As early as I can remember, I wished I hadn’t been Chinese.
I hated my unruly black hair and my eyes, which marked me as a foreigner in the Netherlands, where I grew up. I went to bed at night hoping I’d wake up with blond hair and blue eyes like the other Dutch kids. Sometimes I tricked myself into believing this had happened — until a mirror reminded me where I came from.
I was adopted from China as a toddler in 1993 by white Dutch parents who couldn’t conceive on their own. I grew up in a deeply Christian small town where, every week, dozens of people — all of them white — paraded past our house in their Sunday best on the way to church. It was about as far as you could get — physically, culturally, ethnically — from China.