Sydney Keyes 

Traveling to China in 2001 with my family to adopt a younger sister everywhere we went we were told, “lucky girl ”. I was lucky, lucky to be saved from a life in the orphanage and be given a family.  Their words ring in my ears to this day. It became my outlook on life and shaped my views on my background and adoption. Now, years later, hearing the stories of other girls with the same beginnings as mine I see how differently they view their start to life. How unwanted they’ve felt and the great pain they’ve carried with them. I credit my own parents for so much, for raising my sister and I the  way they did and being able to fill that empty space that being adopted leaves you with. With broadened perspectives this work is an ode, an ode to my parents, and an ode to birth mothers and adopted girls everywhere.

 

 Being an Asian adoptee myself, and after speaking to many others these gestured collages work to illustrate what is spoken about in these collected letters from adoptees all across the country. The collision of being from two different countries, the physical appearance clashing with the internal, the difficulties in placing ones identity. These photographs of my own and found imagery aren’t answers, and instead help to speak about the unanswerable and the questions that linger in the back of the minds of those adopted.