I still remember the first time a classmate looked at my parents, then at me, and blurted out, “Wait… are you adopted?” The question was loud, blunt and overwhelming for a 9 year old. I forced a smile but inside, the truth I’d been trying to ignore: I didn’t look like my family. I never would.

I was adopted at 10 months old from Vietnam and raised in a white family as well as a predominantly white community. My childhood was filled with love. I had family vacations, birthday parties, Christmas mornings with piles of gifts, and for that I will forever be grateful and blessed to be where I am today. 

But no amount of love or presents could erase the fact that when people looked at us together, they saw difference. My parents and siblings blended into the world around them and I stood out. I learned early that love could shield me from the loneliness inside my home, but it couldn’t stop the stares, the questions, or the reminder that I  was “other” outside of it.

School only widened that divide. When teachers asked us to share our family heritage, my classmates rattled off stories about Italian grandparents or Irish traditions. But I sat there silently, caught between the two worlds: the culture I was born but never raised in and the culture I was raised in but didn’t physically reflect. Either way, I felt like an imposter. 

Freshman year of high school I was asked to do a family tree and since I don’t know my biological family history, what was I supposed to say? That my story began in an orphanage I don’t remember? I had no choice but to copy and paste my Caucasian parents’ genetic history on my poster and present it as my own. But it wasn’t mine. It was theirs. Sometimes I wish teachers had a little more sensitivity to culture and race and realize that maybe not everyone has a stereotypical family.

Being Asian in a white family isn’t just about looking different. It means walking through a world with a face that tells one story and a family that starts another. It’s about constantly answering questions you don’t ask yourself. Who am I? Where do I belong? What parts of me are real if I’ve never known where I came from? These aren’t easy questions and sometimes the silence around them is louder than any answer. 

But as I’m getting older, here’s what I’ve come to realize: family is not defined by matching skin or sharing the eyes of my mom. It’s defined by love, by showing up, by choosing each other over and over again. Family is my mom cheering at every choir concert, my dad teaching me to drive, and my siblings laughing with me over inside jokes no one else would get. And identity, my identity, is not about blending seamlessly into one culture or the other. It’s about building something new, something that is both neither and uniquely mine. 

And I’ve come to see that I don’t have just one family, I have many. There’s the one I was raised into, with its familiar chaos and unconditional love. There’s the chosen family of friends who know my heart better than anyone, who listen, who show up, who make the most ordinary days feel like home. There’s the family built in classrooms and communities, where I’ve had the best people guide me and walk beside me. Each of them holds a different part of me, teaching me, shaping me, reminding me that love and belonging are not limited to a single circle, they ripple outward, making me who I am today.

My identity is hard to pin down exactly. It’s not fully Vietnamese. It’s not fully white. It’s a mixture of what I’ve inherited and what I’ve created. It’s standing  at the crossroads of two worlds and realizing I don’t have to pick one. 

So yes, I will always stand out in family photos. Yes, strangers will always ask questions about my race. But I’ve stopped seeing that as something to hide. My reflections, my family, my story. They may not line up in the way people expect, but they are mine… and that’s enough.