by Misty A. Farris

Created on: September 11, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

I am a Caucasian mutt, and my daughters are both Chinese. I have curly hair and blue eyes. They have gleaming black hair and eyes so dark their pupils disappear.

People generally assume that my daughters are adopted. I don't mind too much because we have always been very open about how our family was formed, and my daughters have heard their adoption story for as long as we've been a family. I do worry that, as they get older, the girls may become uncomfortable with the fact that their private story is public-in a sense, that we wear it on our skins. My five year old already becomes shy and self conscious when people ask questions.

And sometimes people feel invited to say things that I wish I, and my children, had never heard.

When my older daughter was about a year old, a man in a bookstore began to scream repeatedly at me, "What are you doing with that Chinese baby?" He disappeared, but we were both shaken. Even a baby can understand when someone becomes threatening, and the provocation was our race.

Recently, after confirming that my daughters are adopted, a woman asked if the girls were sisters. I said, "They are now." This is my typical answer when I understand that someone wants to know if the girls are biologically related: I want to cut the conversation short politely and emphasize that we are a family. Thinking I had misunderstood her, this woman clarified, "No, I mean are they REAL sisters?"

Yes, they are real sisters. And we are a real family.

Our visibility means that too many people who have opinions and preconceptions about our family will share them with us. I will never know exactly what these confrontations are like for my daughters. Maybe I could come closer to understanding if, as my older daughter wants, we move to China for a while. But even there, where almost everyone will look a lot like them, we will always be different.

The best and only thing I can do is to try to give my family and my daughters strength enough to face whatever comes. So far, we are a sturdy little ship.

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