Adoptees in 3: Connecting Mind, Heart and Action – Episode 4 Grace Newton

Episode Transcript 

Voiceover

Introduction

Introduction
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The Voices Unheard Program at Boston Post Adoption Resources is designed to empower adult adoptees in expressing their personal stories and to expand public knowledge and awareness around lived adoptee experiences. Our program goals are accomplished through this Adoptees in 3 video series; through narrative writing workshops; adoptee-created blogs; the use of the Voices Unheard journal; as well as through Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories, which is our annual live speaker’s forum dedicated to educating the greater Boston community through creative expression and storytelling.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Hello, everyone! Welcome to Adoptees in 3: Connecting Mind, Heart and Action. My name is Lillian Hexter, and I'm really happy to have Grace Newton here with us today. So, a little bit about Grace. Grace is a PhD student at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. She's interested in questions of race, identity, belonging, and the meaning of family after de-kinning and re-kinning. Grace's status as a Chinese transracial adoptee drives her passion and authenticity in her personal, professional, and academic work. Grace previously worked as Public Adoption Social Worker in Wisconsin and is currently an Advisory Council member for the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network Conference, also known as KAAN, and has authored the critical adoption blog Red Thread Broken for more than a decade. And for a little bit of background, Grace and I met way back in college at Macalester College, taking a class—

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Grace Newton: Yeah, right in our 1st year.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Yeah, 1st year of college, anything you wanna add to your kind of bio or description, Grace?

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Grace Newton: No, that was wonderful. Thank you, Lillian.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Alright. Thanks for being here. Maybe let's just jump into the 3 questions. Connecting Mind, Heart and Action. The 1st question is, if you were to make a movie about your adoption journey, what would you title it and why?

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Grace Newton: Yeah, I've thought about this for a little bit since you sent the question and it's really difficult, actually. I think that as you mentioned in my bio, I've authored this blog called the Red Thread Broken for, yeah, over a decade now, and I think that that really has become a large part of my identity. So, I think that my movie title would incorporate, like, this Red Thread concept in some way. So, maybe you know, like Red Threads of Reflection or Tracing The Red Thread to My Roots. I think that the idea of making a movie about your adoption journey, I guess. Well, I think it's kind of interesting, because there are a lot of, like, adoption and adoptee documentaries out there. And—but I guess movie sounds a little bit more commercial to me and a couple of things that I was thinking about in terms of like movies or storylines is I feel like, you know, we love a good rags to riches story like Little Orphan Annie and Cinderella, and I think a lot of adoptees who start questioning adoption kind of dispel some of these common storylines that we like. So, for this rags to riches thing, you know, a lot of us do come from countries and families that are less resourced than the situations where we end up. And—and that's kind of like the rags to riches story. But then, when we start questioning like, “Oh, wait! Maybe I would have actually preferred to stay there.” It kind of, I think, throws into question these, like, this story. And another one I think about is like the hero's journey, you know, like Star Wars, and how there's this like, call into the unknown and then you meet this like mentor along the way, and have what—go through these trials of like rebirth, and then—But then you learn whatever you're supposed to learn from that like outer world. And then, like, return to where you came with this like infused knowledge. And I think of adoptees, who like repatriate, and it's kind of like the—this disruption of the hero's journey too. Like, “Oh, wait! You didn't return? Like why didn't you return? You were supposed to, like, make the full circle,” and I think there are a lot of ways like the adoptee, you know. I—I did go back to Toronto, but I—which was part of an unknown, but I think the adoptee community itself was like an unknown world to me when I, like, first kind of jumped in and . . . So, I have returned from China. I live in Chicago, but I haven't returned out of the adoptee community like that—that part of, like, the unknown for me when I jumped in, is like—is still where I—I sit a lot of my time. And so, I think, whatever movie this would be. Yeah, I would try to like, dispel like, these two like, common plots. . . and something with like the Red Thread.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Nice, and for those who don't know, and I might need a little reminder as well, could you recap a little bit what kind of the Red Thread is? How you came to name your blog that?

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Grace Newton: Yeah, sure. So, there's an ancient Chinese proverb, that basically says that everyone in your life, or—or like people you have yet to meet. . . you're connected to them through this invisible red thread that can tangle and fray or knot, but it can never be broken. And—we kind of, is this, like, you know, assumption of predestined fate. And so, my blog is called Red Thread Broken, because what I think I really noticed was a lot of adoption agencies and adoptive parents kind of co-opting this Chinese proverb to basically say that they were fated to be the parents of these Chinese adoptees and—and I . . . my blog when I started it, and I and still I wanted to really kind of question that fate aspect and to really think about the idea that if adoptive parents are saying they're fated to be the parents of these Chinese children, then what that also is saying is that we were fated to be in positions where our families couldn't keep us. And—and you know, in reality there are a lot of like social, political factors that, in my opinion, have nothing to do with fate.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Yeah, thank you for providing that context about how you chose that name. I know, you started this blog back when you were 19 or so, and around when we met in college. Have you been happy with the name of your blog? After this, you know, decade of working on it? Have you ever thought about wanting to change it? Or do you ever get feedback on the name of the blog?

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Grace Newton: No, I've never thought about changing it. And I think that yeah, it still rings true with how I view adoption; how I want people to be thinking about adoption, especially across race and country borders.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Yeah, it's also just kind of like a great catchy name for a blog. I feel like it's memorable and meaningful. And yeah, easy to recommend to people. Okay, great. So, to move on to the second question of Heart —What advice would you give to your adopted younger self?

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Grace Newton: Hmm . . . yeah, I think I was doing a lot of reflection about my younger, 19-year-old self. You know, around last—at the end of last summer around the like 10-year anniversary of this blog. And—and . . . I think that when I was younger, I had a lot of anxiety about, like, the future, I guess, really—where I would end up career-wise if the relationships that I was investing in were going to pan out 10 years in the future. And I just remember so often wanting like a little crystal ball, and—and not necessarily that I would need to see all the steps in between. But just like—just to see that, “Okay, things turned out.” And I'm really happy to say, I think—I think things turned out for me. And so, I think that my younger advice to my younger self is that I would worry less about that. But I do know also I think, that part of my—my worry was that I felt like I had no blueprint or roadmap of what like being an adoptee looks like, and I remember my first KAAN conference when I was 20 years old, and I walked into this room for the first time full of . . .well, mostly Korean Americans, but full of like Asian American adoptees who are at various points in their lives, and some were professors, some—one was a dentist, some were architects . . . and I was, and I remember thinking like, “Oh, my gosh! Like this is what—what it could be,” and I—I think there's, like, a term in the queer community called like possibility model. And I really like that idea of, like, a possibility model like this is one possibility for my future. This is one possibility for my future. Yeah, because I think that even when we were like our group in college we were peer age. And so, that was a new type of relationship that was really wonderful and beneficial but it still didn't have that like future orientation of, you know, like, “This is what like middle-age adoptees look like. This is what all the things that adoptees do with their lives.” And so, I think maybe another piece of advice, and one that I have certainly benefited from is finding good mentors. I think that peers can be mentors. And also like, mentors in the adoptee community who are doing things that you might be interested in. And I think, you know, that's not to say the adoptee community is perfect. There's like a lot of squabbles and issues within it. But I would say that the success of my blog and my—where I am now in a PhD program. I feel like so much of that is because of adoptee mentors who have guided me and provided opportunities along the way for me to develop into, like the places that I wanted to be.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Yeah, that's really great advice to younger self. I've been thinking about the same a lot, too, with the pregnancy study that I've been working on and that's kind of a theme that came up in the study. Is that because a lot of us had adoptive parents who didn't have biological children. As we move into phases of our life like starting our own families, we lack role models who have gone through the same thing. And I think for adoptees, there's so many areas in our life where we kind of lack, you know, racial mirrors or other adoptees or mentor figures and things like that. So, I think that's a really powerful sentiment that yeah, finding these mentors and people that we can see ourselves in the future is—is really important. Okay, so our last question is about Action. So, how are you healing today? What works for you? And then tell me about the work that you're doing in terms of healing. This could be kind of inner healing or if you have kind of an activist lens with healing. Yeah, tell us a little bit about your journey with this.

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Grace Newton: Yeah. Hmm, I think how I'm healing today. . .. Well, as I mentioned, I'm in the midst of a PhD program, and I'm also in the midst of wedding planning, and I think a lot of people would consider both of those things as forms of torture. But I also do think that they are both parts of my healing process, I think. I think first with my PhD research and work for me . . . I've been in these conference spaces and I have, yeah, had wonderful adoptee role models Kimberly Mckee, J. Ron, adoptee professors who I met when I was quite young, and have like shaped the ways that I think and who I thought I could become. And so, as I am doing my PhD, I think one of the really healing things about that is not being just a consumer of research but being one of the people that is, in the process of making it and producing knowledge. I think that when I was in my master's program, I was really disappointed with some of the research that I read on adoptees, particularly as children. And then now, I think about Chinese adoptees specifically because so much of Korean adoptee scholarship has been on Korean adoptees, which is natural, and that makes sense. But there, I think, has been a real flattening of who Chinese adoptees are. And I think there's also been kind of an assumption that because the Korean adoptee population is more established that Chinese adoptees will kind of just use Korean adoptees as a blueprint. But I think that there are very, like, unique aspects of the Chinese adoptee experiences that I'm hoping to untangle and—and work through. And so, for me, I think, being yeah, being at the table, producing that knowledge and—and also just bringing issues for Chinese adoptees more to the surface. Those are all ways of, I think, healing in a way that you know, I think is—is trying to hopefully correct some of the assumptions and things that that I've seen up until this point. And so, that's part of it. And I think, in terms of the wedding planning, too. I—I wrote a little bit about this on my blog, but I'm marrying a Chinese American person. And so, we're trying to infuse a lot of Chinese customs. You know, red is like a traditional wedding color. We're gonna have a tea ceremony. So, we're trying to bring these like cultural elements into our wedding. And then we'll have a lot of like Western, like, traditional Western wedding elements, too, because we were both like raised here, after all. But I think that . . . really, I think I've—I've been in this kind of academic heady space around adoption and Asian American issues for a lot longer than—in some ways I've been really involved in having, like Chineseness be a really meaningful part of my personal home life. I think, I always—I took Chinese language class and dance class growing up. I, at Macalester, I was a double major, and one of my majors was Chinese language, and so I was always trying to capture these aspects of my Chinese identity, and I remember feeling or expressing when I was younger, that I just really wanted to feel balanced in my Chinese and American identities, and I think that for me, when my Chinese components of myself, other than the money I guess, were always something that I sought outside, like outside in a dance class; outside in a Chinese restaurant; going outside for whatever Chinese peers I had. I think that there's no way that it could have felt more balanced, and I think now that I share my like, home-life with another Chinese American. We cook a lot of Chinese food. I can throw in random Mandarin words when I'm talking and he understands and—and it's like one of the first times that I feel like I'm not trying to be an educator to a partner of a culture that I already feel kind of incompetent in. And—and I think that also being with him, and having this relationship with his family too, I think, not only has brought Chineseness closer and like, more like, intimately into my life, but it also, I think—kind of like the adoptee world and these possibility models. I think it shows me . . . or reaffirms that, yeah, there truly is no one way to be Chinese, American, or Chinese enough. And there are some things that I knew about Chineseness that he, who was raised by Chinese parents, like didn't know or realize. And so, then I think, like, “Oh, yeah.” Like, you don't have to know it all. You don't have to be it all. And so, I think that . . . kind of like both of those like in social work terms, we might say micro and macro lens. So, the macro level would be, you know, contributing to this research and this broader project, and then the micro level of, you know, healing at home and doing all these things in my home sphere that make me feel like I have more of a unified identity.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Aw, I love that! Those are such great examples of two different areas of your life of sort of healing and bringing your identity a little bit closer. I was thinking, too, about how what you shared in the Action section connected really well to the Heart section of the advice you would give to your younger self. Cause you mentioned, you know, finding mentors and role models, and both of the people you mentioned were Korean adoptee scholars. And so, I think it's so cool that now you get to be that maybe mentor or role model for other people because I think you know for our generation there weren't as many Chinese adoptee scholars and activists. And now you get to kind of be leading the next generation, which is so beautiful and awesome. Anything else you want to add to any of these questions, or any other kind of topics on your mind, or things that you think would be helpful to talk about?

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Grace Newton: No, I think that's it.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Okay. Alright. So, before we wrap up, if people want to learn more about you, where should they go? How can they find you?

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Grace Newton: Sure. So, my blog is Red Thread Broken. So, you can go to www.redthreadbroken.com. I'm also on Facebook and Instagram under Red Thread Broken. So, just search that. And then on Twitter, I'm a little bit different. My handle is @GracePingHua, so G-R-A-C-E-P-I-N-G-H-U-A.

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Lillian Jiwoo Hexter: Awesome. Alright, thank you so much, Grace, and stay tuned for our next Adoptees in 3: Mind, Heart, and Action.