Noelle Yongwei Barr, In Solidarity
My name is Noelle Yongwei Barr. As you might be able to tell from my name, I am a bit of an amalgam of things. I am also a Chinese adoptee and identify as a cisgender woman of color. Although I recognize the absolute fortune I have had in being adopted into a white middle class American household, I felt the urge to share my story in light of the significant rise in Asian hate crimes.
The story of interracial and international adoptees is not often shared. Perhaps this is because the privilege of integrating into a traditionally stable home, with such economic and social privileges, overshadows the baggage that covertly comes with adoption. For instance, abandonment anxiety, knowing I was left on the step of an orphanage hours after my birth. Anxiety also comes with the fact there is an incongruence between my racial ethnicity and the cultural heritage I actively live. I am an only child and my mother is Italian-Irish from New York and my father is Californian. Both serve their country as hard-working Americans – my mother is an educator and my father a naval veteran.
As a child, I didn’t see my adoption as playing a critical role in my development. However, as I aged, I faced racial slurs in my conservative hometown of Victorville, California, and overtime, I broadened my interactions with other Asian Americans. I played violin in a youth orchestra in Los Angeles County and I attended UCSB. I realized how much the adoption affected me.
Noelle Yongwei Barr, Mother, 2021
Noelle Yongwei Barr, Father, 2021
Emotions around abandonment, social belonging and concern with being “enough” disseminate across many aspects of my life, from academics, to violin and relationships. Yes, I am so blessed to have been adopted, as baby girls were put up for adoption (and historically victims of infanticide) when China had its one-child policy. My dad once told me a story about a family who had a two-year-old girl and that if the next child was a baby girl, they would leave her outside an orphanage, but that if the new baby were a boy, they would leave the two-year-old child.
Growing up I never felt white enough to have all the privileges of a white citizen, but I also didn’t feel Asian-enough, as I was not brought up in a traditional Asian household. When I opened myself up to a diverse community, I learned so much, and now I stand as a proud Chinese adoptee.
But in the past year, with the coronavirus, ignorance, hate and the slurs of number 45, crimes against Asians have increased significantly. Since the start of the global pandemic, 3,800 hate crimes against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders have been reported in the United States. And on the 16th of March 2021, six of eight people shot and killed in three Atlanta-area massage parlors were Asian-American women.
For the first time, this week, I felt profoundly vulnerable, enraged and devastated as I walked around my hometown, where I returned due to the pandemic and where second amendment and number 45 flags burn under the sun.
The virus has opened the scars of bigotry on this stolen land. In solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, Indigenous people and immigrants across the Southern border, the Asian-American population will be heard – no longer silenced by “model minority” status, a micro-aggression equivalent to saying one “does not see color.” It is mistaken that harm against our bodies is a lesser crime, for “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” – MLK.
Today, I share a facet of the Asian-American experience, one that is not usually discussed. This is the reality of being a person of color in a country still wrought with racism. I share my artwork, inspired by my story as a Chinese adoptee in support of my heritage, for I stand with pride as a complex, passionate, woman of color.
#StopAsianHate
Noelle Yongwei Barr (b. 1999, Guiyang, China) is an artist and former UCSB x Lum arts writing intern.
