When my biological sister, Min Song, wrote that she liked me because I am cool, but that she’d also like me if I wasn’t cool, I responded, “Like a hostage situation.”

I don’t speak Korean, so by “respond,” I mean translate English terms into Korean via the Papago translation app, convert it back into English to test the meaning conveyed, copy and paste a bunch of text, and hit send on our chat app. My sisters all laughed at this, as I expected they would, because I am cool, but my bilingual sister Ju Young explained it was funnier than I thought. Poor translation has led to varied outcomes across the entire tragicomic gamut. Rarely has it added meaning.

The message I sent didn’t mean “like a hostage situation.” It said, “I am the protagonist of the hostage play.”

2020 was the year I mindfully distanced myself from my adoptive family. 2021 was the year I found my birth family. 2022 will be the year I embody each of the four major aspects of that oddly translated sentence.

First, consider “hostage.” The intended significance was a joke. My sister’s statement that she’d like me regardless of my mastery of chill read less unconditional affection and more Stockholm syndrome. This interpretation stems from growing up within an emotionally chaotic adoptive home, where I often hid and read books to escape my mother. I understand fickle, interpersonal, power dynamics.

Second, the play of it. As a verb, play can mean participating in a made-up scenario. When my adoptive sister and I were growing up, we’d play “Money Grows on Trees.” We fantasized about a conflict-free life, where we had all the things we wanted, and family life was sitcom-level safe. In this kind of play, everyone wins through the creative, collaborative, constructive doing.

As a noun, play can refer to a scripted performance wherein actors perform roles. How they fulfill them becomes an artistic balance between each production’s talent and direction, but the scripted skeleton of each character remains the same. In adoption, the roles of the birth family, adoptive family, and adoptee are embodied by actual, imperfect, people. Each role requires the other in a powerful, intersubjective way, creating a dynamic performance of family. The birth family could not exist without the adoptee and adoptive household. By definition, the adoptee would not exist without the two family structures. Each part of the triangle depends on the other, just as a hostage cannot exist without a hostage-taker.

Third, as a transracial queer woman of color who favors evolution, adaptation, and revision over stasis, I struggle with most uses of the verb “to be.” Yet as I have learned from the Buddhist chaplain Mary Stancavage: “There is no one more or less worthy of compassion than [me/you/them].” In my mind, this claim justifies the permanency of values like compassion in my daily repertoire. Heroes of their own lives can make such exceptions.

Indeed, protagonists drive narratives and (re)define significance. I have the power to be unreliable or uncool, to reframe my history, revise my perspective. As the protagonist, I could rebelliously remove play and the need for third-party negotiators, leaving only the will to claim my story: “I am the protagonist.”

After all, in any and every language, I am.