Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past author Maisie Chan shares the complexities of being transracially adopted.
Image: Simone Douglas
Maisie Chan
Many of my books feature different types of families, such as kinship and foster families in Keep Dancing, Lizzie Chu and the single parent mixed heritage family in Tiger Warrior.
In Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past, I look at what it’s like being a transracially adopted child with parents who are not the same race as you. It’s a topic I’ve been wanting to explore for quite a while as I grew up in a household just like that.
I grew up in a white working-class family in Birmingham. I was fostered from a baby by my English foster parents and then officially adopted by them a few years later.
Adoption can be a challenging subject to discuss and often something that divides people. I can only talk about my experience with adoption; my childhood was both complicated and unique to me.
I didn’t know the term ‘transracial adoptee’ when I was a child; I just knew that my mum and dad and older brothers didn’t look like me, and sometimes I’d get stared at walking down the street with my white parents. I did, however, grow up around other Chinese children who were my foster siblings. When their Chinese parents came to visit them, my parents and I would also be invited to go eat dim sum in the city centre.
Not looking like my adopted parents made me feel out of place, and that I didn’t really belong. I remember not wanting to be Chinese, hating my name – Maisie Chan – and my appearance. I remember wanting to be a blonde Cinderella instead. I felt an affinity to fictional characters like Oliver and Annie – both were orphans and searching for their perfect family.
Exploring questions of identity
Feeling un-whole was often hard to verbalise, but it is one of the themes I explore in Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past,as Nate feels he’s not Chinese enough. And even though I loved my adoptive parents very much, I felt they didn’t really understand what I was going through as a Chinese-looking child who didn’t feel Chinese at all.
Nate experiences this and his anxiety about belonging is muddled even more when his parents move him to Liverpool because they feel his small village upbringing isn’t helping him to connect with his roots.
His mums are both supportive of him finding out about his Chinese ancestry. But for Nate, identity is complicated as he doesn’t fit into a neat little box. And his family is unusual too because he has two mums, but that part of his life is so normal that he’s not bothered by it.
His new friends Ryan and Missy help him when he meets a Chinese ghost from the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War, Aiguo aka ‘Jirou’ (a silly nickname which means chicken meat). By helping Jirou with his quest to find out why he has appeared at this moment in time, Nate feels more comfortable with his own identity, and he begins to be more curious about his Chinese roots.
This link to the Chinese Labour Corps helps Nate to realise that he has some connection to history, and that people like him didn’t just appear from nowhere.
I think being an adopted child has helped me become an author as I was always looking for the meaning to my existence. Questions were often in my mind: What is my story? Where do I belong?
These questions are universal but for the adopted child, our place in the world is not as cemented as those who know their own history and that of their families. I wanted to write this for children like the young Maisie, to see themselves reflected in a story.
Other books to try
There seem to be several contemporary books about different families like Jen Carney’s The Accidental Diary of B.U.G: Sister Act which touches on adopting a new baby and is a fun and accessible read.
E.L. Norry’s latest book Runaways has a fostered child returning to their biological parent and a blended family where things go wrong.
And Patrice Lawrence’s People Like Stars and Needle both have children in complicated family set-ups or in foster placements.
I hope to see more books about different family dynamics as that is the reality that a lot of children face in today’s modern society.
Nate Yu Riley is adopted, and knows how loved he is. As he’s Chinese and his mums aren’t, they have tried to connect him with his heritage, but he’s just not interested – until the day he sees the ghost for the first time.
Billie Upton Green is about to embark on her third accidental diary (which is cunningly disguised as a Spellings jotter so her Mums think she’s studying and not scribbling). And she has life-changing news.
This research briefing outlines why reading is important for children in foster care, kinship care and adoption and the learning that underpins how BookTrust is encouraging reading habits.
Every family is different, and it’s always wonderful to see part of your own experience reflected in a book. This is a selection of fantastic books – some funny, some exciting, some magical – where the main character is adopted.
