Welcome back to Luna Park for our grand finale: our adoptee pejorative performance! You were a daredevil on our roller coaster, where the Oliver- plot-Twist turned strangers into your family who gave you a slave name, along with a new identity, culture, language, food, etc.—and is now crushing your soul.

After your orphan-Annie famine, the sun did not come out, and you feasted on neglect and frustration, where the food is fried and fake like your better life with your American family who is supposed to feed and nurture you, but instead your mom lays drunk on the couch with the TV and rages on you, while you go hungry!

Round and round you went on the merry-go-round like ooohhh Do-ro-thy in her tornado—except you aren’t so merry from your core abandonment, trust, worthiness, and neglect wounds. You’ll pick people friends lovers partners colleagues bosses who will subconsciously remind you of the combination of your bio ‘rents who you have never met and your adoptive parents and family bulldozing over your needs while telling you that you should be grateful for your adoption—for the loss of your family, name, medical history, stories, country, and anything that you could have built an identity around. 

There’s no place like home as you entered the adoptee Not-So-Fun House, even though you might have not had a home after being left in a basket Moses-style in a police station or baby box, abandoned, tossed in a trash can, relinquished, “lost on the streets,”or whatever tragic lies written in your adoption files to market your potential Princess-to-Prophet foundling story.

As you left the Not-So-Fun House, your whole life started with the Shirley Temple “Good Ship Lollypop” Adoptee Games, where there’s no clear- cut winner, but a “social worker,” who throws darts at a spinning big wheel to pop balloons and match your fun file filled with lies to your adoptive parents, who have also lied about their family history, mental health, and finances. You can’t spell families without lies!

You are a commodity that comes in colors, ages, and abilities—and that is how you are rewarded your adoption prize in the adoptee games! “On the Good Ship Lollipop. It’s a night trip, into bed you hop and dream away…” Step right up and try your luck, you grateful chosen one, in Luna Park! 

Lastly, you approached the big tent for the grand adoptee performance. You have been performing since your adoption to fulfill your family’s unmet needs. With your white-face clown paint and superheroine cape, you are backflipping and code- switching as an assimilated, white-adjacent GOAT, Greatest Of Adoptee Times: smiling when you are upside down, tumbling and swallowing your feelings, cartwheeling and consoling those who gaslight you, and keeping those adoptee performative plates of ultra-high achievement and perfectionism spinning, even when not so subtle “where are you from” microaggressions, bullying, discrimination, and ICE deportation threats are thrown towards you in your not-so-fun home country, plus falsified documents and human trafficking confirmations in your not-so-fun home rehomed country. Regardless, like all orphaned superheroes, you are highly motivated without support, you stick the landing of a perfect-on- paper-life, like Simone Biles! 

10 (American judge)! 10 (Korean judge)! 9.5 (Canadian judge, eh)! 

Except you aren’t perfect without your mask…. 

{Fade to black … Narrator voiceover}

You washed the white face paint off to embrace your multicultural identity … It’s only taken decades of recovery; dozens of Western doctors; count-the-countries international healers; group, adoption, and individual therapy; and piles of self-help books to walk and eat solid foods again, and to accept and give yourself the unconditional love that you craved and didn’t get from your families, partners, and countries, to be the imperfectly perfect performance-adverse adoptee.

Flood lights off, exit stage left, curtain call, descending the 12 Steps, with red and white striped tent flaps open, you can now happily, joyously, and freely exit and head towards Luna Park gates of adoptee lunacy. “Your ticket is torn… and you can never come back.” *Be seeing you, Luna Park!

* John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Directed by Chad Stahelski (Thunder Road Films), 2019