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Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. This is episode 120.

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We're the Nelsons. I'm Lynette.

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And I'm Sean.

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In today's episode we have an interview with Anna Lainard.

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And Anna is an international adoptee.

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She'll tell you all about her experience.

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But Lynette became acquainted with her as she's pursuing her PhD.

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Yeah, so Anna and I get to work with the same professor studying adoption.

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And it's been really wonderful. She's amazing. I loved visiting with her.

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And hearing some of her thoughts. And we're so grateful for her for sharing with us on the podcast.

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You know, anytime we have an adoptee who's willing to share with us, it's just this huge learning opportunity.

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And we're so thankful. So, I mean, these are just like really personal things.

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Yeah. Yeah. And she does share some really personal aspects of her experience.

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And I think it's definitely worth a listen to learn from her experience.

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Awesome.

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Well, we'll cut to that conversation with Anna and Lynette.

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And we'll sum it up and wrap up with some of our thoughts afterward.

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We're here on the podcast with Anna Lainard.

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And Anna, we're so glad to have you back.

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We had Anna on during our National Adoption Month book club discussion series.

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And we're glad to have her back to share more about her and her personal story today.

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Thank you. I'm so excited to be back. Thank you.

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Yeah, to kick off, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

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Yeah. So my name is Anna Lainard. I'm from Salt Lake City, Utah.

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I was adopted from China when I was two years old.

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And I've lived in Salt Lake in Utah ever since.

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I am currently at Brigham Young University. I'm an undergraduate.

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I'm studying adoption, but specifically family studies, human development.

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And I am currently applying to graduate school and hoping to study adoption there.

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That's awesome. Yeah, I get to work with Anna a bit at school and she's so cool.

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One of the very coolest people. I'm so honored to have her on the show today.

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I'm honored to know you. Thank you.

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Well, I'm so glad you could be here.

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So to start off, can you tell us a bit more about your adoption story?

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Yeah. So I, like I said, I was adopted from China and they had very interesting policies at the time.

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The one child policy is what I'm referring to.

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It later changed right to the two child policy and then like open.

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They wanted more children, so it was open.

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And I was in a very unique time.

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And at this time, China realized that they had way more people than they were able to feed

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or maybe wanted to have in the country.

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And so their way of solving the problem was by cutting down the number of children that people were able to have.

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They had people go in and they would track women's pregnancy and their cycles.

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And they would do forced abortions, which is for me very tragic, very hard.

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A lot of women during this time would either have that happen or they would hide their pregnancy

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and leave their child on the street, they would give them to kin or they would drop them at somewhere that they knew was safe.

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I think also in this time, it was illegal to do that.

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And so women would leave no identifying information about themselves.

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And a lot of Chinese adoptees have this similar story that I'm learning.

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But from what I know, I was left on the doorstep and they actually told me the door that I was left at.

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And I was left with a little tag around my name with my birthday.

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And I was taken from there. I was four months old.

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It's taken from there into a welfare center in China.

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And I was there until I was adopted when I was two.

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But I actually was born with a hole in my heart.

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And I think they realized why I was in the orphanage or in the, they call them welfare centers there, in the welfare center.

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And so I was put on a special list for children with medical needs.

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And I was like an urgent.

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I needed to have a heart surgery as soon as I was, as soon as possible.

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And so on the other side of the world, right, my parents in the United States, in Salt Lake City, Utah,

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they had already adopted a little girl from China, from Guangzhou, it's a lower China area.

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And they wanted another child. They looked through this list. They looked through this book.

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And my father recalls flipping through the pages and just feeling really, really inspired when my picture came up.

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And so they filled out all the paperwork. They did all the stuff.

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And then they went all the way to China and they adopted me, which is so great.

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I was really sad. It was really, really tragic for me.

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But it was they brought me home.

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And this is funny for anyone who has children who cry on airplanes.

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I screamed, like screamed for eight of the 11 hours on the flight home and there were no other babies on the flight.

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So I probably think my parents were like, can we return this child? She is crazy.

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But they did it. So I'm really grateful they did it.

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But we got to Salt Lake and Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah is incredible, top tier.

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And they just monitored me for 11 years of my life. I would go every day and then every month and then once a year.

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And I never had to have open heart surgery. And it closed out by itself when I was 11.

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Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. And then I just grew up in the United States.

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My parents have three biological kids and then my sister who's adopted from China and me.

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So we're a group of seven. And then I grew up in here.

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Wow. And so your sister who is also adopted from China, it's a different region. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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I was born near Shanghai. All right.

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So thinking about your experience, what do you want potential adoptive parents to know about adoption before they consider it?

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A lot of things. I think most importantly for me is knowing that adoption is painful and that it's difficult.

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And for you, for parents, but also for the adoptee, right?

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There's a lot that they don't understand. Something I've tried to explain to my parents, but I think is hard because they they just don't have this lived experience is that I've always felt like something is missing in my life.

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And I always have felt like there's just part of my identity that I don't know. And that's painful for me. And that's hard.

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And it's not that I'm not happy to be in my home and then I am not happy to be there.

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But there is always a part of me that I feel like is missing. And also to note for parents is that every single adoptee is different.

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My experiences and my ability to talk about adoption and to want to find my birth parents and to study it even is completely different from my sister's experience, who loves the Chinese culture, loves speaking Cantonese and being there,

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but maybe is not as exuberant about talking about anything she experiences. So knowing there's differences, it's complicated, it's painful for everyone, but it also is beautiful. It's almost like a tragic beauty.

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Yeah. So what do you wish that your adopted family or your community had known in retrospect?

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I think I wish that my parents and my family and community had known that being Chinese in a completely white neighborhood is difficult.

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And that there are racial experiences and racial biases and microaggressions that I experienced sometimes, like weekly or daily, that they didn't even know that were happening.

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And also knowing that it can happen from your parents and it happens from your siblings and it happens in your church communities and it happens in all these other places.

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And so I wish that they had known that that is a lived experience I have or that I would have and that that's not okay.

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And that I think my parents are just very kind and very generous and they love to take the benefit of the doubt.

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But for me growing up, that was so painful to know that I didn't feel validated in my experiences and that the other people were always held up on a pedestal and that I was the one who was should change my mind and I was the one who should be more kind and should be more understanding.

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Instead of realizing that's not okay to do, that's not okay to say for other people and that I'm totally justified in feeling those things.

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Wow, so it felt like maybe there weren't advocates for you and your experiences.

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Yes, it wasn't validated.

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100%.

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And I, but I will say my parents, right, like they did not have this lived experience.

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And so it's so difficult, I think, for someone to be aware of that without experiencing it.

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So how do you feel like adoption education could change to help better prepare families for this?

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Yeah, I think it's so important. I had a great conversation with a friend yesterday and he said he is Caucasian and he was in the South for a while.

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And he was in completely black community. And he's like, for the first time in my life, I felt like the minority, and I felt like no one wanted me there because I was white and it was scary for him and uncomfortable.

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And I think that's so important. That is like an everyday thing that I go through, right, like being in a community where I know I am being looked at or I'm being viewed and opinions are put on me and stereotypes.

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But if parents and if children or siblings, if they could put themselves in that situation, get out of their comfort zone, get out of whatever region that they're in and be in a place where they feel different.

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And there is no escape and they have to not know the language and they have to know all these things that would go a long way to help them understand what their adoptive is feeling.

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Yeah. Wow. So how did your family talk about adoption while you were growing up?

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My family was very open about it. They I knew I was adopted clearly. I looked very different, right?

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And my sister looked different, but we talked about it and we celebrated like Chinese things, kind of not that much, like a little bit. It was definitely there.

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But it wasn't super prominent. I think it was there in the background because in their minds, it's like, oh, yeah, she's adopted.

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That's it. But for me, and I think for a lot of adoptees, it's an ongoing process. I will never not think about being adopted every single day. I'm going to think about that. Right.

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And so they it was almost like just an event and bring it up in my home growing up. I think it's actually very difficult.

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And a lot of parents talk about feeling grateful. Right. Like I would bring something up and they'd be like, oh, but are you not grateful you were adopted or not grateful you were here?

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And those were always hard conversations for me because one, of course, I am grateful, but that should not be a reason I cannot share my experiences and not a reason I can complain about something.

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And additionally, you would never ask your biological children, are you grateful that you're here? Aren't you grateful that I gave birth to you? Right. Like, that's not a conversation that you have.

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And so it was talked about, not super talked about, kind of a touchy subject.

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But I think there also, though, was a lot of freedom for me to study and to be engaged and to be involved with whatever communities I wanted, which I was very grateful for.

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So I made my own experience, if that makes sense. Yeah.

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So what has helped you in working through any emotions or challenges from being adopted internationally from not being able to have this open dialogue about it?

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These different challenges? I think one is my religion.

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I believe a lot in Jesus Christ and in God and that there is an idea that I am where I'm supposed to be, that it wasn't just by chance and it wasn't just because, yeah, it wasn't just by chance that I'm where I'm at, but because there was a reason I was supposed to be here and I'm supposed to have the experiences that I'm having and that Christ really did and does understand my pain and my experiences.

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And so that's a huge part of growing up, you know, even though my parents don't understand, even though my friends don't understand, like God and Christ understand me.

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But I think additionally, being able to now in college have conversations about adoption, being able to study it, knowing that I'm not alone.

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I am not the only person who feels this.

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And especially seeing that people are doing something about this. I was very fortunate to go to an international adoption conference over the summer.

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It's called ICAR, which is so cool. And they, it just blew me away to be in a room where so many people understood what it felt like to be an adoptee, but also wanted to make a difference about it.

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So that was really huge. And then talking to my husband a lot, we have a lot of conversations about adoption and about race, and he's super supportive.

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Even if he doesn't understand 100 percent. Awesome. What would you hope that adoptive families would do to support adoptees and connecting with their birth families or cultures?

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Yeah, I think the first thing is not using your playing cards of you should be grateful. Right.

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Like, I know it is painful. And I think as I've talked to one of my professors about this, that me saying I want to find my adoptive family or no, no, no.

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Me saying I want to find my birth family can be very triggering and can make mothers and fathers feel like their job of being a parent maybe wasn't adequate enough.

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But I want you to know you've done enough. You're really great. Finding a family is not connected to that.

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And so I think understanding that, but to being so open about it, being so excited for them and also knowing if they don't want to find their family, that's OK.

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I've met a lot of adoptees who are content where they are. They're content with what happened and pushing it on them is not it's really not recommended.

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Thank you. So what have you struggled with regarding adoption and what do you wish others understood?

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I think I've struggled with feeling alone, very lonely.

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I think it's just an experience that it's not shared with very many people and you're often not in conversations with other other adoptees.

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And I think also knowing that there's different stages and growing up, it was hard. I had experiences, but I was OK.

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My first years of college, it was OK, more difficult, but I also felt more free to explore my cultural heritage.

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And it was different when I got married. I had feelings and I had experiences that I was so shocked about.

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In specific, being married was for me, it's right, like a lifetime commitment.

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And I realized that if anything happened to my husband, that I would be alone. And so I started having anxiety. I started having a lot of fear about losing my husband and a lot of feelings of just being alone and not wanting to be abandoned again.

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And as I'm getting emotional. And so that was very surprising to me that I could experience that.

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And that that wasn't something that just like was in my past being adopted, but it is very, very present in my life.

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Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on how adoptive parents can better support adoptees and their biological parents?

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Here's a plug for the First Families Project. If you've listened to this already, you should all tell everyone to be involved.

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But the First Families Project is so focused on, it's a research project started by professors at both Colorado College and Brigham Young University to help elevate birth mothers' voices.

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And I think being really aware that their experience is difficult.

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I personally don't know my birth parents, and it's going to be very difficult to find them because of China's laws and rules.

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But from the birth parents that I've heard, really validating that they had a very hard experience.

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And a lot of their choices were constrained. They don't have the same choices that we all have. Right.

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We all have choices, but not the same choices. And so knowing that, but also knowing like a lot of birth parents are walking on eggshells and they in relationships,

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even open adoption relationships are afraid of saying one thing that could set off adoptive parents and not let them have contact with their child anymore.

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And so I think parents, adoptive parents, can support adoptees by being open to birth parents, letting them know, I'm a safe place.

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If you make a mistake, like that's OK. You still have a right to love your child and to love this being.

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And I think for also additionally for adoptees, adoptive parents can be very aware that it's not about them.

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And it's about really just sitting and listening and talking to your adoptee and hearing their experience.

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And if they don't want to share it, then not pushing them. Great advice. Thank you.

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So this is a giant question. What do you think some of those biggest challenges the adoption community faces are?

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I think one huge challenge is that adoptees are always talked about as children and they are studied as children and they are measured as children in their outcomes.

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I've done lit reviews about educational outcomes in children, but there is nothing about or very limited about adoptees as adults.

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And they are not thought of as adults and they are not treated as adults and their lived experiences.

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And I think that's that's huge. The United States has a lot of rules that are made and a lot of regulations that are made based on Caucasians and specifically male Caucasians.

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But that does not apply to everyone, especially not transracial adoptees.

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And so knowing that medical practices, right, like a woman in Korea is tested for breast cancer in like in their 30s or their 40s, where in the US it's like 60s, 50s, 60s.

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Right. And so a woman is so much more likely to have undetected breast cancer in the United States as a transracial adoptee and not get the help that she needs because testing is only based on one race.

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And so I think that's a huge problem is that there are not enough policies regarding the diversity and the complexity that we experience here in the United States.

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I feel like that reminds me of a book just a little quick side comment. It's older now, but the book Invisible Women is so fantastic talking about the gender data gap right where we treat men as the default gender and just talking about how that can impact women.

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And looking at how you're talking about how it can extend and impact different races and ethnicities. Such an important discussion where are we actually looking at people as a whole or are we just focusing on one group and missing a lot of other people and experiences.

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It's really interesting. Thanks for bringing that up.

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Of course.

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Alright, so how do you feel about the policy change regarding adoptions from China. This is a recent change just from a few months ago, where there are no more adoptions allowed in the United States from China.

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I have mixed feelings. I think I think I can see on both sides. The pros and cons first for example in China, they are struggling with fertility. They're struggling with people being able to support their economy.

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They just have lost so many people because of their one child policy and it is really impacting the way China is functioning. And I will say China, you're doing great. I think China right there noticing that they're having gaps in their population, their population pyramid is upside down.

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They have so many elderly people, not enough people to take care of them, not enough family members to take care of them while they're doing their day jobs. So it makes sense to me that China wants to limit international adoption and have people in China take care of their children and raise more children.

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Yeah, that totally makes sense. But I think on the reverse side, it's so difficult I think for especially me being a Chinese adoptee to think that something that benefited my life is now cut off for a lot of other children.

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I grew up in a very great neighborhood, great parents, great home and have had opportunities I would probably never have if I stayed in China. So that's difficult. But also, I think there is talk about it limiting Chinese adoptees ability to find their birth parents.

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I'm not sure how much of that is accurate. But I think that that's scary for me. It's been one of my driving forces since I was younger. It's like a reason I studied Mandarin Chinese for like multiple, multiple years to be ready for that moment that I meet my birth parents.

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But having that choice gone and limited is, I think, very painful. I think a lot of things in my life have been chosen for me without my knowledge or my permission, right? Lots of macro level systems.

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And so it just feels like one more thing that is just excluding me from living in the way that I want to live.

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So you are applying for grad school right now. You're amazing. You're doing lots of adoption research right now, too. So what drew you toward doing adoption research?

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I think a lot of scholars might say this, a lot of professors, but I feel like studying something and studying a topic is really just like a deep dive into yourself because you want to understand what's going on in your life and in your families.

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So that's one thing. But I also I really have become a large proponent of social justice and of making sure that people's voices are heard and that they're aware of any challenges, like just general knowledge.

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They're aware of challenges that people experience. And so I feel like research was a good, happy medium for me to, one, make myself knowledgeable and know my own situation.

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But two, be able to help other people who are not aware and are not able to get the resources that they need.

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So that's what drew me towards adoption research.

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That's beautiful. Yeah. And then what's the most meaningful part of working on adoption research right now? You're working on this study that you talked about with birth mothers and you're probably working on other things, too, right?

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Yes. I think the most meaningful part to me is that these are human experiences and that life is so tricky and challenging for everyone.

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Like I said before, if I was in the situation that a lot of these birth mothers was in, I would probably make the same choices, right? I would make the same choices.

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And it's beautiful to me to think that there are so many sides and everyone has so many opinions.

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Listening to a lot of transcripts from women who have shared their experiences, a lot of them say, right, like I have not gone a day without thinking of the child that I placed for adoption.

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And on the other side, my side, that is so comforting to know that I'm not forgotten and that I do belong and someone does care about me, even if I can't see them.

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And I think additionally, like adoption research is so powerful and knowing that there is a lot that I can do and that there is a lot that can be changed in this community that hasn't been so far, but that can change.

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And so I really feel like I'm doing something that is helping other people.

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That's awesome.

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Yeah, thank you so much for being here. Is there anything else you want to share or talk about today?

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Yeah, I've done a lot of studies recently on, like I said, educational outcomes in young international adoptees, and they experience a lot of challenges, right?

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ADHD, attention problems, internalizing behavior problems.

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And in some studies, they found that adoptees do well, they develop really quickly and really fast, but some don't ever catch up to levels of their other peers.

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And so I think really increasing education for not only parents of adoptees, but teachers and classmates and in schools to help them know that children have some of these issues and some of these difficult behaviors because of adoption or because of home circumstances.

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So I think that adoption really does bleed into every aspect of society, and it should be prepared for as such.

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Do you have any thoughts on societal perceptions of adoption?

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How do you feel like we're doing as a society here in the United States with how we see adoption culturally? Does it match?

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Do you think? What do we need to do?

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I will say I'm in a very niche area, right?

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Like I live in a very predominantly Caucasian area with a predominant religion, Christian religion.

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And I have had a lot of difficult conversations and I've had a lot of microaggressions, and I don't think that reflects the world in the United States.

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But from what I have experienced, we're very far behind in how we should talk about adoption and how we should treat adoptees.

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And I get that a lot of people like our brains just want to put people in schemas and in boxes and organize them so we can relate to people.

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But that's painful for me on my side.

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And it's hard to think and difficult to think that someone can't relate to me as a human until they know what my story is.

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And I think it's important to know that you're not entitled to hear my story and you're not entitled to know everything about me and to be okay with that.

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And so I think from my experiences, we're behind and we need to really learn how to talk to people person to person and human to human instead of adoptee, non-adoptee.

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But also really that's important that I am adopted and that does influence how I view things.

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So, the news.

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It's complicated.

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It's complicated.

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There's so much nuance.

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Well, Anna, I have loved talking to you.

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Thank you so much for being on the show.

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Yes. Thank you.

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Thank you so much.

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It's been incredible to be here.

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Well, thanks so much to Anna for being willing to share her thoughts and experience with us in this episode.

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A lot of things stand out to me from her.

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And I know that you get to interact with her more regularly.

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Yeah, it's so fun.

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She's amazing.

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One thing that that kind of just struck me when she was speaking was when she talked about after she got married, how she was struggling with some anxiety around having these thoughts.

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If her husband had passed away, that she would be alone or or abandoned again.

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And that's kind of the thought or feeling that she expressed.

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And I I know that there's that sense of potential sense of abandonment with some adoptees like a trauma response for you.

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Yeah.

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And yet it's it looks a pricer to it.

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I was like this deep seated sort of trauma that might not be immediately noticeable, right? Like it might not come out and be present or visible until later in life.

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Yeah.

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Well, I was thinking a little bit about like secondary rejection.

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You know, that's when you reconnect with biological family or birth parents and and there's not a good relationship or they don't want that relationship.

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And I was thinking about how that's one form of kind of I mean, really difficult experience that an adoptee can face later in life because of having been adopted.

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But I never really thought about the other relationships that an adoptee has as an adult and how those relationships can be and often are impacted by the fact that someone was adopted.

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Yeah. Yeah. I was so so moved by her experiences that she shared and so thankful to be able to hear.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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So thank you, Anna. Yes. Thank you so much.

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And I did mention the first families project that she's working on as a graduate student now.

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And it's a really awesome project where it's a research project focused on interviews with birth parents.

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Right now, the researchers are recruiting birth mothers and any birth mom who's interested in talking to them.

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They would love to chat with you.

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So we would just send you to their Instagram.

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It's at first families project, but there are underscores between each of those words.

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So at first underscore families underscore project on Instagram.

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If you want to find more information, it's a really awesome research project.

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You do get compensated for your time.

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And so, yeah, I highly recommend working with these amazing professionals who are searching for a better understanding of birth parents to help better informed decisions in the future.

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Great. Well, we are going to take just a little break.

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We've been a little bit more sporadic in dropping episodes, but we'll probably take a month or two off with no episodes.

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We'll come back with several more probably at the end of May or early June.

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We're excited to try to recruit some more people to chat with.

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And if you or someone you know is an adoptee or a birth parent and you're interested in sharing your experiences on our podcast, we would love to chat with you.

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So please reach out to us at open adoption project at Gmail dot com or just message us on Instagram at open adoption project.

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Awesome. Thank you so much for being here with us.

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Thanks for listening and learning. We are so honored to get to share adoptee experiences and to learn from adoptees and birth parents and try to facilitate better connections.

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Thanks so much for listening.

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Thank you.