Resistance of Gravity

i walk towards the sweated silk 

that you call home 

it cascades into my mouth and 

i bite it like the apple laid 

on your kitchen counter 

pooling down among my finery  

i hear your echo as it once was 

seeped among the trees you birthed me in 

you call me home.  

I learned what gravity was the first time I fell off of my bike. In a storm of my own tears, I watched the ground reach its rough hands towards my legs and leave slated marks across my skin. I began to cry, not because it hurt—I didn’t feel the pain—but because my sister was getting farther and farther away, still pedaling up the hill of our neighborhood, unaware that I had fallen.  

The ground suffocated me in its embrace and the embarrassment that flowed along my limbs kept me there. I swore to myself that this memory, soon to be a husk, would be folded and shoved into the line I deny exists. But, trying to push it down only made me remember it more. How I was strewn underneath the dented black lamp at the corner of our cul-de-sac, my legs woven among the chains and pedals of my red bicycle. Newly torn holes adorned my navy leggings and the oil that kept my bike spinning was smeared in a “c” across my t-shirt. In that moment, I could feel the eroded contour of the ground beneath my palms and hear the hum of the earth under my ear. It was a hymn of past travels, warm voices, and a promise to my future self.  

For over 35 years, China’s one-child policy held its nation to impossible restrictions on family size as an attempt to stop the rapid population growth. Through penalties, fines, and rewards for reporting others’ “crimes” against the mandate, politics bled through daily life. As one could predict, it led to a host of issues regarding age, marriage, and shrinking numbers. Many babies were abandoned in the hopes of them being found and sold to eager foreigners. This policy was the start of my life.  

I learned that I was adopted at a time when I couldn’t fully comprehend the idea. There was no doubt that I didn’t look like the kids in my class, but I spoke like them and I had a family that was like theirs too. When my classmates stretched their eyes into slits and said some gibberish like ‘ching chong,’ I laughed alongside them. I made faces at the spring rolls the Vietnamese twins brought in because that’s what my friends did. Even with their sun-tanned skin and European straight noses, I felt that I was no different than them. Like clockwork, I had to remind myself of my sameness to them, because if I didn’t, I knew I would crack. 

I was, and still am, reminded every day that I was Asian but not Asian like the others in my class. My mother was always mistaken as someone else, whether as my grandmother or as a friend taking care of me as a favor. My ham and cheese sandwiches looked out of place next to the cabbage stews and fried noodles other students brought in. The push I felt from my White friends that reminded me I wasn’t White was the exact same push I felt from the Asian students who knew that whoever was inside me did not match my almond eyes. 

Every night when I was swallowed by blankets, I used to clasp my hands together and beg the universe that I would wake up and look like my mother. It would make that silent shun I felt from my classmates stop. I wanted to walk up to my mother in the morning and hear her say that she knew my time of birth and how much I weighed when she delivered me. I needed her to say I wasn’t adopted. I felt it so deeply in my heart that I would’ve given anything for her to tell me I was born in Pennsylvania, not that place she called Fuling. Or, I would’ve begged to have been given to a different family, one that was Chinese like me and could raise me the way the other Asians in my class were. It didn’t matter to me, as long as I wouldn’t have to have this label wrapped in a circlet of thorns around my forehead. 

Being adopted meant I was a fraud. That my mother wasn’t really my mother. At least, that’s what the kids in my class said. Instead, it was a woman halfway across the world. Cooking congee for her other kid like she never had to put me on a train station bench to be found. She must’ve had a son. If my mother taught me anything about being adopted, she said that they always gave up the girls so the son could grow up to take care of his parents when they were older. She was probably in her thirties, slaving over house chores while her husband worked for little pay. They were poor in my mind. It made me feel better if it wasn’t just the son that made them give me up. So they were poor.  

As one primes a canvas in a wash of Gamsol and burnt sienna before painting, I was primed through grilled cheese sandwiches and the constant reminder that I looked different than everyone else. As much as I tried to forget that part of myself, and take my mental paintbrush and paint myself white, there was no hiding behind my appearance. That place, that felt more like a dreamscape than a landscape of mountains and my mother country, was inevitably rooted inside my soul.  

the deep voice says i am no longer 

the child who stepped on the shell 

at the white beaches of your womb 

i breathe now with lungs,  

not the hope of your passage 

to my eternal, immovable 

place called after 

let me lie among you. please, i do ask. 

allow me to seek where 

your voice emerged from. 

In the spring of my second semester of university, I spent a day laying in the grass across from the local graveyard.  The sun was kissing my face in welcome and the ground beneath me wrapped my body inside its cool blanket. I closed my eyes with the passing of the clouds and my chest rose and fell with the soft wind. There was a voice, seeped within my bones, that floated me into the stream of my own self-realization. My body, connected to the ground among the decomposing plants and earthly treasures, was created by a woman I could only call my mother if I was in a different life. I wondered if her eyes downturned like mine and if my button nose, that I had spent my childhood hating, was something she wore proudly. 

I didn’t feel the anger I usually did when I thought of her. Perhaps it was because I had met other adoptees with stories similar to mine, who shared the subtle curiosity I did about our birth parents. Or, that I realized my adoptive mother is the only mother I wanted to have that title. It was no longer frustration that flowed in my thoughts—it was understanding. 

I was twenty when I first called myself Chinese and believed it. In my first year of university, I had attended a conference for East Coast Asian Americans at Yale. It was the first time I was surrounded entirely by people who were Asian, some of whom were also adopted. One of the talks I went to was about Asian adoptees navigating their lived experience. The room was small and filled with dark, wooden tables and gigantic beanbag chairs. Every possible seat, including the floor, was occupied by someone. As the discussion began, I studied each of those faces. There was a foreign, yet connected understanding in the room. The threads of experience were laced across all of us, and I felt it tug against the already cracking facade that I’d still been clinging to.  

I spent years of my life in the push and pull of two places that never made me feel grounded. I was in the limbo of identity and what I had been searching for was now in plain sight. The image of that woman flickered across my subconscious. That woman whom I had chased for years, wanting her to tell me who I was. She felt so close. I could smell the jasmine perfume sprayed across her neck and see the lines of sun-birthed age that adorned her eyes. Her hair, wavy and black like mine, weaved through this crowd of other adoptees, across the seas of their almond eyes and the mountains ridged across their memories until it wrapped around my feet. It was only then that I realized that I needed only to look down to see that she was the wings attached to my feet that urged me forward. That crown of everything I thought I had to be unraveled because of the promise she painted across my skin when she first held me, now etched into the valleys of my soul. It was only then that I realized the weight of gravity. 

She made me, so I loved her. She left me—so I loved her. 

bittersweet and fleeting, 

i grasp at the knowledge that 

you can never leave me 

trapped 

to my mind among the stars 

of promises and unsaid 

to fall like this 

is to know that my organza was worth it 

smoke among stone tiles 

hush, that is all.