The Things I Feel I Can’t Discuss
A Chinese-American Adoptee’s Struggle with German Heritage
I remember us years ago — my dad and I — walking down a random street in Berlin and being envious of the little Asian girl across the street, hand in hand with her parents, because I can’t. As my dad says, the people here are old-fashioned. He’s worried I’ll be mistaken as his mail-order bride because I don’t look like him, a tall, pale middle-aged German man from Bavaria. I must have been 12 or 15, with a thin build, long, straight black hair, and lighter beige skin than I am now. I was young enough not to know the phrase’s weight, yet grown enough to be perceived as someone’s oriental prize.
But I loved it there in the early 2010s—everything from the street food and architecture to the layout of the streets and varied landscapes. I even dreamed of moving there someday and immersing myself in my dad’s culture. Then, the tide began to change in 2015, followed by a rocky U.S. presidency that revealed how fragmented the country is. When I went again with my parents at 18, we were grabbing food at a local spot in a southwestern borough of Berlin when I saw a man resembling a rough-and-tumble American sitting at an outdoor table nearby and felt on edge. My mom was still in the shop when my dad took out his phone and drew something. Handing it to me with a knowing glance, I looked down and saw a swastika. I tried to conceal my panic and disbelief that this man could be a neo-nazi, as my father gestured to keep it cool. We never interacted with that man, and another layer of my naivete got stripped away.
In my twenties, I accompanied my dad to a car dealership as he negotiated for a new car. Constantly making sure to mention he’s my father and she’s my mother as often as possible had become second nature; it was a shock when my dad’s worries about our relationship came true. The woman who helped him was Asian and attractive, like me. To my dismay, she immediately assumed we were a married couple and asked some questions about my being there. I was stunned and humiliated. How could another person of Asian descent perpetuate the idea that I had to be his wife? Was I really that wishful in thinking people knew what adoption is? Let alone the wave of Chinese adoptees to Americans that now ceases to exist.
I am one of many Chinese-American adoptees around my age who were brought over during the program’s golden age around the turn of the 20th century. The few children already in the process of being adopted will mark the last generation of Chinese-American adoptees. Ever.
My family is inherently a melting pot. I’m not afraid to say I’m Asian-American or Chinese-American because anyone can see that. So, I guess that’s why I’ve never been forthright in claiming my German heritage, even though it’s my right. I don’t want to defend this part of me when it’s only visible at home—putting the pickle ornament on the tree every year around Christmas as we eat stollen and lebkuchen. But most importantly, I miss the sense of home from hearing my father speaking German and being able to babble with him like a little kid again, or as I call it, kindersprache.
I wish I didn’t crave the validation of citizenship to prove to myself and others that I am, in fact, part German and that no one can take it away from me. It’s hard for me to say I’m proud to be German, but I don’t want my father’s legacy to die with me in silence. I can rest a little easier knowing that my late grandmother helped hide Jews during the Holocaust. However, the shock of seeing my great-uncle wearing his uniform with the swastika in an old photo is still jarring. He didn’t have a choice, but I can only hope he didn’t get sucked into the ideology before he died in action. Nor did my late grandfather, a former prisoner of war as my father recounted the story of his capture and escape.
In light of the highly divisive U.S. political climate, it feels like my duty to reiterate that no matter how dire it seems, fascism and totalitarianism are never the answer. As I wrote in a 9th-grade history paper on Hitler’s rise to power, a critical governmental factor was how the Weimer Republic’s judicial system intentionally ignored crimes by right-wing extremists while readily waiting to punish left-wing extremists. Unfortunately, the 47th president’s rhetoric mirrors this dynamic as he openly vows to silence anyone against him (Dreisbach, 2024). However, this shouldn’t be surprising given that he has praised Adolf Hitler and shared his desire to have his generals (Mercia, 2024).
I’m often at a loss for words these days, but we cannot have a neo-Third Reich or anything close to it. We are a fragmented society with deeply polarized ideologies that feel foreign to their former iterations, and all I can do is hope that we remind ourselves of our humanity and that we should focus on trying to work together in the present instead of continuing to sink further into our eco-chambered realities.
