Being raised in America the chances of you being a minority in any setting is extremely high. It can have a huge impact on a person when it comes to emotional development later in life. If you are adopted from China and raised in the U.S, it is almost guaranteed that you will be a minority your entire life. Chinese adoptees that are raised by white guardians in America often have a difficult time feeling like they "fit in" with a specific culture or society. This feeling of "not belonging" can often lead to thoughts of suicide/depression.
The ability for adoptees to talk about their adoption and ask questions they have is key to help them process their emotions and to help process what happened when they were adopted. Speaking from personal experience being able to talk about struggles about being adopted helped me through one of the roughest parts of my life, and has changed the way I view myself. I can say with confidence that had I not been able to talk about my feelings freely without ridicule and discuss my interest in searching out my birth parents I would be more depressed and anxious than I am today. This is important because there are many other adolescents and young adults of color who, because of the lack of cultural identity, struggle much more when it comes to self-confidence and depression. This is especially pertinent in areas where a majority of the population is white, and any culture from people of color is whitewashed to better include the white people. .
A study titled "Adopted Chinese girls come of age: Feelings about adoption, ethnic identity, academic functioning, and global self-esteem" was performed by Tony Xing Tan and Brittany Jordan Arthur at the University of South Florida. .
"In order to tap into the unique circumstances that the adopted children are racially Chinese but are being raised by White parents, a 5-item ethnic marginality subscale adapted from the Belongingness and Ethnic Identity Scale (BEIS; Mohanty et al.
