U.S. Citizens in Guangzhou, China.
Along with a few other friends, I grew up thinking I was fully Chinese. Biology and ancestry tests have changed the lives of many adoptees.
My parents would get updates about how I was doing when they were still processing my adoption from China. The reports would be in Chinese and English, and would come with photos of me in the orphanage.
Growing up as an American Citizen can create a sense of othering when thinking about our birth country. The most common first assumption made by people when they first learn you were adopted is that your situation was so bad you had to be saved, so the world that an adoptee once might have lived in is now imagined as a much less developed place than it might be.
My dress from when I was baptized in 2004 at Old St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, New York.
A woman sits inside of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Nolita, Manhattan, on March 16th, 2024. I was baptized here in June of 2004, 3 months after coming to America.
Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, New York.
Dim Sum Go Go, a dim sum restaurant in Manhattan’s China Town, New York, is the closest I frequently got to experiencing Chinese culture in New York, aside from Lunar New Year. Unlike some, my parents did not try to raise me in any sort of Asian culture because they wanted me to seek that on my own when I said I was ready.
A playground in Chinatown, New York that I used to go to when I was younger with two of my adoptee friends, Hannah and Emma. They were separated at birth and reunited when their adoptive parents, Debbie and Chuba, got a call from the adoption agency that the girl who they were trying to adopt had a twin.
The girls from Nina's cohort of adoptees. They were all adopted on the same day and had reunions once every few years until around 2010.
Elizabeth Irwin Lower and Middle school in the South Village of Manhattan, New York, is in session on March 8th, 2024.
In the cab on the way to lower and middle school, taxi drivers would ask me where I’m from. My mom and I would take turns answering. Some mornings I felt perfectly comfortable talking with a stranger about my adoption, but other days, I could not believe someone would ask such a personal thing. I had grown up with the connotation of someone asking where I was from as a clear show of racism and disrespect, assuming that I do not belong in America with white parents. I thought people looked down on me and questions about my origin were not welcomed.
Sometimes people have told me how good my accent is, but my first true language I ever spoke was English. My mother and I have been complemented on how much we look alike which made me think that you had to look like your parents to be theirs which made me angry.
I have always been creative. When I was in pre-school, I would draw flowers and trees, fruits and sweets, but most frequently, I would make an image of a family, or an image of someone or something without a family and have the teacher write what the photo was about.
I attended LREI High School at 40 Charlton St in Manhattan, New York. Attending a liberal arts school taught me to think critically about the world, and about who I am in it. Adoption was more of a conversation in my childhood than it is for a lot of other adoptees. I joined T.A.G., The Adoption Group, a club centered around discussing adoption with other adoptees. Not everyone who was adopted would come, and I often did not participate until eleventh grade. My senior year of high school, I was running the club.
People walk bast 60 Warren St. at rush hour on March 8th, 2024, in Manhattan, New York. Mary and John Gerzema resided on the 3rd floor for two-and-a-half years before adopting Nina Gerzema, where she lived from 2004 to 2017.
Adoption can cause attachment and abandonment issues, making it difficult for them to leave friends, family, and places to whom they have made their own attachment.
Daisy lays on my bed in my room wanting to keep me company after us having spent a month away from each other.
这是我的家人。我很爱他们。
This is my family. I love them very much.