The Wedding Series | Transracial Adoptee Grief and Imposter Syndrome

As I plan my wedding (again), I feel like a total imposter. I scroll through Pinterest trying to find ideas of how to incorporate my birth culture into my wedding. The options either feel very shallow or they make me feel like I’d be a fraud for doing them. 

I think about how if I held a traditional tea ceremony, I would be serving tea to two sets of white parents. I would be the only Chinese person in the six-person ceremony. I consider wearing a qipao as one of my dresses, but I don’t want people staring at me and asking me questions about it. 

It all feels so foreign and at this point, it just doesn’t feel fair.

It isn’t fair that on one of the most important days of my life, I am stressing about how to be my authentic self. How I can pay homage to a culture I was born into but didn’t grow up in. 

I still imagine having my first family there. I picture both of my fathers walking me down the aisle. I have no clue if they imagined this for me. I’ll probably never know. 

While those around my stress about keeping out guest count down and wondering whose feelings will get hurt if they aren’t invited this time around, I think about the people who are supposed to be there but can’t be. The ones who should be sitting in the first aisle, but don’t even know I am getting married.

The hardest part of it all is this is supposed to be the happiest time of my life thus far.

But no one talks about how emotionally heavy it can be. When I was planning the first wedding and shared my video about wedding woes, no one expected that would be one of the videos where I cried from sadness and grief. And while I appreciate that people want this to be a happy time for me and they want to reply with the typical, “Of course your first family imagined this for you,” I prefer to sit with all of the emotions and my reality. 

Of course, I am happy to be where I’m at.

I’m so proud of the work my partner and I have done to be able to confidently be together and plan a wedding. There is always that grief in the background too. And that’s okay. That’s just my reality as an intercountry, transracial adoptee.

For more posts from The Wedding Series, click HERE

For part 1: