In 1997, Lana Condor was adopted from Vietnam when she was four months old by American parents of Irish and Hungarian descent. She speaks fondly in interviews of her parents’ efforts to introduce Vietnamese culture into her life through food and dress. She also confidently addresses criticism that she is not “Asian enough” because she did not grow up in an Asian household: “My Asian American experience is different from someone else’s Asian American experience, and that’s okay,” she states in one interview.

Asian American adoptees are used to this erasure. We’re told that we’re ‘pretty much White,’ and our White friends cheerfully comment that they forget we are Asian.

Other actors, such as Henry Golding and Sonoya Mizuno of Crazy Rich Asians, have been similarly criticized. Both actors are half-Asian, and their casting led to accusations of whitewashing, understandable due to the (very recent) history of whitewashing Asian roles in Hollywood and the narrative scarcity that Asians face. But this criticism also unfairly erases the Asian backgrounds of both actors.

Asian American adoptees are used to this erasure. We’re told that we’re “pretty much White,” and our White friends cheerfully comment that they forget we are Asian. Yet when racial slurs are thrown our way from passing car windows or when microaggressions crop up in casual conversation with co-workers, we can’t forget the bodies we inhabit.

“Until I tell somebody I’m an adoptee, no one else in America is going to see me as anything other than Asian American,” said Adam Goodman, a transracial Korean American adoptee and editor for Plan A Magazine. “I do feel Asian because of that lived experience.”

In the last 20 years alone, nearly 125,000 children were adopted from Asia. This doesn’t include the major Korean adoption boom of the ’80s — which I was a part of — when more than 65,000 Korean children were sent to the United States into mostly White families. We’re out here, and we’re adults ready to tell our own stories — happy or not.

Adoption doesn’t end with the placement of a baby with a family. It can be hard for young people to grow up in the contradiction of multiple identities. Adopted teens are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adopted peers and have higher rates of psychiatric disorders, including depression and anxiety. Adopted teens seek the same things other teens want — belonging and identity — but their existence in the “in-between” can stifle their development until it reaches a crisis point.

Having a role model who looks like you and shares in your experience can make a world of difference. Transracial adoptee and writer Alice Stephens grew up in the 1980s with little to no Asian representation in pop culture, let alone transracial adoptees. “I would note whenever I came across another adopted person in the news,” Stephens said, a habit mirrored by the protagonist of her 2018 adoption novel, Famous Adopted People. “But there weren’t many and none of them were transracial.” She says she would have loved a role model, or even a fictional story or movie that accurately reflected her experience as an adoptee. “I would have been able to see myself in a creative community that reflected and validated my experiences,” Stephens said.