How I Found Community in the Midst of Covid

To start, I live in New York City. I moved here for graduate school and ultimately decided to build a life here.

You see, I grew up in a very close-knit community. Yes, the kind where everyone knows everyone. You see your classmates and teachers at church every Sunday, alongside your doctors. Who are your classmates’ parents and your teachers’ spouses. The remarkable thing was that there still managed to be small pockets of divergence. To seek them out was an entirely different matter. It didn't even seem like overt control to conformity. But a simple necessity for survival.

Being adopted, coming from the perspective that I was left alone from the start, growing up as an only child exacerbated it. To be anything but neurotypical, cisgender, heterosexual was to practically volunteer yourself as a social experiment. Throw in a majority White community in the Bible Belt; you get a lot to talk about to your therapist. Who also attended your church. This community was the only social interaction I had other than my parents. I tried to please everyone. When that didn't work, my default person to blame was myself. I never questioned the environment because I did not know another environment was possible. I assumed the rest of the world was the same as my own.

Objectively I knew that this was not the case. I knew that other countries and cultures existed outside of my community. But to me, other cultures and other countries were like tasting Sour Patch Kids after Sour Straws. I never knew M&Ms existed.

It was with this lens that I entered my first year of NYC.

I spent the better part of a semester searching for a community that I felt comfortable in. It took about 6 months until I decided to finally let go of searching for something that felt like “home.” What I didn't realize that I never really felt 100% comfortable in my home. I was looking for familiar. I wasn't looking for home. Rather than embracing the unfamiliar, embracing the part of me different from my first community, I searched for the NYC version of that community.

When I finally got a clue my second semester, my entire life seemed to turn around. I found friends that I could count on. Friends that I felt I could be myself. Diverse backgrounds where differences weren't commodified weren't seen as exotic.

In my first-year post-grad school, my first job, my first shitty New York apartment, I felt pretty good figuring it out as I went. I had friends I could go out with, explore with, see the city with. I enjoyed that for approximately 9 months. The city went on lockdown in March, friends moved away due to safer job opportunities and to be closer to family, among other reasons. I was determined to stay in NYC. Because I just found out how to feel comfortable in my own skin. I wasn’t ready to give it up. And I had never felt so alone when seemingly the majority of my friends left.

Fast forward to May. I had been isolated in my shitty windowless room in Midtown Manhattan for about 2 months. I was afraid. Afraid of leaving my apartment after hearing about the racially motivated attacks on Asians throughout the world. I was struggling. Because I saw support groups being created for Asian Americans. But was I Asian American? The familiar voyeuristic feeling of joining Asian spaces, even spaces online, crept in.

I didn’t join any Asian clubs, groups, or caucuses throughout any time in my college or post-graduate years. It never felt right. I felt out of place. I felt exhausted. I didn’t want to continue retelling my adoption story. Telling it to Asians felt different from telling it to White people. It still does.

When the support groups came online, even ones promoting Asian solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, I still felt as if I didn’t belong.

This continued well into the fall of 2020. November is National Adoption Awareness Month. I decided to begin to speak out. I was tired of feeling in this in-between space. Where I did not deserve any of the identities I carried. It was through writing, finding my voice, that I met others. Other Asian Adoptees, and they felt similarly as I did. Before long, my writings began to connect me to others through Instagram. I was invited to an online space for adoptees. I never thought about connecting to others through the internet without first knowing them in person, but since everything was taking place online due to the pandemic, I figured, “why not?” and decided to jump in.

It was the best decision I made in 2020. The recognition and acceptance, feeling like one of my own, feeling like one of their own. Like I was being claimed within a community for the first time. Not only was I surrounded by faces that looked like me, but I was surrounded by those who had come from similar feelings, similar experiences. Something that would have been literally impossible had an adoptee not first reached out to me.