Among all of the (sometimes invasive or rude) questions that I feel compelled to answer to make others feel comfortable, one of the most frequent ones is what my adoption journey has been like. Or, what it feels like being an adoptee—or, more accurately, a transracial, transnational Korean adoptee.

That is obviously a loaded and complex question. I find it best to explain it to someone like they are five years old.

In that vein, I liken my journey to a complex puzzle, one that sadly will most likely never be solved or completed. One that will never show a beautiful happy picture, but many different scenes. 

When it comes to puzzle construction, I love starting puzzles with the four corners first, then the bottom edge … then the top … then the sides … The first four corner pieces are crucial in knowing how the puzzle will shape up.

Those four corner pieces would be my early years of my life, placed by someone—an unknown entity—without my knowledge … and most likely not in the way I would like them placed on the table. One corner was placed by my birth mother or birth family, another by the family that “found me” two days after my second birthday in the freezing cold in the middle of winter. Another corner was placed by the adoption agency and country and culture that I didn’t have the chance to get to know fully … and the last corner was placed there by my adoptive family.

It would be the only corner piece that I would recognize, simply because it would match the edge pieces that joined it. My adoptive family taught me how to fit into their world … but in so doing, erased my Korean culture and language and replaced it with the only culture and language that I would know for the rest of my life.   

Don’t get me wrong, some of the pieces line up nicely and create beautiful scenes. My early years, where my adoptive mother taught me lessons on how to live and behave and learn, would be a lot of my edge pieces.

Obsessively, I would keep coming back to the table, eagerly ready to put together more pieces of the puzzle, because as far as I knew, this was my life as a transracial adoptee.

I can remember going over to my grandparents’ house when they had grown too old to live on the farm and had moved into the elderly apartments in town. Since they no longer had as many chores to do, Grandma would always have a puzzle laid out on a card table, and I could see the distinct areas she had worked on. The pieces were kind of sorted by looking like they might form part of an area together. We would create small vignettes to figure out how those fit into the larger puzzle as a whole. We would try to finish random parts of the puzzle together and suddenly hours had flown by and we had maybe been able to complete a whole corner, but the puzzle was not completed and it was time to leave. I would think about that puzzle on the two-hour drive home.   

Months later when we would return, there would be another puzzle in the same state. Or maybe it was the same puzzle, just restarted?

The puzzle of my adoption would look very similar.

So over here was my life as a child where it seemed everything was happy and easy, but that picture would be frayed on the edges by hints of racist or microaggressive reactions from the outside world. “Where is she FROM from?” “How long have you had her?” “Wow, she speaks really good English.” “Does she know she’s adopted?”  

Obviously, even in these vignettes where the pieces fit together to form a picture, I imagined that others assumed someone had put the wrong piece in the puzzle and wondered why there was an Asian girl with this family.

Other vignettes in the incomplete puzzle are: little jenny gets baptized; little jenny gets straight As in school; little jenny scrapes her knee riding her bike for the first time; little jenny keeps trying to be perfect and work extra hard to fit in and be accepted as a “true” member of the family.

Then there is a section that I would like to throw away in the garbage (or set fire to), but each time I try to forget it … or remove it … it somehow “magically” reappears and rears its ugly head. It is the part where we see my adoptive family’s biological son groom and rape me. The pieces form a picture of panic and helplessness and not understanding—especially when I get in trouble for bringing it to my parents’ attention. The edges are frayed and shouldn’t fit into the puzzle, but frustratingly, they do.

Not surprisingly, these puzzle pieces fit in with those of being ostracized for being Asian, and those of being hypersexualized and fetishized in college and my 20s. Both versions of these vignettes are equally confusing and painful.

This puzzle seems to only grow and the pieces multiply. None of the pieces fit together neatly—as if they are from the wrong puzzles, and no matter how hard I try to force the piece, it just won’t fit.

I’m the piece that just won’t fit.

It looks like I should fit. Everyone has told me I should fit—especially if I do this, or act like this, or dress like this, or think this. My piece has the right round shape—but even if I push it really hard, it just will not fit, as if it is the correct piece trying to be forced into the incorrect puzzle.  

I often joke that I am like the raisin that is in what people think is the chocolate chip cookie.  

When people are expecting a cookie to be an oatmeal raisin cookie, it is delicious. But when they expect it to be chocolate chip and bite into a chewy raisin, the feeling of utter disappointment is immense and there is no coming back from that. I feel like I am that. I should be enough, but I am NOT and it’s not my fault. I can’t be held accountable for something I had no control over.

In my puzzle, there are too many pieces that I will never be able to make fit—or even find—especially if they had anything to do with my adoption. I’ve found some pieces but they don’t seem to fit together to create a whole picture. And somehow they don’t seem to fit anywhere else in the puzzle, either. 

There are also the pieces that are lost forever. I can search everywhere for them and will never find them. I don’t even know … what do they look like?

Each day, the puzzle waits for me. Like my grandmother would say, “Keep plugging away … the fun part of the puzzle isn’t finishing it … it’s the working on it.”

So for my long-gone Grandma, I am still working on finding that piece and making it fit.