No Reason to Hide

Some stories are meant to be told.

My son attended a Chinese immersion school starting in kindergarten. Throughout the years we were a host family for one of the school’s Chinese interns. Each spring, one would leave. Each fall, another would arrive.

When he was in third grade, we welcomed our third intern. Around that time, my son had begun talking more openly about being adopted. We always considered it his story

On the drive home from picking up the new intern, he sat in the back seat beside her. For reasons I still don’t understand, he said, very casually,“I’m adopted.”

She looked at him.“What?”

“I’m adopted,” he repeated.

She had been in the United States for about twenty minutes.

“I don’t think that’s something you should joke about,” she said.

“It’s not a joke,” he replied. “I’m adopted.”

She leaned forward and asked me, confused,“Why does he keep saying he’s adopted?”

“Because he is,” I said.

“In China, we would never joke about that,” she replied.

“It’s not a joke,” I said. “He really is adopted.”

She sat back in her seat and said quietly,

“Oh.”

Then we moved on to other things.

Several months later, we were sitting at the table with our intern and another Chinese intern when the conversation returned to that moment. She told us how shocked she had been—not only that we had an adopted child, but that he knew and spoke about it openly. Her friend felt the same.

They explained that in their province in China, adoption was taboo and families pretended the adopted baby was biologically theirs. No one admitted it. Even when relatives knew, it was kept secret. You simply did not talk about it.

So that first day in the car, she had genuinely thought we were strange, a family openly discussing adoption, with a child who spoke about it without shame.

She told us she was surprised that we treated him as if he were “really ours.”

After living with us for a few months, she concluded that yes, we were a little crazy. 

But not because our son was adopted.

It was because, in our house, it wasn’t a secret.