Hundreds of thousands of children were adopted from Korea, China, Vietnam, India and elsewhere into predominantly white families in the US and Europe over several decades. Those people are now adults, and they have been unusually articulate about an experience that services were slow to understand.
What’s specific here
Racial isolation inside the family. Growing up as the only person of colour in a household, frequently in a town with few others. Learning about race without anyone at home who had lived it, and often with parents who believed the most loving position wasn’t to see it.
Being expected to be grateful. The adoption narrative — rescue, opportunity, luck — leaves very little room for grief, and grief is nonetheless present. Many adoptees describe being unable to voice difficulty because the framing made it read as ingratitude.
Loss that predates memory. Separation from a first parent, frequently in infancy. Not recalled, and not therefore absent — and it’s one of the more contested and one of the more consistently reported features of the experience.
Missing information. Medical history, birth family, circumstances of relinquishment, sometimes an actual date of birth. Some records are incomplete; some, in certain programmes, were falsified.
Neither category fits. Not the experience of a second-generation child of immigrants — no filial obligation, no immigrant parents, no language at home, frequently no cultural transmission at all. And not the experience of the white family either.
Citizenship, for some. A number of intercountry adoptees were never naturalised because adoptive parents didn’t complete the process, and some have faced immigration consequences as adults. This is a real and under-publicised problem.
The things people work on
Searching, or deciding not to. DNA testing has changed this substantially, and the possibility of finding a birth family without an agency has made it a live question for people who had settled it.
Reunion, when it happens, and how frequently it doesn’t go the way anyone imagined. Contact with a birth family across a language barrier. And what to do when the search ends without an answer.
Relationship with adoptive parents, particularly around whether race was ever acknowledged — a frequent and painful subject, because the parents were usually acting on the best advice available at the time.
And connection to the country of origin: whether to visit, what happens when you do, and what it means to learn a language you were supposed to have.
Finding the right clinician
This is one of the clearest cases for a specialist. Adoption-competent therapy is a recognised area, and a clinician without it frequently makes one of two errors: treating adoption as background rather than as material, or treating everything as adoption.
Ask directly whether they have worked with transracial adoptees specifically. Adoptee-led organisations — and there are several well-established ones, including Korean adoptee networks with decades of history — maintain the most useful referral lists.
Adoptee community itself is worth mentioning separately: for a great many people it has done more than therapy, for the same reason group work does. It’s the room where nothing needs explaining.