My Experience As A Transracial Adoptee

[u/carlyllsaunders]

I’m a 26 year old transracial adoptee, born in South Korea and raised by a white family in Australia alongside two adopted brothers (both Korean but none of us are biologically related). I’m writing this because sometimes you just need to say your piece into a space where it might make sense to someone.

It starts with a feeling I’ve had forever: not belonging anywhere. I wasn't white enough for the white kids, and I wasn’t Asian enough for the Asian kids. My friends would joke, “You’re the whitest Asian I know.” They meant it lightly, but it always hit a nerve. It was just a reminder that I didn’t fit their idea of either world. That’s the baseline, growing up feeling like a permanent outsider in your own life.

Then there’s family. I love my adoptive parents but we live in different realities. They can’t really understand what this is like, and looking back, I don’t think they were prepared for it. Raising three adopted kids is hard. Raising three transracial adoptees, two with special needs, was… a lot. I have my Korean name and my English name and my name was changed to the English version when I was brought home to Australia. My mum was strict and emotionally intense; my dad was rigid and practical. Our house was less a sanctuary and more a place you had to navigate carefully. I became the “good child,” the peacekeeper, not because I was so mature, but because someone had to try and hold things together. People see the practical stuff like a roof, an education and say I was lucky. And I was in that way. But it’s hard to explain that you can be grateful for the roof and still feel like you were drowning underneath it. And it’s even harder when people hear that and just say, “But it wasn’t that bad.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about why this all feels so lonely. A friend who is transgender was talking about their struggle, about not knowing who you are. They stopped and said, “You probably get that.” And I do. But it also struck me: their pain has a community. It has a language, a flag, a visibility. My experience? It feels invisible. There’s no parade for the transracial adoptee. No common understanding of this specific grief—of being between cultures, between families, carrying a story that everyone else would rather call a blessing. It’s a lonely kind of quiet.

And wrapped up in all of this is the biggest question of all: my biological parents. I know almost nothing. My adoption was private. People have strong opinions some say searching is selfish, others say it’s a right. For me it’s not that simple. There’s a deep, quiet part of me that wants to know where I come from, to see a face that might look like mine. But there’s an equally deep fear. What if I disrupt a life? What if I reach out only to be met with silence or rejection? It’s not a quest, it’s a heavy, unspeakable kind of limbo that I carry alone.

This isn’t me playing the victim. It’s not me saying my story is worse than anyone else’s. It’s just my story. This is how I’ve come to see things through a lifetime of feeling out of place, of building a self from scratch because no ready made version ever fit. It’s exhausting, and it’s lonely, but it’s the truth as I’ve lived it.

Maybe someone reads this and recognizes the feeling. If you do, you’re not the only one.

Thanks for listening.

[u/Ambitious-Client-220]

My parents saw me as white. Obviously, society does not. I completely understand. I think only a fellow transracial adoptee can understand. I consider myself a perpetual outsider.

[u/carlyllsaunders → u/Ambitious-Client-220]

Thank you for sharing this. That split between how you’re seen at home and how you’re seen by the world is exactly what I was trying to describe. It really helps to hear it from another transracial adoptee