Symptoms of Connection

Personal Essay by Adaline Bara

In this intimate exploration of motherhood and identity, a Chinese adoptee experiences pregnancy and birth for the first time, discovering that her body holds not only her daughter's story but also echoes of her own unknown beginnings, as she navigates the complex intersection of being both a mother and an adoptee.

By Adaline — Good Things

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She didn’t cry right after she was born, but her eyes were wide open. She looked straight into me as the midwife placed her on my chest. I couldn’t stop saying, “Oh my god,” over and over again as I held her so delicately. Adrenaline rushed through me, my body reminding me to be vividly present for this moment. It was two in the morning and the blinds were still drawn from yesterday’s sun. The untouched water pool sat a few feet away from my hospital bed and the tray of medical tools lingered in the corner of my eye.

I was numb from the waist down but felt a jolt of vulnerability as she side-eyed me. She stripped me naked with her unwavering ten second gaze.

We’d spent 39 weeks together. People praised me for “doing a good job,” but I often felt like I was taking credit for something that I, my mind, and soul, didn’t have any play in. It was my body that did all the work. I was an idling passenger to her. While she built our baby, organ by organ, I sat on the couch and shoveled mashed potatoes into my mouth. While she meticulously architected her skeletal system and painted the hues of her irises, I only endured the symptoms of her work and trusted her process, awaiting what was to come. The first time I threw up from morning sickness, I smiled. I figured, if nausea, fatigue, back pain, bleeding gums, carpal tunnel, hemorrhoids, mood swings, brain fog, and a small bladder were the cost of meeting my first biological relative, then so be it. It’s something I’ve tried picturing before, in the same way a child dreams up fictional stories.

I met her in that hospital room and asked myself, “Who is this baby?”, delirious after 55 hours of labor. She looked at me as if she wanted to say, “I know exactly who you are. More than you know yourself.” But more likely, “Who the hell are you?” Her hair was matted with blood and amniotic fluid, her eyebrows stitched ever so slightly in a curious frown.

When I think back on this moment, I laugh. But questions about my entrance into the world have intruded on my thoughts ever since. In the oldest portrait photograph, I am no younger than four months. It’s a black and white headshot of me staring into the lens. The image is soft, as if someone has airbrushed the edges of my round and very bald head. This photo is my genesis. It has carried the weight of where I come from, even though its background is blank. It is the only photo that exists from the time before I met my mothers who adopted me. If this photo was an object, it would feel heavy, saturated from my endless gaze over the collective years.

Author Adaline Bara’s baby photo

I’ve studied details in my adoption papers. Searching and reading them again and again, hoping to discover something world shattering. It’s like repeatedly opening an empty fridge when you’re hungry, all while knowing nothing new will appear. A new hunger for the unknown lingers with me. It is the duality in everything I experience related to motherhood, as if I’m processing everything twice, once for me and once for my birth mother.

“This is to certify that Guo Youxin, female, was born on Nov. 25, 1995. She was found at You County on Jan. 15, 1996, and then transferred to our center by the Birth Control Committee of You County on the same day. Our center hasn’t found her parents and relatives.

Zhuzhou Children Social Welfare Center

Apr. 16, 1996”

I stare at You County on Google maps.

Population of 819,845 and covers 1,023 square miles.

My name, Guo Youxin, is often the first confrontation with my existential questions.

In Edinburgh, my colleague, Professor Ping, read over my papers in her office on her lunch break. “What an interesting name, Youxin. I haven’t heard it before,” she said as she opened a bag of pretzels, and the sound of a toilet flushing across the hall filled the quiet.

“Oh, you mean my last name?” I pinched my knees together as I sat in the wooden office chair next to her. Glancing over my shoulder, the door was closed. My afternoon was free from meetings, so I figured this would be an appropriate time to break open artifacts from my unknown past.

Like a click of a hammer severing a rock, revealing a fossil, Professor Ping said, “Your first name. Your surname is Guo.” I watched her eyes glance over the white page that had dulled with dust and time.

My mind paused for a minute. I understood Chinese naming conventions—last name followed by first name—but this never registered personally. It felt like such an obvious fact and realization, but what spooked me the most was that I never made the connection myself.

“What else am I ignorant of?” I thought to myself and felt ashamed. Looking back, though, I’ve wondered if it was ignorance or a declaration of loyalty.

Years before, I faced the Beijing Capital International Airport immigration gate, waiting to get through to my two days of work in the city. The tired man in a booth examined my passport, then gave me a surprised look. “You were born in China?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yes.” I replied.

“Do you have a Chinese name?”

“No.” I lied, thinking that I was doing him a favor by cutting to the fact that, legally, my Chinese name was irrelevant.

“But you were born in China?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t have a Chinese name?” He wondered how this was possible.

“Yeah.”

“Ok.” He gave up.

The white, fluorescent lights buzzed above us. In my mind, I shouted, “Yes!”

But Guo Youxin was only a fictional character, a ghost from an old life. She was not there at that moment. Only a mythical creature, my own Chinese folklore. To find her, would require to embark on a quest; to helm a ship across the sea, conquer great beasts and walk strange lands. All while unknowingly if it would lead to something or nothing or a labyrinth of more questions.

Freezing her in time as my dear keepsake, gently cradling in my heart, protecting her from the unkind world, has often felt easier.

Although I’ve sometimes distanced myself from my Chinese name and identity, my mothers still made sure that I had every opportunity to know her, to love her. Meticulous scrapbooks documenting every childhood moment, adoption day celebrations, Chinese language classes, Lunar New Year parties, adoptee culture camps, and trips to China. They filled my cup and collected the excess that spilled over when it overflowed. Stitched together, their efforts made a beautiful tapestry of culture and community.

They also saved everything worth a second glance. Plane tickets, home videos, baby blankets and clothes, printed emails from adoption agencies, news articles, nursery notes, birthday cake toppers, letters from grandma, Mother’s Day crafts, heaps of photographs, art projects, English essays, angsty journals, yearbooks, and dance costumes. All representing the afterlife of the baby in the black-and-white photo. With a keen weakness for nostalgia, they fill me with deep gratitude and longing.

My phone routinely reminds me that my storage is full—full of photos of my baby that I can’t bring myself to delete. Duplicates and all. Every moment feels fleeting and perfect knowing the simple fact that these moments exist and I get to bear witness to them. I rarely fight the urge to hoard them all. She was here. I am too. How precious this present feels. The beautiful, the frustrating, the exhausting, and the silly.

“No, I don’t want to see how heavy her diaper is,” my husband shouted from the kitchen, wondering why his wife was so weird.

“But it’s the fullest I’ve ever felt!” I rebutted, attempting to convince him to feel its weight, to feel this very important evidence that she is indeed growing. She changes a little bit more every week. I can see her father in the fullness of her cheeks, the shape of her lips, and the strength in her arms and legs. I look for myself in her and wonder if the glimmers I see are a lineage that I never knew. She reminds me of an old curiosity.

I wonder if my birth mom had the comfort of her mother beside her in the first month of her baby’s life as I did. I wonder who was the first person she told after finding out that she was pregnant? I wonder if she, too, ugly cried in public because of the flood of first trimester hormones. A million questions render my imagination and make themselves known in different ways, fiercely rumbling into my mind like an angry storm cloud or appearing like an air bubble rising to the surface. “Did she smile when she felt kicks? Did she know the gender before? Who held her hand during contractions? Was she coerced into giving her baby away? Did she have another name for her?” I wonder about her dreams, her fears, her trauma, her joy. Everything that felt abstract before has come into clearer view. Although she is still invisible, she is vivid in my heart.

Living with an adoption story is like a balancing act between the light and the dark. Every birthday that passes, I wonder if she is still alive. This year I’ll turn 30. The quiet math of her age works like a ticking clock in my mind; if she was in her twenties when she had me, then she must be in her fifties. If she was in her thirties, then she must be in her sixties now. Maybe my life began with a side-eye; maybe it began with a cry. Maybe it began with a hello; maybe it began with a goodbye.

It makes me wish that there were physical symptoms that I could experience somehow, to know that she is still there, like with my daughter when I was pregnant, going by what I felt in my body when I didn’t have medical scans or documents as reassuring proof. To feel a prick in my thumb or an ache in my gut to know that she exists somewhere in this world. That we still co-exist in this lifetime, connected by our bodies that once lived and grew together. To send her back a busted knee or tightness in her temple, to tell her I’m still here, her granddaughter now is too, and that we love her.

But then, there is my daughter still staring at me, eyes wide open. I wonder what she is thinking about. How sweet it feels to be seen by her. I wonder if she knows how happy she makes me feel when she looks at me. When she smacks her lips together, drool sliding down the side of her mouth, I realize that she simply longs for my breast.

About Adaline

Adaline Bara is a freelance designer and writer from Kansas City, now based in Edinburgh with her husband and daughter. She co-created the Whatever Next? Adoption project motivated by her experiences as an adoptee from China. She has appeared on BBC Radio Scotland, STV, and KSHB 41, and The Kansas City Star. Her writing has also been featured in 404 Ink Inklings.