Hunan, China --> Chicago, IL.
Re-introducing myself and Girls Adoption Connect
Full Transcript
Hi everyone. I am Téa Tamburo. I am the founder of Girls Adoption Connect, and I was adopted from Hunan, China, September 19, 2005. I was nine months old when I was adopted. And I have noticed a lot of new people following and finding Girls Adoption Connect, so I thought I'd go ahead and share a little bit more about myself and my story and who we are.
Since I was adopted when I was very young, I have no memory of what it was like living outside of the U.S.. I have actually a fair amount of information about my finding story. I was found outside of the door to Yiyang Social Welfare Institute; I was one day old. And I actually have a photo from when I was very little; it is the cover of this post. And I did not know that I had that photo until I went back to my orphanage to do a homeland tour, when I was going into eighth grade.
So my family has always been very open to talking about and discussing adoption with me, I have grown up my entire life, knowing that I was adopted, and knowing everything that they know about my adoption and about my heritage. I also grew up learning Mandarin, as a way to connect with the culture, something that I've been grateful for a for a long time. But I used to always kind of think it was something that made me different: that and being Chinese, with white parents; I go that into that in a few other posts on our page.
I've gone through a long journey of accepting and learning what it means to me to be adopted and how I can embrace that, and how I can use that to fuel what I want to see with change in the world. So I used to never really think about my adoption that much, and it was always something that made me feel different or just separated me from my peers. And now I see it as something that makes me who I am and some major part of my identity: being an adoptee, being Asian American and being female- those are like probably my three main core identifiers. And it took me a long time to get to that point.
That was one of the things that drove me to start Girls Adoption Connect was discovering those identities about myself and what they meant to me. And then also wanting to further connect with you all about "what has that meant to you" and to just share our stories and elevate our voices, because I think adoptees honestly kind of overlooked when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. So I really want to have this platform to elevate our voices.