Thirty Years After My Adoption, I Found Out I Wasn’t a US Citizen

“I hated when attention was brought to my adoptee status. I was American, and that was all I wanted to be.”

The day before white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended upon Charlottesville to chant “blood and soil” and remind the world of their odious beliefs, I sat at the Citizenship and Immigration Office in Pittsburgh, waiting to establish the United States citizenship that I once thought was firmly and unequivocally mine.

That morning, before I drove from Morgantown, West Virginia to Pittsburgh, I had packed every form of identification I could think of: driver’s license, birth certificate, Social Security card, US passport, naturalization certificate. If I’d been robbed on the way into the office, I’m not sure how I would have proven my Americanness to the agent. Could I tell them about the time I wrapped care packages for soldiers on the anniversary of 9/11? The time my friend and I watched the Fourth of July fireworks at the edge of Boston Harbor? Or maybe I could tell them about all those cheeseburgers I ate at McDonald’s when I worked at the mall in high school.

The naturalization certificate, the woman behind the desk at the immigration office said, was key. She was so glad I’d brought it—it made everything easier. A piece of paper proved what my lifetime of fairly average American experiences could not.

*

On the naturalization certificate, dated March 4, 1988, the words “United States of America” are bolded at the top, larger than my own name. There’s a photo of almost-two-year-old me, staring solemnly into the camera. My dark hair is a cross between a mullet and a flying seagull, and I sport a pink satin Members Only jacket; it’s as if my adoptive parents styled me so that one day they could point to the picture and say, “See how much of an ’80s American she was!”

Other artifacts, documents, and photos related to my adoption are contained in a brown glossy scrapbook nestled in the bottom of the china cabinet in my parents’ dining room. I have a blurred childhood memory of my parents pulling this heavy book out one night and plopping it down on the kitchen table. I remember turning the pages, running my small fingers along the fringe of the Korean flag on the first page.

At the time, I wasn’t so interested in the description of my birth mother, with her “strong desire for wanderlust”; I did little more than glance at the photo of me wrapped in a blanket, fresh off a flight from Seoul. An American flag hung in my childhood bedroom. I just wanted to be accepted by my mostly white friends. I hated when attention was brought to my adoptee status, like when my third-grade teacher told me I was so lucky to be here, or when I had to complete a genealogy project in biology class. I was American, and that was all I wanted to be.

*

When I was twenty-eight, I moved to Morgantown for graduate school. It was there that I began to face my adoption head-on. I began writing a novel about adopted Korean-American siblings who grew up on Staten Island, my hometown. As the pages spooled from my fingertips, I realized I had a lot of research to do about adoption, the legal system, Korean culture, even my own hometown. I bookmarked various government websites and checked out a stack of books on Korean folklore and art from the library. My parents’ brown scrapbook suddenly became a valuable artifact.

As graduation loomed, I decided to try and find work through a temp agency while I worked on my novel. The afternoon after I successfully completed my thesis defense, I sat in a comfortable lobby chair next to a fish tank while the receptionist ran my mandatory background check.

She called me over and asked me to verify my Social Security number and the spelling of my name. Then, in a hushed voice, she told me that according to the E-Verify system, which performed a background check through Homeland Security, I was not a US citizen.

She handed me a printout as proof: SSA was unable to confirm US citizenship. It included instructions for naturalized citizens to simply call the Department of Homeland Security with their naturalization certificate number to confirm status as a US citizen. I was shocked and embarrassed, but I thought that was all I would need to do—just complete one more step in the process before I could begin working. “I’ll get this taken care of as soon as I get home,” I promised, trying to convey that I was honest, reliable, and eligible to work in the US.

But when I called that afternoon, the agent had trouble helping me. Typing in my name and Social Security number brought up no matches. My naturalization certificate number was nowhere to be found. The agent on the phone asked me for my birth name, which I couldn’t remember (many adoptees do not even know their birth names). Eventually we discovered that my Social Security number was listed with my birth name, not my adopted name, and the latter was the name listed on all of my government-approved IDs.

Though I knew I would most likely be able to clear this up, I couldn’t help thinking about our president’s slander of immigrants and refugees. I felt myself growing more and more upset. “How could this have never come up before?” I asked the agent. She explained about different employment eligibility verification processes—my previous employers would have noted my US passport and/or my birth certificate, and wouldn’t have needed to perform a background check through Homeland Security.

“I urge you to get this cleared up right away,” she said, “because this president is pushing to make this process mandatory for all employers.” She gave me the phone number for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and told me she would update my status in the system to Permanent Resident, which would allow me to work right away. I thanked her for her help, but I hated being listed that way.

When I called USCIS, I spoke with a woman who likely meant well, or was reading off a script, but the line of questioning felt offensive to me. She asked if my adoptive parents had filled out an N-600 form. I told her they must have if it was required for the naturalization process, because I had my naturalization certificate in my hands. When the search for the numbers came up with nothing, she told me to ask my parents where they got the certificate. “They didn’t just print it off their computer or something!” I snapped. I wanted to shout that I had been brought to the US with purpose and love by American citizens, who filed the necessary paperwork and painstakingly documented every step of the process to ensure I would have the rights of a natural-born citizen.

Finally, the agent was able to find one of the numbers on the certificate listed as an Alien Number. Connected with this number was my birth name: Hai Jin Di. A name I had forgotten, and was only able to confirm by looking at some paperwork from my parents’ adoption scrapbook. Hai Jin was the “alien,” I thought, not me.

I asked my parents about the N-600 form. They couldn’t remember, because it had been nearly three decades, but told me they’d call the adoption agency and the judge who signed the paperwork. Once they confirmed that everything had in fact been filed and gone through the proper channels, I called USCIS again. An agent advised me to go to my nearest USCIS field office to get it straightened out. “Bring everything with you,” he said.

*

The nearest field office was in Pittsburgh, an hour and a half away. I made an appointment for a Friday in August. When my name was called, the woman behind the desk asked me what documentation I had brought with me. “Everything,” I told her, laying it all out on the table.

She confirmed that yes, my birth name was listed, and my status was still stuck at “adopted by US citizens.” She confirmed the spelling of my first, middle, and last names as she typed them into the system, stumbling over the long Italian surname as countless others had before her. Within fifteen minutes, I was a US citizen, and now a government background check would verify it.

I asked her what might have happened to my records. Why weren’t they ever updated? She said that in the ’80s, government databases weren’t updated in the same way they are now, and somehow my information never went to the centralized database. It might also have been lost in the transition from paper to digital.

Previously, when I had to prove my citizenship—when I’d had to verify work eligibility or apply for my passport—I’d simply brought along physical documentation; no search of the system was necessary. If all that physical proof had been lost—in a house fire, or a flood—what evidence could I then have presented when I went to USCIS?

*

The day after my citizenship status was resolved, I watched from home as a mob of white supremacists arrived to terrorize Charlottesville. I know that in the eyes of some, I will never be American enough. Many of us won’t be. They’ll continue to tell us we don’t belong here, no matter how many documents we have, no matter how hard we work or what we manage to attain.

What can we do?

We can remind ourselves that neither the fragility of our status nor the questioning of our right to be here can change who we actually are. We can try to change the image that pops into people’s minds when they hear the phrase “all-American.” We can embrace all parts of ourselves—our immigrant stories, our cultural treasures, my old Korean flag alongside the American one to which I grew up pledging allegiance—and stop hating the bits and pieces that don’t fit supremacists’ narrow definition of what is “American.” We can plant our feet here and tell them that we are not going anywhere. We can show people our pictures and continue to tell our stories and say, “Look. Look at this American life.”