Now that my trip to five countries (Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong.) is completed, I’ve had a plenty of time to mull and I read ‘Outliers’ book by Malcolm Gladwell since it got out in the paperback version. Outliers was fascinating because basically, in order for people to be as successful as those mentioned in the book, they needed to be born at the right place at the right time. That was his major premise of the book. I thought about that deeply, and well, I thought I’d share a story of mine…on how I got adopted.

When it comes to adopting a child, you can be sure that there are lots of procedure/factors involved to have a successful adoption. One tiny misstep in the procedure could make adoptions go awry. I’ll give an example. My parents needed to get their fingers pressed for the application. The agency was able to get my dad’s fingerprints but not so for my mom. They were having a hard time getting a clean copy from my mom’s. Why? because my mom had worked 15 years at the Capitol Records (EMI Manufacturing) factory in Jacksonville, IL on checking the quality of cassette tapes. She had to make sure that tapes were properly packaged before they get inserted into plastic boxes. All of those checking had pretty much smeared my mom’s fingers. She also had to quit because the job was giving her carpal tunnel syndrome, in which she got a surgery on her both wrists. After unsuccessful prints, my parents had to drive up to Chicago and stop by a FBI office to meet with a FBI-trained officer and get fingerprints. They did manage to get them but barely. So if that didn’t happen, I won’t be here typing this post.

Often the reason for parents deciding to adopt a child is because they couldn’t have a child of their own. That was precisely the case for my parents too but there is a story to this. Both of my parents were sterile but how did they get to be like that in the first place? My dad, in his younger days, had a serious car accident that could have cost his life but he was fortunate to live. After he woke up from a 3 days coma, doctors asked him several questions. One of them was asking him how many kids he’d like? My dad replied 10. Doctors had to say that he couldn’t because medications they gave him had made him sterile. As for my mom, she had an unfortunate incident back in her school days. She was in the shower area and her friends were playing around and accidently bumped my mom. She fell hard on the slippery floor, hard enough that the blood came out of her uterus. She was brought to a hospital and after recovery, her ovaries had been damaged, leaving her sterile.

The next story is how my parents met. My mom had been married to her first husband but the husband cheated on my mom because she couldn’t have children and he didn’t want to adopt a child, so my mom divorced him. One reason why my mom decided to marry him in the first place was because one, he was charismatic and two, he could speak well, which means he can talk with my mom’s parents who were hearing and didn’t know any sign language. In this way, my mom was trying to appease her parents. My dad was at one time seriously dating one lady and after realizing that the lady had stated that she’d like to have kids someday, my dad had to break up with her. After a while, with deaf community being small, it didn’t really take long for my parents to find each other and they started dating. Funny, both of my parents were worried that one of them might break it up because of their inability to conceive but eventually, they found out they were both sterile. So, with that fact behind them, they got married after only 3 months of dating. 4 years later into their marriage, they finally adopted a child, which would be me.