Published:
June 2024
Issue:
Vol.19, No.1
Word count:
7,679
About the author
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MCAT, GradDipArtTherapy, LLB, AThR
Anna is a culturally sensitive creative arts therapist working with CALD and non-CALD families in AOD. She uses the creative arts and play therapeutically with parents/caregivers and their children to heal their ruptured attachment relationships. This dyadic work is with children who have been reunified with their biological parents, who are currently in foster care and those who have experienced trauma in their family of origin. Anna is a domestic transracial adoptee of Chinese Vietnamese descent with an American Indonesian upbringing in Australia. She has an interest in attachment theories, family systems, cultural identities and trauma.
This work is published in JoCAT and licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA-4.0 license.
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Lam Sasson, A. (2024). Cultural longing and loss: An arts-based inquiry into the experience of cultural identity for adult transracial adoptees (TRAs). JoCAT, 19(1). https://www.jocat-online.org/a-24-lamsasson
Cultural longing and loss: An arts-based inquiry into the experience of cultural identity for adult transracial adoptees (TRAs)
Anna Lam Sasson
Abstract
This paper is focused on cultural-identity experiences of transracial adoptee (TRA) participants from a co-autoethnographic arts-based research (ABR) project in which I was a TRA co-researcher and participant. This research was completed as part of coursework for the Master of Creative Arts Therapies program at Murdoch University in Western Australia. The results, drawn from interview questions and a collage-making activity, found that research participants shared experiences in the areas of identity, not fitting in, belonging and connection, language, and grief and loss, when it came to their cultural identities. Furthermore, I propose that TRAs oscillate between states of rejection, recognition, embracing and integrating, in a similar way to the grief process, when navigating between the various cultures that they occupy. This paper explores the results from the five female TRA research participants, the challenges that arise for TRAs when it comes to their cultural identities, and how the creative process behind the ABR approach impacted my experience as a TRA.[1]
Keywords
Arts-based research, lived experience, transracial adoptee, cultural identity, grief
The research project
As a third culture kid (TCK) and a transracial adoptee (TRA) respectively, my research partner, Natacha Barghout, and I were curious as to whether our shared experiences around cultural-identity formation were mere coincidences, or whether these are the felt experiences of other TRAs and TCKs. To explore this, we designed the research project titled Cultural Longing and Loss: An Arts-Based Inquiry of the Experience of Cultural Identity for Adult Transracial Adoptees (ATRAs) and Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs). This was approved by the Murdoch University Human Research Ethics Committee (Approval 2021/119) as part of the Master of Creative Arts Therapies program coursework at Murdoch University, Western Australia.
In the research project, Natacha and I designed the co-autoethnographic arts-based research (ABR) enquiry, consent forms, information letters, interview questions and methodology, and applied for ethics approval together. The subsequent recruitment of participants, interviewing, collage-making, creative responding, transcribing and coding of those transcripts were completed separately. I focused on the TRAs and Natacha’s work was with the TCKs. We then compared the major coded themes and agreed on the similar themes (see Diagram 1). We wrote our final papers for grading separately, without contributing to each other’s work. My paper was focused on the TRAs’ data and findings, juxtaposed with the selected TCKs’ quotes and images that Natacha submitted to me. Natacha’s paper was TCK focused, relating the TCKs’ experiences to the selected images and quotes of the TRAs provided by me.
The data was collected from five adult TRAs (myself included) and five adult TCKs (Natacha included). Overall, we found that the shared TRA and TCK experiences with cultural identity tended to fall into states of rejection, recognition, embracing and integrating (see Diagram 2). The nuanced overlap in the TRAs’ and TCKs’ data sets were themes around identity, not fitting in, belonging and connection, language, and grief and loss (see Diagram 1).
Diagram 1. Overlapping experiences among TRAs and TCKs.
I have written this paper based on the TRAs’ data and creative results derived from the research project, focusing on their cultural-identity formation experience, and the impact of this creative ABR process on me as a transracial adoptee researcher. All of the TRA participants were asked to consider the provided information about the research project and the consent forms before deciding to participate, and all TRAs provided their written consent to use their information and artworks during the interview stage. My research partner, Natacha, acknowledges and supports me writing this focused article to explore the TRA component of the research project.
Diagram 2. Journey of cultural identification.
Who am I? What am I? An introduction to a transracial adoptee (TRA)
As a TRA, my personal journey in forming a firm sense of identity has been lonely, confusing, painful (see Figure 1), enlightening, deeply fulfilling and ongoing.
Figure 1. Anna Lam Sasson, A collage of my nightmare: The missing girl, 2020, collage, four images 210 × 297mm each.
TRAs are people of one ethnic or racial group who have been legally placed with adoptive caregivers of another ethnic or racial group (Baden et al., 2012; Fong & McRoy, 2016). I was born in Australia to a Vietnamese birth mother and a Chinese-born Vietnamese birth father. At around six months old, I was legally placed with a White Jewish-raised American father and an Islamic-raised Indonesian mother, to be raised in the context of Western Australian society. Growing up with intersecting cultural and racial complexities within myself, my family and the community, I always felt like an outsider, never quite fitting in.
As an adult, each new revelation that I uncover about my past, once processed, leads not to resolution, but to a deeper layer within my sense of identity. I feel like a babushka doll riddled with ever more unanswered questions and new feelings to unpack (see Figure 2). I have come to accept that this process of forming my identity will be lifelong, which appears to be at odds with the view that identity formation is a task of childhood and adolescence (Erikson, 1968; Stoddart et al., 2021).
Figure 2. Anna Lam Sasson, The babushka doll (detail of Figure 6), 2021, collage and mixed media.[2]
The importance of cultural identity
In 1968, Erik Erickson proposed that the development of the self is influenced by one’s society, “for we deal with a process ‘located’ in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture” (p.22). Forming an identity is a developmental task for all individuals; failure to do so would result in role confusion in life (Reynolds et al., 2021). Erikson believed that if an individual developed a negative view of the self (a negative identity), this would encourage a distorted view towards society and problematic psychosocial beliefs (Erikson, 1968).
During this critical stage of development, a person reflects and assesses whether they align ethnically, racially and culturally with a group, and is “likely to depend on recognition of the meaning of group identity for opportunity, status, and affiliation with others” (Williams et al., 2012, p.306). The literature appears to be unclear and evolving in the definitions and distinctions between racial, ethnic and cultural identities, with these terms being used interchangeably by authors (Boivin & Hassan, 2015; Neville et al., 2014; Ponterotto & Park-Taylor, 2007; Quintana, 2007; Williams et al., 2012). Neville et al. adopted the term “racial-ethnic-cultural (REC)” to encapsulate the “interrelatedness of the concepts and as a way to acknowledge the artificial divide between the terms” (2014, p.415). As this paper’s main concern is the TRA research participant’s subjective experiences of what they perceive as their ‘cultural identity’, and not to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the definitions of race, ethnicity or culture, sources from the wider literature citing the themes of race, ethnicity and culture are included to inform this perspective.
Kim et al. note that the “sense of belonging and sense of exclusion are important psychological influences on the co-construction of racial and ethnic identities” (2010, p.180). Consequently, being able to gain a sense of belonging promotes well-being, resilience and life satisfaction (Nazerali Hilborn, 2017; Neville et al., 2014). Usually, a person’s belonging to an ethnic or racial group is given by birth, and the development of the ethnic identity is a lifelong process intimately tied to that person’s social context (Manzi et al., 2014).
The literature reveals hurdles in this process for TRAs. TRAs have difficulties as they do not share their heritage culture with their adoptive parents, relatives and community (Baden et al., 2012; Fong & McRoy, 2016; Gale, 2017; Manzi et al., 2014) and are usually an ethnic minority within their adoptive society (Stoddart et al., 2021).
Transracial adoptees (TRA)
Intercountry and domestic TRAs have “dual connection to two cultural backgrounds: the heritage culture, on one hand, and the national culture on the other hand”, but they have limited, or “not equal access to both of their cultures” (Ferrari et al., 2015, p.414) (see Figure 3). As such, TRAs are exposed to “obstacles in developing a positive identity and a sense of belonging” (Stoddart et al., 2021, p.72), and they are more likely to suffer from “weaker ethnic identity or from identity confusion as compared to their same-race counterparts” (Boivin & Hassan, 2015, p.1085).
Figure 3. Anna Lam Sasson, A collage of my nightmare: They are my mother’s, 2021, collage and mixed media, 230 × 300mm.[3]
At the time of the research project in 2021, there was little to no arts-based research conducted on TRAs’ felt experiences of longing, loss and cultural identity. There had been a variety of theoretical lenses and models used to objectively predict the psychosocial adaptation of TRAs, such as the cultural-racial identity model (CRI) (Baden, 2002), and the bicultural identity integration model (BII), which Manzi et al. used as a predictor for positive psychosocial adjustment among immigrants and ethnic minorities, on TRAs. Research found that if TRAs perceived a conflict between their two cultural backgrounds, it would lead to forming behavioural problems (Manzi et al., 2014).
Baden et al. (2012) proposed the concept of ‘reculturation’ specifically for the TRA experience. They considered that the existing concept of acculturation used to describe the cultural and psychological adjustment that immigrants undergo when moving to a new country (Berry et al., 2006), did not encapsulate the unique experience of TRAs (Baden et al., 2012; Reynolds et al., 2021). Reculturation was therefore developed to explain the process that TRAs may experience in “their journey from identifying with their adoptive parents’ White culture, to eventually exploring, discovering/rediscovering, and reclaiming their culture of origins” (Reynolds et al., 2021, p.87).
A study of cultural identity on Taiwanese Australian intercountry adoptees used semi-structured, narrative-based interviews to demonstrate the importance of TRAs’ close relationships and environment on their development (Stoddart et al., 2021). The authors found that attitudes the TRAs experienced in their lives towards Asian Australians at the micro, meso and macro levels of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory, shaped the way that the TRAs viewed themselves (Stoddart et al., 2021). When they experienced a positive attitude within their families, relationships, communities and schools, “the development of a positive ethnic identity for intercountry adoptees [was] highly likely” (Stoddart et al., 2021, p. 84). However, TRAs who experienced racism, “practices that ignored their ethnic differences” (Stoddart et al., 2021, p. 84) or faced a clash between negative and positive messages across their ecological system, encountered considerable hurdles in establishing their cultural identity (Stoddart et al., 2021).
Longing and loss
The concept of loss has been described by Freud as including “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (Freud, 1957, p.243). As TRAs have experiences with moving from one country and culture to another, they have experienced losses. In my experience as a TRA, my response to the loss of my Vietnamese and Chinese culture has an element of longing, which feels equivalent to Bowlby’s (1998) “yearning/searching” stage of grief (see Figure 4). That is:
…anger is seen as an intelligible constituent of the urgent though fruitless effort of a bereaved person is making to restore the bond that has been severed. So long as anger continues, it seems, loss is not being accepted as permanent and hope is still lingering on. (Bowlby, 1980, p.91)
Figure 4. Anna Lam Sasson, Screaming out the anger and frustration from not knowing who I am (detail of Figure 6), 2021, collage and mixed media.[4]
So, in this research I was interested in how TRAs emotionally respond to their losses and whether there would be themes of grief in response to cultural loss that complicated their process of forming their cultural identity.
Methodology to explore the felt experiences of TRAs with their cultural identity
The co-autoethnographic arts-based research design
An autoethnographic approach “uses personal (‘auto’) experience to create a representation (‘graphy’) of cultural (‘ethno’) experiences, social expectations and shared beliefs, values and practices” (Leavy, 2017, p.42). Co-autoethnography expands this from the self to the plural, constructing knowledge together (Taylor & Coia, 2020). Arts-based research (ABR) is a process that requires “methodological commitment” (Knowles & Cole, 2007, p.66) to “involving the researcher in some form of direct art making as a primary mode of systematic inquiry” (McNiff, 2011, p.385). In this ABR my presence can be “implied and felt”, and is seen though the “explicit reflexive self-accounting” (Knowles & Cole, 2007, p.66). This makes ABR naturally compatible with autoethnography.
ABR is a “transdisciplinary approach to knowledge building that combines the tenets of the creative arts in research contexts” (Leavy, 2017, p.4). The arts can create and communicate meaning and convey the truth (Barone & Eisner, 2011; Leavy, 2020). As ABR is founded on “aesthetic knowing”, which refers to the beauty that comes from how the ABR product itself “fosters reflexivity and empathy in the consumer (and researcher)” (Leavy, 2017, p.5), ABR can “capture meanings that measurement cannot” (Barone & Eisner, 2011, p.167). As such, the ABR methodology differs from the objective and diagnostic-like approaches used to explore TRAs’ experiences of cultural identity such as the CRI and BII models referred to earlier.
Collage as an arts-based inquiry
Collage is known as the practice of creating visual artworks by selecting images, textured papers, natural materials and objects to cut and stick onto a flat surface (Butler-Kisber, 2008; Chilton & Scotti, 2014). It has been used as an elicitation technique in research (Dutton et al., 2019; Knowles & Cole, 2007) with vulnerable populations such as refugees (Vacchelli, 2018) and Indigenous communities (Dutton et al., 2019). Collage has been particularly effective when working cross-culturally and covering sensitive topics (Dutton et al., 2019). Collage has been recommended as a medium for ABR as it can be used at different stages of the research, and can help the researchers to visualise and conceptualise the study (Leavy, 2020). Researchers can collaborate in a process of viewing and discussion in response to each other’s collages to identify similarities and differences across the work, and develop the emerging nuances of the phenomenon in the study (Butler-Kisber, 2008; Chilton & Scotti, 2014). Coincidently, prior to this research, I had already created collages in response to my struggles with forming my cultural identity (see Figure 5), which informed the original research question and this paper.
Figure 5. Anna Lam Sasson, Preliminary collage work of cultural identity for TRA researcher, 2021, collage, six images 210 × 297mm each and detail of Figure 3, collage and mixed media.
Data collection
The TRA interviews were 60 minutes long, each comprising a 15-minute semi-structured open-ended interview about their cultural-identity experience, 30 minutes of collage-making and then a 15-minute semi-structured open-ended interview about their creating experience and what their collage meant to them, based on Knill’s aesthetic analysis process (Knill et al., 2005, pp.150–158) (see Appendix 2). As the TRA researcher, I undertook the interview and collage-making myself, and included it in the data set (see Figure 6). Participants kept their original collage and provided me with a photo of their work.
Figure 7. An example of my personal reflections on the literature review, 2021, paper and ink, 297 × 420mm..
Figure 6. Anna Lam Sasson, The pain endured in being erased, and trying to find myself again, 2021, collage and mixed media, 297 × 420mm.
Participants
There were five TRA participants including myself. All four of the recruited TRA participants were intercountry adoptees. They each contributed a different cultural mix to the study: Sri Lankan Australian, Korean Australian, Vietnamese Australian, and Indian Swedish. I was the only domestic transracial adoptee participant (see Appendix 1).
Risk-management strategies
All participants were given contact details for therapeutic support in their local area, in the event they found themselves affected by the interview. Fortunately, none of the TRA participants reported any triggered experiences at the conclusion of the interview.
Trustworthiness
As an autoethnographic ABR designer, I sit in the insider/outsider dichotomy (Breen, 2007). Trustworthiness and reliability in this model are conditions met through exploration of self and the other simultaneously. I engaged in ongoing creative works, such as paintings, diagrams and expressive writing responses throughout this research project and maintained these in my self-supervision research journal. For examples, see Figures 7, 8, 9 and 10.
Figure 8. Anna Lam Sasson, The pain and anger from being denied my culture, history, language, 2021, paper and acrylic paint, 297 × 420mm.
Figure 9. Personal reflection after creating my collage The pain endured in being erased, and trying to find myself again, 2021, paper and ink, 297 × 420mm. (Please see together with Figure 6.)
I triangulated my creative process work with weekly discussions with my TCK research partner and our research supervisor, about issues and themes that arose. I also processed any personal content arising from the research material weekly with an ANZACATA-registered Creative Arts Therapist, and used these personal engagements reflexively to guide my ABR research process.
Pulling the data together – results
After the conclusion of each of the participants’ interviews, I used collage as a reflexive and analytic tool (Knowles & Cole, 2007) to understand the implicit felt themes that came through in each of the sessions (see Figures 11, 13, 15 and 17). As I was dealing with two sets of data, one visual and the other verbal, I decided to process them together as they were inextricably linked, and together formed how the participants presented their experiences of cultural identity (Culshaw, 2019). After each participant had created the image parts of the collage, I looked over the image while reflecting on poignant words or phrases that the participant had said, and then wrote them into the piece to complete the collage (see Figures 12, 14, 16 and 18). This kind of collage “memoing” (Knowles & Cole, 2007, p.269) has been recognised as a technique that researchers can use in the qualitative research field to help them reflect on aspects of the research (Butler-Kisber, 2008; Knowles & Cole, 2007). My ongoing creative process in this research has allowed me to “bring about awareness” in relation to myself as a TRA and researcher, as well as to the “knowledge of others” in this research (Leavy, 2020, p.20).
Themes that arose out of the reflexive and analytic collage-making provided me with insight by contextualising the participating TRAs’ experiences with my own journey with cultural identity. This informed the framework of potential themes and codes that came from the participants’ collages and their transcripts. It also revealed that there was a ‘journey of cultural identification’, which eventually became the model proposed in Diagram 1. My experiences with the TRA participants’ different journeys provided a frame through which I could more clearly view my feelings towards my birth culture (see Figure 10).
Figure 10. An example of my personal reflection completed after creating my collage response to a TRA participant, paper and ballpoint pen, 297 × 420mm. (Please see together with Figures 17 and 18.)
Figure 11. TRA participant, 34, 2021, collage and mixed media, 420 × 297mm.
Figure 12. Anna Sasson, The researcher’s collage response to the session of “34”, 2021, collage and mixed media, 297 × 420mm.
Figure 13. TRA participant, In this Skin, 2021, collage and mixed media, 297 × 420mm.
Figure 14. Anna Sasson, The researcher’s collage response to the session of “In this Skin”, 2021, collage and mixed media, 297 × 420mm.
Figure 15. TRA participant, Hidden Narratives, 2021, collage and mixed media, 297 × 420mm.
Figure 16. Anna Sasson, The researcher’s collage response to the session of “Hidden Narratives”, 2021, collage and mixed media, 297 × 420mm.
Figure 17. TRA participant, Integrated, just me, 2021, collage and mixed media, 297 × 420mm.
Figure 18. Anna Sasson, The researcher’s collage response to the session of “Integrated, just me”, 2021, collage and mixed media, 297 × 420mm.
The impacts on TRAs of disconnecting from their birth culture
Upon reflecting on their own collage work, all TRAs spoke of being adopted, how they had adapted to their adopted family and community, how they related to their birth culture and country, and the impact on their lives of the disconnection with and lack of knowledge about their birth culture (see Diagram 3).
Diagram 3. TRAs’ cultural identity experience. (Please read anti-clockwise starting from ‘Disconnecting from birth culture’.)
With respect to the TRAs’ relationships with their birth and adopted cultures, the overall experiences described tended to fall into states of rejection, recognition, embracing and integrating, with the TRAs oscillating between all states (see Diagram 2). Diagram 4 illustrates how one person, a TRA, can flow through and between these states in a non-linear fashion.
Diagram 4. Rejection, recognition, embracing, integrating within one ATRA’s experience.
TRAs and their experience with identity, not fitting in, belonging and connection, language, and grief and loss
“Researchers experiment with artistic ways of working rather than just describe their observations of others”(McNiff, 2011, p.385).
When analysing the TRAs’ shared experience of cultural identity, I selected quotes from the transcripts that reflected the themes. McNiff suggests that using a “simple and consistent methodology for artistic inquiry” (McNiff, 2004, p.34) is important for ABR because the simpler the methodology is, the deeper the introspection (Knowles & Cole, 2007). Intermingling the collective visual data (my collage and those of the four TRAs, plus four of my collage responses) with the selected quotes as the verbal data, I felt into these data sets to pull out the felt themes that had emerged, to create a collective collage for each overarching experience.
Identity
Figure 19. Anna Lam Sasson, The overarching experiences of the TRA participants with identity, 2021, digital collage.
The themes for identity that emerged for TRAs were: taking ownership to construct their own identities, and adapting and belonging to the human race as opposed to a specific cultural group. The images created by the participants had elements of scattered objects or materials and also sewing, and hand making, giving a felt sense of someone gathering elements they found to put together and create anew. TRAs found that they had a sense of feeling alone in their search for identity as their adoptive families did not have the cultural fluency or social connections to assist them when they sought to find out about their past. One TRA specified the need for adoptive families to have:
the skill of going out and find[ing] that information for the child, instead of the child themselves… [and to] make sure those connections are there… otherwise, don’t take that child… Find those things, have this ready to go for them, because otherwise it’s too much.
An insight alluded to by this TRA is that the process for a TRA to better understand their cultural identity is one that is emotionally, psychologically and logistically difficult. The TRA expressed disappointment and frustration around the lack of help they had received from their adoptive families, when they had reached a longing to access their birth culture identity:
when you’re a young person, and you’re trying to establish identity and pathway… to then have to find out your roots. [It] is not your responsibility. You actually get that in a biological family, you actually get that from your families. So be a family. Go give them that history without making them go and do it for themselves. Tell them who those people are and if you don’t know, look harder, figure it out, put aside money so they can go and do those journeys… the stuff that you would do if they were biological[ly] yours.
TRAs instead learn to adapt themselves as part of their journey in forming their identities:
and then there’s how I speak with my friends, how I speak with you and then how I speak in my work environment, they’re quite… It’s not that the accent changes but it can become quite different because I can fill different roles and then none of them need to be the same, but I don’t need to combine them to be any more genuine.
Not fitting in
Figure 20. Anna Lam Sasson, The overarching experiences of the TRA participants with not fitting in, 2021, digital collage.
For TRAs the theme of not fitting in was experienced internally and externally. In the collages there were elements of people looking alone or out of place, emphasis on colour, not being ‘white’ and typography such as “outsiders”. All TRAs experienced racism from their adoptive community.
Reported internal experiences of not fitting in included:
I had cut off from anything Asian because of the shame that I felt growing up here being so different and not fitting in… [and] also, hearing negative comments about Asians in Australia for such a long time. So it took a concerted effort to reconnect or reach out, to actually start to investigate my cultural heritage.
Growing up in Australia, I felt very much like I wanted to be Australian, like I, in hindsight, I was Australian and I wanted to be Australian… I had all Aussie friends but I always felt kind of outside of it.
Reported external experiences of not fitting in included:
And I think that’s why the hidden narratives are [about] the people that don’t ever get talked about. We don’t ever get spoken about. And if you try to talk about something like this, I feel like people look at you like you don’t belong there.
But when it comes to magazines, that’s definitely something. They’re really lacking representation, and when you look at representation… the only people of colour I… [see are] a black woman and a black man. And that’s something as well that I grew up with… and [we’re] still seeing in the media: that they use… one person of colour, and then they [are supposed to] represent everyone. And it’s very rarely that that person of colour is an Asian person… it’s always covered by a black person… [and we are] hardly ever represented.
Belonging and connection
Figure 21. Anna Lam Sasson, The overarching experiences of the TRA participants with belonging and connection, 2021, digital collage.
The TRAs were able to recall feeling a sense of belonging and connection when they were around other TRAs: “Until I came across different groups of adoptees… that's when I started to really delve into it”. TRAs started to feel connected when they were physically located in a place of cultural or personal significance. In the images, there were references to nature, the outdoors, symbols of togetherness, and typography such as “natural” and “positive”.
It’s amazing… when you travel to Vietnam. One thing I love which I really connect to is everything there is so… it’s such a connection to Mother Earth.
Language
Figure 22. Anna Lam Sasson, The overarching experiences of the TRA participants with language, 2021, digital collage.
Language emerged as an ambivalent experience across the TRA participants. Some found language as a barrier to access the people and culture of a place:
I wish that I could speak the language so that I could just interact and flow with Vietnamese people like I should have been able to.
Setting foot in Korea, I felt really good. Like a sense of… apart from when I opened my mouth… I could sense… belonging.
Whilst others used learning the language as a way of connecting to that culture:
Even things like the words and verbiage… like han? And I learnt another word today, which I forget, but it’s like it was in relation to grief, what the cultural identity in Korea. The term was related to grief and was around a cup, a woman and… the war and loss, just loss in general, that Korea had lost. And I really connected with that, probably in more ways than one because of my lived experience.
The images selected by the participants included things such as cassette tapes, Asian words and characters, typography such as “it’s always been strictly as a tourist” and “shhhhh”.
Grief and loss
Figure 23. Anna Lam Sasson, The overarching experiences of the TRA participants with grief and loss, 2021, digital collage.
Most of the TRA participants felt a sense of grief and loss relating to the chance of knowing their birth culture. In the collages, there were images rich with emotive colours such as dark greys, tears, and facial expressions such as sadness and anger. Some of the examples of grief expressed by the TRAs included:
…but living without your culture feels like you’ve lost something. [As] if you have this constant feeling of loss and longing for something but you don't know what you're longing for. And I don’t really have any Indian people in my life that I can ask these things.
And I guess, not just understanding the celebratory practices, and the history and what led to creating these special celebrations, but also having memories of celebrating these practices… memories of being welcomed into these practices and given a role in these practices, and then the repeated ability, the repeated opportunities to celebrate these practices so that they become part of your way of life, I think, is a marker of belonging to that cultural group. For example: Seeing the lion dancing, hearing the drum beats that was so magical… but also very scary for me... I just felt very hurt from it because it didn’t feel like I was entitled to watch and enjoy it and that I was… I was like a fake Asian. I was always afraid that someone's going to call me out on it and say that you’re not real.
Gluing it all together – discussion
TRAs have difficulties developing a positive sense of identity
Erickson defines negative identity as “an identity perversely based on… identifications and roles which, at critical stages of development, had been presented to them as most undesirable or dangerous and yet also as most real” (1968, p.174). During this stage of identity development, people are assessing the valency of their identifications, self-images, social roles and values, which frame their perceptions of self, and what may be positive and negative in society (Hihara et al., 2019). Like the participants in the study by Stoddard et al. on Taiwanese TRAs, the TRA participants in this work all spoke of, created collages of, and described their experiences growing up with explicit negative responses towards their birth country, culture and people.
One TRA described an event involving their adoptive parents:
I was constantly shushed or told, “now this is Sweden, you’ve got to speak Swedish”, or they just completely blanked me, so I wouldn’t speak… that was such a trauma that I’ve… never been curious about Indian culture.
Others described overall attitudes from the adoptive community such as:
The representative of Sweden was white, and she [said that]… colonisation gave something really good to India, which is the English language, which I thought was insulting.
I guess it kind of creates apathy as well, like it always creates another inside of me, culturally, like, I’m not meant to be me. That’s not accepted here, but it’s also known to me… not to be just numb to overtly racist things.
These negative views expressed towards birth country and culture of TRAs during their childhood and adolescence, together with a lack of cultural or social mirroring are likely to have impacted the TRAs’ ability to find or identify positive aspects of themselves in their adoptive communities. This difficulty is internalised into their sense of identity (Erikson, 1968; Rogers, 2018). One TRA participant attributed her struggle to set realistic expectations for herself to a lack of inspirational role models that represented her unique cultural background:
I feel that I've become more aware that there’s never been any representation for me… I used to compete with horses. My mom bred horses [and there was] hardly any representation of brown people or Indian people doing it. And you don’t really have anyone to look up to.
A lack of access to birth culture prevents TRAs forming a sense of cultural identity
The narratives of all TRAs in this research do travel along the course of the reculturation model proposed by Baden et al. (2012). However, the model does not provide insight into the lived experiences of the TRAs in their journeys from identifying with their adoptive parents’ culture to exploring and reclaiming their culture of origin. As evident in both the visual and verbal datasets of this research, the struggle of TRAs to form positive and culturally solidified identities is more than theoretical. It affects their views of themselves:
I didn’t want to be Asian or think sort of different because I wanted to fit in and it’s almost like a challenge and I’ve succeeded in getting rid of my backlog.
And their relationships:
That’s literally how I felt. And I've always felt like to be successful… [you need to] do your parents proud, but then just hide who you are. And don't ask questions too much. So not having that cultural identity, like having to be the light [of her family] but then also disconnected from that [her cultural identity]... it isn’t very happy...
If a TRA does start the reculturation journey, opening that door leads to the acknowledgment of their multiple losses:
I just saw her straightaway [in reference to the female head covered by a lampshade in her collage, see Figure 13] and that [she represented] my cultural identity or… my missed experience of cultural identity. ...like not knowing what it is to be Korean, to be a Korean adoptee in Australia?
This research shows that the journey also starts the internal processes of making sense of one’s experience allowing the TRAs to move though the phases of rejection, recognition, embracing and integrating (see Diagrams 2 and 4).
Cultural longing and loss
Diagram 4 demonstrates how seamless the movement between the states of rejection, recognition, embracing and integrating can be for a TRA. This oscillation is similar to the fluidity of the grief process (Blandin & Pepin, 2017). Grief has been described as an internal “emotional or affective reaction” to the loss of a loved one, a “tangible, symbolic or psychosocial” loss, or even a response to a threat of a loss (Everly & Lating, 2019, p.523). From the TRAs’ results, it is evident that they experience a sense of cultural longing and loss, but whether they have the motivation, awareness or the space to process their loss is dependent on the individual. Some TRAs were able to speak of the things that they have missed out on culturally:
I wish that I could speak the language so that I could just interact and flow with Vietnamese people like I should have been able to.
Whereas for some, exploring their culture is not yet an option:
I’ve never identified with those from the country where I was born and when I went back… from then after I never want to go back. I've got no interest and almost a negative interest.
Well-being of TRAs
Adoptees have been reported as being over-represented in therapy, and when seeking help, look to work on intimacy issues instead of their identity (Zamostny et al., 2003). In this research the TRA participants mentioned issues with suicidal ideation such as:
I think about my brother… and that he died… I haven’t seen the coroner’s report, but I’d be very interested to see if it says “adopted child”. And if it doesn’t, I’m going to make it… I’m going to lodge an appeal… [so that it is] registered that “this was an inter-country adoption, and this child took their life.” And then if my siblings do it… Because that’s one out of four of us…
It’s really strange because I didn’t really think about this, but growing up with horses, they were always my ‘go to’ thing when I felt bad, when I was really extremely low. When I felt suicidal, they were always the one thing that saved me.
As well as expressing frustration with the lack of support for TRAs:
I think it’s so… necessary for research because it makes me so cross that in the scope of adoptees… [there’s] poor practices and [little] research… like we are meant to just be children and then be okay. Just like we’re fine after that… [being removed from birth family and being adopted].
As such, this research can help open the conversation amongst practitioners that care for, or look after, TRAs therapeutically, highlighting the importance of training in cultural-identity issues and complicated grief for TRAs.
Impact of the arts-based research process on the researcher
“In the creative process, one action leads to another, and the final outcome is shaped by a chain of expressions that could never be planned in advance” (McNiff, 1998, p.132).
Writing this paper almost three years after completing the research project, I have found myself in a privileged position of emotional distance and hindsight upon revisiting the work. When examining both my ABR creative processes and my own personal creative therapeutic processes, it is evident that “the creative spirit makes use of everything that happens to a person” (McNiff, 1998, p.132). My experiences through witnessing and interviewing the TRAs, creating my own collages in response to the TRAs’ creative works, reflective journaling, and writing the final research paper, inspired “growth in insight and in developing forms of feelings” that reconfigured my way of “being attuned to the world” and to myself as a TRA (Innis, 2013, p.13).
After submitting my final paper, I created an image to summarise the feelings around my perceived end of enquiry (Figure 24). As demonstrated by my need to create this image, the ABR process had me completely engaged for almost a year on a topic close to my heart. The handwritten caption says, “I feel sad to have to walk away from the forgotten parts of the research participants – or forgotten parts of myself?” These feelings, similar to how I felt about the little-known, unacknowledged Vietnamese Chinese girl in me, were ones that I had spent years running away from (see Figure 1).
Figure 24. Anna Lam Sasson, Untitled [Artwork created after submitting my research paper], 2021, paper and oil pastels, 210 × 297mm.
Figure 1 shows a series of collages that I created to expel the visceral and terrifying nightmare I had in the year prior to the research project. I recalled waking up in a sweat with the sound of meat being hacked away ringing in my ears, and I felt sick in my stomach. The dream started with the Shadow luring me into an old house to show me “the missing girl”. There, with “the missing girl”, was an old white woman and a young white boy. In the dream, the old white woman and the white boy felt safe, but dull to me. “The missing girl” then started violently slicing open the white boy’s neck and then hacked away at the kind old white woman who was trying to stop her. That girl frightened me. I felt so threatened by her. She was wild and unpredictable. She was white, and then she was Asian. I felt I couldn’t control her overwhelming feelings at the time. In retrospect, “the missing girl” was showing me something, but at the time it was too much for me, which is why I had run away from her for so long.
After reviewing Figure 24 and its caption, I now can see that I had experienced a “total organic resonance”, which Innis explains as “the distinctive feeling of being alive and feeling the world in a certain mode that escapes full articulation in language and that can never be fully objectified” (Innis, 2013, p.16). Upon reflection, I felt very much emotionally alive during this year while working with the TRA participants. I felt excited, purposeful, more connected, but also a lot more angry, frustrated and anxious. My art-making experience in the ABR process helped me feel into the participants’ data and enriched my self-enquiry, but it challenged my thoughts and feelings around my cultural-identity experience as an Australian-born, but Indonesian American-raised, Vietnamese Chinese person (see Figures 7, 8, 9 and 10).
As a result, this research uncovered those parts of myself formerly hidden, which were in fact being fiercely protected by my subconscious, deeply disturbing my own established thoughts and feelings around my own experiences as a TRA (Innis, 2013). During this research year, I started experiencing regular nightmares that intensified as the research and the year progressed. I recreated many in my art, to process in my personal art therapy (see examples in Figures 25, 26, 27 and 28). Obviously, as observed by McNiff, “the more I deny or avoid a problematic feeling within me, the greater its shadow power becomes” (2004, p.97).
Left to right, top to bottom:
Figure 25. Anna Lam Sasson, I feel so angry! So frustrated at everyone and everything. I hate everyone, 28 April 2021, paper and oil pastels, 210 × 297mm.
Figure 26. Anna Lam Sasson, Nightmare – He’s going to burn us in here. If he can’t have me, no one will, 7 May 2021, paper and oil pastels, 210 × 297mm.
Figure 27. Anna Lam Sasson, Nightmare – How dare you, she threatens and hurts me, 10 May 2021, paper and oil pastels, 210 × 297mm.
Figure 28. Anna Lam Sasson, “You can face her”. I am terrified, tired and don’t want to yet, 2 June 2021, paper and oil pastels, 210 × 297mm.
“If a dream or artwork agitates the person who generates it, it is likely conveying a message that needs attention” (McNiff, 2004, p.97). It appears that the more I connected with the emotional experiences and psychic material from the TRAs’ artworks, the more my protective parts wanted me to stop. But as depicted in Figure 24, I felt an overwhelming sense of emptiness and sadness upon finishing the research. I felt anxious about whether I had properly honoured the stories of the TRAs and I didn’t feel ready to let go.
However, even though the research project had come to an end, the self-enquiry into the unearthed forgotten parts of myself continued in the background. The inspiration I got from the TRA participants’ images and stories, and my musing into where I was in my journey of cultural dentification (see Diagram 1) continued as “tacit residue” (Innis, 2013, p.16) in the background of my everyday life. Prior to this ABR project, I had acknowledged and told people that I was ethnically Vietnamese Chinese, but I had little to no interest in learning about my Vietnamese heritage. I’ve felt more open to learning about my Chinese cultural background, as it was partially accepted by my adoptive father, who had learnt Mandarin when he was a young man, and a lot of my adult friendships have been with Australian-born Chinese people. Sadly, I’ve had very little exposure to Vietnamese people, culture and language in my life. My lack of interest in Vietnam, the cultural background of my birth mother, could be viewed as me moving between the rejection and recognition phases of the journey of cultural identification, which has negatively impacted my feelings towards myself.
After completing this ABR project, I’ve grown open to building a connection with my birth mother’s culture, which was only achieved by accepting and feeling the deep emotional experiences of grief and loss of my birth mother (who I have no memories of, and who has been deceased for many years). It has been only within the last year that this openness has motivated me to actively learn Vietnamese, read literature around the Vietnam War and Vietnamese children’s stories, and plan a trip to Vietnam to meet my birth mother’s family in July this year. One could view this as me being in the recognition and embracing phases of the journey of cultural identification. It has brought me joy, after a lifetime of being fearful and rejecting of it. This new openness to an aspect of my cultural identity has empowered me, and positively impacted my sense of self and well-being, as demonstrated in Figures 29 and 30.
Figure 29, Anna Lam Sasson, “We’ve defended ourselves. We’ve let ourselves be known. We’ve been brave”, 27 September 2022, paper and oil pastels, 210 × 297mm.
Figure 30, Anna Lam Sasson, “Cutting out the racket and following the rainbows”, 29 September 2023, collage and mixed media, 297 x 420mm.
Comparing Figures 29 and 30 to my collage on my cultural-identity experience during the research project (Figure 6), there is a definite shift in the imagery. The wool that was once red is now golden and not as tangled. The female Asian figures in the images are now able to see and are caring for the tangled golden mess. Figure 30 evokes a soothing felt sense with the words “here comes the sun”, “quiet connection”, “the light” and “I believe in you”. There is a sense of following the good feelings and not letting powerful but unpleasant feelings hold me back. Comparing Figure 29 to Figures 26, 27 and 28, the imagery of me has transformed from being terrified, shamed, powerless, punished and wanting to hide, to being brave, centred and cultivating a quiet confidence.
Limitations and future research
Because this paper was written quite some time after the completion of the research, I was unable to apply the journey of cultural identification model (Diagram 1) to all of the TRA participants’ transcripts. I hope that this model could be included in any future research or creative exploration into the experiences of TRAs with their cultural identity. It would be interesting to investigate the felt experiences of male TRAs in addition to the female participants in this research. I would also like to explore the therapeutic effects of collage- or art-making on TRAs’ cultural-identity experiences.
Conclusion
As demonstrated by the themes that arose from the TRA participants’ data – identity, not fitting in, belonging and connection, language, and grief and loss – this paper concludes that TRAs face unique challenges when forming their identities, particularly their cultural identities. The barriers to accessing their cultural backgrounds are inherent in the system that removes TRAs from their birth cultures, families and/or countries. Their cultural identities are further complicated by the TRAs’ experiences in their adoptive communities, which are ethnically, culturally and linguistically different from their own. My experience as a domestic TRA has been that making sense of my complex cultural background, and navigating the emotional ride between rejection, recognition, embracing and integrating, needed and still needs ongoing therapeutic support. This was corroborated by TRA participants, who also raised issues around emotional well-being and an increased risk of suicide as a result of feeling alone in this journey. My wish is for the artwork and stories of the TRA participants in this paper to inform further awareness of the difficulties that TRAs encounter in trying to develop a positive sense of identity. The paper may also provide insight for creative arts therapists, in their consideration of how to approach culture, longing, loss and identity in their work with TRAs or other culturally diverse clients.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge my TCK research partner, Natacha Barghout, the TRA and TCK participants, and our academic supervisor, Dr Rose Williams, for their contributions to the research project. I would also like to acknowledge the significant personal support I have received from Tom, Michaela, Lynelle, the Intercountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV) community, and the editorial team from JoCAT. Without their encouragement, I would not have taken the leap to follow this through to publication.
Endnotes
1. Author’s Note – The author declares to have no conflicts of interest to disclose. This article is based on findings of research that was conducted as part of the coursework for the Masters of Creative Arts Therapies at Murdoch University, Western Australia. Correspondences pertaining to this article can be addressed to Anna Lam Sasson at anna_sasson@hotmail.com [back to place]
2. Figure 2. The babushka doll, 2021. Black-and-white photo of an Asian girl with her eyes scratched out while holding her ‘selves’. From the collage The pain endured in being erased, and trying to find myself again, 2021. [back to place]
3. Figure 3. A collage of my nightmare, They are my mother’s, 2021. A black-and-white photo of a group of Asian people on the left. Coloured Australian animals and landscape on the right. The jewels are coming alive in gold. These jewels are being passed down to me in my nightmares from the ghostly, implicit, pre-verbal memories of my Vietnamese birth mother. What the jewels represent keeps evolving over time. 18 March 2021. [back to place]
4. Figure 4. Screaming out the anger and frustration from not knowing who I am.From the collage The pain endured in being erased, and trying to find myself again, 2021. [back to place]
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Appendices
Appendix 1
TRA participant recruitment methodology.
Appendix 2
(Knill et al., 2005, p.152.)