Born in Seoul, Jenny Heijun Wills was adopted into a family in Kitchener, Ont., in 1981, one infant among countless others in the wave of overseas adoptions that took place in the long shadow of the Korean War. Acutely aware of how different she looked, not just from her white family, but within a predominantly white community, Wills sought out her Korean birth family in her late 20s, a complicated, bittersweet process she recounted in her Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize-winning memoir, Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.
Adopted into a Kitchener, Ont. family in 1981, Wills sought out her Korean birth family in her late 20s and recounted this process in her memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.Supplied
Her follow-up, a searching book of essays titled Everything and Nothing At All, suggests that being a transnational, transracial adoptee continues to inform every aspect of Wills’s existence: from her relationship to looks and beauty, to how she reads, to her career as an English-lit professor, to her non-traditional approach to relationships and child-rearing. Wills spoke to The Globe from her office at the University of Winnipeg, where she teaches.
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Shows like Finding Your Roots and genealogy company ads suggest that discovering our ancestry can put us on the path the wholeness. That wasn’t the case for you. Getting to know your birth family and culture seems, rather, to have opened up more trap doors.
I think it’s so important for individuals, especially individuals who have been cut off for various reasons, to be able to pursue seeking their origins, if that’s what they want. And I don’t regret it at all, even though it did create different challenges and avenues, sometimes, for distress. Hopefully what this book is working through is that there is no one narrative or origin that can bear the weight of making us whole.
As an adopted person, I had mythologized the idea of the origin. The idea of first, biological parents. But these people are only human, and they’re flawed, like humans are. And what was revealed to me is that it’s a generosity to understand that no one can be responsible for bringing a person together.
What were some of the myths you held about your birth family before you met them?
I don’t know if I had concrete ideas, if only because that felt too dangerous. Also, it felt like setting myself up for disappointment. I think I was just looking for people who resembled me physically.
And so it was, “What will it be like to meet people who don’t just have typically East Asian features, but who have the exact same shape of eyelid as me?” It was the small, minute things I was looking for.
I was also looking for an explanation as to why that life path had been chosen for me. To share with my biological family some of the positives of my life, but also to reveal that transnational adoption isn’t necessarily a solely positive thing.
You write in the first essay about using beauty as a coping mechanism during your upbringing. How so?
My experience of transracial and transnational adoption has always been through a drive for perfectionism; a sort of anxious attachment.
People return pets or throw them into the street. And we know that adopted individuals also unfortunately get “returned” – for lack of a better word – to orphanages or whatnot.
Ignorant youths sometimes associate difference with ugliness, and I was often told I was ugly growing up. Because aesthetics were always something that fascinated me, beauty-making, or trying to be a beautiful person, felt like a tool to [help me] be kept.
When people look upon a family that’s racially blended like mine was, they’re always staring, asking questions, creating narratives about how this came to be. I was very aware from far too young of an age that I was being watched and looked at and surveyed and evaluated by strangers. And at some point, it registered that this discomfort could maybe be mitigated, or placed in a space of denial, if I presented myself in an aesthetically ostentatious way.
And so when people stared, I could delude myself into thinking that I was in control; that it was a positive thing.
Most of us can point to at least one seminal, character-forming book we read in our younger days. You, on the other hand, write “I read myself into being,” which is taking that concept a fair bit further.
Having not known any Asian people, Asian diaspora people – very few people of colour at all – growing up, and also feeling as though I couldn’t really explore race in a multifaceted emotional way, I needed, with the tools I’d been given, to find a way to learn about race and my identity in private. And what’s more private than reading? It’s something that you can do quietly with yourself. It’s something that enters your body and your mind and your organs and your blood.
Maybe I’m romanticizing literature. Is it not normal to think about books that way? But that’s how I first learned how and what it meant to be Asian Canadian. It also brought a whole world of people to me that I didn’t have in my everyday life.
Reading was a way for me to think about some of the amazing, beautiful things in Asian Canadian individuals’ histories, but also some of the difficulties. To learn for the first time about Chinese exclusion. To learn for the first time about Japanese internment. To learn about the first time about “comfort women” and intra-Asia colonialism. Things I didn’t learn about when I was growing up in Ontario.
I read about my culture and my race. And then I was able to read about other adopted individuals. My first experience of interacting with other transnational and transracial adoptees was through their writing.
If I was considering adoption, especially a transnational adoption, and I read your book, it would definitely give me pause before carrying on. People must ask you about this all the time. What do you say?
I’m not cleared ethically to make those decisions for other people. My writing isn’t meant to tell people what they should do. Because that’s also unkind, a stone to ask someone else to carry, I think.
I hope that people who have or are considering overseas adoption, or transracial adoption or adoption at all are at least engaging with people from all parts of this so-called adoption constellation that includes first parents; i.e., biological mothers, biological siblings.
I hope they’re looking at documentaries and uncomfortable texts as well. There definitely are positive elements to it. However, it’s – what do they call it? – confirmation bias, if one is only seeking out those kinds of narratives. It’s not in the spirit of generosity to one’s current children, current kin, future kin, to ignore those things.
Well, yours are some of the uncomfortable texts they can read.
I don’t know if they’d want to read mine [laughs].