I am so happy to share the following piece below with my readers. It was written by one of the people I hope most to meet one day in person. Ma-Li and I connected a few years ago when she contacted me with news that she was also adopted in Taipei from The Family Planning Association of China. We are just a year apart in age. I was so excited that someone who once lived at the same orphanage contacted me. Ma-Li currently lives in Germany, but was raised in the UK by British parents. She is a gifted writer and poet. You can read some of her beautifully written poetry at Poet Jena’s Blog. Please stop by for a visit. Here’s a little about Ma-Li in her own words:
I am a writer, a poet, a thinker, a philosopher, a storyteller, a lover of children and animals and beauty – an artist, love-junkie and music addict which, in terms of taste, can mean anything and everything…. ! My background is a ‘story within a story’ in the way that there is a ‘play within a play’ in William Shakespeare’s tragedy, “Hamlet”. It involves being given up to adoption at an early age and adjusting to foreign cultures. It is a story of a lonely upbringing and at the same time the never ending search for identity. Above all, it is the archetypal journey from the life saving pages of a diary begun as a despairing teenager to the crystallization of thought as found in the adult poetry of my current writing.
By Ma-Li:
In an television broadcast I caught by non-coincidence, I was reminded of the adopted part of me, what in the end may only amount to a story in an ocean of stories, but still, I felt immediately connected to this interviewee, this woman called Sarah Fischer.
Existence beyond duality says we are all ONE. To find a little piece of ourselves in another is the seed of the hope of this awareness.
Others who have lived a part of our own lives strike us to the very core, or so I have always found. They awake inside us what it is we mean to ourselves. Or what we may have believed we have meant to ourselves for the longest time. As if by magic, there is the sudden and extremely moving recognition of a deep knowing – a sense of timelessness almost.
But perhaps what resonates for me most is when she says, to paraphrase, – it was of great importance to her that the man she met and eventually married had ‘roots’.
Something else which touched me deeply: in order to find out that Germany was her true home, she had to first undertake a trip around the world.
It reminds me that no matter in which ways we choose to do it, whether adoption or by other means, the underlying journey of which this globetrotting, to me, seems to be only an allegory, is one of self-discovery, and moreover, ‘re’-covery. And in it, one sees the soul’s intense longing to finally be acquainted with itself. And what relationship is there or was there ever going to be which is more essential than that?
Sarah Fischer, Globetrotter | Talking Germany | DW.DE | 01.03.2013
http://www.dw.de/sarah-fischer-globetrot…
In her current book, “Heimatroulette”, Munich photographer Sarah Fisher describes her search for her own roots. She was adopted by a German couple as baby.
A few closing words from Ma-Li:
I came into contact with the writer of this inspiring blog some time ago during my own attempts to uncover aspects of my adopted past. It is now coming up to more than forty years since the day that I myself got on that JAL airlines plane headed for a new and unknown life. Finding her was not only a surprise, but a huge unexpected delight. Imagine someone so close in age to me and even having been born in Taiwan! And that is how the connection began. At present, time will not allow me to write more than this. Suffice to say that like all adoptions it is a story, and a somewhat involved one at that, whose multifaceted details are to this day still not all known to me. But for better or worse, adopted, I am. And nowadays I am starting to come around to the thought that the adoptees journey is not as rough a one as I might have believed in the beginning. Although we have never met in person, there is somehow a sense of closeness for me to have met someone such as this, in that space, as her blog so aptly says, “beyond the two worlds”. Simply put. It is an honor to know you Marijane. And, without having ever been adopted myself our paths might never have crossed.
Musings of a Taiwanese American Adoptee 